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Thursday/ at the Park: clear and cold 🌬

I ventured out of the house to get a little sun today, even though the high was barely above freezing (34°F/ 1°C).
These pictures are from Volunteer Park.

The bronze sculpture of William H. Seward at the greenhouse in Volunteer Park. The statue was unveiled at the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition in 1909 and relocated to the park the following year. Steward was a determined opponent of the spread of slavery in the years leading up to the American Civil War, and was Secretary of State of the Union during the Civil War.
[Source of text: Wikipedia]
There was a murder of crows on the lawns by the greenhouse.
It’s a good time of the year to get a clear view of the water tower.
Look for the tiny slice of white waxing crescent moon in the blue sky towards the top and in the center of the picture.
These are two of 14 new stone benches installed and placed throughout the park. The benches were commissioned by The Henry art museum, and the artist is Chloë Bass (b. 1984, New York).

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Tuesday/ a little hail— and a little math ⏱

There was fine hail on the deck at my house this morning, and a little more came down early in the evening.

Let’s see what this picture can tell us ..
First— there is more hail in the middle of the deck because of little stones tumbling off the roof of the house. (And the big fir tree in the corner of my yard casts a ‘rain shadow’).
Second— let’s say those little white streaks in the top of the picture are 2 in. long.
My phone camera recorded the shutter speed of this picture as 1/265 s.
So ..
2 inches in 1/265 sec would be equal to
530 in / sec, which is equal to
1,908,000 in/ hour, which is equal to
159,000 ft/ hour, which is equal to about 
30 mph, the terminal velocity of the little hail stones. 🤗
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Sunday ☀️

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.

Light drizzle, and looking north on 19th Avenue at East Aloha St.
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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.

Alcaraz doing the fist pump on at this week’s Argentinian Open.
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]
The venue for the Argentinian Open is the Buenos Aires Lawn Tennis Club, a private tennis club located in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. There are no lawns to tennis play on —only red clay! Alcaraz is about to close out his match today against fellow Spaniard Bernabé Zapata Miralles (26).
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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.

Statement from the Anchorage Police Dept.—
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’. 😆
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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).

1970 (5 Nov.) Christmas Perf.10½ x 11
#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]

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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.

.
I don’t know what Mike Pence is saying. Does it matter? Even if he tried, there is just no way he will win the Trump Party’s nomination for 2024.
[Posted by Devin O’Malley @devin_omalley on Twitter and captioned ‘The lights are bright @PizzaRanch in Cedar Rapids, Iowa’]
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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.
This Identifiable Flying Object is a Boeing 777-300ER (twin-jet) from Emirates Airlines. It had just taken off at 3.38 pm for its 14 hour 50 min flight to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. [Information from the Flightradar24 app on my phone].

I like the square windows in the gray and turquoise siding. I’m approaching the corner of East Union St and 19th Ave (and thinking brr .. ! it’s time to head back home).
A lamp post sticker promoting I-135. (It’s a special election in Seattle for which the ballots were due today). Initiative 135 asks voters to approve the Seattle Social Housing Developer, an agency that would develop, own, acquire and maintain so-called “social housing” in Seattle.
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.
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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? 😉

Posted by Pacific NW Seasons on Twitter @NWSeasons, with the caption
‘Perhaps another UFO, masquerading as a cloud, nearing Mt. Rainier/Tahoma this morning? 😁’.
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Sunday/ hello there 🌷

The little harbingers of spring have started to appear here on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

Crocus is a genus of seasonal flowering plants in the family Iridaceae (iris family) comprising about 100 species of perennials growing from corms.
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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.

Photo posted by Mike Reid  at mike@mikereidphotography.com and on Twitter @SeatownNative.
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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!

1986 Thirteenth Commonwealth Games, Edinburgh
(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

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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.

Major Earthquakes in Turkey since 1900, map from the New York Times. [Sources: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; United States Geological Survey Notes: Includes earthquakes since 1900 that are classified as significant earthquakes by the National Centers for Environmental Information based on a series of criteria including deaths, damage and magnitude.]
From the New York Times:
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.

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Tuesday/ the State of the Union 🇺🇸

President Biden bragged nearly a dozen times about his administration’s accomplishments, but said he had more to do.
[Picture by Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times]
President Biden has not yet officially announced that he is running for a second term in 2024. He seemed energized tonight during the State of the Union address, though— taking on Republican shouters with ‘sharp retorts and even a sense of humor in some moments’, as the New York Times put it.

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.

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Monday/ blazingly fast 🚀

Test results from fast.com. The wired connection’s speed tonight is even faster then when I had tested it this afternoon. The wireless speed is 640 Mbps.  Fiber internet speed is symmetrical— the upload speed matches the download speed. (With cable internet, upload speeds are much, much slower than download speeds).

 

 

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.

Look for the very thin line (fiber optic cable) that the technician is connecting (he is holding two loops and a strand runs towards the ground). The core inside consists of multiple (say, 8) individual strands of optical fiber, each less than 10 microns in diameter— thinner than a human hair).
Here’s the modem inside my study. The hole in the wall on the left is for the fiber optic cable. (The hole on the right has the black co-axial cable for my old cable modem. Co-ax cables have copper or copper-coated steel cores). The flat white cable connects the Quantum Fiber modem to the Google Nest Wifi Router and Points for my mesh home network.
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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.

Yay .. the eggs have landed, in my kitchen. Eggs are now $4.25 a dozen on average in the USA, double what they were a year ago. These bad boys cost me $6.59, but they are organic and from pasture-raised hens.