a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
There goes November .. the year is running out on us. It’s great to be home from the road a little earlier this week. Daytime and night time temperatures are falling here as winter approaches. On Monday night the first dip below freezing is expected at 30 °F (-1.1 °C).
My three new smoke/ CO detectors from Nest have been installed (with Bryan and Gary’s help). Despite the step-by-step instructions, it was definitely not straightforward to do the connection of each of the three devices to my home network .. so this may be something the manufacturers could work on to improve.
Well, I left Seattle-Tacoma airport wet on Sunday night, and it was wet again when I returned tonight. And we have a soggy Thanksgiving weekend ahead of us (Thanksgiving is Thursday), says the weather forecasters. San Francisco airport was full of holiday weekend travelers. One mom and dad herded five small kids with strollers stacked up on a cart and roller-bag luggage strung together in threes, through the airport. ‘Wow .. quite an operation you have going there’, said my colleague admiringly.
These pictures are from my walkabout this afternoon here in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
It’s good to know when I’m out on the road that Thursday will come soon enough, and that I would get to go home .. and so it was today again. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train station not even a block away, and catch the train to the airport. I still have not had a ride in the brand new train cars, though. I see BART’s goal is to order more than 1,000 new train cars. Whoah! So maybe sometime soon!
It was raining lightly today*, but that did not stop me from taking my Sunday afternoon walk down to Capitol Hill train station for a run to downtown to go check up on the biosphere construction. I also stopped at the Barnes & Noble bookstore downtown. Sunday afternoons are just perfect for browsing through the cornucopia of offerings on the bookstore shelves.
*It’s been a very wet October here in the Seattle area. Seattle-Tacoma Airport’s October 2016 rainfall has now exceeded the previous October monthly record of 8.96 inches.
There was a second storm on Saturday here in the Puget Sound Area. We were warned to stock up on batteries, and charge our cell phones in case of a power outage, even to stock up on water and food. Well, while there was some damage to trees and property, the storm was not as bad as predicted.
My plan in case the power went out, was to crawl in bed and wait for it to pass!
There are two great bookstores withing walking distance of the University of Washington train station : the University book store and the Amazon bookstore. There are smaller second-hand bookstores in the University District as well.
Today, I walked to the Capitol Hill station, and Bryan (friend) and I took the new light rail extension to the University of Washington. It’s a bit of a walk (a mile) to the Amazon bookstore from there, but hey, walking is good exercise, right?
On Monday mornings, I have to leave the house just a little too early to be able to take the train to the airport (so I take a taxi or Uber car instead) .. but when I come in to the airport on Thursdays, I can take the train all the way up to Capitol Hill.
I was a little shocked to see a convoy of military vehicles make their way along the Embarcadero in San Francisco during lunch time today, but then learned that it’s Fleet Week in San Francisco, and there will be fighter jets flying over the Bay and all that (the same Blue Angels that come to Seattle for Seafair in August every year). The fighter jets have been a sore subject with peace protesters in San Francisco since the mid-80s.
Hurricane Matthew was projected to make landfall at West Palm Beach in Florida just as I arrived at my home in Seattle, so I immediately turned the TV on. It seems now that the storm’s eye will stay out in the sea – but the storm surge from the ocean will still cause a lot of flooding in the low-lying areas and outer banks all along the coast.
The Alaska Way viaduct tunnel is making progress .. but still has some way to go. The tunnel dig is scheduled for completion in ‘summer 2017’ says the Wash-DOT website (I guess that means July).
Gun violence
here in the USA continues. If you do not know the numbers, let me enlighten you. 90 people are shot to death each day in the USA. 33,000 per year. As a reminder, that is eleven times the number of people killed on 9/11. Eleven times, every year. No exception.
On Friday night, five people were shot to death in a department store in Burlington, WA (pop. 8,000). The killer (I’m not a journalist, so I don’t have to say ‘suspect’) was apprehended on Saturday. He is 20 years old, a Turkish immigrant, with a history of violence. He stole the gun that he had used from his dad. He may have been looking for an ex-girlfriend (she was not at the store). There was an uproar on Twitter because the police was looking for a ‘Hispanic’ person. Agreed – Turkish or Middle-Eastern is not Hispanic, but describing him as such definitely helped in his identification and in tracking him down.
Public transport aficionados that we are, Bryan and I made a run down to the new Angle Lake light rail station that was opening on Saturday. It will be five long years before more stations will open (to the north of the University of Washington).
The new station offers a stop 1.6 miles south of Sea-Tac airport, with some 1,200 parking spaces for commuters (parking time is limited to 24 hrs and not intended for airport-bound travelers).
The latest Bloomberg Businessweek has an extensive article on the American electorate, and the different demographic groups that will vote in the upcoming election .. Check it out here. There is also an article about the suburban city of Tukwila south of Seattle, the population of which has 40% refugees. Wow, I thought, I never knew that.
From the article: Saar’s Super Saver Foods have risen about 16 percent in the past year as the market diversified its offerings to cater to Tukwila’s immigrant community. “When people come in, see the store, and then go tell their friends or their family, ‘Hey, they got this, this, this,’ I think that’s what’s really driven the growth,” he says. The store now sells almost 45,000 different products. “A lot of items surprise us,” he says. “One of the big ones in our Middle Eastern section is actually dates. I thought a date was a date, but there’s five, six varieties of dates, and we sell just a ton of them. We make sure we have the lowest price on them.”
My mom used to buy dried dates for us in South Africa, pressed into little ‘bricks’ (she made Rice Krispie balls with them. Rice Krispies, and sticky dates, rolled in shredded coconut. Hmm). I need to go check out that store.
I took the light rail train down to Pioneer Square on Saturday to check out the ice cube (that I wrote about last Sunday). It’s pretty cool (icy, to be exact), but not a solid cube. Afterwards I walked up six blocks to University Street station and stopped along the way to check out The Mark, a new high-rise building under construction on Fifth Avenue.
On September 9th a 9-10 ton ice cube, with 80 inch (6.7 ft) sides, is going to be placed in Occidental Park in downtown Seattle. The temporary ‘art’ installation is designed by Seattle architecture firm Olson Kundig (OK), and will ‘showcase the stages of the natural water cycle as the ice shifts from opaque to translucent’. I see weather blogger Cliff Mass has issued a challenge to his readers : to estimate the amount of time it will take for the cube to melt. Hmm. Some of the calculation will involve very well known parameters, such as the Specific Heat Capacity* of Ice (2.108 kJ/kgK) and the Latent Heat of Melting** (334 kJ/kg). What one would have to estimate: what the starting temperature of the block of ice will be (it could be well below freezing), and what the surrounding temperature will be.
*The energy required to raise the temperature of one unit of mass of a given substance by a given amount (usually one degree).
**The energy it takes to melt ice and make it into water, with no temperature change.
I went down to Lake Union on late Saturday afternoon to check out how Lake Union Park was coming along. (Also: Google is slated to build new Seattle campus buildings starting in 2017 there, a stone’s throw from the Lake). The park looks OK; I would say it still needs some big trees, though. The pond and surroundings with the Canadian geese is more or less under control. (The geese are notorious for making a big mess with their droppings!).
It was nice to catch two floatplanes on the maneuvering on the lake, one from Kenmore Air, and one from the local TV station.
August has run out all its 31 days. The days are getting shorter, and weather is cooling down.
There are several parallels between San Francisco’s Embarcadero waterfront, and Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Embarcadero had an ugly double-decker freeway (built in the 1960s) that was finally undone and demolished in 1991, following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct has been a long-time eye-sore as well; and damaged in the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. It’s demolition will finally be under way in the next 18 months or so, with the completion of a replacement tunnel.
The Seattle Time
s reports that the digging for the Sound Transit Light Rail expansion – adding three stations to the north – is almost done. From the newspaper : ‘The tunnel boring contractors are only 650 feet from the finish line of a seven-mile marathon dig to extend the Light Rail tunnel from the University of Washington to Northgate’. The tunnel-boring machine should emerge next to Husky Stadium in about 10 days.
So how much more work remains? Well, it will take five more years before the three stations open in 2021. That sure sounds like a lo-o-ong time. One of the reasons may be funding and another limited construction time due to noise abatement considerations.
Here are some iPhone pictures of works of art that were on display at Volunteer Park here in my neighborhood on Saturday night. The exhibit was called Lusio and organized by artist Mollie Bryan.
