There was no sun here— on this day that the Romans had named after the sun. There is going to be snow in the mountains tomorrow and Tuesday, and freezing cold towards the end of the week.
Sunday ☀️
Saturday/ he’s back 👏
Carlos Alcaraz is back on the tennis court after a hiatus of three months (partly due to injuries). His No 1 ranking slipped to No 2 after he had to withdraw from the Australian Open in January.
He will take on Cameron Norrie (Great Britain) in the final of the Argentinian Open tomorrow.
With six ATP titles (which includes last year’s US Open) to his name now, he is still only 19 years old.
I’m pretty sure that pink t-shirt from his clothing sponsor Nike is hand-tailored for him. They’re not going to just yank a Medium or Large shirt off their shelves and hope it fits him, right?
[Source: ATP Tour en Español @ATPTour_ES on Twitter]
Friday/ out of the cold ❄
Happy Friday.
Here’s a picture with a report from the Anchorage Police Dept. that was posted on Facebook earlier this week.
We got a call from a concerned citizen regarding a pig in Fairview, standing on the side of the road, who “looked cold.”
We’re all familiar with refrigerated bacon, we just never thought we’d respond to a call for service related to that topic.
As it turns out, the portly dude was quite friendly. You’ll be happy to know he has been reunited with his family and all is well. Would you like to know the best part? His name. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Elvis. Elvis Pigsley.
To which someone wrote back: ‘Hogwash. It was a Hambush’. 😆
Thursday/ stamps from the USA 🗽
All right— how about a smattering of vintage stamps from the United States, courtesy of a seller in Houston, Texas?
Amazingly, he used a stamp from 1934 on the envelope!
(Pro tip: Click on the picture. It’s fun to look at stamps with a magnifying glass).
#1410 837 6c Multicoloured, National Art Gallery ‘The Nativity’ by L. Lotto
1970 (21 Nov.) 350th Anniversary of Landing of Pilgrim Fathers in America
#1416 837 6c Multicoloured
1934 (8 Oct.) National Parks Year
#748 245 10c Grey, Mount Le Conte, Great Smoky Mountains
2001 (3 Aug.) Pre-sorted First Class Card Coil Stamp. Self-adhesive gum. Imperf x p11½
#3991 2590 (15c) Multicoloured, Woody Wagon
1973 (28 Sept.) American Revolution Bicentennial. Colonial Communications.
#1484 903 8c Multicoloured, Drummer
[Source: Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue 2005, Part 22, United States]
Wednesday/ early days for 2024 🐘
Nikki Haley announced her bid for President for the 2024 election.
She was South Carolina’s governor from 2011 to 2017, and appointed as US Ambassador to the United Nations by Trump and served there from Jan. 2017 through Dec. 2018.
Right now, she is the only official GOP candidate other than The Leader Of The Cult.
[Posted by Devin O’Malley @devin_omalley on Twitter and captioned ‘The lights are bright @PizzaRanch in Cedar Rapids, Iowa’]
Tuesday/ broken clouds and sun breaks 🌥
There was a dusting of snow on the shadowy side of my garage roof this morning.
It warmed up to 43 °F (6 °C) later on— the bare minimum to going out for a walk.
It warmed up to 43 °F (6 °C) later on— the bare minimum to going out for a walk.
It’s not clear if this initiative will move the needle on affordable housing. There is no funding mechanism written into the initiative’s language (to prevent it from being tossed out by the courts). If approved, the developer will immediately be able to apply for grants and philanthropic dollars.
Monday/ what’s going on up there? 🛸
So after the big white spy balloon from China, three more mysterious unidentified flying objects over Alaska, Canada and Michigan were shot down by U.S. military jets with missiles— on Friday, on Saturday and on Sunday.
Our government assures us there are no aliens involved.
Are they sure? 😉
‘Perhaps another UFO, masquerading as a cloud, nearing Mt. Rainier/Tahoma this morning? 😁’.
Sunday/ hello there 🌷
The little harbingers of spring have started to appear here on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
Saturday ⛅️
Here’s a gorgeous sunset picture from photographer Mike Reid. (Sunset is now at 5.28 pm).
Those are the peaks of the Olympic Mountains, peeking out above the clouds.
Friday/ mail from the UK ✉
The stamps I had bought from a seller in Great Britain arrived in the mail today.
I looked up the stamps on the envelope in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. (It definitely seems like some stamp sellers have reams and reams of unused stamps from many years ago).
The black ink line across the stamps is the cancellation mark.
Aw. What’s up with that? I would like a proper cancellation mark showing the sending location and the date!
(15 July) Phosphorised paper
1330 801 Weightlifting, 29p multicoloured
1991 Scientific Achievements
(5 Mar.) Phosphorised paper
1549 991 Gloster Whittle E28/39 Aircraft over East Anglia (50th Anniversary of First Flight of Sir Frank Whittle’s Jet Engine, 37p multicoloured
2006 ‘Smilers’ Occasions
(17 Oct.) Booklet stamps (2nd series) Self-adhesive. Two phosphor bands. Die-cut perf 15×14.
2675 1932 Balloons (Ivan Chermayeff), (1st) multicoloured
2001 Regional Issue Northern Ireland
(6 Mar.) Printed in lithography by Walsall, two phosphor bands. Perf 15×14 w. one elliptical hole in each side
NI190 N7 Aerial view of patchwork fields, (1st) black, new blue and greenish yellow
Thursday/ the fault lines in Turkey ⚡️
The widespread devastation and loss of life of Monday’s earthquake in Turkey is shocking to me. The map below shows where the North Anatolian Fault line and the East Anatolian fault line runs in Turkey.
It was the East Anatolian fault that ruptured— well-known to seismologists and government officials. The problem was that it had not caused a catastrophic earthquake in at least the last century. So building codes had not been enforced rigorously enough in many areas near the fault line.
The major earthquake and large aftershock in Turkey on Monday are two of more than 70 quakes of magnitude 6.5 or higher recorded in the region since 1900. Turkey’s two main fault zones — the East Anatolian and the North Anatolian — make it one of the most seismically active regions in the world.
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake at 4:17 a.m. local time, and the unusually large 7.5-magnitude aftershock nine hours later, both were in the East Anatolian Fault Zone. But there have been several extremely deadly quakes in the North Anatolian Fault Zones as well, including one in 1999 about 60 miles from Istanbul that killed about 17,000 people.
Wednesday/ the winter rose 🌼
My hellebores (genus Helleborus) thinks it is spring already.
Even though they are sometimes called winter rose, Christmas rose or Lenten rose, hellebores are really not related to the rose (family Rosaceae).
Tuesday/ the State of the Union 🇺🇸
[Picture by Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times]
Further reporting from the New York Times:
President Biden delivered a plea to Republicans on Tuesday for unity in his second State of the Union address, but vowed not to back off his economic agenda and offered no far-reaching, new ideas in a speech filled with a familiar litany of exhortations from more than four decades in political life.
Reading rapidly through his prepared remarks and occasionally sparring with his congressional adversaries in real time, Mr. Biden — at 80 the oldest president in history — used the biggest platform of his office to frame his argument for an expected re-election bid by portraying Republican policy proposals as out of step with most Americans even as he offered to work across the aisle.
Monday/ blazingly fast 🚀
The Quantum Fiber technician hooked up my line and modem for my new fiber internet connection today. It is blazingly fast.
What is the difference between fiber internet and cable internet?
In a nutshell: Fiber is faster, more reliable, and generally more expensive .. but it turned out that my fiber connection cost per month will actually be lower than my cable connection’s cost.
Sunday/ I want my eggs 🥚
Eggs are eggs. And people want eggs.
– Amy Smith, agriculture business expert
I had to go back to the Safeway (grocery store) around the corner for eggs today. They were completely out of their good eggs three days ago. Avian flu is partly to blame for the limited egg supply, but it also seems everyone now wants eggs from free-range chickens.
Observers say prices will still have to go up substantially before they will make a dent in the demand for eggs.
Americans consumed an average 286 eggs per capita in 2020, which means many people eat an egg every day.
Saturday/ 💥poof! goes the big balloon
[Picture by Randall Hill/Reuters]
As reported by David Ignatius for the Washington Post:
The Pentagon official said it weighed as much as two or three buses and could have caused considerable damage if it had hit land. If it had fallen over Montana, 2,000 people could have been in danger from scattered debris.
As a military operation, the shoot-down was relatively simple. An F-22 Raptor fired an AIM-9 missile at the balloon, and television cameras showed what happened. The Pentagon official said the key targeting priority was to avoid shooting clear through the balloon, which might have left it largely intact and able to travel another 500 to 600 miles east, perhaps out of range of U.S. retrieval.
The Pentagon weighed whether it might be possible to partially deflate the balloon and capture the intelligence pod at lower altitude. But the official said no technology exists that would allow such a “butterfly net” capture operation.
Friday/ a soft landing? 🎛
A surprisingly strong jobs report for January came out today.
Maybe the US economy will have a soft landing after all —a short and shallow recession this year. (Or none? There is going to be a recession at some point in the future, we know that. That’s just the way the economy works).
From the Wall Street Journal:
January’s seasonally adjusted payroll gains were the largest since July 2022 and snapped a string of five straight months of slowing employment growth, the Labor Department said Friday. December job growth was also stronger than previously estimated, pushing the average job gains for the last three months to 356,000, well above the 2019 prepandemic average of 163,000.
Payrolls grew most strongly at services businesses, the Labor Department said. Leisure and hospitality industries added 128,000 workers in January, up from 64,000 in December.
Thursday/ Happy Groundhog Day ❄️
The groundhog from Pennsylvania says there will be 6 more weeks of winter. (Of course there will be, looking at the weather map).
The 51 °F (11 °C ) and calm weather we had here in the city today felt almost balmy, though. I walked back to Capitol Hill from downtown, after taking the No 10 bus to get there.
Wednesday/ a little pickle 🥒 ball
It was warm enough (48 °F / 9 °C) for the amigos to play a little pickleball this afternoon.
Tuesday/ the last of the 747s ✈️
[Jennifer Buchanan / The Seattle Times]
Somebody told her that there was a place like heaven
Across the water on a 747
Yeah we’re living in
In a modern world
And pretty soon she’s really got the notion
Of flying out across the big blue ocean
Yeah we’re living in
In a modern world
– From the song ‘Calling America’ (1986) by Electric Light Orchestra (ELO)
Across the water on a 747
Yeah we’re living in
In a modern world
And pretty soon she’s really got the notion
Of flying out across the big blue ocean
Yeah we’re living in
In a modern world
– From the song ‘Calling America’ (1986) by Electric Light Orchestra (ELO)
The last assembled Boeing 747 had left the Boeing’s widebody factory in Everett, Washington, on December 6, 2022.
It was delivered to Atlas Air today: a 747-8F (Freighter) with plane number #1,574 and registered as N863GT.
Pan-American Airways was the launch customer for the first 747 passenger jet created, the 747-100. The airline ordered 25 of the exciting new ‘jumbo’ jets, and the first one was delivered in January 1970, and christened by First Lady Pat Nixon.
