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Posts Tagged ‘Seattle’

Jet City Gridlock

Posted in Culture, Seattle, tagged , , , , , , , on 06 Feb 2013| 2 Comments »

Gossamer WheelSeattle is #10 in the nation for time wasted in commutes. To anyone who lives here, this is not a surprise.

Remember the old PC game, Sim-City? It was the game where the computer randomly generated a topography and your goal was to build a town and grow it into a city. Well, if you ever played that game, then you know that the hardest terrains to beat were those where water bisected the map, forcing you to build bridges to link up the different areas of town. Those bridges were a nightmare; they were always clogged with traffic, you could never build enough of the damned things, and of course, when Godzilla showed up, he scarfed them up like Seattleites eat biscotti at a coffee bar.

Well, dear friends, that scenario (sans Godzilla) is Seattle. (more…)

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Geese

Posted in Seattle, tagged , , , , , , , , on 28 Jan 2013| 1 Comment »

I rise early; dawn is just a hint behind the eastern hills. I slipper down to the kitchen for coffee, then, hot brew in hand, slipper back to the office. I snap on the worklamp, turn on the computer, then sit and sip while I wait for the heat to come up from the furnace,

Outside, dark grey clouds hang in an oyster blue sky. The rain has eased and all is quiet until, just there, from the south, down the street, I hear the call. It’s a faint “Honh!” Iike a French adolescent clearing his throat, first one, then another. I rise and step to the window. I pull aside the curtain and peer upward. “Honh, honh” gets closer, is repeated. Different voices echo the first, and craning my neck, I see them, a vee of dark wings just above the treetops. Black necks, white cheeks, beaks pointing north, they “honh” to one another. Passing instructions? Keeping tabs? Giving encouragement? They fly over my house, and I can see their fingertip feathers against the paling sky. Now past, continuing onward, their calls fade with distance as they travel, as they head north to their nesting grounds.

Every year, I hear them–south-bound in winter, north-bound in spring–and every time I smile. I live right along their route, right along the necklace of lakes and ponds that guide them: Green Lake, Bitter Lake, Twin Ponds, Ronald Bog, Echo Lake, and beyond.

They’re a bit early this year. A mild spring, then, and an early summer ahead.

k

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The Little Birdies Say

Posted in Seattle, tagged , , , on 24 Jan 2013| 2 Comments »

One thing I adore about Seattle is its proximity to the natural world.

This morning, en route to work, I got off the bus at Convention Place Station (as usual). CPStation is at the north end of the transit tunnel, through which many of the downtown buses (and eventually light-rail trains) travel. The station is not in the tunnel, but at its northern entrance, and so when you leave CPStation, you climb up not through a series of underground passages, but up staircases in the open air.

The architecture of CPStation is primarily tubular steel and glass. Sort of an amalgam of I.M.Pei’s Pyramid at the Louvre and the Crystal Palace of Victorian England. Well….sort of. A really small-scale sort-of.

ANYway… (more…)

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Shrouded City

Posted in Seattle, tagged , , , , , on 22 Jan 2013| 2 Comments »

Think Seattle. Think rain? Think again.

For the past fortnight, Seattle has been wrapped, swathed, and swaddled with fog. It’s been like living in a cloud. Foghorns call across the Sound, echoed by ghostly ferries out on the cold waters. Hillsides disappear, the Space Needle is missing its top half, and the sun has been replaced by a vague drear that illuminates the mist but provides no aid to vision. Heading up to the park-and-ride this morning, visibility ended a block up the street. Streetlamps, stop lights, and brake lights defined the roadway with glowing balls of light.

Overnight, temps drop into the 20s and the fog freezes as it touches down, creating slick, invisible ice and limning everything with hoar. During the day, the mercury barely gets its head above freezing, and the frost persists near houses and fencelines, wherever the weak sunlight cannot reach.

Drive up to the mountains, though, and you’ll break through the inversion layer. At 1000 feet, the sunlight coalesces into an orange ball above. At 1500 feet, you break through into open air and a cloudless sky. Temperatures soar, and you remove your gloves, your scarf, your coat, and walk in shirtsleeves through the warm sunshine. Below you is a sea of fog, bright white stretching from mountain to mountain, from the Cascades to the Olympics.

Tomorrow, Seattle will be reprieved. Tomorrow, a storm comes.

Think of Seattle. Think rain. Tomorrow.

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The Empire Strikes Back

Posted in Culture, Hi Tech, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 12 Nov 2012| Leave a Comment »

Remember when I posted the sad story of a bestselling writer trashing his competition in bogus reviews? Well, it seems that Amazon is doing something about it.

Salon and other sources report that Amazon is deleting book reviews made by authors. That’s right. Deleting them. Poof. Gone. Nothing. And from now on authors will be banned/prohibited from posting reviews on books. That’s right! “The Evil Empire” is censoring my words and opinions! Egad! Zounds! Help! Help! I’m bein’ repressed!!

Actually, I’m fine with it. (more…)

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Not a Fan

Posted in Culture, Seattle, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 31 Oct 2012| 3 Comments »

Obey the Kitty!All Saint’s Day. All Hallows.  All Hallows’ Evening. Hallows Even. Hallowe’en. Halloween.

Not my favorite…well, you can’t really call it a holiday…not my favorite festival. Not even my second favorite. To be honest, my least favorite, which is to say, I really dislike it. A lot.

Growing up, it was just another example of social stratification, another peer-review spotlight that illuminated my inner nerd. You must understand that, back then, at that age, carrying a violin to school on a regular basis did considerable damage to one’s street cred. So did liking to read. Wearing glasses didn’t help. Neither did being sports-deficient. So, being a scrawny, gawky, four-eyed kid who walked to school, a violin in one hand, while reading a book with the other…it pretty much guaranteed that I was going to peg the lower end on the Cool Scale.

Halloween just rubbed it in.

There was only one time where Halloween and I got along. One night. In college.

(more…)

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A Wing of Plovers

Posted in Low Tech, Seattle, tagged , , , , , , , , on 18 Oct 2012| Leave a Comment »

They don’t have a cool collective noun like “a murmuration of starlings,” but they were enthralling nonetheless.

Yesterday, I stood on the beach while a wing of plovers gyred and swooped around me. I stood transfixed, my feet freezing in the cold water, watching them, hearing the whispers of a thousand wings surround me. They flew as one creature, sides flashing like a school of fish in clear water, black wings, white bellies, gyring and twisting as one, creating shapes in the air above the sandy waves.

They rose in a mass, split into two amorphous shapes, each one moving around the other, until they merged like droplets of quicksilver. They spindled into a long roll and swept across the sand before piling up again into a heap, a mound, a pillar fifty feet tall.

As the wing spun and eddied, individuals would fly off from the body, peeping as they shot outward, slate-winged rockets ejected from a massive, living firework.

And then they settled, falling like heavy leaves back down to the sand, the rustle of wings replaced by a piping chorus that drowned out the roar of the surf. The wing of plovers in the air, now a congregation on the shoreline, dipping each black beak into the sand, searching for food, skedaddling back and forth in time with the waves until the ocean sent another big roller to make them take wing once more.

I stood there for the better part of an hour, rapt, giddy, grateful.

k

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