Discovery channel’s documentary about the successful attempt to videotape a giant squid deep in the ocean aired last night here in the USA. It was quite an undertaking, as documented an this article on theverge.com (link below). The article points out that that’s not all — there is evidence of a squid even bigger than the giant squid out there, called the colossal squid. Whoah. How little we know about the deep sea.
Here are some facts about the giant squid.And this is a still shot from the first video ever taken of a live giant squid deep in the ocean about 2,000 m (6,000 ft) down, captured in July 2012. (In 2006 one was videotaped by Japanese scientists on the surface of the ocean as it took bait that was dangled from a ship).
The Amante Pizza parlor’s sign at the corner of Olive Way and Denny in Seattle’s Capitol Hill on Saturday afternoon shows a temperature of 47 ºF (9 ºC).
It was 47 ºF (9 ºC) and rainy in Seattle on Saturday, but not bad weather at all, considering that snow-and-ice storm Luna* is hitting the Midwest and Chicago area this weekend.
*The Weather Channel’s name. They explain that their goal with naming storms is to better communicate the threat and the timing of the significant impacts that accompany these events.
I took the bus downtown to 5th Ave to hand in my passport for an expedited replacement. I was almost late (you make an appointment), since the office moved 6 blocks and I did not know that beforehand. And inside the Department of Homeland Security does an airport-like security screening, but with guards with guns and dogs and all. Pretty intimidating, even though they were very friendly. Weird that these measures ‘protecting our freedom’ actually makes it feel as if you do not have any in there. Anyway, up on the 6th floor the agent – paging through my fully stamped passport with two sets of added pages – was impressed with all my business travel, and said ‘Wow. Do you not feel like retiring yet?’. ‘Oh, of course I do’, I replied, but I have to work at least ten more years’.
My OneBusAway app shows up-to-the-minute information about buses in Seattle. My bus is No 43, and it is 2 minutes late to the stop. NOW means you have to run (‘Run Forrest Run!’*) since the bus is approaching the stop, or already there. *A reference to Forrest Gump the movieAnd here it comes. I WOULD have gotten a perfect shot, had the stupid tree not jumped in front of me at the last second ! : )Making my way down 5th Ave, with the obligatory shot of the Seattle Library on the right.The YWCA building is at 1118 Fifth Ave is 100 years old ! (completed in 1913).The King County Administration building with its hexagaonal honeycomb theme in its walls and windows was built in 1971.Still on 5th Ave, but I’m now making my way back from Yesler Way where the passport offices are. That’s the Mars Hill church in the foreground. (The sun is making a spirited attempt to break through the clouds, its light reflecting off the buildings).These copper leaves in the sidewalk are part of the Homeless Remembrance Project of Seattle to remember people who have died while homeless in King County. This is outside the Seattle Municipal Court on 5th Ave.
We completed our ‘blueprinting’ phase workshops in for our project today. Weather wise, the light snow of the last few days gave way to freezing rain* in the Salt Lake City area. There was so much of the stuff that the airport was closed for a few hours after a JetBlue plane skidded after landing (no injuries, and it stayed on the runway). It also made for a slow and treacherous drive out to the airport from Ogden.
*[From Wikipedia] Freezing rain is made entirely of liquid droplets. The raindrops become super-cooled while passing through a sub-freezing layer of air many hundreds of feet above the surface, and then freeze upon impact with any object they encounter. The resulting ice, called glaze, can accumulate to a thickness of several centimeters.
Tweet from Mike Seidel reporting for the Weather Channel about the freezing rain in the Salt Lake City area.My little red rental wagon had an ice blanket as I was preparing to drive it back to the airport. And the parking lot was as slippery as an ice rink in places. Watch out !
The snooze button is a standard feature on bedside alarms in the USA. (A big button on the top that stops the alarm and sets it to ring again at a short time later, most commonly nine minutes .. yes – nine, not ten, did you know that?). I don’t use the snooze button, though. When my iPhone alarm goes off at 5.15 am here in the hotel, I know : time’s UP. Got to jump out of bed now to make breakfast downstairs at 6.00 am! Last week I actually proved that I can speed it up dramatically; was woken one morning at 6.00 am by my colleague’s phone call, and made it down by 6.15 am! Of course, for that to happen there is no morning shower, no tidying up the room a bit – and certainly no ironing my shirt.
Some statistics in today’s Wall Street Journal related to sleeping. Yes, 6 hrs of sleep is really not enough! I try to get 7 1/2, and definitely a little more on weekends,
(Late post). I had to work on Monday (which was also Martin Luther King Day), but I did catch the highlights of President Obama’s Inauguration speech.
From the White House Blog : This morning, at 11:55 AM Eastern Time, President Obama delivered his Second Inaugural Address. The speech was 2,137 words long and took 15 minutes to deliver. “America’s possibilities are limitless,” he said, “for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together.”[From the Wall Street Journal] Some interesting numbers at the top of this page, comparing 2009 and 2013 statistics of the US population.
I am in Ogden for a last trip for now (but will probably come back in March). Here are some pictures from today. It is a little warmer than last Monday, but still well below freezing at night.
This is at the South Terminal. The Virgin America airplane is just taxiing up to its gate. The FAA’s grounding of all 787’s continues to be in the news. Boeing has stopped delivering new planes to customers but (for now) is continuing with their manufacture. It’s cheaper to continue doing that and putting the fixes (coming out of the investigation) with the lithium batteries in later. About FIVE a month is built – and the machines go for about $200 million each.A summary of the temperatures in the Salt Lake City area so far, reported by a local TV station. (Note that those are Fahrenheit temperatures! 32 F is O C)
The Zephyrus Pilsner from Elysian Brewing Company (picture from beeradvocate.com).
I ordered a vegan burger at our favorite watering hole and pub grub place here in Seattle on Saturday night – the Elysian Brewing Company. Soon after, the food server showed up with a burger with a strip of bacon on it. No, this is not mine, said I. What happened was that I said ‘vay-gen burger’ and the waiter heard ‘bacon burger’. I should have known something was up when he inquired ‘How do you want that cooked?’ .. I said, well how it is normally cooked? and he said ‘Medium’. Medium it is, I said (LOL). Veggie burgers are cooked only one way. Anyway, they replaced the bacon burger for me, the veggie burger was very tasty, and went very well with my Zephyrus Pilsner beer (it’s a German pilsner beer).
We have arrived in Seattle, and passengers – and the Great Dane : ) – are getting ready to disembark.
As the first class flyers were boarding in Salt Lake City on Thursday night for our flight to Seattle, a guy was let on board with a Great Dane service dog. I was in coach and we all thought ‘Well, this will be interesting : to see where the dog goes’. Turned out the guy had a whole set of three bulkhead seats in coach to himself, so that there was room for the dog to lie on the floor at his feet. This would NOT have worked with a full flight! Then as we approached Seattle, the pilot warned that it was foggy – and that he may have to do a touch-and-go landing if the fog was a lot thicker than they had anticipated. We could even have ended up at Portland airport 120 miles south. But all went well – even though the runway appeared suddenly out of nowhere – and so we landed and taxied to the gate.
My taxi driver had to deal with a foggy Interstate-5 highway, driving north to Seattle from Seatac airport.Here’s what the fog looked like at the corner of Broadway and Olive on Capitol Hill : not too bad, probably because Cap. Hill is at a higher elevation than highway I-5.
The blue and red tails of the Delta jets are from Concourse C at Salt Lake City airport. One of them will get me out of Dodge*. The project’s workshops are done for the week. We did a tour through the plant where we are working today. It was bitterly cold as we walked outside, so our little group of 5 was all too thankful to duck inside each of the buildings that was part of the tour so that our noses and ears could defrost. One building has a furnace in. ‘Do we have to leave?’ we said when it was time to go. If you’re not in an office, that is where you should work in winter time!
*’Getting out of Dodge’ is an idiomatic reference to a phrase used in the TV series ‘Gunsmoke’. The villains were told to get out of Dodge City, Kansas. (Yes, there is still a Dodge City in Kansas, named for Fort Dodge nearby).
Here is The Roosters Brewing Co. and Eatery on 25th St.And across the street these ‘Wild West’ saloon-style storefronts now house restaurants. In 1977, 25th Street in Ogden was recognized as having the most complete series of turn-of-the-century architecture in the state of Utah, and the preservation of these buildings was started.This beautiful example of Art Deco is Ogden Municipal building’s entrance. Completed in 1939, it was a federal work projects initiated during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.Peery’s Egyptian Theater is a movie palace located at 2439 Washington Blvd. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Check out the snow on the roof that has started to make icicles as the dripping water freezes up again.
I braved the bone-chilling cold late this afternoon to go out and take a few pictures – but man! I had to give it up after 30 mins. My thick stretch jeans was no match for the cold that seemed to come right through it. I did not wear my gloves, thinking it would interfere with my picture taking – big mistake. And I was very worried about condensate in my camera as well — I’m not supposed to use it in these low temperatures without a cover.
The mercury dropped to -22°C (-8 °F) this morning here in Ogden. Since mercury freezes only at -38°C (-36 °F), I guess the thermometers still work ! There is no snow in the forecast for the next week, but the stuff on the ground is certainly not going to melt any time soon.
We’re on our way into Ogden back from work on Monday. The Wasatch mountains in the distance now have a complete covering of snow, with a cloudy blanket as well.My iPhone weather app’s report out at 5.48 am. So it will ‘warm’ up to -3°C over the next few days.
Our din-din was at the Wing Wah tonight. My colleague and I asked for chopsticks to eat with – a nod to the many meals we had in China (but of course ‘Chinese’ food in America is not the same as ‘Chinese’ food in China).
This Sunday night finds me at Seatac airport for another trip to Salt Lake City. Only one more to go after this one – a good thing because I am not used to ‘solidly frozen’ temperatures. Seattle weather usually manages to stay more or less above 32° F (0 °C) for most of the winter (the average nightly low for Dec-Jan is 36°F). At least I remembered to pack my Cossack-style woolen hat that covers my ears and straps down under my chin, my gloves, and an extra scarf.
Salt Lake City high and low temperatures for the next few days (° C)... and in ° F.This British Airways Boeing 747 was sitting at gate S10 here at Seatac airport, catching the last few rays of a beautiful winter’s day in Seattle. It is headed home to London Heathrow airport.
It was a frosty Saturday morning in Seattle, but a bright and sunny day. On Saturday night I spotted a Bavarian ‘Ayinger’ beer in my local grocery store, the exact same one that I saw advertised in Munich. So of course I had to buy one. (Confession : a nice colorful label gets me every time). It is a very tasty beer, making a nice foamy head when poured. Aying is a town south west of Munich – that is actually still in the Munich municipality.
I snapped this big Ayinger beer label picture (pronounce ‘eye-ing-ger’) from the window of a neighborhood bar in Munich, close to the hotel that I stayed at over New Year’s.And here is the Ayinger beer that I bought at the grocery store, now poured into a glass on my kitchen counter top.
I made it to the airport, driving very carefully. The hardest part was getting the 3 inches of fluffy snow off my Nissan Altima rental car. The snow is not so fluffy right there on the windshield and windows : you have to scrape the ice crystals off. (The combination brush-scraper Hertz provides does a great job). And I remembered from my winters in St Louis to brush off snow powder from the car seat and from my clothes immediately. The stuff melts and becomes icy wet water (of course).
My Nissan Altima rental car had a a snow blanket this morning.
The snow at Salt Lake City airport caused some delays this morning, but I’m sure the airport is well-equipped to take care of a few inches of snow.
The snow flakes started coming down just as we were leaving the project site today, and it has been sifting down steadily since then. A total accumulation of 5 to 8 inches is expected in the lower areas; much more in the mountains. I will definitely have to navigate some snowy roads on the way to the airport tomorrow (Friday) !
Here is the Old Post Office across from the Marriott Ogden. I couldn’t venture out very far, since it’s very cold and still snowing lightly even though it does not look like it on the photo.This is about 8 pm. The streets in downtown Ogden (yes, I know – no skyscrapers here!) have a layer of snow, and are almost deserted.This is around 4 pm We’re driving back to Ogden from the project site. The snow is just starting to stick to the road surface.
It’s Wednesday and three of us stopped at Ruan Thai for dinner. The air outside is chilly, stagnant and bone dry, but that is set to change Thu and Fri with winds and lots of snow in the forecast. The mountains are expected to get more than a foot, which I am sure the skiers are eagerly anticipating. I just hope I will be able to drive to the airport on Friday.
The view towards the Wasatch mountains on the east of Ogden, as seen from the Walmart parking lot. (We shopped for lunch food at Walmart).This (unassuming) Thai food restaurant in Ogden serves up awesome Thai food .... as well as 5% alcohol/ vol Singha beer imported from Thailand. Domestic beers in Utah are allowed to go to 4% alcohol/ vol (which is actually pretty close to 5%). The Singha is a mythical lion from ancient Thai and Hindu stories.
I finally got over a bad cold I had and was well enough to fly out to Utah for my project on Monday night. Speaking of cold, the Salt Lake City area is off to a chilly start for 2013. Even the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper says so. Temperatures here have yet to rise above freezing (32°F) since the start of the year. It does look like it will happen on Wednesday – but only to dip down to an estimated 13°F (-11°C) on Thursday night.
Temperatures are in °F ! Check out the conversion below. 19 °F is 7 °C below zero 34 °F is 1°C 26 °F is 3 °C below zero 35 °F is 2°C 13 °F is 11°C below zero 20 °F is 7°C below zero
The 12th Man Flag on top of the Space Needle shows support for the Seattle Seahawks football team. [Picture from seahawks.com website]
There was some football fan frenziness going on in Seattle on Sunday with a Seahawks play-off game against the Washington Redskins. The Seahawks rallied to a 24-14 win, after being down at 0-14. The picture shows the ’12th Man’ flag on the newly painted Space Needle dome (those are pine trees). And what does 12th man mean? It’s a term for the fans in the stadium during a game. Several American football used it at one point, then Texas A&M registered it as a trademark, and in 2006 filed a trademark lawsuit against the Seahawks. The lawsuit was settled out of court, and the Seahawks continue to use it. (For the life of me, I don’t quite understand why — were we not creative enough to come up with something different?)
