Category: Seattle

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.

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.

The Seattle Times 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.

I chase myself out of the house on Saturdays and Sundays to go and enjoy the mild summer weather.  With the new Capitol Hill train station seven blocks away, I can go downtown or up to the University of Washington, and go check up on all the construction going on in the city.

The City of Seattle held its Gay Pride Parade today, and the perfect weather made for record attendance.  The Orlando tragedy of just two weeks ago may very well have contributed to more people attending as well.  The parade is the third largest in the country,  and by some estimates as many as 500,000 people lined 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle.   I made it out there for an hour or two, and below is a compilation of some of the pictures that I took.

Here are some pictures from Sunday.  It was sunny and mild, and I went downtown to check up on the construction activities there, and ended up at Pike Place Market as well.

I walked along the the Montlake Cut this afternoon, on the warmest-recorded-so-far June 5th for Seattle at 93 °F/ 34 °C.  (The temperatures are expected to cool down to the normal average high of of 68°F/ 20°C by the end of the week).

The Montlake Cut is the easternmost section of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which passes through the City of Seattle, ultimately linking the large body of water Lake Washington to Puget Sound.   It is approximately 2,500 feet (760 m) long and 350 feet (110 m) wide. The center channel is 100 feet (30 m) wide and 30 feet (9.1 m) deep.

Our departure last night from San Francisco was delayed by 3 hours due to 60 mph winds, but I finally made it in a little after midnight.  The big maple tree in my neighbor’s back yard had been in bad shape (rot in the tree trunk, main branches) for a number of years now, and a note in my mailbox said that they had scheduled it to be taken out today.  So this morning I kept track of the activities (hard to ignore with all the chainsaw noise!), and in the space of 5 short hours or so, the whole tree had been taken down – all the way to the ground. There was a wood chipper on hand as well, to make it easy to take away the wood.   Here is a sequence of pictures.   I was sad to see the tree go, but it will certainly let in a lot more afternoon sunlight into the western rooms of my house.

I drove out to the South Lake Union on Saturday to 1. take my old camera to Glazer’s Camera (got a $300 exchange voucher for it, not bad), and 2. to finally hand in the modem that my internet service provider has been charging me $10 a month for.  (More a matter of principle than a matter of saving money.  I’m not paying $10 monthly ‘rent’ for an item that costs $80 outright!).

I thought the report of a power outage of many thousands of Seattle area homes early this morning was odd – given the perfect sunny weather we had today here.   It turned out it caused by a raccoon breaking into a substation, creating several system circuit outages. The raccoon did not survive.

Below is a pictures that I took today of Amazon’s biospheres, showing the progress that has been made in their construction.   Here are more pictures and a report from the Seattle Times.