Category: Seattle

It’s been a week since the collapse of the Skagit River Bridge on Interstate 5 north of Seattle.  Washington State Department of Transport (we just call them ‘wash-dot’ here on the news) has dredged up the bridge section and vehicles from the river, and is getting ready to put a temporary section in place.  I see Wash-DOT splashed out on Yahoo’s photo site (called Flickr) with detailed pictures.  Here is the link http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/sets/72157633665218854/

Here’s a nice view from behind the overhand of a maple tree onto the pavement on 15th Ave, seen as I went for a little walk late Tue afternoon.  The leaves make a nice camouflage pattern (the French word derived from camoufler, to disguise).  After Memorial Day it’s ‘unofficially summer’ but the warm and dry weather still has to arrive here in Rain City.

It’s been many years since I had been inside the Seattle Central Library on 4th Avenue, and today I went there, also in search of a 1967 Time-Life Sciences book.  (The book is long out of print and has pictures of an Einsteinian ‘relativistic’ train robbery in that I am very fond of.)   Alas, I did not find the book, but I took some pictures.  The library opened in 2004 to mixed reviews, some criticizing it for being relatively isolated from 4th Ave and 5th Ave and not easy to get into and out of .. but its current usage is actually double of what was estimated when it opened.   

From Kiro7tv.com : The Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River at Mount Vernon collapsed Thursday evening, dumping vehicles and people into the water shortly after 7 p.m.  Here is a link http://www.kirotv.com/gallery/news/i-5-skagit-river-bridge-collapses/g9w8/#last.

Three people and their cars ended up in the river, but was pulled out and seem to be doing fine.  At this point there are no known fatalities. The bridge was built in 1955*, and is some 65 miles north of Seattle, and the four-lane structure sees an average daily traffic of about 71,000.  So this spells trouble for the immediate area. There is an alternate route and a newer bridge, but it was not designed for nearly as much traffic.

*Designated ‘functionally obsolete’ on its most recent inspection reports but apparently that does not mean the bridge is unsafe.  (Sounds as it was overdue for an upgrade or replacement, though).

This metal tile that I found under my feet while  I was at the Westlake Center plaza in downtown Seattle, poses a question.  It is one that a Seattle resident should be able to answer (or at least guess) easily : What is the longest floating bridge in the world? (Side comment .. shouldn’t the question have said ‘WHERE is the longest floating bridge in the world?). Answer : In Seattle, of course. Well, between Seattle and Redmond. So that the Microsofties can get across Lake Washington.  Here is a post I made long ago  SR 520 showing what a cross-section of the bridge will look like once the renovations and expansion to it is complete, scheduled for 2015.

I learned a new word while listening to a discussion of the Denny Substation’s progress on the city council’s web site : there will be a utilidor for the station.   Utilidor is short for utility corridor (really just a utility tunnel, to carry cabling and to house equipment underground).  There’s not much to see behind the Denny Substation Project site yet .. right now they are scooping up the top two to four feet of soil to clean up oil and grime from the old Greyhound bus station maintenance facility.   It’s still a ways to 2016 when the substation will be complete.

The picture is from Thursday.  I am standing on the corner of 7th Ave and Olive Way. I had just left the Vessel bar/ watering hole where I had a beer with a few colleagues after work.  The ‘Olive 8’ condo tower still has 5 units left, but it seems like the opportunity to snap up a condo on the cheap from the distressed developer has now come and gone. The building was completed in 2009, and one bedroom condos typically listed for $500,000.  One condo for sale on the property website Zillow had been sold in Nov 2010 for $328,000, probably by the developer to a speculator.   The listing price (it’s a one bed, one bath condo) is now back up to $495,000.

It looks as if two weeks of dry weather is coming to an end today, and we had beers on Bryan and Gary’s deck tonight to enjoy the last of it.  Check out Bryan’s ‘Elysian Superfuzz Pale Ale’ beer, brewed with blood orange to give it a citrussy taste.  I buy the little blood oranges here at the grocery store when I see them.  They are small and sweet and make you feel like a vampire when you bite into the juicy dark red fruit.  Njarr !

I thought it was warm on Monday – but didn’t realize until the evening news that the 87 ºF (30.6 ºC) we had in the city was quite an aberration.  It was the highest May 6 temperature on record, and by a wide margin.

So .. does a beach have to have sand?  Madison Beach here alongside Lake Washington does not really have sand, and the water is not salty. We have to make do with what we have since it’s a heck of a drive out to the open ocean’s beaches here from the city !

We have a high-pressure cell hovering over us this weekend – keeping the clouds of the jet-stream away, and giving us a beautiful clear blue sky* and warmer temperatures (70’s º F/ 20’s ºC).

*And just why is the sky blue? Because of Rayleigh scattering.  In plain English, the molecules of the earth’s atmosphere scatter the shorter wavelengths of light from the sun more than the longer ones, and the human eye sees the blue.  If our eyes were more sensitive to violet light, the sky would have been violet.  When the sun sets, the scattering of the red color wavelengths become more predominant, and we see red and pink).

With Wednesday being May 1, there were street marches for workers’ rights and immigration reform here in Seattle.  Everything went OK but after 6 pm things turned ugly in downtown Seattle. Most of the marchers had dispersed by then, but a small group of self-described ‘anarchists’ started confronting the police, and damaged cars and windows by throwing rocks.  So some 17 people were arrested, and 8 police officers hurt – but mostly bumps and bruises.   My take? Hey, you’re not going to get an argument from me that we’re doing just fine with capitalism in the USA.  Capitalism is killing our morals and our future, argues Paul Farrell on the Wall Street Journal’s website Marketwatch : http://www.marketwatch.com/story/capitalism-is-killing-our-morals-our-future-2013-04-27?link=kiosk.  We cannot put everything up for sale. The examples he mentions : “for-profit schools, hospitals, prisons/ outsourcing war to private contractors/ police forces by private guards, almost twice the number of public police officers/ drug companies’ aggressive marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers, a practice prohibited in most other countries.”   But to think we can live in a society with almost no government, no laws and no police (libertarian socialism, which seems to me pretty close to what anarchists stand for) – that is just a pipe-dream.

Here are two pictures from Friday.  I took the bus the the gym and back late afternoon (nice not to deal with the crush of traffic downtown).  There was still some sun left after that, and so I walked down to Broadway (the main out-and-about street here in Capital Hill) to see what’s going on there.

Here is one more post for the Bullitt center as a follow-up to the ones I made some six months ago when construction was underway :  Seattle’s new ultra-green building and   Bite the Bullitt.   The sleek and shiny solar-paneled building is now ready for its opening on Monday (Earth Day).

It was a turbulent weather day here in central Puget Sound with thunderstorms and hail. Heavy snow also fell near Snoqualmie Pass (53 miles east of Seattle on I-90).  This mountain pass saw two avalanches as a result.  In the one, a 12-person snow-shoeing party got hit, but all were accounted for without serious injuries by end of day Saturday.   In the other avalanche three experienced hikers were carried more than 1,200 feet.  By Saturday night one still had not been found, with hopes now dimming that he is still alive.

My brother and I and friends went out to the Museum of History and Industry in South Lake Union neighborhood (yes, I was there a few weeks ago as well), grabbed a bite to eat nearby, and went on to check out the Ballard Locks (official name : Hiram M. Chittenden Locks).  The locks are part of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, a large project that was started in 1911 and officially completed only in 1934.  The system of locks separate the fresh water body of Lake Union that is on average 20 ft higher than the salt water of Puget Sound (depending on the tides).  The locks also have a ‘fish ladder’ .. a set of boxes and weirs that allow salmon to migrate into Lake Union and Lake Washington to spawn.  I see fish like salmon that do this salt water-fresh water migration, are called diadromous fish.

Sunday was another blue sky day here on Easter weekend, and I felt compelled to get out of the house on Sunday afternoon.  I walked down to the Japanese Garden and the Arboretum to check out the blossoms on the trees.

Mono no aware is a Japanese phrase associated with cherry blossoms.  It literally means ‘the pathos of things’, or could also be translated as ‘an empathy toward things’ or  ‘a sensitivity to ephemera’  (source: Wikipedia).  So it is a term for the awareness of the impermanance or the transience of things, and a gentle sadness or wistfulness at their passing.