An Athina sofa in Very Peri from the KK by Koket collection. I looked up the price: $5,000. Interior designers caution to use the color sparingly.
Pantone Color Institute’s pick for its 2022 color of the year is an intense purple called Very Peri. The ‘new’ color is said to have been developed from scratch (instead of being plucked out of an existing color catalog).
The color is not universally acclaimed. New York-based interior designer Brock Forsblom warned that too much of the color could give off a “‘My Little Pony’ alternate universe” vibe, or “Princess Jasmine out for a hot night” attitude.
Mariette (looking at a picture of a tree) : What’s that? ‘K’ (the Blade Runner) : A tree. Mariette : I’ve never seen a tree. It’s pretty.
– from the 2017 movie about a dystopian Earth, ‘Blade Runner 2049’
The Prez was here in Seattle today. He talked about legislation to help the U.S. Forest Service plant 1.2 billion trees on national forest lands.
These pansies (genus Viola) are in the flower beds by the greenhouse in Volunteer Park.Here is President Biden, speaking in Seward Park. Writes Katie Rogers for the NYT: ‘He unveiled a plan to restore national forests devastated by wildfires. He promoted a climate agenda that has largely gone unfulfilled. .. The trip granted him a bit of a respite from Washington and returned him to the campaign-trail style of schmoozing that energizes him. In Seattle, Mr. Biden appeared before a group of big-ticket donors that included Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft.
Here is my picture of tonight’s rainbow that was visible just before sunset, now at 8.08 pm.
Rainbows are optical illusions: reflected sunlight that is scattered by suspended drops of moisture in the atmosphere. Moreover, the multicolored band with ‘seven’ colors is an artefact of human color vision. There is no banding in a black-and-white photo of a rainbow, only a smooth gradation of intensity to a maximum, then fading again towards the other side. – Paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry for Rainbow.
Three of the five amigos (two are out of town) had beers and a bite at Union. We liked the ambiance inside. The food was decent. Maybe the volume for the music videos on screens around the place was turned up a trifle too high— or maybe I’m not as young as I used to be.
One of us had to surrender a credit card as collateral, as soon as we ordered our beers. Say wha-aat? I thought. (It’s the first time in a very long time that we had been at a place that required that). They worry that unscrupulous clientele might vanish after a second or third round of expensive cocktails, of course.
I just happened to take this picture of Union’s entrance last week while on a walkabout. ‘Airy bar & eatery with a leafy patio, serving cocktails alongside hearty comfort food & happy hours’, says the online description. The bar used to be located at 14th & Union some three blocks away, but the building there had caught fire in April 2019. It all ended up in a relocation and reopening here in March 2021. (Side note: very nice to see the sidewalk and street free of trash).
I forgot to post this picture on Sunday. It’s a peek at the inside of Seattle City Light’s Denny Substation (through a clear glass panel in the stainless steel perimeter wall that runs along Denny Way). It’s clean and tidy inside.
The former Greyhound bus garage that had been here is now long gone (demolished 2012-14). This substation was completed in 2018, the first new substation built by Seattle City Light in 30 years at a cost of $210m. It has lots of capacity for future expansion.
So a Trump-appointed judge in Florida overrules the national mask mandate for airplane travel and throws the CDC’s recommendation out the window .. and then the Biden administration promptly announces that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will no longer enforce it.
Nice try, United. I will be the dinosaur with the mask, but this cutesy tweet does not work for me, because it should not be about comfort. You would have done so much better reiterating that airline cabin air is completely changed every three minutes through HEPA filters, and all that. What was also completely unacceptable on Monday: for pilots from several airlines to announce midair that the mask mandate is gone, and that it’s OK for everyone on board to take their masks off.
This afternoon, I walked down to the 45-story apartment towers on Denny Way (official address: 1200 Stewart Street) to see how the construction is coming along.
I paused at the Melrose Avenue overlook as usual, to peer out at the Space Needle. The Needle is 60 years old this week, on April 21. Surely the owners will put a flag up, to celebrate the milestone? The Brothers (a pair of prominent peaks in the Olympic Mountains near Hood Canal) are to the right of the bare flagpole on the right.Here’s the 3-story podium of flanked by Denny Way an Minor Ave. The 45-story tower is hiding its twin right behind it. That’s the Seattle City Light Denny Substation with its Frankenstein tree (my name for it) art installation, on the left.The podium wraps around towards Stewart Street. The installation of the window panes on each floor is slowly progressing.Here’s a reflection of the two towers off the Building Cure (opened 2019) belonging to Seattle Children’s Hospital. I see I caught a sun halo of sorts from the sun behind the building on my picture. I couldn’t really see it with the naked eye. (Sun halos can appear when sunlight interacts with ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere).
I ran into this 2018 set of Ukrainian stamps while researching the stamp with the Russian warship on (Thursday’s post).
The characters are too cute for words (but each has a letter, and a word, nonetheless).
I compiled the table below with a little help from Google Translate. ЕНЕЛЯТКО stumped it, though : a word that has to be Ukrainian for alien or extraterrestrial. ҐАВА was also a problem; must be raven, I thought— but another online translator indicated it is crow. ПИРОГИ looked like hats in the tree, but turned out to be pyroghie pies, in fact.
UKRANIAN ALPHABET, says the lettering at the top. The modern Ukrainian alphabet consists of 33 letters. The set of letters is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script.
The Moskva features on a recent Ukrposhta (Ukraine Post) stamp. This was artist Boris Groh’s winning entry for the Ukrposhta stamp design contest, with the theme “Russian warship go f— yourself”. (That was the defiant response of the Ukrainian defenders of Snake Island when they were asked to surrender by someone aboard one of the two Russian warships that had attacked the island on Feb. 24).
The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet has sunk in what western officials have described as a “massive blow” to the Kremlin.
Moskva, a Slava-class warship that commanded about 30 vessels in the region, is thought to be the first cruiser lost in conflict since the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands war in 1982 and the first such loss of a Russian vessel since the Second World War.
– The Times newspaper, London
Djokovic lost yesterday in the Monte Carlo Open, but so did young Carlos Alcaraz, today (against Sebastian Korda). Aw. That really hurt my interest in the tournament, but I will continue to watch.
I love this picture. Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, the 22-year old Spaniard, went for it with everything he had, against Djokovic, for the win. He took a tumble in the second set, and did not even change his shirt until much later. That red clay dust gets into everything: your shoes, your socks, your racquet, all of your kit, really. And you have to know how to slam on the brakes and slide, as Fokina does here, to scoop up a drop shot at full stretch. [Photo by Denis Balibouse/Reuters]Writes Christopher Clarey in the NYT: ‘Davidovich, 22, looks like a Viking prepared to make mayhem with his head closely shaven on the sides and his fair hair pulled back into a knot. His father Eduard Mark Davidovich, a former boxer, is originally from Sweden and his mother Tatiana Fokina from Russia. But he was born in Malaga, Spain, and raised, as his accent makes clear, in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. He started playing tennis at age 2 — even younger than Djokovic did — and has become one of the flashiest, fastest men in the game under the tutelage of his longtime coach, Jorge Aguirre’.
The watering hole called The Chieftain Irish Pub— that the amigos like to go to— seems to have survived the pandemic.
The place was busy tonight, possibly because it was Trivia Tuesday.
We don’t wear masks at the pub or restaurant anymore— almost nobody does— but I still wear my N95 mask when I go anywhere else indoors (grocery store, post office).
I have not gotten my second booster shot, and I probably should go and get it over and done with. There seems to be no downside.
‘Bustling taproom for game-viewing & happy hours, plus familiar pub grub, in dark-wood-paneled digs’, says the description for The Chieftain on 12th Avenue.
The annual Monte Carlo* Open tennis tournament has started.
It is one of the big 9 second-tier tournaments on the calendar (the big ones are the four Grand Slams: Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, US Open).
*Monte Carlo is one of the four quartiers (sections) of Monaco. It is situated on an escarpment at the base of the Maritime Alps along the French Riviera, on the Mediterranean, just northeast of Nice, France.
Novak ‘No Vax’ Djokovic will play (still unvaccinated), as will Carlos Alcaraz, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Sacha Zverev.
The courts at the Monte Carlo Country Club are red clay, same as for the French Open. Sebastian Korda (21, USA) is changing sides while playing against Botic van de Zandschulp (26, Netherlands). Korda won 7-5, 6-4.These waters by Monte Carlo are called the Ligurian Sea. That’s Monte Carlo Beach on the left of the picture (a beach in name only, say I, with just pebbles and no sand). The rocky outcrop is called Pointé de la Veille. Let’s pan to the right, though. Is that a warship, the vessel in all gray?Why no, it seems to be a superyacht of some kind. (The cameraman zoomed in on the vessel, but the commentators of the tennis match were of no help. WELL. Then I will have to find out for myself, I thought).A few clicks on the icons on marinetraffic.com floating around Monaco revealed it to be the Olivia O. She is owned by Eyal Ofer (age 72), Israeli billionaire based in Monaco (of course), and active in shipping and real estate. Price tag: $200 million, with an estimated running cost of $15-20 million per year. The vessel has 7 cabins for guests and 15 cabins for the crew (not nearly as luxe as the ones for guests, I am sure).
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
– from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
The results from last night is promising, and more in line of what I experienced as far as my sleep: in bed for almost 8 hrs, and asleep for a little less than 7.
The Apple Health app that tracks my sleep every night, has been reporting only 4 to 5 hours of sleep for me, even after I had been in bed ‘sleeping’ for the most part of 8 hrs.
I generally feel OK in the daytime, so I believe I get more than 4 or 5 hours of official ‘sleep’.
For comparison with the Apple Health app, I’m trying an app called Sleep Cycle (screen shot on the right). The results from last night look encouraging (more accurate).
Here’s another gorgeous picture by Tim Durkan, of tonight’s hail storm. It was fine hail, but it went on for much longer than usual.
Photographer Tim Durkan says he sat in his car as he watched it come in from the north: from Edmonds, then over Discovery Park, and then over the city of Seattle.
Picture by Tim Durkan (@timdurkan on Twitter), ‘Seattle-based photographer capturing moments that help define our city and times’. More pictures at http://timdurkan.com.
The original packaging for lidocaine, labeled LL30 for its Swedish inventors Löfgren and Lundqvist. Clinical trials started in 1944 and a few years later it was used around the world. The compound was overwhelmingly superior to local anesthetics in use at the time.
The hard cast came off my wrist and forearm today. In addition, two stainless steel pins were extricated. The surgeon pulled them out with sterile pliers, basically.
The pins had held the lunate and scaphoid bones against each other so that the new scapholunate ligament could establish itself.
The second pin had a slight bend in (by design), and was not easy to pull out. I was very thankful for the fat syringe of lidocaine that was deployed on my wrist. Lidocaine blocks the pain signals that nerve cells send to the brain, by interfering with the so-called sodium channel that is the pathway for the signals.
It was 70 °F (21 °C) here in the city today; it will be a lot cooler again tomorrow.
These tulips are from the little Thomas Street Garden by 10th Avenue.
The breakfast Buds I had looked for far and wide, suddenly showed up on the shelf in the QFC on Broadway, and I grabbed four boxes.
Push had come to shove, and I was no longer playing nice by taking only one or two boxes!
And — I returned my ‘black stainless’ coffee maker, and got a slightly different model, after all.
Interesting how the wide-angle lens of the iPhone 13 Pro makes ‘vanishing edges’ of the sides of the boxes of All-Bran Buds.My new Cuisinart coffeemaker has a bigger digital display, and a slightly bigger carafe as well. Yay! Now I can leave the instant coffee behind, and go back to filtered coffee again: the stuff that is a royal treat, fit for a king.
Former President Obama was in the White House today for the first time after leaving office (more than 5 years ago, Jan. 2017).
Obama was there to celebrate 12 years of the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) with President Biden. They also announced that they are pursuing expanded coverage for families, and how to make it easier to enroll.
Also mentioned in the reporting today, was Biden’s famous hot-mike comment ‘This is a big f**king deal’, which he made in 2010 as the ACA was signed into law.
I couldn’t agree more.
The Affordable Care Act has saved me a lot of anguish— and tens of thousands of dollars in health insurance costs, just over the last five years.
The East Room in the White House today. As former President Obama took the podium, he started with ‘Vice-President Biden, Vice President (Kamala Harris) .. ‘ then stopped. ‘That is a joke!’ he said, and walked over to shake President Biden’s hand.
It looks like the stormy weather of the past two days is clearing up.
Seattle photographer Tim Durkan (@timdurkan on Twitter) posted this gorgeous picture today—of a piece of blue sky and a brilliant rainbow over the city.
I believe his vantage point was off Alki Avenue SW in West Seattle, on the very edge of the waters of Elliott Bay.
