a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
My flight went without incident, and I took a train and a tram to get to my hotel here in Frankfurt.
It’s a cloudless afternoon here at Seattle-Tacoma airport, and I’m waiting for my flight to board.
I forgot to take a picture of the Lufthansa bird at the gate before coming up to the lounge, so for now an online image will have to suffice.
I am bound for Frankfurt on Lufthansa tomorrow afternoon— the stop on my way to Johannesburg, South Africa.
I will stay over for two nights in Frankfurt.
I double-checked, for Germany as well as for South Africa:
Travel is allowed;
Quarantine is not required;
Proof of a pre-departure COVID-19 test is not required;
Visa is not required for Germany nor for South Africa (US passport holders).
So I am just about ready to dislodge myself from the comforts of my home and go board the flying machine that will take me across Canada and Greenland to Europe.
My phone is all set for international use (how did we ever travel with no phone?), my debit card for those foreign ATMs, and my credit card with its RFID chip. I already have some Euros and South African Rands (paper money).
New for this trip to the set of gadgets & cables in my bag: a portable charger for my phone. Electricity is in short supply in South Africa (rolling blackouts).
Here’s the cool envelope that my vendor from Antwerp, Belgium, put the stamps in that I had bought.
The stamp was issued in 2021, and it depicts a cycling jersey.
The 2021 UCI Road World Championships was between 19 and 26 September 2021 in the Flanders region of Belgium.
The daffodils are out here in my neighborhood.
No matter what size the pie (the circle) is, its circumference divided by its diameter is always pi*.
*The number pi (symbol π) is a mathematical constant and is a transcendental number (a number that is not algebraic—that is, not the root of a non-zero polynomial of finite degree with rational coefficients).
The value of pi is approximately 3.14159.
Pi appears in many formulas in mathematics and physics.
Here’s 6 o’clock tonight here on Capitol Hill.
Sunset is now at 7.13 pm.
One hour of sun from the morning is now showing up at the end of the day.
We changed over to Daylight Saving Time here in the USA last night.
The Sunday after changing the time forward— or back— always feel a little weird to me.
For the record, my opinion about changing the time on the clock twice a year: it’s STUPID.
Here are a few pictures from along Westlake Avenue and Lenora Street.
We still don’t know what will happen to the Cinerama movie theater, even though it’s been more than three years since Paul Allen had passed away.
The swank new apartment building on Lenora Street is The Modern.
Sample rents:
1 bed, 1 bath, 499 sq ft: $2,791 – $2,986.
3 beds, 2 baths, 1,666 sq ft – $8,830.
The Indian Wells Open (BNP Paribas Open) tennis tournament is underway in California.
Friendly fans pitched in to help dry the court tonight, after a burst of rain early in the evening. I like those spongy squeegees— they will come in handy for drying up the tennis courts here in Seattle.
This poster on a lamp post calls for Peace in Ukraine, a cause which we can all support— but when one takes a closer look, it quickly gets very complicated.
Yes, the US should not have invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Does that mean the US should also not supply weapons to Ukraine? Only food and shelter with heat, now that all the cities are getting destroyed by Russia’s invasion?
I don’t think so.
The New York Times posted pictures shared by their readers in California, of the snow there. I like this one.
I tagged along with Bryan and Gary to Hansville on Kitsap Peninsula today.
We did the usual drive-around south of Puget Sound across the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge by Gig Harbor, and then came back across the Sound on the Kingston ferry.
The Space Needle picture was a telephoto lens shot (on my big camera, not the phone) from I-5 South, looking across Lake Union.
‘Early bird catches the worm’
– Proverbial saying first recorded in English in 1605
Mr Robin* found an earthworm on my front lawn this afternoon, and promptly made a meal of it.
Robins can actually eat as many as a dozen earthworms in a single day.
*American robin (Turdus migratorius)
I took the No 10 bus to downtown, and here are a few pictures.
Yesterday’s envelope with my stamps had this 1987 stamp on the outside.
It was dark by the time the mailman came today, but he dropped an envelope with a bunch of stamps I had ordered from a seller in California.
So it was all worth the wait.
Rivian has delivered some 1,000 electric delivery vehicles (EDVs) to Amazon since July of last year— for deliveries in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Nashville, San Diego and here in Seattle.
This is only the start: the goal is for Rivian to deliver 100,000 of the EDVs to Amazon.
When I go to Elysian’s Capitol Hill brewery, I check the out the vehicles at the Electrify America charging station across from it.
Tonight there was a Volvo XC40 Recharge compact SUV and a Rivian R1T pickup truck (Montana plates) getting a charge.
The clouds have cleared, and there is a nice view of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction* tonight in the Western night sky here tonight.
Hopefully the sky will be clear tomorrow night as well, when they will appear to be even closer.
*Conjunction means two astronomical objects appear close to each other in the sky, as seen from our view on Earth. Jupiter is still some 400 million miles away from Venus (on average 416 million miles away).
