Category: Seattle

We went to Columbia City on Wednesday night for a beer and a bite, and lucked out with the last parking spot in the lot across from our regular ‘watering hole’.  I love that lot’s parking fee ‘machine’ .. hanging in there, defiant, retro and analog, with no such fancy tech as accepting payment by mobile phone or debit card.   Paper money and coins, stuffed into a slot !

The elevated stretch of waterfront highway called the Alaskan Way Viaduct closed on Thursday night, for two weeks.  It is as a precaution for the digging of the new tunnel for State Route 99 that goes under the Viaduct at this point.   (When the tunnel has been completed, the Alaskan Way Viaduct will be demolished).   On a typical weekday some 90,000 drivers used the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and for the next two weeks there will be a lot of extra traffic using the downtown Seattle streets.  For those that can : use the bus, use the light rail, bike, walk.  Driving around in a car in downtown Seattle should only be done if there is no other option.

It was another nice spring day here in Seattle, but there is some rain on the way for Sunday night and Monday morning. I walked by the St. Nicholas* Russian Orthodox Cathedral on 13th Ave to check on the progress of its entry-way renovation, and saw that it is almost done.

*[From Wikipedia] Nicholas II was the last tzar of Russia, ruling from  Nov 1, 1894 until his forced abdication on Mar 15, 1917. His reign saw the fall of Imperial Russia from being one of the foremost great powers of the world, to economic and military collapse.

The new SR 520 Floating Bridge and Landings project has been underway since early 2012, and parts of it is really for final commissioning and use by the general public.   Bryan, Gary and I went to the official opening of the new State Route 520 Floating Bridge today.  The new bridge has been built alongside the old (which will be dismantled and recycled).  The final work on the ‘approaches’ to the bridge (the on-ramps and off-ramps) will continue, but vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) will be able to start to use the new bridge just a little later in April.  The west-bound lanes will open first, with the east-bound lanes to follow two weeks later.

Here are a few more pictures from my visit to the Seattle Asian Art Museum on Thursday night.  We have had a nice run of warm spring days here in Seattle, touching 70 °F (21°C) for the first time since October of last year.  70° weather usually arrives only in mid-April.

 

The two remaining Democratic Party candidates for President of the United States are Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  There was a Bernie Sanders for President rally in Seattle’s baseball stadium tonight. Some 15,000 people attended (a large crowd for a political rally). Sanders was on his home turf.  Washington State (or at least the Western part of it) is one of the bluest* in the nation.  And so Sanders ran through a litany of progressive issues still needing work in the USA : immigration reform, paid maternity and family leave, equal pay for women, raising the minimum wage, criminal justice reform, environmental issues and pollution, free college education and reduced student loan debt, infrastructure funding .. a long list.  The primary elections tomorrow are all about the Democrats, in the States of Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.

*Blue (state) on a political map of the USA means Democratic.  Red states are Republican.

It is officially spring* here in the northern hemisphere ! .. even though it was a rainy, cloudy day here in Seattle.  (The sun did come out early evening afternoon, just before it set at 7.24 pm).

*Spring starts at the vernal equinox, the day the sun ‘crosses’ the celestial equator (the imaginary line in the sky above the earth’s equator), from south to north.  The sun does not really cross the equator.  The earth spins like a top around a tilting axis, which at this time of year is at a right angle to the sun.  So that is why day and night are nearly exactly the same length (12 hours) all over the world at this time of year, and again at the autumnal equinox.

There is a lot of excitement here in Capitol Hill today with two new light rail stations opening : one here in my Capitol Hill neighborhood, and one more at the football stadium of the University of Washington. My friend Bryan and I did a round trip from Capitol Hill Station up to the University of Washington, down to Westlake in downtown Seattle, and back up again to Capitol Hill.   I was going to say the project came in 6 months early and $200 million under budget, but I see that comes with a big asterisk.  The original schedule and budget that voters had approved in way back in 1996, called for a $1.8 billion light rail line from the airport to the U-district, opening in 2006.   Instead, $2.3 billion was spent on a light rail line from the airport to Westlake Station (completed in 2009).  This extension cost an additional $1.8 billion.  I guess it is this part that came in under budget.

We had a blustery and stormy Sunday afternoon here in the Seattle area.  The strong winds uprooted trees and broke branches off from others.  Several houses and cars were damaged, and tens of thousands of residents lost their electricity for a few hours.  In Seward Park, a very large tree toppled over and hit an SUV, fatally injuring the driver.

We had a nice break in the rainy weather on Saturday, and I ran out to go buy new LED light bulbs for my kitchen.  Not everyone has warned up to them : they require super-low wattage, but are also super-expensive ($15 per bulb).  And some people say they still prefer the warm glow of Edison’s 110-year old incandescent bulbs .. to which I say : it’s 2016, people! Doesn’t saving energy and money (over the long haul) feel good as well?

We had a natural gas explosion here in a Seattle neighborhood this morning.  There were nine firefighters on the scene – to investigate a gas smell that residents had reported first reported at 1:04 a.m. on Wednesday. The explosion tore through the neighborhood 39 minutes later, flattening a coffee shop, a convenience store and a Greek food store and damaging the store fronts of 36 businesses.   The firefighters were injured, but not seriously, and luckily no one else was hurt.   The cause of the leak and the explosion is still being investigated.

Spring is on the way. It’s still not very warm here in Seattle this time of year, with the day temperatures between the 40 and 50°F (4 and 10°C).  We do have blossoms on the trees and some flowers that have started to open up.

 

When I was young, my dad would take all of us for drive around the neighborhood on Sunday afternoons, and he and my mom would point out houses for sale, or check out houses under construction.  I thought about that as I walked around my neighborhood and checked on the progress of houses getting built and fixed up this weekend.

Here is Exhibit A : the house that suffered a bad fire, that I wrote about in April 2015.   The house had been completely renovated inside: new roof, new floors, new plumbing, new kitchen cabinets, new bathroom fixtures, and new paint.  More than $220,000 spent on the renovation (!), says the write-up on the Zillow home listing website.

Then for ‘Exhibit B’ there is the old dilapidated house on a street corner nearby that was torn down, that I wrote about in July 2015.   Construction of a 5 unit townhouse set is progressing rapidly (picture below).

We always get a lot of winter rain from December through February here in the Pacific Northwest.  And on Thursday it became official : this 2015-2016 season we are having the wettest winter on record* here in the Pacific Northwest.

*I am steering clear of the word ever, even though some TV news stations have bandied it about.  Our rainfall records only go back 122 years to 1894. Earth is some 4.543 billion years old .. and who knows what deluges this spot we know call Seattle might have experienced through the eons?

 

It was a rainy weekend and Valentine’s Day in Seattle.  The temperatures here were really mild, though, compared to what was going on across the continent in the northeast (see the graphic from CBS News).   A friend from Portland, Oregon was visiting, and we played some tennis on the indoor courts at the Amy Yee Tennis Center.  Hey, I could still hit the ball.  It was the first time I had played tennis in a long time.

Here is a picture I took today of Amazon’s biospheres in downtown Seattle.   Nobody seems quite sure what to make of these unusual structures .. are they ridiculous or something special and futuristic?  ‘The goal of the new spherical space is to create an environment where employees can work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting’ according to the design document for the spheres .. and ‘The generative idea is that a plant-rich environment has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting’.    Well, one thing is for sure : this is not a typical office setting !

‘Please understand that our emotional unavailability is an expression of love’, says Sean Nelson in this week’s ‘Welcome to Seattle’ issue of The Stranger (our ‘alternative’ newspaper, alternative from proper, establishment newspapers).  He is referring to the famous Seattle Freeze, and tries to explain what it is and why it exists (and has trouble doing it, as do we all). Still, he says, in the end Seattle is like any other place in the world : a newcomer’s to navigate, to discover, and to ruin or to improve by the exact measure of the self that the person adds to it.  And we love Seattle and choose to live here ‘despite the fact that the weather is garbage, our rents have skyrocketed, our jobs have disappeared, our favorite bars have been shuttered, and our friends won’t return our texts.