Category: Seattle

It was the warmest June ever here in Seattle with eight days at 85°F (30°C) or higher in June. On Sunday, east of the Cascade Mountains, the mercury hit 113°F (45°C) in Walla Walla in central Washington State. Yikes!

I usually manage to cool down my bedroom during warm summer evenings by opening the window for a few hours .. but that strategy has not worked these last few weeks. So it was a relief to get my hands on a used portable conditioner, and now I can cool down the bedroom nicely before bedtime.

Check out the cool Space Needle ‘panocam’ at this link.  If it is night time, one can always click on the ‘Best Views’ links on the panel on the right to see recorded views from previous days.   This one below shows a cruise ship at one of the two terminals here.  In 2015, Seattle will host 192 cruise ships and more than 895,000 passengers. (I still have to take my obligatory cruise up to Alaska!  Yes!).

We celebrated Independence Day on Saturday here in the United States.   Here is a picture of the fireworks over Seattle’s Lake Union.  The colors of the fireworks were mostly red, white and blue (of course).

 

It’s already warm here in Seattle with temperatures heading toward 90 °F/ 32 °C for the weekend.  (The warm weather usually arrives after the 4th of July weekend).  The dry conditions and warm weather is not a good combination, of course.  A fire in the Wenatchee area in central Washington State has destroyed 24 homes and heavily damaged three businesses since Sunday, and thousands of people have been told to be ready to evacuate on a moment’s notice.   Hopefully more fires can be contained early on. The  2014 Carlton Complex was the largest wildfire in Washington State history : the fire burned 300 homes and 400 square miles.

The City of Seattle has painted 11 crosswalks in the Capitol Hill neighborhood with rainbow colors to just in time for the weekend’s Gay Pride celebrations.   It’s not an original idea, though – the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco has had a few of these since October of last year.

I love this red R neon sign in the window of the Union Bar in Hillman City where we had a bite to eat on Wednesday night. It is a nod to the Rainier beer brand (which is no longer brewed*), and indirectly to Rainier Mountain and the Rainier valley.  Hillman City is located a mile further south than Columbia City, and in August 2013 Seattle Weekly named Hillman City the “Best Up-and-Coming Neighborhood” in Seattle.    The original neon “R” from the brewery is now on display at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

*Correction posted 6/28 : Rainier beer is still being brewed, but by the Pabst Brewing Company that now owns and markets the brand.

We walked around Pike and Pine Streets on Capitol Hill to check out how the building boom (of apartments) is progressing – along with the interesting people that are out and about on the street.   Here are a few pictures.

My windows are back – so now I can spy on everyone walking by in the street in front of the house again.  I could also sit on my little porch, we don’t do that anymore now, do we? Life has become too fretful and frantic.

It’s getting warm enough here in Seattle now (78 °F/ 26° C) so that I need to open my windows late afternoon and into the evening to let the cooler air in.

I check out these free-standing lattice radio antenna towers every time I walk over to Trader Joe’s (grocery store) across the street from them.   The ground elevation there is about 410 ft above sea level, to which can be added the heights of each of the three towers – 594 ft (181 m), 637 ft (194 m) and 682 ft (208 m) for an elevation of the top of the towers of about 1,000 ft.   A slowly blinking red light at the top warns low-flying objects (as well as UFOs) at night to steer clear !

(I did not make it out to San Francisco on Monday due to a bad cold).  My old house’s wood-frame windows with their double glazing (two panes of glass filled with gas) had started to fog up inside with water vapor some time ago, and so it had become time to send them in for repairs.

I was barely up when Bryan and Paul (the famous and well-known among friends here ‘Double Dog’ contractors) showed up and in a shockingly short time had the four sets of double hung windows out of their frames.  The Cherry Creek Window van (company that will repair the windows) was already waiting outside and took them in.  So .. can someone not come and easily steal my house’s windows?  I wanted to know from Bryan.  The answer : the thieves would have to be inside the house – but then why would they? the windows are made for your house in a custom size.

So now I have a house with a hurricane-battened-down-the-hatches look for a few days until the windows come back!

We always say here in the USA that Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer.  So here is the (somewhat cheesy) cover of a brochure of the summer events scheduled for the Emerald City.   Check out the orca frolicking in the foreground right by Pier 57 (where the Ferris Wheel is) .. a very unlikely sight!

And I’m still getting used to the Ferris Wheel’s silhouette on the waterfront –  but that would pale in comparison to the changes that will be brought when the Alaskan Viaduct (double-decker highway right above the waterline) eventually comes down when its replacement tunnel had been completed.

Here’s a nice Washington State quilt that caught my eye at a store where Bryan, Gary and I stopped by on Sunday.  We also tried to get a nice close-up look at the Polar Pioneer oil rig, but it was not possible to drive right up to it .. which should not have been a surprise, I guess.

We have a huge oil rig destined for drilling off the coast of Alaska docked here in Elliott Bay at Terminal 5 in the Port of Seattle.  There were plenty of protesters in kayaks our in force today on the water around the rig (called kayaktivists).  I want to run out tomorrow and go and take a close-up look of the intimidating drilling monster.   Here is the article in the Seattle Times that I borrowed the pictures from.

 

There are reports of heavy downpours and tornadoes in the central parts of the USA this weekend – but here in the Pacific Northwest we are enjoying mild and tranquil weather.

I guess I knew from previous spring blooms that the tree close to my house on the corner is a jacaranda tree, but I realized it again as I walked by it on Tue night.  Man!  Did you know that? Did you forget? I asked myself. Jacaranda trees are actually native to tropical and subtropical regions, found widely in Asia, and in Nepal .. and in South Africa as well.   In fact, my home city for a few years in the 1990s in South Africa was Pretoria, which is popularly known there as ‘The Jacaranda City’.   The jacaranda trees lined the street in front of my house there, and would produce carpets of purplish blossoms that had dropped onto the sidewalk.

More than a year ago, in Feb 2014, I reported that this beautiful old house on 16th Ave was being torn down.  Well, here is what was built in its place : a modern eight 2 bed-2 bath townhouses.  Four have already been sold.  The list price is $660,000.

 

There was a bad house fire just a block away from my house on Thursday morning.  The fire brigade was just clearing out by the time I got home by 7 pm on Thursday night.    An elderly lady in her nineties died in the incident and her son had to be taken to hospital.  I wanted to find out what had caused the fire, and The Capitol Hill Blog  reported that it was improperly discarded smoking materials that ignited a chair in the house.

 

We’re not used to heavy weather – thunderstorms with lightning bolts here in the Pacific Northwest.  So tonight I thought a few times Whoah!  that was close!, as the night sky outside lit up several times with white light, and the sound of thunder followed a short time later.

 

This proposed new 58-story office tower for Seattle’s downtown will cot $600 million.  The property is owned by the University of Washington.  The developers hope to lure tech companies away from neighborhoods such as South Lake Union to Seattle downtown (Hmm. South Lake Union is barely a mile or two away).  Here’s the article in the Wall Street Journal of Wednesday that caught my eye.

My two colleagues from China were in Seattle for the weekend, and wanted to go on a Boeing factory tour. Let’s go! I said, since I had not done that either.   The factory is actually in Everett, 40 minutes north of Seattle. (There is another factory that produces 737s in Renton closer to Seattle, and some 787 work is done in North Charleston in South Carolina).  The tour starts with a short film, and then we were taken into two of the cavernous construction hangars, one for the 747 and 777 and another for the new 787 Dreamliner.  We entered by the utilities tunnel and then go directly up with the freight elevator to the third floor where we look down on the floor.

The factory is very, very, very large, by volume the largest in the world.   The 777 is assembled with a crawling assembly line, until the plane is in its weight-on-wheels (WoW) configuration; then it is tugged along and outside the building to be painted.  In contrast, the 787 is assembled in one place, with its major sections flown in from all over the world (wings from Japan, center fuselage from Italy, landing-gear system from France, main cabin lighting from Germany main cabin lighting, among others).

Some 6 million parts go into a modern airplane. That is counting each little rivet as a part, though. Since the fuselage expands under pressurization, it cannot have welds.  I was also reminded that the wings are actually gigantic fuel tanks (I will try to forget that again by the time I fly on Monday!) and that the skin of the fuselage is no thicker than that of a dime (yikes).   We could actually check a section of fuselage out up close and it is shocking how thin the skin is.

So!  .. while we’re all very proud of Boeing and its manufacturing prowess, being a fierce international competitor and providing some 30,000 jobs to local communities around Washington State, does it make for a good corporate citizen?  The Center For Effective Government reported in 2014 that Boeing Company’s 2013 tax filings noted that it had claimed $82 million in federal tax refunds, despite $5.9 billion in U.S. pre-tax profits for the 2013 tax year. ‘This represents an effective tax rate of -1.4 percent. Boeing paid just $11 million in state income taxes, an effective state tax rate of just 0.2 percent’.    Fantastic for the shareholders, but the company makes almost no contribution to the Washington State coffers for the use of its infrastructure, and pays no Federal income taxes in spite of being the second largest federal contractor in the United States.

As for the machine workers that pop all those rivets, they should start learning to program and maintain the robots that are on the way to take over the work from them.  This video is from Boeing’s web site itself, here.