Category: Seattle

Monday was Martin Luther King Day here in the United States, so : no fretting about the stock market on the CNBC TV channel (with the stock market closed).  I walked down hill to the gym (and then when I’m done, I’m lazy/ tired, and I wait for the No 8 bus down below to give me a ride back up to the top of Capitol Hill !).

The opening of the new light rail station here in Capitol Hill, some seven blocks away from my house, is now only a few months away. I plan tp go for a little jolly ride on the train just as soon as the train station opens !

It was foggy outside on Saturday morning. And the the latest TIME magazine says Mr Donald Trump ‘has won’. No, he has not.  He leads in the polls, and the first primary caucuses for the 2016 Presidential candidates, in Iowa, are held on Feb 1).  And Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story ‘Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Want Your Vote’ explains that if you are a money manager or a Wall Street executive, you would not want to vote for Bernie Sanders.  He favors much stricter regulation to keep the big banks and investment firms from foisting another 2008-like global financial crisis on all of us).

I am not traveling to California on Monday morning, so I could afford to relax a little – and make an impromptu stop by the Space Needle to take a picture of it with the Christmas tree lights on top of it.

The days are short here in the Northern Hemisphere – sunset is a little after 4 pm – so I feel I have to strike out and run my errands early on.   I have done well : had my hair cut, cleaned my house, charged my car’s dead battery*, took some old pillows, wheeled suitcases and an oven toaster to Goodwill, a big box of used packing ‘peanuts’ to the UPS store for them to re-use, did my laundry, and packed my bags for one last trip for 2015 to California in the morning. It’s to Sacramento this trip, with a drive up north from the airport.

*I did not shut the driver’s door properly, and the dome light drew down the battery’s charge.  Hmm.  And I want to get an electrical car.  I will have to do better, right?

It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.  I had taken this picture from the inside of the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum here in Seattle in 2013.

There’s a beautiful full moon in the Northern skies here tonight.  I see its Native American name is the Beaver Moon.  The next full moon is due on Christmas Day, and it is going to be the Cold Moon. (It’s cold already!).

I finally made it to Amazon’s book store to go check it out.  The book store is a good size but not nearly as large as a typical cavernous Barnes & Noble book store.  (The world’s largest book store has been on line, for a very long time, of course).  The store seems to offer a carefully selected set of books, almost all with ‘customer reviews’, on various topics.  I was a little disappointed with the smallish sections for math, science and information technology, but admittedly my book preferences may not be very mainstream. There are Kindles on display (of course), and fairly large children’s and youth book sections.   I really hope that there will always be a plenty of book stores around, with new books, old books, serious books and books just for fun.  And I still want at least some of my books – the really good ones that I treasure – printed on paper.

Today is election day for cities, counties and states across the USA.  (Not quite as exciting as next year’s presidential election and US Senate or House of Representative elections, but at least it’s something, right?).   It looks as if the ‘Let’s Move Seattle’ levy to improve transportation infrastructure is going to pass, as is the ‘Best Starts’ levy to increase funding for early education for very young kids.   Ksharma Sawant, the unabashed socialist candidate for Seattle City Council, is leading in the polls as well.

In other local news, the rumors have been confirmed : Amazon has opened it’s first brick- and-mortar bookstore (actually made of brick and mortar) here in Seattle. Whatever out of this world books could they be offering inside, I wonder? The store is small, says the first reports – not nearly as big as a typical Barnes & Noble bookstore – but offers a nice experience.  I will have to go and take a look. Surely there will be Kindles for sale as well !

Our local Seattle elections are coming up again and I got my ballot, so I have to study up on the candidates and initiatives. (Washington State is one of 24 in the USA that allow voter initiatives – so the citizens can gather signatures and put initiatives on the ballot).

Some of this years initiatives : an initiative proposing that the State of Washington crack down harder on people trading dead animal parts (including those of a pangolin), one proposing higher property taxes for early childhood education for underprivileged kids, another proposing for $12 a month in property taxes for maintaining and improving Seattle’s transport infrastructure, and a Charter Amendment for increased oversight into police actions.

It’s Monday, and there is no Columbus Day holiday for me.  No holiday? asked the cab driver early this morning.  No, no, I said, and ‘in fact Columbus Day has been abolished in the city of Seattle’.   It is true : more cities are recognizing Native Americans on Columbus Day, and activists are pushing for a renaming of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day.

We had an inch or more of rain in the city on Saturday, and with the dry summer months behind us* gardeners can now certainly curtail the watering of their lawns and other greenery.  The leaves are coming down from my neighbor’s big maple tree and I sweep them up every weekend.   That way I have enough room in the yard waste bin every week – and I don’t have to go out and buy 25 giant yard waste paper bags, the way I had to one year when I waited until Thanksgiving !

*Yes, it rains a lot less in summer in Seattle.  Check out the little graphic : only 0.7 and 0.9 inches on average for all of July and August.

My friends and I went to the Cinerama movie theater here in downtown Seattle on Saturday to go check out The Martian, the movie of Andy Weir’s self-published book about a marooned astronaut (portrayed by Matt Damon) on Mars, written in 2011.  I am told the movie could not nearly capture all the technical and scientific details from the book .. which is probably understandable because of time and mass-appeal constraints in the movie!   Nonetheless, we liked the movie a lot.  I will now have to go read the book even though I know how it all ends.

origin of bumbershoot
bumber- (alteration of umbr- in umbrella) + -shoot (alteration of -chute in parachute)
first known use: circa 1896

I am lucky .. I don’t have to drive in the city of Seattle in rush hour.  (I take the bus to my office downtown).  This picture with mark-ups of the traffic violations was posted on the Seattle section for ‘reddit’, an online bulletin board system, by an irate bicyclist.

I drove out to Carkeek* Park on the northern outskirts of the Seattle metropolitan area this Sunday afternoon to enjoy some of the sunny weather.  The Park is big .. 216 acres, and offers hiking trails and playgrounds in addition to the strip of pebbles and rough along Puget Sound.   I waited for a train to come by, and my patience was rewarded : a Burlington North-Santa Fe oil train came along.  I counted about 110 cars on the train!

*named after an English building contractor who came to Seattle in 1875.

It’s Seafair Weekend here in Seattle, part of a month-long series of events that include parades, airshows over Lake Washington, and a hydroplane boat race on it as well.  Dare I say, this display of airplanes tearing through the air with ear-splitting noise, and the boat races, are going against Seattle and the region’s ‘pacific’ and environmental sensibilities.   Just this Thursday Greenpeace protesters dangling from a bridge in Portland tried to prevent Shell Oil Company’s icebreaker from leaving its repair dock on the Willamette River.  Thirteen of them had spent the better part of 40 hours in climbers slings and on portable platforms!).

On Sunday morning we had a little breakfast at the Hans Grille, and then made for the Bainbridge ferry terminal.   The online page for the terminals give a count of the number of places on the ferry that remain for cars, and we were cutting it close for the 11.30 am departure*.  As we pulled up to the payment booth, the clerk removed the 11.30 am sign and said we were ‘questionable’ for making the 11.30.  But we made it, albeit with only two cars behind us. Yes!

*Worst thing that can happen when one does not make a departure, is to have to wait patiently for the next sailing, about an hour later .. except if it is the last one of the day of course.   Then you would have to drive around the Sound like we did coming in.  (And if it was that important to catch the ferry, one should have allowed more time to wait upfront, right?).