Flightaware showing the activity around Seattle-Tacoma airport, located at the south end of the Puget Sound. The KSEA is the airport navigation beacon’s identifier.
I’m home .. my flight went without incident. I sat in row 10 on the Alaska Air Boeing 737 the way I normally do. So why do we have a sound, and San Francisco has a bay? I wondered as we landed. Well. Did Wikipedia have an answer for me – and more :
In geography a sound is a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, and wider than a fjord; or a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land (see also strait).
Now I know there is something such as a bight as well. A bight is a shallow sound.
The Alaska Airlines flight this morning from Seattle to San Francisco left out of Terminal A this morning – all the way at its very end where gates A13 and A14 are located.
This work of art is called Pantopol V (1972), and the artist is Ted Jonsson. There’s two Willems in the reflection.And there is the painting on the window panes, just lit up from behind with the sunrise.
It’s official (say I) : we had no winter here in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, there was a little snow in November, as I noted in this post, and a few cold nights and mornings in December – but that was it. Check out the gorgeous blue sky from this picture on Saturday, as I walked down John Street to the gym, the temperature approaching 60 °F (15 °C).
I’m on John St, approaching Broadway, with the new Capitol Hill Light Rail station’s construction starting to emerge above the fence around it. The lime green building on the right is Queen Sheba, an Ethiopian restaurant.
Seattle’s State Route 99 boring machine* (Bertha) ran into trouble while boring through sloppy old tide flat dirt and fill material. Some of the water and abrasive material made it past the seals designed to keep it out and into critical bearings for the cutters on the head of the boring machine, causing it to overheat. So a big hole had to be dug to get to the cutter head, lift it out, and repair it. (The stoppage occurred in December 2013, and the project is now some two years behind schedule).
At midday Thursday, the top portion of the SR 99 tunneling machine’s cutterhead broke through the southern wall of the access pit. It will be several months before boring can continue, and there is still a long way to go.
*A tunnel boring machine with a cutting head that is 17.5 m (57 ft) in diameter.
Only about 1.000 ft of the State Route 99 Tunnel has been bored (at the tunnel’s south portal) .. there is still a mile and a half to go!The pit to reach the boring machine’s cutter head is about 120 ft deep. Check out the inside of the wall on the left. The cutter head has bored through the hole’s concrete wall.The local alternative newspapers are NOT happy with Bertha’s troubles. A terrain sinkage of about a quarter inch in the immediate ares is also blamed on Bertha’s digging.
A ground plaque at Westlake Center in downtown Seattle asks ‘What started the Great (1889) Seattle Fire?’ Answer : a pot of glue that boiled over in a cabinet maker’s shop.
I had some business downtown on Friday, and managed to escape from my conference calls and work only at 4 pm. I hopped on the bus so that I could avoid dealing with rush-hour traffic (the bus driver still has to deal with it, of course!). We have balmy winter weather here in the Pacific Northwest, even as the brutal cold and snow storms continue to batter the Northeast of the USA.
It was clear and mild on Sunday for my little Capitol Hill walkabout. I like to check out the status of the numerous apartment buildings under construction. This one on Republican and 14th Avenue has been completed. Nice enough? The wood’s color is just a lot more striking than perhaps the architect intended. And will the varnish stand up against the wind and rain (when it inevitably comes?).
The Yardhouse is a new studio and one-bedroom apartment block on Seattle’s Capitol Hill... and just out of curiosity I pulled up the website. This artist rendition’s colors are quite muted. Maybe the website should put up a real picture now that the building’s construction has been completed?
Bryan, Gary and I went to the annual flower and garden show here in the Convention Center in downtown Seattle. The pictures are of some of my favorite exhibits.
A cute ‘mushroom’ gnome cottage with a lane of daffodils leading to it.Is this garden shed (I think it’s a garden shed) too whimsical for such a practical purpose?The red tulips are striking in this display. Maybe these had been grown in a green house, since it’s still a while before the tulip fields in Skagit Valley north of Seattle will be in full bloom (in spring, around April).
It felt like spring here in Seattle on Friday with very mild weather (57 °F/ 14 °C) .. which was good because I had several errands to run. Lots of ‘new’ things happened. I took two new pairs of pants to the tailor to adjust them, and I checked into my firm’s newly refurbished office space (we just moved up 10 floors in our building in downtown Seattle). And while I was there – I picked up my new Lenovo notebook computer and a new ‘jet pack*’ network device as well !
*It’s a little device that uses the phone network to provide wireless connectivity anywhere in the USA. Yes, airports provide free wireless internet access, but many times it is just too slow.
Here’s a glimpse up north on Broadway at the Seattle Community College. The two sets of rails in the surface of the road is for a new street car (not yet in service). And check out the line of parking spots between the street car and the bike lanes. Better be VERY careful while getting out after one had parked one’s car!This picture of higher-or-lower-compared-to-hisrorical-temperatures is from Cliff Mass’s weather blog. There is a high-pressure ridge in place that assures the western USA of higher than normal weather. Meanwhile – in the east – there is yet more snow and very frigid weather expected.
It’s foggy and forty (5 °C), even here in the slightly higher elevations of the city where I am on Capitol Hill’s 15th Avenue. I took the picture at 10.00 pm on Friday night.
At the gate at San Francisco airport. Over at the next gate is a Sun Country Airlines Boeing 737. No, it’s not a foreign airline : the airline is based in Minneapolis–Saint Paul in Minnesota, and has a fleet of 21 airplanes.This is the C concourse of Seattle airport after my arrival. My first thought was the 3 means three days to the Superbowl! but no – it’s of course the No 3 jersey of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson.
It’s been a tough work week for me, and I was very happy to drive out to San Francisco airport Thursday afternoon. Our flight was on time, and went without incident, which I am always thankful for. The guy right next to me brought a large pizza on board for dinner. A woman in front of me had her hair dyed in three colors. Hmm, I thought. The two shades of brown look great, but that reddish brown is one color too many. But none of my business, right?
Russell Wilson with the NFC trophy (shouldn’t the trophy be a little bigger?). The Seahawks will meet the New England Patriots in the Superbowl two weeks from now.
Oh, I cannot watch this any longer, I thought, as the Seahawks were down 0-16 at half-time. Let me get my errands done before it gets too late. (I fly out to San Francisco in the morning, hope my ear is going to be OK). Then in the 4th quarter I learned that the Hawks were rapidly catching up and going for broke. By the time I got home they were up 22-19. The Packers put in a field goal to even at 22-22. Time was up, and now it was into overtime. Three minutes in, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson threw a perfect ball 35 yards down the middle to Jermaine Kearse for the winning touchdown.
Here’s a bird’s eye view* of the city of Seattle, looking south with the ’12th man’ (Seahawks football team supporter) flag atop the Space Needle. Other tall buildings sport the blue and green colors of the team as well. The action on Sunday at 12 noon is in the stadium at the top right of the picture, where the Seahawks play against the Greenbay Packers for a spot in the Superbowl.
Yes – 2014 is almost gone. I made it out to the gym today, but had to bundle up. It was sunny, but only a few degrees above freezing (38 °F/ 3 °C) here in Seattle this afternoon. The outdoor art is located in the open space across from the gym, the site where construction on the city’s new Denny Substation will start in 2015.
Should we read anything into this arrangement? There is no 4 in the artwork, and no cross/ plus sign. And it would certainly have been awful to accidentally end up with a something like a swastika in it.
The Poodle Dog Restaurant off Highway 99 was started in 1933, originally in railcars, and still serves classic greasy spoon diner food.I love truss bridges like these, but man! most were built shortly after World War II and are 50 years old. This is in the Tacoma area.The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is a pair of twin suspension bridges that span the Tacoma Narrows strait of Puget Sound, and connects Tacoma with the Kitsap peninsula. We’re traveling westbound on the older of the two bridges. The oncoming traffic’s bridge is new and was completed in 2007.Christmas Day, and we’re inspecting the seawall along the properties. Logs, rocks, seawalls – all help to stabilize the land .. but they interfere with the inter-tidal habitat of little creatures in the sand and on the coast. The new seawall along Seattle’s waterfront will try to mimic some of the features of a coastline with steps and terraces.There are little trails in the woods around Hansville as well. The trail was a little squishy but not too muddy.And of course, here is the sunset. The sun sets far to the south on the western horizon at this time of year.
Paul, Thomas and I set out for Paul’s ‘beach’ house in Hansville on Wednesday night. The wait at the Edmonds-Kingston ferry crossing was so long, that we drove the long way around south through Tacoma, and up north again to get to Hansville on the Hood Canal. Tacoma is sometimes called Seattle’s step sister-city, but she definitely has her charms : great views of the south Puget Sound and much more affordable living than Seattle.
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson’s mug appears on some Alaska Airlines planes. He is the ‘Chief Football Officer’. Passengers with a No 3 Russell Wilson jersey are invited to board early with the frequent flyers.
And how are the Seahawks doing anyway, this season? Well, they look like the favorites to win their Division and go on to the playoffs. (The playoffs involve six teams from each of the league’s two conferences. The winners of the two conferences play in the Super Bowl).
This is the corner of 17th Ave and Roy St at 8 am on Saturday.
We woke up to a dusting of snow here this morning in Capitol Hill .. just a half inch or so that stuck to the ground, but not really to the slightly warmer street and sidewalk surfaces.
Watch your step! The sidewalk in front of my house is not slippery – yet. If the melting snow tuns into ice it can get very slippery.
It was Black Friday today (the infamous shopping day after Thanksgiving, with people trampling over one another and fighting over items that are on sale). It was wet and cold here in Seattle, and on top of all that, I saw on the news tonight that there was a ruckus in downtown (again) at the lighting of the Christmas tree there. Protestors, still over the Ferguson police shooting, crowded into the Westlake shopping mall, and tried to disrupt the proceedings at the tree lighting. So a good thing I ventured no further than the grcoery store here two blocks from my house !
On a happier note, I see our Cinerama movie theater has reopened after extensive renovations. It’s been many years since I’ve been there, and I should go check it out.
Here is a beautiful picture I found on Monday’s King5 TV on-line report. Check out the deep orange with Mount Rainier and Seattle’s waterfront. The picture was taken on Nov. 8 by Sigma Sreedharan.
From King5’s website : Sreedharan knew the proper equipment to use because she has photographed the Seattle Great Wheel in motion many times. To capture the image, Sreedharan used a 4- to 5-second shutter speed, ISO 50 and a f/13 f-stop on a Sony A7R Mirrorless camera. She says she then made few edits to brighten the shadows and enhance details in the darker areas in Adobe Photoshop.
If one does not pay attention to the time at this time of year, the darkness sneaks up and .. the day is gone! So when 4 pm came I knew I had to go for a walk immediately if I wanted to catch a few rays of sunlight. The sun sets at 4.30 pm already, and the days are still getting shorter.
The sun is about to set over Seattle’s Volunteer Park .. with the Asian Art museum soaking up a last few rays of sunlight.
One more update on the mushroom from Friday – the last one, I promise. It’s just that I feel a little like Tintin in ‘The Shooting Star’ .. facing a mushroom that grows to be very big in a short space of time.
The top of the mushroom has flattened out, and is now about 10 inches across.Here are Tintin and Snowy (from the German translation of The Shooting Star), discovering what they first think is a bird’s egg, and then realizes it is a mushroom. (Spoiler alert : And what happened to the giant mushroom? It exploded.).
