Category: Seattle

So Thanksgiving Day behind us, the shopping for Christmas can start in earnest.  This year the Black Friday sales events at stores started on Thanksgiving evening already, on Thursday. The ugly face of capitalism clashing with family time? Yes. Should there be a law to keep stores closed? Probably not. Can a store force its workers to come in on Thanksgiving Day?  Of course.  But then it may have to deal with an unhappy workforce (or maybe it will keep the store in business, and save some jobs?).  Doorbusters! 30% off ! screams the headlines.   But most items were not meant to sell at the ‘full price’ at any time of the year, anyway.  It’s marketing hype and marketing theater.   As had been said already in the times of the Roman empire : caveat emptor. Buyer beware.

It’s been awhile since I stopped by the flagship REI store (Recreational Equipment Inc.) here in Seattle.  I need new gloves and was looking for a jacket for wearing in Denver. The Hilton Garden Inn is much further from the office, and a 15 to 20 minute walk.  Indeed, there were forests of ski jackets to wade through, with inner layers and outer layers and Gore-Tex and all .. but they all seemed a little too much, and too colorful, too sporty to wear as an outer layer for an office job.   So I will keep looking.   The departments stores are sure to offer blander jackets and coats.  It’s just that the Christmas season onslaught of music and displays and the Salvation Army jingling their bell all day long outside the Pacific Place mall have now started.

 

On Saturday we made a quick day trip to Paul’s getaway cabin on Kitsap peninsula.   We drove up to Edmonds, and took the ferry to Kingston.  At Edmonds we just missed the 10.30 am departure of the ferry, and walked over to the water’s edge while waiting for the next departure.   Immediately to the north of the ferry terminal is Edmonds Underwater Park : an area of seabed stretched across 27 acres of tide and bottom lands. The park was established in 1970 as a marine preserve and sanctuary by city ordinance. The primary attraction for divers is the man-made reefs constructed of concrete blocks, tractor tires, PVC pipes of various sizes, sunken navigation buoys, an old tree trunk, sunken boats & ships, even old pieces of the 520 floating bridge.   There were 20 or so divers to be seen on Saturday.  It looked deceptively calm and shallow to me, given that a diver died in there 2005 and two more in 2010 in separate incidents. (Malfunctioning equipment, cross currents). Events like these send shock waves through the diving community, since there are so many diving protocols dedicated to safety – but I guess accidents are bound to happen with some 25,000 divers going there every year.

 

 

 

The mushrooms in my back yard seem to favor this time of year to sprout up in my back yard, and I took out about a dozen of the red ones with white speckles today.    I wash my hands carefully after I had taken them out, since they might be poisonous.   Even edible mushrooms have a tendency to absorb heavy metals, so they should not be harvested in the wild if they are near roads or industrial areas.

So .. Daylight Savings Time has come to an end. It’s time to ‘fall back’ one hour.  Today was a blustery day here in the Seattle area with wind and rain.  I cleaned up the leaves at the front and the back of the house as usual, knowing that I don’t have to get all of it .. it just keeps coming down, and I will get the rest next weekend.

Here are a few selected pictures that I took at the 2014 Seattle Auto Show that we attended today.

 

 

The green in the trees here in Seattle are turning into reds, oranges and yellows, as they are across the United States.

So why are leaves green to begin with? asks Wikipedia in its article on chlorophyll.  Wikipedia : ‘It still is unclear exactly why plants have mostly evolved to be green. Green plants reflect mostly green and near-green light to viewers rather than absorbing it. Other parts of the system of photosynthesis still allow green plants to use the green light spectrum (for example, through a light-trapping leaf structure, carotenoids, and so on). Green plants do not use a large part of the visible spectrum as efficiently as possible. A black plant can absorb more radiation.   For more, check out Wikipedia : Chlorophyll

 

We are having a ‘big weather event’ (as the meteorologists like to say) here in Seattle this weekend : lots of rain with gusty winds at times as well.  The first big storm of the season can make trouble and bring down tree branches and there was indeed a power outage in parts of the city.

So fall* is officially here!  It was supposed to rain on Saturday in the city but it didn’t .. we did get some rain on Sunday.   When it stopped, I was ready to get out of the house for a bit, and went for a walk on 19th Ave.   *We say fall in the USA and Canada, elsewhere it is autumn!

It’s Bumbershoot weekend, Seattle’s annual music festival by the Space Needle. I have to confess that I am not soo into the music scene and the headliners that include Heart, Death Cab for Cutie, MGMT and Bassnectar are all unfamiliar to me.  Does that mean I should listen to more music? Broaden my horizons? The thing with live music is : it’s never quite the same as its recorded version that you have come to love, the one on your boombox or iPhone or iPad.  But yes, it’s nice to see the band of humans that actually make the music, make it for real up there on the stage – and share the experience with a crowd of fans .. right?

Businessweek magazine says there are 3,200 utilities (!) that make up the U.S. electrical grid. They sell $400 billion of electricity every year, mostly derived from burning fossil fuels in centralized power stations, and distributed over 2.7 million miles of power lines. (In the Pacific Northwest we generate up to 70% of our energy with hydropower stations).   Says Businessweek : Regulators set the rates, utilities get guaranteed returns, investors get sure-thing dividends.  It’s a model that has not changed much since Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  And it’s doomed to obsolescense.  There is a confluence of green energy and computer technology, deregulation, cheap natural gas and political pressure that, says David Crane of NRG Energy, poses a mortal threat to the system.    Rooftop solar in particular, is turning tens of thousands of businesses and homes into power producers : ‘distributed generation’.  Of course, it’s going to be a long haul to see how all of this plays out.  But it seems certain that the energy and technology sectors will no longer be supplier and customer.  They will be competing directly with each other.

I am sure Friday’s surprise announcement of CEO Steve Ballmer’s departure sometime over the next year, caused a buzz in the Microsoft world over on the ‘east side’.  (A reference to the main campus in Redmond and the city of Bellevue east of Seattle across Lake Washington).   Ironically, with the jump in the stock price, Mr Ballmer saw some $700 million added to his net worth.  Yes, the juggernaut is struggling to transition to a ‘devices and services’ company, and Windows 8 has not found traction so far.  But for fiscal 2013, Microsoft reported revenue of $77.85 billion,  6% increase over the previous year.  It sits on a $68 billion pile of cash.  They still have their operating system sitting on 91% of workstations(45% Windows 7, and 37% Windows XP : a product that is now 12 years old to the day).    Will it be a sales guy that replaces Steve Ballmer, or a product guy* (as the late Steve Jobs was)?  I would say the latter, but time will tell.

*I should say person and not guy.  For example, there is Meg Whitman leading the charge on Hewlett-Packard’s long comeback trail.

We all went out to Paul’s ‘cabin-in-the-woods’ (it’s really a house) in Hansville on Kitsap peninsula and some of us stayed over on Saturday night.   The peninsula is covered with pine trees – very green – and surrounded by water from the Puget Sound. So the tide comes in and goes out, and there are sea gulls, bald eagles, heron, kingfishers and osprey to be seen. (I need a long-range telephoto lens to have any hope of taking nice pictures of the birds, though).

 

This cute pamphlet from the Seattle Animal Shelter arrived in my mail on Saturday.

1.  Friday saw a 35-day day streak broken here in the city with a few welcome rain showers. (Per the Seattle Weather blog July was the driest in 50 years here! .. but we did have plenty of rain in April).

2.  I spotted a new (new to me, at least) ‘Big Belly’ solar trash compactor on the corner of Yale and Stewart.  It looks like a US Mailbox.  It uses solar power to compress trash put into it, and electronically alerts trash collectors through a web-based system when its belly is full.  The smarty pants trash can with the big belly comes at a price, though : they cost about $5,000 apiece.

On Saturday Gary got me out of the house to go to the Elysian Brewery Co. for a quick bite. After that we walked down two blocks to check out the Capitol Hill Block Party.  The ‘party’ consists of a few Capitol Hill city blocks that are fenced in, with four stages of live music, and beer and food that’s available.   I don’t drink enough beer (had my one at the Elysian already!), and I don’t really listen to live music so : not for me.   It was still early, and that may be why the crowds appeared to be a little thin. There was also the ‘Seafair Torchlight’ Parade going on in downtown Seattle (which admittedly is more of a family affair than the Block Party).

It was a beautiful warm, sunny day here in Seattle (85°F/ 29°C). The pictures are from Fifth Ave in downtown, near the Convention Center.

I walked by the Capitol Hill train station’s construction site. The tunnels to the station have been completed. Here is a Youtube clip of the tunnel breakthrough.  But there is still a long way to go to fill in all the construction that makes up the rest of the station !