So, this week I drove through the Seattle Waterfront Tunnel.
Given all the sturm und drang that has accompanied this project - from the controversy over design options to the two-year delay when Big Bertha, the drilling machine, broke down - troubles that continue even now - I honestly never expected the tunnel to be completed. I thought it would be another mirage that evaporated into nothingness, taking with it scads of taxpayer money, just like the notorious monorail project.
But, for good or bad, it's there, and I drove thought it on the way to SeaTac to drop Coco off for a trip to Hawaii. We had jumped off I-5 at Crown Hill on the advice of the GoogleMaps to save a little drive time; congested 99 was not much better than the crawling freeway, but it was nice to see the changes to the strip. There were some bigger box-buildings, but overall the Aurora Avenue stretch of the state route looked as depressed and depressing as ever, shabby and grimy commerce at its worst, with dilapidated structures, weeds, and ugly signage.
That traffic was miserable was not a surprise or even a disappointment, since we had no expectations; it was just a drag. It was exacerbated by our failure to understand the lane convergence as 99 crossed the Aurora Bridge and headed south: there was only one lane for southbound traffic for a long time, as the left lane was exit-only to Denny Avenue in south Lake Union and the right lane was bus-only. The lane changes and merging as vehicles joined the flow from Queen Anne access points brought us all to standstill over and over again.
We were surprised by the tunnel, to tell the truth; when we left Seattle for Bellingham in 2015, Bertha was still comatose. We had heard that the project was active, but honestly hadn't been following it closely. Traffic didn't speed up until we were out of it, so we had ample time at single-digit mph to experience the engineering. One thing stood out for both Coco and me:
The wall was covered with exit markings, big graphics and arrows, lots of them. There seemed to be an exit every 600 feet or so, with numerous marking in between each. Having grown up riding through the Holland and Battery Tunnels in New York City, I had always been intrigued by the exits and personnel stations along the walls, and wondered about what subterranean - or subfluvial - world they led to. It was Coco who pointed out that the stick people on the wall were running.
These are emergency exits.
Now, remember the tunnel exits because of an earthquake - the 2001 Nisqually quake was the final blow the the seismically under-prepared viaduct that the tunnel replaced. The Seattle waterfront has always been a major concern in earthquake planning - much of the waterfront is landfill, and in a major quake a lot of the ground is expected to just liquefy. But the Department of Transportation says the tunnel is built to the most up-to-date seismic standards and might even be the safest place to be during an earthquake. And perhaps it is.
But all those emergency exits still make me nervous.
So, I caught some nice funny video of our college president at graduation and I have been meaning to convert it into a GIF so that we could stick it on a web page somewhere for a bit of whimsy. I checked around online and found a couple of sites, one of which was a little better than the others. Since I was in the groove, after I converted the commencement video, I made a few more GIFs from easily accessible clips on my laptop.
Coco in the Rain
...flooded Office Dept parking lot
Will it Go Round in Circles
...Cowan park?
JK Could Have Danced All Night
...Oscars Night!
Sissy Celebrates
...empty middle seat on a flight to Chicago.
Be-Bop-a-Coco, that's my baby...
...Ballet Vietnamese restaurant
When you read the headline, did it sound like gif or jif?
So, I scheduled myself for a training in Vancouver USA. It was on a Friday, so I figured maybe Coco would come down with me - we could leave in the morning, she could have a short day of adventure, and then we could make an evening of it in Portland. Nice multivalence.
Of course, I had forgotten that we don't live in Seattle anymore, we live in Bellingham. The trip to Vancouver is no longer three hours or a little under, but rather four and half hours or a little longer. The leaving-in-the-morning plan wouldn't quite work; I'd have to go the night before, and then it just started getting complicated, so it became just my trip.
I cleared the decks and scheduled my departure for 1:30 Thursday afternoon, right after a webinar. The plan was to get past Seattle traffic - and maybe even Tacoma's - before the rush hour. Maybe stop at Chehalis for dinner, maybe at the McMenamin's there. Roll into The Couv at 7pm, fed and happy, and have a productive night.
As you might guess, that didn't happen. Today made me think seriously about not coming south of Everett ever again. Or even Mt. Vernon. I'll spare you the details - well, here's just one: a solid hour to get from the Tacoma Dome to JBLM. Add in a little Everett traffic, a little Seattle traffic - when did rush hour start to build at 2:30? - and the trip took over six hours. I drove straight through, not stopping to get coffee, to get gas, to pee, not at all, and I hit the motel just before 8pm. Dinner turned out to be a bag of Safeway deli from down the block, and a small beverage to take the edge off.
A minor misadventure, as far as bad news goes, but man, was that a longer drive than I anticipated. On the bright side, the sun was out most of the way down, even though rain had been forecast. Of course, that meant it was shining right in my eyes for most of the trip, but what do I want, an egg in my beer?
So, as I am entering the decanal world once again, that means leaving the classroom and entering the office. Here's mine. That big batwing thing is a standing-desk retrofit apparatus with screens. Pretty slick, innit?
There will be differences working for a technical college instead of a community college, not the least of which seems to be the amount of motorcycle parking available. After a week, I am totally happy with the campus, the staff, my faculty, and the programs.
Once source of all that goodwill has to be the living arrangements as well as the job itself. This is the view from our deck, looking at the Alaska Ferry Terminal/Amtrak Train Station just down the street, on Bellingham Bay.
And that's the view from the cafe in Village Books, a short walk away - the Bay is always somewhere in the background, it seems. Bellingham is just a pleasant and laid-back place - quite a change from Seattle, especially the city Seattle is becoming.
But Seattle is where I am tonight. Coco and I spent the day finishing the packing and tomorrow morning the movers come. I had my last meal at our neighborhood pho place as a local, and tonight will be the last night we spend under this roof, where we've been for almost ten years.
I moved around a lot when I was a kid, so moving in and of itself doesn't signify for me; I know Coco is a little more affected, but in the end she's as excited to make a new home as she is sad to leave this one. We won't miss the daily garbage truck visits, the freeway noise from I-5 a few blocks away, the commute traffic, the neighborhood traffic, or the alley denizens, but this townhouse has been a good home to us. We've seen a lot of good times, hosted a lot of good friends, and served a lot of Thanksgiving waffles in these rooms, and our move to Bellingham has some bitter in with the sweet. Thank goodness that noisy freeway connects these two towns.
One thing that it totally sweet: I can unpin my Alley Marshall badge and throw it into the dust: from here on in, let someone else worry about the garbage cans overflowing, lids being blown away in a storm, or recycling being strewn about by a critter or other scavenger. I quit.
Well, the Summer Self-Improvement Scheme™ of 2015 is coming to a (slightly) premature close.
It was pegged to the 10 Weeks to a 10 K race training that was providing structure to my long, luxurious days of not-teaching. As I reported earlier, a piriformis strain put a hitch in that giddyup and both the execution and results of the regiment have been reduced considerably, to wit:
You can see (a) a bunch of missed runs and (b) a regression in both speed and distance. Who'd have thought I'd get a typical runner's injury? Maybe I should stick to a trike.
But piriformis syndrome is just a hiccup compared to the major life change that is disrupting the Scheme:
Yep, I'm heading back to Deantown! I have accepted a position as Dean at Bellingham Technical College, just up the road a piece from Seattle. This is wonderful opportunity to join a great school and do some good work, and Bellingham has always been a favorite place to visit for Coco and me (and Coco attended Fairhaven College there), so we're terribly excited by it all.
We're also going to be terribly busy, since my start date is less than two weeks away! As our cat's mechanical hamster used to say, here we go!
Just to tie up loose ends:
I'm back on Facebook. As problematic as the platform is, it is really the best way to keep in touch with local peeps during this transition.
I finished reading The Rhesus Chart and started and finished New Frontiers. I am in the middle of Traitor's Storm by M.J. Trow; I'll probably finish that but I'm not sure how much other pleasure reading I'll be able to fit in before winter.
Since the last SSIS report, I've done a lot of cat-sitting, spent a day working on campus, went to a magic/mentalism show, playtested games and bought one, had a guy-lunch and sweetie-sunset, but the featured highlight is this Taco Time Fiesta with my sissy:
So, I mentioned that last night, Coco and I were going out to listen to some live music - specifically, to Mama Doll, a group from Spokane that I have been trying to get to see live for about two years. I expected to be writing today about how cool that was, as indeed it was, but there was something even cooler.
Working backwards:
Yay! Mama Doll was the headliner, so they went on last, and they were great. They aren't the same group I fell in love with, though. Originally, it was just the honey-voiced Sarah Berentsen on ukulele dueting with Austen Case and her single drum; the pair produced haunting, smoky tunes with minimal accouterments. Now, Austen is gone and Sarah has been joined by Jen Landis on bass, Claire Fieberg on guitar and vocals, Kris Hafso on drums (with a full kit), and occasionally (like last night) Bart Budwig on trumpet. Sarah's ukulele and guitar are amplified now, too, and there's even a keyboard.
not last night
Well, it's not Dylan going electric, but it was still a bit of a change.
Nonetheless, the band is still great. Sarah opens her mouth and magic comes out - this is the kind of music that can summon spirits and open doorways to souls. Her new teammates provide excellent support, both musically and vocally. I was not disappointed after my long wait.
Okay: The middle act was Windoe. I wish I could say that I had enjoyed them more, but they were the weakest link of the night - the band played series of sort-of psychedelic rock tunes with little tonal or thematic variety. But they were in a challenging position, sandwiched between the other performers that night.
Best for last: The opening act was Shenandoah Davis, and here was the surprise of the night. The entire house was blown away by this performer's passion, both in her vocals and in her piano playing. Her bandcamp tags are avant-garde classical parlour music pop singer-songwriter Seattle and that's probably pretty accurate, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.
Shenandoah Davis plays the piano like she was driving a diesel tractor-trailer rig up a mountain switchback in a storm, and she delivers a metric ton of torches with every load. Davis physically engages the piano not just with her fingers but with seemingly every muscle in her body, her shock of black curls tossing and her shoulders rolling as she pushes and shoves the music out of the instrument and into the world. Her piano pounds and booms with impossibly complex melodies while her beautiful, high-pitched voice cuts through the soaring music and her deceptively simple lyrics cut though your unsuspecting heart.
It's been a long time since I was moved so strongly by a performance. I don't go out to live music often (why it's clearly a blogworthy event) but I am going to go see Shenandoah Davis whenever I can. And you should too.
This clip doesn't do her justice - she needs at least a baby grand, not a little keyboard, to really open it up and roar - but it will give you a taste.
So, right about now is when this blog usually announces the current year's Summer Self- Improvement Scheme™, through which we would try to fill the 100 days between the last day of Spring quarter and the first day of fall quarter with uplifting, enlightening, or enriching activities that take place within somesort of clever structure.
This year was supposed to be a bit different: this was meant to be the announcement for not just a run-of-the-mill regimen, but for the launch of a new business: Trike Snacks - The Snacks You Buy from a Guy on a Trike!
You can probably tell by all the conditionals and qualifiers in the foregoing that that announcement is not forthcoming - at least not in this writing. And as Jaques said to the Duke, thereby hangs a tale.
For a long time, I have had a scheme involving taking a summer off from all teaching and campus responsibilities and doing something completely different. I didn't really want to work somewhere, but a part-time project sounded appealing. The idea that had gelled was getting a trike and riding up and down the Burke-Gilman Trail all summer selling power bars and energy drinks to the cyclists, runners, and walkers. The goal was not necessarily to make a lot of money - that I could much more easily make by teaching summer classes - but rather to try some entrepreneurship and use some different skills while getting exercise and enjoying the outdoors. Whenever I discussed the idea, people thought it was awesome. This year, I decided to actualize it.
First up was finding a suitable ride. I originally wanted a tadpole recumbent trike with a trailer, but for reasons both financial and logistical, I decided on a recumbent delta. I got a good rig at a great price from a nice military couple down in Tacoma, got it home (it barely fit in Sylvie the Scion!), and tricked it out with a cargo basket and some other goodies, including an umbrella. Cool beans all the way.
Then, while discussing the project at lunch with the titular Scott, he asked whether I had obtained any necessary permits. I told him I had to investigate what was necessary and that I would do it.
And the gap between word and deed has never been greater.
So, first, a City of Seattle Business License. Easy-peasy.
Then, research into the Seattle Department of Transportation Street Use Vending Permit. A little more difficult: there are permits for Sidewalk or Plaza Vending, Curb Space Vending, (including Designated Food-Vehicle Zone and Temporary Curb Space Activity), Stadium and Event Center Vending, and Mobile-Food Vending, and navigating the differences was difficult even for a seasoned bureaucrat like me - especially since they all seemed to be geared toward food trucks and not bicycle vendors. A trip to the municipal building helped clear things up: a guy told me that the permit I needed for the Burke-Gilman trail was Mobile-Food Vending (remember that, it will be important later), and gave me a checklist of steps and all the forms to fill out.
I found out that vending in city park required my completing a Seattle Parks and Recreation Concession Proposal. After whacking my way through the thorny undergrowth of this particular organization, I found that (a) I would need to file a proposal and pay for an Experimental Concession Agreement for each park I planned to sell in; (b) they only allowed one concession at a time for many of the parks and most of them were taken already; (c) they did not issue permits for the Burke-Gilman Trail at all; and (d) unbelievably, they asserted that every ice cream vendor I had ever seen in a city park had complied with these rules. Yeah, right.
Given that the Burke-Gilman trail website said that it was jointly administered by SDOT and Parks & Rec, I figured that if SDOT was willing to issue a permit, I was good to go regardless of what Parks & Rec said. I'd give up on the whole idea of selling in the parks adjacent to the trail (or go rogue a little bit).
To move forward with the SDOT permit, I needed to get a Costco Card. Getting the business card was easy - Costco just needed my business license - but they informed me I also needed a Washington State Department of Revenue Resellers Permit to buy goods for resale without paying sales tax. Good to know, and I got on it.
Before I could get the resellers permit, I needed to get a State of Washington Business License and the concomitant Unified Business Identifier number. That was easy, too; it just took a while, even doing it all online.
The reason for getting the Costco card so soon was to identify the specific products I was going to sell for the SDOT permit process. As it turned out, granola bars and coconut water seemed the best compromise between profitability and ethical practice. I needed to send the specific information to the King County Department of Health for an exemption from the health-permitting process. The Health Department folks were very helpful and forthcoming with this, providing an email I could attach with the application.
So, ducks were lined up in rows - all that was left to complete my checklist for SDOT was a Certificate of Liability Insurance. When I was in the commercial insurance business, additional-named-insured stuff like this cost about fifty bucks; more recently, Coco's business liability insurance was included in her massage therapist association annual dues of about two hundred bucks. Well, whatever the specific requirements of the city of Seattle are, after checking out various sources I found that the cost for this insurance came to about $900.
All of a sudden, I was thrust into a decision: do I want to start a serious business, or is this a part-time summer project? Nearly a grand just for insurance is a little too much capital investment for the short-season sideline business that I had envisioned Trike Snacks to be, and I am not sure I want to make this the kind of operation where I need to work too hard to make sure it pays for itself. And it wouldn't be easy to get in the black: back-of-the envelope calculations indicate that after all the required permitting fees and such, I'd have to make about 75 sales a day to break even. Not too big a hill for a committed business, but more dedication than I had planned on.
I contacted the city to look for options and found someone at SDOT who was actually eager to figure this out. She seemed to understand that my planned micro-business didn't quite entail what the Mobile-Food Vending Permit was developed to cover and said she would talk to the City Risk Manager to see if an exemption could be made for Trike Snacks and I could at least get some less costly insurance coverage.
Of course, every silver cloud has a burlap lining, and in the course of our communication my contact revealed that in fact SDOT does not issue permits for the Burke-Gilman Trail, ceding that authority to Parks & Rec (see, I told you that was important). She did, however, promise to bring it up with Parks & Rec at their next regular interdepartmental meeting and try to get another exemption for Trike Snacks.
So, here's the potential outcomes:
I have my fingers crossed waiting to hear from my city hall angel, but school's officially out, summer's officially here, and we're still not rolling yet.
So, it seems the Central Library has had a bit of a remodel, and at least one element of it is a major improvement.
Some of you may recall a post on this very blog from about two years ago, describing (among other disappointments) my attempt to navigate from the Third Floor/Fifth Avenue entrance of the building to the First Floor/Fourth Avenue entrance. Here's an excerpt:
***
***
Well, today I was once again downtown, killing time between conducting research for the Summer Enterprise™ and having lunch with a pal, and I once again found myself at the uphill entrance to the library. Upon entering, what to my surprise lay before me but a bright yellow escalator heading downwards. I stepped on the moving tread and took the trip: it left me out on the First Floor directly in front of the downhill entrance.
Behold, the power of the blog!
It was amazing. Finally, at long last, the library is in alignment with the prevailing architectural culture of most buildings in hilly downtown Seattle, which values providing a throughway to traverse the slopes. Bravo for that!
The rest of the building is still pretty much a nightmare, but I'm not going to go into it again.
One other note: when the library opened in 2004, I noted how cheap the furniture was and predicted it wouldn't last ten years. I noticed today that all of the "armchair" groupings had been been replaced, the IKEA-quality, seventies-airport-style, square-cushion boxes in orange and gray swapped out for molded plastic Cape Cod chairs in purple and green. I remember when library furniture was crafted from indestructible hardwood; I don't expect that, but these new pieces look like they were purchased from the patio department at Home Depot.
Our modern urban environment is a jumble of a jillion different elements. Many of them are transitory: cars parked on our street come and go, signs in store windows change regularly, garbage cans and dumpsters and bike racks and parking meters are moved or removed or replaced, contruction cones and crews appear, taking over traffic lanes or sidewalks for a day or for months before disappearing again.
Even the supposedly permanent features of our daily world change. Sometimes this happens in small ways: a floor covering store becomes a bank, a boutique becomes a hamburger joint, a Craftsman bungalow is remodeled unrecognizably. Sometimes the big changes happen in big ways: a supermarket is torn down for a train station, or a block of single-family houses is replaced by an apartment building.
What all these changes have in common is that they are often unnoticed, or at least so assimilated into our daily routine that the original state of affairs is only a dim recollection.
Didn't there used to be a bike shop on this block? Oh, that moved to where the Tibetan gift store was. That's gone? Really? Yeah, about six months ago, I think. Man, I liked that store.
The image of our landscape in our minds and the physical reality is often vastly different: either we think something that has been gone for a while is still there, or we have mostly forgotten that it was ever here on the first place, substituting the details of the present reality whenever we try to recollect the past. Didn't we used to walk to a QFC near here?
It's nice to once in a while encounter evidence of this transience beyond those "Then & Now" photo essays that once graced the magazine sections of newspapers. I was brought face-to-face with this lifescape evolution recently.
When Coco and I drive, we often use an app to send the other a GPS display of our location; it's useful for letting the person at home plan dinner or otherwise get their act together when someone is on the way home, for example. On a trip not too long ago, I was at home, and observed the following image on Coco's tracking display:
What the what? She hadn't called or texted to tell me that she had been off-roading through an empty field. Then I realized what it was: for over a year, we had been driving through construction in this area as they redesigned the road pattern. This tracking program had the roads in the right (new) places, but was using an outdated photograph for the satellite view: this image shows the site at the very beginning of construction, with the old road still in place. The changes to the road placement had been so incremental, and so obfuscated by traffic cones and lane closures and flaggers, that we had never realized how drastic a change it actually was.
I scouted around a bit and found a more recent aerial shot that showed how the main road had been straightened and moved closer to the river. This makes it clear that the route the app showed Coco taking through an empty parcel is actually the new roadway:
This whole process reminded me that the empty parcel used to be a commercial center: there had been a McDonald's, an Indian restaurant, a ski shop, and some other stuff I can't remember in a big parking lot. Poking around a little more, I could find an even older photo that not only showed the old road layout, but showed the buildings that had been removed to create the empty space for the new road to run through.
I'm glad I found this stuff. I know that someday I'll be driving through that area and someone will say Didn't there used be an Indian restaurant around here? and I'll have something more than wispy memory to base a reply on.
So, I know it's kinda cheating and not exactly "long-form," but these photos have been kicking around my computer for a while and lumping them all together seems to be a better idea than dribbling them out. Anyway, here they are.
This is picture of the best idea I ever had back when I was a dean. Not the packing peanuts, that was Maurice Laverne Zweigle in 1960. I mean hiring Alex as the (de facto if not ex officio) lead in the instructional science labs at my college. She is smart, thorough, dedicated, endlessly innovative, and in this picture totally adorable. The lab techs at Cascadia are the best in the business and Alex is a gem.
You had one job...
Seattle formal wear: how many flannel shirts are at the typical restaurant table where you live?
I saw this hanging at Sea-Tac, and all I could think of was this.
That backwards__15clon the wine glass there caused a bit of consternation. Two questions were raised: Is 15 centiliters (a little over 5 ounces) a decent pour for a classy place? and Is putting a pour line on the glass a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? I'm the guy who still drinks Two-buck Chuck out of a tumbler and likes it, so I didn't have much to offer, except another question: How do you know it's really 15 cl?
So, while Coco enjoys her birthday luxuriating at what is colloquially called The Naked Lady Spa, I am out blogging in Starbucks, just like old times. I've got an outlet and a hot coco, and they're playing some nice tunes, but the view isn't much to write home about. Ah, Suburban Nation.
(If I were really ambitions, I would have done some time-lapse photography.)
Since I'm feeling old school, I thought I would just dump some bloggy stuff in here, like I used to, when people actually had blogs and read each other's. See, here's an old joke about it:
(Now our cat has his own Facebook page)
Ah, those heady days. We'd meet each other and someone would ask "what's up?" and the response would be a resentful acknowledgment that maybe not everybody was waiting for your latest post, to devour it and know exactly what was up. I guess the practice lives on in memory, at least - I mean, this is from a fairly recent television show, isn't it?
(Although that short looks like it's made out of Qiana - that's not coming back, is it?)
Before hanging out at Starbucks waiting for Coco to finish her spa visit, I hung out on campus waiting for her to finish teaching. (Yeah, she had to work today, more's the bummer.) I graded and prepped and visited some folks and sent some email and had lunch, a tofurkey sandwich. Not leftovers from Thanksgiving: we didn't have any of those, since we went out for dinner to Bamboo Garden, although we did have some faux-leftovers because Coco made stuffing anyway and I bought a can of jellied cranberry sauce, just like mom used to buy, except that the can isn't ribbed anymore and they don't emboss the sell-by code into the metal but use ink instead, so the quivering purple cylinder has less architectural detail now, but I digress. My sandwich included cheddar cheese and cucumbers, and was on sliced "artisanal" bread.
So, a check of the tally sheet over on the right shows a little bit of pre-fall free-fall going on. It would have been a pretty disappointing week if hadn't been for my discovering Babymetal.
Anyway, as might be said in politics, WARMER has not been an unqualified success. The lofty goals embedded in the concept and the strong performance early in the season have given way to a perhaps less-ambitious regimen. I have been honest throughout; I'm not like this guy:
but that is, of course, cold comfort when it comes to assessing my own performance. However, we will save the post-mortem until the patient is actually dead.
This week included two RPG game nights, one civilian game night, one working lunch, one playing lunch, a couple of catch-up sojourns, and a beer-drinking, carpet-buying afternoon adventure that almost but not quite resulted in a car being impounded. And long afternoon at the tattoo place where I got married, getting this:
So, I got a new tattoo today up at Two Birds. Since Coco was there for the process, we have voluminous photojournalistic coverage, which I have edited down to a manageable amount, to wit: Art Design
