a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The heavy winds knocked the power out for tens of thousands of Seattle metro residents last night. The power was still getting restored across the city and Western Washington today.
There was a break in the rain this afternoon, and I walked down to Elliott Bay Bookstore on 10th Avenue.
The store was still without power, but customers were allowed in.
I looked like they used their phones to pay for their purchases through the store’s website.
Laurin Girgis reporting for the Seattle Times:
Friday’s rain and gusty winds will continue through the weekend, with somewhere between half an inch to 1 ½ inches of precipitation accumulating in Seattle over Saturday and Sunday.
National Weather Service meteorologist Dev McMillian said Friday’s torrent of rain and wind came from an atmospheric river: a long band of moisture stretching across the Pacific Ocean and resulting in large amounts of precipitation. Saturday and Sunday, despite more precipitation coming in, will not be an atmospheric river, McMillian said. Rainfall rates Saturday through Monday are expected to be less than Friday.
Happy Friday from a very wet Seattle.
The city had about one inch of rain today, with windy weather and more on the way tomorrow. We also had the last 6 pm sunset for the year (but we could not see the sun at all today 😉).
The three US stock market indexes are again at a record high, even though it’s still October (many years past, a volatile time for the markets).
I do not understand why this is the case.
From what I glean on YouTube and elsewhere, lots of other bad numbers are also at a record high (or close to it, compared to the last 10 years or so): the gold price, bitcoin, credit card debt, student loan debt, the US national debt, mortgage rates.
The US government has now been shut down for 25 days. Hello?
Uncertainly over tariffs with America’s largest trading partners (China, Canada) drags on, unresolved.
About 1.9 million Americans have been looking for employment for 27 weeks or longer now— and we’re told that AI is soon going to kill millions of entry-level jobs for humans.
The Sep. 2025 inflation number that came out today (3%) is actually the highest since January.
The Halloween decoration in the window of the Pacific Supply hardware store on Capitol Hill’s 12th Avenue is nicely done.
Jess Bidgood writes for the New York Times, referring to the destruction of the East Wing of the White House:
It wasn’t so long ago that Trump was promising his plan to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the grounds “won’t interfere with the current building.” In fact, my colleague Luke Broadwater reported today that the entire wing, which is historically the domain of the first lady, will be razed in the project.
Images of the demolition, which began on Monday as a precursor to the construction of a $200 million ballroom, have rocketed around the globe, swiftly becoming political fodder and a perfect Rorschach test for a deeply polarizing presidency.
Here is the other sheet of 2025 stamps that I bought at the post office on Friday.
Issued Feb. 28, 2025
Perf. 11 serpentine die-cut |Self-adhesive |Design: Antonio Alcala |Sheet size: 15 stamps | First-Class Mail®’FOREVER’ stamps (75c) |Engraving: Ashton Potter (USA) Ltd. | No watermark
[Source: stampworld.com]
From USPS.com: Take a hike from the stresses of modern life with The Appalachian Trail stamps, celebrating the century-old footpath that rambles through unspoiled nature from Maine to Georgia.
The pane of stamps includes a photographic view from each of 14 states through which the trail winds. An additional stamp represents the so-called “green tunnel,” an affectionate nickname for stretches of trail through dense forest.
[From Wikipedia]
It was not to be— the Seattle Mariners playing in the World Series.
They lost 3-4 in Game 7 tonight against the Blue Jays, in the deciding game in the American League Championship Series (ALCS).
The Toronto Blue Jays will now take on the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.
Beautiful fall foliage surrounds the playfields at Miller Community Center on 19th Avenue East on Capitol Hill.
I got these ‘USA forever’ stamps on Friday.
It never costs me just one stamp when I take something to the post office, because I always buy a whole sheet of stamps! 🤗
From Wikipedia:
The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was the armed conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American Revolution, in which American Patriot forces organized as the Continental Army and commanded by George Washington defeated the British Army. The conflict was fought in North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The war’s outcome seemed uncertain for most of the war. But Washington and the Continental Army’s decisive victory in the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 led King George III and the Kingdom of Great Britain to negotiate an end to the war in the Treaty of Paris two years later, in 1783, in which the British monarchy acknowledged the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, leading to the establishment of the United States as an independent and sovereign nation.
Issued Apr. 16, 2025
Perf. 11 serpentine die-cut |Self-adhesive |Design: Derry Noyes (from watercolor paintings by Greg Harlin) |Sheet size: 15 stamps |First-Class Mail® ‘FOREVER’ stamps (75c) | Engraving: Banknote Corporation of America | No watermark
[Source: stampworld.com]
Four amigos attended the No Kings* march in Seattle today.
We walked alongside the monorail on Fifth Avenue, and the train would honk at us with a whoop! whoop! every time it passed overhead.
From local TV broadcaster King5 news:
Organizers with Seattle Indivisible reported preliminary counts of nearly 90,000 people taking part.
The demonstration began beneath the Space Needle and poured into downtown streets, part of what organizers call the largest coordinated protest in U.S. history.
*The No Kings protests is a series of demonstrations, largely in the United States, against what the organizers describe as authoritarian policies of Donald Trump and corruption in his administration.
Happy Friday.
The new pickleball court facility called Sideout Tsunami Center is open for business (but the official grand opening will be in November).
This weekend, the center is hosting the finals of the National Pickleball League team competition in the “Champions Pro” division for players aged 50 and above.
I stopped by this afternoon to check out the new courts and the action there.
P.S. A win for the Mariners in Game 5!
From the Seattle Times:
Cal Raleigh and Eugenio Suárez delivered eighth-inning homers to send the Mariners to within a win of the World Series, and send T-Mobile Park into a frenzy.
Toronto Blue Jays 8, Seattle Mariners 2.
The best-of-seven series is now drawn at 2-2.
Game 5 is tomorrow night here in T-Mobile Park in Seattle.
Game on, and on to Game 4.
The Toronto Blue Jays rocked George Kirby and the Mariners, 13-4, in Game 3 on Wednesday night, silencing a sold-out Seattle crowd and climbing back into this best-of-seven American League Championship Series in emphatic fashion.
– Adam Jude, Seattle Times staff reporter
Western Washington’s interior lowlands got its first frost of the autumn this morning.
Here in the city of Seattle the low was still above freezing: 40°F (4°C).
Tim Booth, Seattle Times staff reporter, concludes his analysis
“ALCS: Three impressions as Mariners take 2-0 lead vs. Blue Jays” as follows (this series is best of 7 games):
.. but general playoff history, momentum, belief, maybe a weird witch-induced aura are all on the side of the Mariners.
The opportunity is there for Wednesday night to be one of the most important games in the history of T-Mobile Park.
Win and put a stranglehold on the series.
Lose and the Blue Jays are right back in it.
By Jodi Rudoren reporting for the New York Times, Monday morning NY time
I am the former Jerusalem bureau chief.
They’re free. Two years — 737 days, to be exact — after the Hamas terror attack that set off the war in Gaza, the last 20 living Israeli hostages left Gaza this morning. In exchange, nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees are being let go; the first buses filled with them just started arriving in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The releases are part of the first phase of a cease-fire deal that took hold Friday. A triumphant President Trump, the force behind the deal, flew in Air Force One over jubilant crowds in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square and timed the plane’s touchdown to coincide exactly with the first hostages’ arrival in Israel. He is about to address Israel’s Parliament and then will head to a summit of world leaders in Egypt, where the agreement was negotiated.
It’s Monday morning in Gaza. The release of the hostages (and Palestinian prisoners) is imminent, it seems.
May the war and the destruction and the famine and the killing of civilians stop now.
Reporting from the New York Times:
Here is a very interesting analysis that appeared in the New York Times recently.
(Whoah! Electricity is very expensive in the Golden State.)
– Report by Francesca Paris in the New York Times of Oct. 8
The federal subsidy for electric cars has ended, which means E.V. sales will probably fall because of simple math: Electric cars are generally more expensive than comparable gas cars. (Some automakers are offering discounts to get around that.)
But there’s one place where E.V.s are usually cheaper: the cost of filling up.
Driving 100 miles in a typical gas car that gets 25 miles per gallon costs about $13 on average.
In an E.V. you’d pay just $5, if you recharged at the average home electricity rate. (Stopping at a fast-charging station — if you couldn’t charge at home, or had to travel far — would cost quite a bit more.)
There’s also a big difference between a standard gas car and a hybrid. A typical hybrid (not the plug-in kind) is essentially a highly efficient gas car — a Toyota Prius can get more than 50 miles per gallon — and so its fill-up costs can be roughly on par with an E.V. charged at home.
It’s almost go time for Game 5.
Below is a ticket from the Mariners game against the Texas Rangers that I had attended wa-ay back in 2004. 🤗
10.30 pm:
They made it!
At the bottom of the 15th inning the score was still 2-2. Jorge Polanco delivered the walk-off* on a sharp groundball to right field to score J.P. Crawford and end the winner-take-all game 3-2 against the Tigers.
*A walk-off in baseball is a play where the home team scores the winning run in the bottom of the final inning, which immediately ends the game. The term walk-off comes from the fact that the visiting team “walks off” the field, as they have no more opportunities to bat.
What happens next?
From espn.com:
Starting Sunday in Toronto, the No. 2 seed Seattle Mariners and No. 1 seed Toronto Blue Jays will clash with a trip to the World Series on the line.
Seattle outlasted the Detroit Tigers in a thrilling ALDS Game 5 on Friday night, two days after Toronto dispatched the AL East rival New York Yankees to get to the ALCS.
Whoah! was my reaction as I rounded the corner and came up against this giant Halloween skeleton with blinking eyes. It made me think of the Terminator*— even though the terminator had red eyes, and a metal skeleton.
*From the 1984 American science fiction action film directed by James Cameron. It starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, a cybernetic assassin sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to assassinate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn son will one day save mankind from extinction by Skynet, a hostile artificial intelligence, in a post-apocalyptic future.
[From Wikipedia]
The Mariners crashed to a 3-9 defeat in Game 4 today in Detroit.
Game 5— the deciding game— will start at 5:08 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday night in Seattle.
There was a rain delay to the start of the game in Detroit.
Once the game started, though, the Mariners were the first to put several runs on the board. They held off a late attempt by the Tigers to come back in the 9th inning.
