Category: Seattle

We are lucky not to have to deal with many bugs in Seattle.  Here’s one I caught in my so-called garden yesterday, though.   I don’t have a close-up lens for my camera so it was hard to take a sharp picture of the tiny bug.   Ladybugs belong to Coccinellidae, a family of beetles.   In other parts of the world they are called ladybirds and in Afrikaans they go by liewenheersbesie which more or less translates back into English as ‘the dear lord’s little bug’.   There you have it.

I looked out my window on the front of the house to see what was making a noise (it was a generator used across the street for painting or cleaning a house outside). Then I spotted this truck in the street.  Grabbed my camera just in time to snap the milk man jumping back into his white-and-black cow truck (and of course it would be a cow truck! we expect it to be a cow truck! – right? : ).    But I really did not know milk is still available for delivery this way.

Their web site is www.smithbrothersfarms.com

(Yes, the sidewalk lawn in front of my house is dried out, the way it usually is in summer.   I don’t have a sprinkler system like my neighbor on the right!  And I am not home every week to water it!)

I made the second of my three trips to the passport office and took a few pictures of the buildings downtown.  The picture shows the region’s tallest building, the Columbia Center, in the middle ‘below’ the street lamp.  It has 76 stories and is almost 1,000 ft tall .. and is reportedly 40% empty.  Which is actually a lot better than some condo buildings downtown.

From The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly newspaper :

In March, the present owners of the Columbia Center tower, a Boston-based group called the Beacon Capital Partners, decided not to fork over its $1.6 million mortgage payment. This rattled not only downtown Seattle but the whole commercial real-estate market…  For the Columbia Center all the trouble began in 2007, the year the future refused to reveal anything to developers and financiers but a golden escalator to a brilliant cloud of profits. Beacon Capital bought the building for an astounding 621 million bucks—more than triple what it cost developer Martin Selig to build the tower two decades before. The purchase was a part of the group’s money-mad, frenzied, intoxicated spending spree of glamorous office properties in Seattle and Bellevue. The region had never seen anything like it. Millions upon millions were poured into amazed pockets.

Looking back, we now wonder how in the world anyone (and particularly those in the business of making loads of money) had such blind faith in an economy that was to crash only the following year. How could these professionals miss the signs? These same men and women bought the Columbia Center with the complete belief that today, in 2010, there would be even more money to be made than in 2007, the year the stock market passed the dizzying 14,000 mark. A year after the economy collapsed, the mighty Columbia Center has instead lost roughly 40 percent of its value, and the income from the building is now “less than needed to service its debt” (Puget Sound Business Journal, March 24).

Here is a picture from late Saturday afternoon, driving due west across Lake Washington on the State Route 520 Floating Bridge  into the sun.   It was a beautiful day, with blue sky and 83 F (28 C) temperatures.    (Yes, yes – I shouldn’t take pictures while driving with my cell phone, and I really do NOT touch my phone as a rule while driving).

I’m on the far left in this panoramic picture from Wikipedia (search for Evergreen Point Floating Bridge).  In 1989, an electrical fault caused the draw span to open during rush hour, causing one death and five injuries. In 2000, a gravel barge struck the bridge, closing it for eleven days and causing $500,000 worth of damage.  The bridge is actually nearing the end of its useful life and is scheduled for replacement by 2014 after a lot of political wrangling over how to go about it, and Microsoft weighing in as well.   (The Microsoft campus is on the east side of the bridge in a town called Redmond).