It's Summer, for Pete's Sake
Short ramble on neighborhood blackberry patches,
jam-making, real-estate prices in formerly affordable West Seattle, and the
intriguing depths of Seattle's newest residential area - Belltown; plus an
assortment of photos from The Bite of Seattle (food festival at Seattle Center),
the Belltown scene, and yet another Olympic Sunset from the roof
deck.
Enough with the house stuff, already. It's
summer and it's time to continue my explorations. No, I haven't been on my bike
but I did move it back to the shed now that there's mostly my stuff in the shed,
except for the paint. The paint crew is taking a break - two of the three
painters are together with their wives in Las Vegas and Redondo Beach,
California (forget which place they were going to first). When they come back
that'll be pretty much the last of the
job.
So, as previously mentioned I've been taking long walks around the neighborhood, checking out other people's houses, other people's gardens, and the various blackberry patches with which this city abounds. When I was growing up in Central Pennsylvania, one of the joys of living in a rich farm area was the fact that I could walk through my neighborhood there (Camp Hill, West Shore of Harrisburg, Susequehanna River Valley) and pick fresh cherries from people's cherry trees, fresh apples from their apple trees, fresh peaches from their peach trees and fresh strawberries from the endless strawberry patches which that area seemed to have. I got used to the idea of just strolling about a place and being able to eat fresh fruit.
No where else except for our house in Bellaire, Texas (inner suburb of Houston, inside the corporate limits and hard by the Galleria-West Loop area) have I experienced this joy - except for Seattle. In Houston, we had a couple of pecan trees which bore fruit, a couple of fig trees which bore so much fruit that I had to plan around the squirrels if I wanted to get a fresh fig, and a patio filled with mulberry trees which the birds loved and which gave their normally white feces a decidedly blue cast - a staining blue that is.
Here, there's the usual apple trees, there are pear and plum trees (we've got a fruit-bearing plum in the corner of our yard) and so many blackberry bushes that it's almost obscene. Today I spent a few hours getting scratched and falling down inside a quite thorny patch gathering about three quarts of fresh blackberries. I didn't have to walk that far. I started about a mile away at Westwood Village shopping plaza, which is surrounded by streets on two sides which are lined with these bushes. Then I headed for a stretch of Henderson Street where I knew this one corner lot had half a block's worth of blackberry plants (if they're hanging on the sidewalk side, they're fair public game) and then right down the street from me at the corner of 39th and Cloverdale. When I got home I probably had a hundred scratches on both legs (one SHOULD wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts - they do get snagged but save the skin) and at least several dozen on my picking arm - my right arm. Oh, and because both the plastic bags I used had tiny, unbeknownst-to-me, holes in them, I also had blackberry stains all over my clothes and running down both legs. It looked like I'd been in a losing fight with a bear or large cat but I did have my blackberries.
I bought 12 Mason (actually they were Kerr) jars with lids at the QFC grocery while I was in the Westwood Village area and two containers of SureJell (Kraft, who else?) pectin and had one box of pectin at home. I got home, read the instructions for the "no cook" jam and mashed the berries, added the sugar and pre-stirred the pectin into the warm water as advised and then mixed them for the requisite three minutes and damned if I didn't have ten 8-ounce jars of fresh blackberry preserves. I froze five of them and kept five in the refrigerator - according to the label, they'll last up to a year in a freezer and up to five weeks in a refrigerator. It's unlikely that they will last that long. I'm real fond of putting jam on salty crackers and eating them like that instead of with cheese. Our normal jam (blueberry, blackberry, tart marmalade) usually goes one jar per week or faster. We usually pay about $3.50 or slightly less - if on sale - for the imported French jam or Safeway house brand which my taste tests have decided are the best values. It cost me eight bucks for the jars and lids, two bucks each for the pectin for a total of twelve dollars for ten 8-ounce jars of fresh blackberry perserves. Which, by the way, are delicious. Katherine thinks they're a bit too sweet for jam and said they'd go great on ice cream or pancakes. I actually think they'll go great on Trisquit or Carrs crackers and they're only too sweet if you don't like sugar as much as I do.
So, my little jam experiment cut the price more than in half for my favorite preserve and it was unbelievably easy. The jam-making did have it's down side - blackberries produce an amazingly dark and really-hard-to-get-rid-of blue stain. I had to use Comet on the sink twice and had to use 409 on the door and outside of the house where the juice dripped. My clothes, well - I've always liked blue anyway.
Next year (the blackberry season is early this year and is already more than half-over) I'll come up with a better plan and freeze some of them for use as fresh berries, use some in jam - probably make two or three times the number of jars, and probably make at least one cobbler or pie or one of each. This is just so great to be able to wander about and come up with quarts of these things. I know some folks like their raspberries, or blueberries, or strawberries - but to me, there's nothing finer than a sweet-but-still-with-tart-undertone blackberry. I do love this town - for all these little reasons.
Other wanderings have produced a stunning realization that the real estate market here in downhome and previously affordable West Seattle has heated up to oven-like temperatures. A house which was a remake from one wall of an old, 1940's "war box" which sold two doors down from us for $450,000 just five months ago is now selling for $625,000. No, it's not the same house, just the same builder-real estate developer who used the identical set of plans and produced an identical house to the one two doors down from us only the new one is over one block and down one block. Same exact house - same square footage, same upstairs living/downstairs sleeping arrangement (they call it "reverse floor plan"), same views from upstairs of the Sound and Olympics, same team who did the "custom garden", same everything in fact except the price has gone up nearly thirty percent in only four months. Only Allah knows what we'd get for our house but it surely will be close to seven figures. In fact, all the remaining 800-square-feet war boxes in the neighborhood which are being sold are getting about a hundred "K" more now than they were when we were here a year ago looking for houses.
My forays into the neighborhood have also produced the results of a survey I've been taking. I've been examining houses with respect to the windows - how many, how big, do they open, do they seem to provide cross-flow ventilation, and other aspects of windows. I'm still trying to understand what was in the minds of the builders or architects who built these houses. It seems that the older housing stock, the ones built - say - pre World War II anywhere from the actual turn of the century through the late twenties, did have large windows, full-height double-hung, which did have at least two windows per room - mostly - and which did provide good ventilation for the house. The ones built following WWII, the war boxes like our original house, the '50s ramblers, the '60's split-levels, the '70s "modern" and later all were built on the assumption that people would use either fans or air conditioning. Folks, this is one of the mildest climates in North America. It's rare that one would actually need air conditioning. And, yet, here are all these houses with one window, usually a token if it's not the living room, per room and this "forced air" monster which was going to make everyone's life "nicer." What's with this desire to escape from the environment when the environment is as pleasant as it is here? In Houston, sure, ninety-plus percent humidity nearly all the time and certainly ninety-plus degrees temperature for the better part of a year. Air conditioning actually made Houston liveable for most folks. But the Pacific Northwest?
Maybe I just love the out-of-doors more than most and couldn't imagine a house which was closed in on me. If that's true then that might explain everyone else's penchant for "controlling" their environment and shutting out the world. But, seriously folks, that's a notion or idea whose time has come and gone. We should quit trying to manipulate our planet to our own personal desire and get on with being part of the world instead of creating our own separate worlds. For one, we'd probably live more healthy lives. It's very unhealthy to breathe the air which has been recirculated inside most modern homes. There's all sorts of outgassing products from the walls and plastic stuff we put inside these dwellings and these chemicals have a bad effect on us. Plus, there's no towns north or west of here which produce acid-air or put other obnoxious chemicals into the environment. Which is to say that our air - for the better part of the entire Pacific Northwest - comes clean off the ocean. Why wouldn't we want to breathe this fresh, oxygenated, air?
Just another puzzling mystery of modern life. Sort of like explaining why one needs a V-8 SUV or van to transport a single person - and yet anyone pretty much anywhere in North America can do their own survey of vehicle use and find a huge waste of materials as well as petrol being used to transport most of the denizens of this continent. But, you know what, it doesn't matter because in a matter of only a few decades we will either have to come up with true alternative transportation energy schemes (my favorite is hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell electric motor vehicles) or we'll all pretty much have to walk everywhere. But, again, I'm ahead of the curve as I walk most everywhere anyway or take the bus or use my car to transport more than one person very very long distances. Okay, I'll quit preaching - but think about it. We all do make a difference and it's a difference we should be conscious of. It's much better to make a positive difference than a negative difference. It's also much better to share and be polite than to be selfish and self-centered but how many of us wouldn't jump ahead in line if we could? Again, think about your actions - they have global consequences even if you fail to recognize that aspect of them.
What else has been cooking, so to speak. Well, Katherine's arm seems to be mending and her supply of pain killer medicine is no where near depletion - both of which are good things. I've managed to move most of the things upstairs which belong upstairs - save a few dozen boxes which I'm still trying to figure out where I can put them (the photos and slides and that sort of thing).
We've got seven really large containers of art and mounted photos and other wall decorations still in the shed. I suppose that will be a task which can await the Fall. We had picture rail installed in the stairway on two of the really high walls so when I do get around to unpacking the art, this will be the first place we've lived where it might be properly displayed - that should be fun, actually, so I should await Fall just because it'll be rainy and hanging art is a perfect indoor sport and one which more than one person can play at, as well.
I went to the last day of the "Bite of Seattle," this past Sunday and had a great time sampling some good food for a reasonable charge - sample plates were two bucks and a full course was five bucks. I did the two buck thing. There were also four stages which featured another round of the excellent music which this place has. Heard a cover band called "Shelley and the Curves" which did B-52, Aretha Franklin, and a bunch of other noted artists and they were really quite good. They had an "act" which reminded me of the Temptations or the Vandellas and the band members were quite accomplished. "Love Shack" was a fun one and the crowd got into it as well. The other group I heard was Skip Peri's new band - the Shimmers. Skip Peri is a songwriter-singer who has an amazing range and really dives into the heart of his songs. The lyrics are poignant, personal, and hit home in a lot of areas. His new band consists of two guitars - bass and rhythm - and a drummer. Skip plays lead and sings. He's been around for about four years and has played an incredible number of venues here in Seattle and a few in Oregon and one back East. He's got two CDs of his own songs and playing and he and the Shimmers have a CD coming out soon. As usual, check CDBaby <http://www.cdbaby.com> for copies.
I don't think I had any idea of the richness of the music scene when I moved here. Sure, I'd heard all about Seattle bands and the Seattle sound and the super-active club and music scene out here, but honestly, folks, this is one hellacious music town. I truly can say that I haven't heard a bad band since I've been hanging out at these fairs and festivals and live gigs. Oh, so far, I've yet to pay for a live performance - I could, easily, there's about a dozen venues for live music and more than four dozen bars, clubs, cafes, or whatnot's where these folks play and which do charge a cover. But so far, I've not been compelled to attend since by judicious picking and looking at the schedules I can hear pretty much anyone for free. Of course, that will stop when Bumbershoot arrives. There's a day or several day cover charge for Bumbershoot and I do plan on attending so that will be my first "paid" musical experience. Not only that, but there's a rich palette of music which plays live from radio station studios and it's not just the exemplary KEXP <http://www.kexp.org> which has live performances in their studios. KJR, KMTT, and a bunch of other stations in Seattle and nearby in Bellingham and Tacoma which also feature live studio performances.
Perhaps it's the audience. These folks out here really like their music - they like it live, they like it well played, they like it original, and they respond when it's all of the above. I've even become an evolving fan of the Seattle grunge sound -which itself is evolving. When what the rest of the country hears is what's on the Clear Channel radio you don't really get a good ear into the current Seattle music scene. But, when you're in the Northwest, there's such a diversity and range that it's really quite satisfying. And, there's a really active folk and blue grass and blues scene out here, too, so one isn't stuck with only rock-and-roll. Actually, there's a really active jazz scene which I guess eventually I'll have to dig into and learn about. Right now, though, there's plenty to keep my ears filled.
One thing I've been thinking about acquiring, and right now I'm classically house-poor, is a slightly more flexible digital camera. True, I do love my Canon Elph but there's an endless number of times when I wish I had either a variety of lenses I could plug into it or wish it had a somewhat higher density of pixels in the CCD array. The downside is the usual problem with portability, ease of use, unfettered access to taking the picture rather than dwelling on "which lens" and all the rest which goes with having a photography system. For the time being I've decided to just let that idea stew and see where it takes me. I don't really want to be encumbered by a camera bag and a set of lenses. I really like the fact that I can put the Elph in the pocket of any pair of pants I'm wearing and basically forget about it. I lament the fact that it's mostly an automatic and I have basically only two controls at my disposal - turn flash off and set exposure plus or minus up to one EV. That's it! Like I said, I'll continue to evolve with the Canon Elph and see where my expectations take me and where my wallet lets me go.
Recently found out about a slick deal which Costco has for digital camera types. For about a buck a shot, you can take the media of your choice to any Costco, plug it into one of their computer consoles at their photo desk and get enlargements up to 11x14 done on what looks like a laser printing system. The darned thing is that even a two megapixel camera can be made to produce some pretty convincing large prints. I hadn't much thought about "hard copies" with a digital camera but with this new avenue of exploration I just may give prints another go. I've also got five prints appearing in a small group showing at a Tacoma art gallery. I"ll be on the road for the opening but the show will stay at the gallery for several months so I'll at least get to see some of my work on display. Now I've got to figure out what I think would be an appropriate price to put on my art. I've always been of the notion that art (as well as information) wants to be free so I've never charged even what it cost me for any work I've been asked to "sell." Time for that Marxist philosophy to give way to the realities of maybe actually getting some bucks from photography. Anyway, I'll think about what is a good price and see if any actually sell. Few folks actually know this but I do have formal photography training as well as formal oil/acrylic training. Just one of the odd set of courses I took eons ago at Penn State. And, yes, I've even done the zone system.
I've been having great fun trekking back and forth through Seattle's Belltown. Because I like to take a single bus and because many of the events I attend are close enough to downtown, I've been walking north-south and east-west through this section of Seattle's near north downtown area. It was formerly a warehouse and light-industrial section which languished between the northern edge of downtown and the southern boundary of the Seattle Center-Lower Queen Anne area. About two decades ago everyone decided (developers, residents, city council, the mayor, the banks, the city administrators, et al.) that it would make sense to create a new urban neighborhood for all the urbanites in town. Urbanites being the classic Gen-X individual. Sort of like "Friends" except without New York prices. Well, it seems to have worked. There are several dozen thousand Gen-X and other "gen" individuals, couples and small groups living in the apartments, condos, and high rises which constitute this nearly square-mile stretch of Seattle's urban fabric. The streetscape here is bright, neon-colored, filled with all the kinds of "modern" services and stores one would expect in New York, or Lakeside Chicago, or maybe even Rittenhouse Square section of Philly. It's quite fun to stroll about. There's always a lively street scene with lots of people, all doing something, and lots of patrons at most of the restaurants or clubs or cafes. It's also one of those areas of the city where architects like to play and as a consequence it looks quite eclectic and inviting with each new or re-done older structure featuring some bizarre form of adornment or amenity. And, because it's pretty much downtown, there's alleys everywhere and the alleys are nearly as interesting as the main streets. Oh, and everyone still has a dog, even in the heart of the city. Honestly, this is the most animal-crazy place I've ever seen, and, no, I've got absolutely no desire to own a pet.
There's a smattering of images on the blogsite <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/iblog>, mostly illustrative of Belltown's peculiar nature. Upcoming events include the block party on August 3, where we get to show off the house and eat and drink with our several dozen neighbors; the completion of the house which is mostly the stair rail for the spiral stairs and the steel wires for the balcony and maybe a hundred paint "patches;" and yet another transcontinental trip for the Volvo - which is about 1500 miles shy of 100,000 miles - nearly all of them exploration jaunts somewhere in North America.
Get outside folks, it's real and allows you to enjoy the rest of the world away from your air-conditioned, closed-window, cave. Heck, you might even find something you're actually looking for. On every single trip I've taken in the neighborhood for the past month, I've found at least one penny on the sidewalk on each trip. Sure, it's not a lot of money in aggregate but it's still fun to find a penny, eat a blackberry or two, and chit-chat with the endless stream of animals and people walking them.
Ciao
Chas
Sunday at Seattle Center was hot and there were hundreds of folks enjoying the water
at the International Fountain. The Bite of Seattle was set up in a variety of venues at the
Center with live music stages in what I've come to realize are "all the usual places." In
the three days of the food festival, slightly less than half-a-million people traipse through
making it one of the more popular entertainment gigs of the summer.
Shelley (in pink feathers) and the Curves - a cover band which puts on one great show.
They were playing at the KJR-sponsored stage and had the crowd rocking, especially with
their rendition of the B-52's "Love Shack."
This little guy was awestruck by Shelley and the Curves. He watched through two songs and then broke out into a very believable version
of the stage performance - throwing his arms up, "walking like an Egyptian," wiggling his tiny hips and so on. I guess he was deep in
the process of imprinting at this stage - he looks so serious. Once he started dancing, though, he flashed everyone a great big smile and
just kept on dancing. These festivals are great family fare and lots of families bring their kids and animals and let them pretty much
have free reign.
Skip Peri and his new band "The Shimmers." That's Skip in the middle and the drummer,
alas, was way behind and invisible from this camera angle. The rhythm guitar guy (left) was
all over the place whereas the bass player (as they all seem to) just planted his feet and
played in one place. Skip's vocals and lyrics are incredibly rich, vibrant and poignant. He's
received rave reviews from all the usual music review sources and has been writing and
playing since 2000, all Seattle except for a few spots in Oregon and one back East.
Leaving Seattle Center heading for Second Avenue the Olympics loom large in this view.
The weather allows mountain views about half the time, not because it's cloudy but because
they're mountains and clouds tend to hang right over them obscuring their view. If the image
has an odd tinge in the foreground it's because I used Photoshop's magic wand to capture
the darker areas (I exposed for the mountains and sky) and lightened them slightly.
Here's both a far and near view of West Seattle through some of the trees lining Second
Avenue about three blocks from Seattle Center. Nearly anywhere in Seattle one can stand
there's a view of some other neighborhood or water or mountains or all three. That's
Elliott Bay in between and some of the balconies of Belltown condos on the sides.
Further along (south) on Second Avenue is this view down to the Victoria Clipper ferry
terminal with West Seattle and portions of Alki Beach in the distance. The construction on
the left is yet another high-rise Belltown condominium with minimum prices starting in the
very high one-hundreds.
This older warehouse-turned-condominium features this blue corrugated barrel on the sidewalk which catches the
runoff from the roof area and provides a slow watering reservoir for the urban green island which surrounds it. Just
another example of the eclectic nature of the architecture in this section of town. Oh, and that's West Seattle across
Elliott Bay in the distance, from here it's about a mile from shore to shore.
On any given street in Belltown one can find these street lamp posts with a Belltown logo.
None of them are the same and all of them look like examples of welder's art. More proof
of the urban eclecticism which - I believe - has come to define Belltown - that and the fact
that living here you can walk nearly anywhere close in - to Capitol Hill, to Seattle Center,
or to the rest of downtown. That and the fact that most of Belltown is inside the "free ride"
area for the buses means it's a very, very convenient section of town to live in if you really
don't want a yard.
And yet another gorgeous Western Sunset from the roof deck. The lower section of red from the center to the right is actually sky with
the clouds which typically hang over the Olympics defining the dark gray line. The Sound is in front for this entire wide angle view
and is mostly visible in the left and center areas as a lighter blue. The neighborhood is heavily populated with 50-foot and higher
Douglas Fir trees - the native tree for the Northwest.
So, as previously mentioned I've been taking long walks around the neighborhood, checking out other people's houses, other people's gardens, and the various blackberry patches with which this city abounds. When I was growing up in Central Pennsylvania, one of the joys of living in a rich farm area was the fact that I could walk through my neighborhood there (Camp Hill, West Shore of Harrisburg, Susequehanna River Valley) and pick fresh cherries from people's cherry trees, fresh apples from their apple trees, fresh peaches from their peach trees and fresh strawberries from the endless strawberry patches which that area seemed to have. I got used to the idea of just strolling about a place and being able to eat fresh fruit.
No where else except for our house in Bellaire, Texas (inner suburb of Houston, inside the corporate limits and hard by the Galleria-West Loop area) have I experienced this joy - except for Seattle. In Houston, we had a couple of pecan trees which bore fruit, a couple of fig trees which bore so much fruit that I had to plan around the squirrels if I wanted to get a fresh fig, and a patio filled with mulberry trees which the birds loved and which gave their normally white feces a decidedly blue cast - a staining blue that is.
Here, there's the usual apple trees, there are pear and plum trees (we've got a fruit-bearing plum in the corner of our yard) and so many blackberry bushes that it's almost obscene. Today I spent a few hours getting scratched and falling down inside a quite thorny patch gathering about three quarts of fresh blackberries. I didn't have to walk that far. I started about a mile away at Westwood Village shopping plaza, which is surrounded by streets on two sides which are lined with these bushes. Then I headed for a stretch of Henderson Street where I knew this one corner lot had half a block's worth of blackberry plants (if they're hanging on the sidewalk side, they're fair public game) and then right down the street from me at the corner of 39th and Cloverdale. When I got home I probably had a hundred scratches on both legs (one SHOULD wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts - they do get snagged but save the skin) and at least several dozen on my picking arm - my right arm. Oh, and because both the plastic bags I used had tiny, unbeknownst-to-me, holes in them, I also had blackberry stains all over my clothes and running down both legs. It looked like I'd been in a losing fight with a bear or large cat but I did have my blackberries.
I bought 12 Mason (actually they were Kerr) jars with lids at the QFC grocery while I was in the Westwood Village area and two containers of SureJell (Kraft, who else?) pectin and had one box of pectin at home. I got home, read the instructions for the "no cook" jam and mashed the berries, added the sugar and pre-stirred the pectin into the warm water as advised and then mixed them for the requisite three minutes and damned if I didn't have ten 8-ounce jars of fresh blackberry preserves. I froze five of them and kept five in the refrigerator - according to the label, they'll last up to a year in a freezer and up to five weeks in a refrigerator. It's unlikely that they will last that long. I'm real fond of putting jam on salty crackers and eating them like that instead of with cheese. Our normal jam (blueberry, blackberry, tart marmalade) usually goes one jar per week or faster. We usually pay about $3.50 or slightly less - if on sale - for the imported French jam or Safeway house brand which my taste tests have decided are the best values. It cost me eight bucks for the jars and lids, two bucks each for the pectin for a total of twelve dollars for ten 8-ounce jars of fresh blackberry perserves. Which, by the way, are delicious. Katherine thinks they're a bit too sweet for jam and said they'd go great on ice cream or pancakes. I actually think they'll go great on Trisquit or Carrs crackers and they're only too sweet if you don't like sugar as much as I do.
So, my little jam experiment cut the price more than in half for my favorite preserve and it was unbelievably easy. The jam-making did have it's down side - blackberries produce an amazingly dark and really-hard-to-get-rid-of blue stain. I had to use Comet on the sink twice and had to use 409 on the door and outside of the house where the juice dripped. My clothes, well - I've always liked blue anyway.
Next year (the blackberry season is early this year and is already more than half-over) I'll come up with a better plan and freeze some of them for use as fresh berries, use some in jam - probably make two or three times the number of jars, and probably make at least one cobbler or pie or one of each. This is just so great to be able to wander about and come up with quarts of these things. I know some folks like their raspberries, or blueberries, or strawberries - but to me, there's nothing finer than a sweet-but-still-with-tart-undertone blackberry. I do love this town - for all these little reasons.
Other wanderings have produced a stunning realization that the real estate market here in downhome and previously affordable West Seattle has heated up to oven-like temperatures. A house which was a remake from one wall of an old, 1940's "war box" which sold two doors down from us for $450,000 just five months ago is now selling for $625,000. No, it's not the same house, just the same builder-real estate developer who used the identical set of plans and produced an identical house to the one two doors down from us only the new one is over one block and down one block. Same exact house - same square footage, same upstairs living/downstairs sleeping arrangement (they call it "reverse floor plan"), same views from upstairs of the Sound and Olympics, same team who did the "custom garden", same everything in fact except the price has gone up nearly thirty percent in only four months. Only Allah knows what we'd get for our house but it surely will be close to seven figures. In fact, all the remaining 800-square-feet war boxes in the neighborhood which are being sold are getting about a hundred "K" more now than they were when we were here a year ago looking for houses.
My forays into the neighborhood have also produced the results of a survey I've been taking. I've been examining houses with respect to the windows - how many, how big, do they open, do they seem to provide cross-flow ventilation, and other aspects of windows. I'm still trying to understand what was in the minds of the builders or architects who built these houses. It seems that the older housing stock, the ones built - say - pre World War II anywhere from the actual turn of the century through the late twenties, did have large windows, full-height double-hung, which did have at least two windows per room - mostly - and which did provide good ventilation for the house. The ones built following WWII, the war boxes like our original house, the '50s ramblers, the '60's split-levels, the '70s "modern" and later all were built on the assumption that people would use either fans or air conditioning. Folks, this is one of the mildest climates in North America. It's rare that one would actually need air conditioning. And, yet, here are all these houses with one window, usually a token if it's not the living room, per room and this "forced air" monster which was going to make everyone's life "nicer." What's with this desire to escape from the environment when the environment is as pleasant as it is here? In Houston, sure, ninety-plus percent humidity nearly all the time and certainly ninety-plus degrees temperature for the better part of a year. Air conditioning actually made Houston liveable for most folks. But the Pacific Northwest?
Maybe I just love the out-of-doors more than most and couldn't imagine a house which was closed in on me. If that's true then that might explain everyone else's penchant for "controlling" their environment and shutting out the world. But, seriously folks, that's a notion or idea whose time has come and gone. We should quit trying to manipulate our planet to our own personal desire and get on with being part of the world instead of creating our own separate worlds. For one, we'd probably live more healthy lives. It's very unhealthy to breathe the air which has been recirculated inside most modern homes. There's all sorts of outgassing products from the walls and plastic stuff we put inside these dwellings and these chemicals have a bad effect on us. Plus, there's no towns north or west of here which produce acid-air or put other obnoxious chemicals into the environment. Which is to say that our air - for the better part of the entire Pacific Northwest - comes clean off the ocean. Why wouldn't we want to breathe this fresh, oxygenated, air?
Just another puzzling mystery of modern life. Sort of like explaining why one needs a V-8 SUV or van to transport a single person - and yet anyone pretty much anywhere in North America can do their own survey of vehicle use and find a huge waste of materials as well as petrol being used to transport most of the denizens of this continent. But, you know what, it doesn't matter because in a matter of only a few decades we will either have to come up with true alternative transportation energy schemes (my favorite is hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell electric motor vehicles) or we'll all pretty much have to walk everywhere. But, again, I'm ahead of the curve as I walk most everywhere anyway or take the bus or use my car to transport more than one person very very long distances. Okay, I'll quit preaching - but think about it. We all do make a difference and it's a difference we should be conscious of. It's much better to make a positive difference than a negative difference. It's also much better to share and be polite than to be selfish and self-centered but how many of us wouldn't jump ahead in line if we could? Again, think about your actions - they have global consequences even if you fail to recognize that aspect of them.
What else has been cooking, so to speak. Well, Katherine's arm seems to be mending and her supply of pain killer medicine is no where near depletion - both of which are good things. I've managed to move most of the things upstairs which belong upstairs - save a few dozen boxes which I'm still trying to figure out where I can put them (the photos and slides and that sort of thing).
We've got seven really large containers of art and mounted photos and other wall decorations still in the shed. I suppose that will be a task which can await the Fall. We had picture rail installed in the stairway on two of the really high walls so when I do get around to unpacking the art, this will be the first place we've lived where it might be properly displayed - that should be fun, actually, so I should await Fall just because it'll be rainy and hanging art is a perfect indoor sport and one which more than one person can play at, as well.
I went to the last day of the "Bite of Seattle," this past Sunday and had a great time sampling some good food for a reasonable charge - sample plates were two bucks and a full course was five bucks. I did the two buck thing. There were also four stages which featured another round of the excellent music which this place has. Heard a cover band called "Shelley and the Curves" which did B-52, Aretha Franklin, and a bunch of other noted artists and they were really quite good. They had an "act" which reminded me of the Temptations or the Vandellas and the band members were quite accomplished. "Love Shack" was a fun one and the crowd got into it as well. The other group I heard was Skip Peri's new band - the Shimmers. Skip Peri is a songwriter-singer who has an amazing range and really dives into the heart of his songs. The lyrics are poignant, personal, and hit home in a lot of areas. His new band consists of two guitars - bass and rhythm - and a drummer. Skip plays lead and sings. He's been around for about four years and has played an incredible number of venues here in Seattle and a few in Oregon and one back East. He's got two CDs of his own songs and playing and he and the Shimmers have a CD coming out soon. As usual, check CDBaby <http://www.cdbaby.com> for copies.
I don't think I had any idea of the richness of the music scene when I moved here. Sure, I'd heard all about Seattle bands and the Seattle sound and the super-active club and music scene out here, but honestly, folks, this is one hellacious music town. I truly can say that I haven't heard a bad band since I've been hanging out at these fairs and festivals and live gigs. Oh, so far, I've yet to pay for a live performance - I could, easily, there's about a dozen venues for live music and more than four dozen bars, clubs, cafes, or whatnot's where these folks play and which do charge a cover. But so far, I've not been compelled to attend since by judicious picking and looking at the schedules I can hear pretty much anyone for free. Of course, that will stop when Bumbershoot arrives. There's a day or several day cover charge for Bumbershoot and I do plan on attending so that will be my first "paid" musical experience. Not only that, but there's a rich palette of music which plays live from radio station studios and it's not just the exemplary KEXP <http://www.kexp.org> which has live performances in their studios. KJR, KMTT, and a bunch of other stations in Seattle and nearby in Bellingham and Tacoma which also feature live studio performances.
Perhaps it's the audience. These folks out here really like their music - they like it live, they like it well played, they like it original, and they respond when it's all of the above. I've even become an evolving fan of the Seattle grunge sound -which itself is evolving. When what the rest of the country hears is what's on the Clear Channel radio you don't really get a good ear into the current Seattle music scene. But, when you're in the Northwest, there's such a diversity and range that it's really quite satisfying. And, there's a really active folk and blue grass and blues scene out here, too, so one isn't stuck with only rock-and-roll. Actually, there's a really active jazz scene which I guess eventually I'll have to dig into and learn about. Right now, though, there's plenty to keep my ears filled.
One thing I've been thinking about acquiring, and right now I'm classically house-poor, is a slightly more flexible digital camera. True, I do love my Canon Elph but there's an endless number of times when I wish I had either a variety of lenses I could plug into it or wish it had a somewhat higher density of pixels in the CCD array. The downside is the usual problem with portability, ease of use, unfettered access to taking the picture rather than dwelling on "which lens" and all the rest which goes with having a photography system. For the time being I've decided to just let that idea stew and see where it takes me. I don't really want to be encumbered by a camera bag and a set of lenses. I really like the fact that I can put the Elph in the pocket of any pair of pants I'm wearing and basically forget about it. I lament the fact that it's mostly an automatic and I have basically only two controls at my disposal - turn flash off and set exposure plus or minus up to one EV. That's it! Like I said, I'll continue to evolve with the Canon Elph and see where my expectations take me and where my wallet lets me go.
Recently found out about a slick deal which Costco has for digital camera types. For about a buck a shot, you can take the media of your choice to any Costco, plug it into one of their computer consoles at their photo desk and get enlargements up to 11x14 done on what looks like a laser printing system. The darned thing is that even a two megapixel camera can be made to produce some pretty convincing large prints. I hadn't much thought about "hard copies" with a digital camera but with this new avenue of exploration I just may give prints another go. I've also got five prints appearing in a small group showing at a Tacoma art gallery. I"ll be on the road for the opening but the show will stay at the gallery for several months so I'll at least get to see some of my work on display. Now I've got to figure out what I think would be an appropriate price to put on my art. I've always been of the notion that art (as well as information) wants to be free so I've never charged even what it cost me for any work I've been asked to "sell." Time for that Marxist philosophy to give way to the realities of maybe actually getting some bucks from photography. Anyway, I'll think about what is a good price and see if any actually sell. Few folks actually know this but I do have formal photography training as well as formal oil/acrylic training. Just one of the odd set of courses I took eons ago at Penn State. And, yes, I've even done the zone system.
I've been having great fun trekking back and forth through Seattle's Belltown. Because I like to take a single bus and because many of the events I attend are close enough to downtown, I've been walking north-south and east-west through this section of Seattle's near north downtown area. It was formerly a warehouse and light-industrial section which languished between the northern edge of downtown and the southern boundary of the Seattle Center-Lower Queen Anne area. About two decades ago everyone decided (developers, residents, city council, the mayor, the banks, the city administrators, et al.) that it would make sense to create a new urban neighborhood for all the urbanites in town. Urbanites being the classic Gen-X individual. Sort of like "Friends" except without New York prices. Well, it seems to have worked. There are several dozen thousand Gen-X and other "gen" individuals, couples and small groups living in the apartments, condos, and high rises which constitute this nearly square-mile stretch of Seattle's urban fabric. The streetscape here is bright, neon-colored, filled with all the kinds of "modern" services and stores one would expect in New York, or Lakeside Chicago, or maybe even Rittenhouse Square section of Philly. It's quite fun to stroll about. There's always a lively street scene with lots of people, all doing something, and lots of patrons at most of the restaurants or clubs or cafes. It's also one of those areas of the city where architects like to play and as a consequence it looks quite eclectic and inviting with each new or re-done older structure featuring some bizarre form of adornment or amenity. And, because it's pretty much downtown, there's alleys everywhere and the alleys are nearly as interesting as the main streets. Oh, and everyone still has a dog, even in the heart of the city. Honestly, this is the most animal-crazy place I've ever seen, and, no, I've got absolutely no desire to own a pet.
There's a smattering of images on the blogsite <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/iblog>, mostly illustrative of Belltown's peculiar nature. Upcoming events include the block party on August 3, where we get to show off the house and eat and drink with our several dozen neighbors; the completion of the house which is mostly the stair rail for the spiral stairs and the steel wires for the balcony and maybe a hundred paint "patches;" and yet another transcontinental trip for the Volvo - which is about 1500 miles shy of 100,000 miles - nearly all of them exploration jaunts somewhere in North America.
Get outside folks, it's real and allows you to enjoy the rest of the world away from your air-conditioned, closed-window, cave. Heck, you might even find something you're actually looking for. On every single trip I've taken in the neighborhood for the past month, I've found at least one penny on the sidewalk on each trip. Sure, it's not a lot of money in aggregate but it's still fun to find a penny, eat a blackberry or two, and chit-chat with the endless stream of animals and people walking them.
Ciao
Chas
Sunday at Seattle Center was hot and there were hundreds of folks enjoying the water
at the International Fountain. The Bite of Seattle was set up in a variety of venues at the
Center with live music stages in what I've come to realize are "all the usual places." In
the three days of the food festival, slightly less than half-a-million people traipse through
making it one of the more popular entertainment gigs of the summer.
Shelley (in pink feathers) and the Curves - a cover band which puts on one great show.
They were playing at the KJR-sponsored stage and had the crowd rocking, especially with
their rendition of the B-52's "Love Shack."
This little guy was awestruck by Shelley and the Curves. He watched through two songs and then broke out into a very believable version
of the stage performance - throwing his arms up, "walking like an Egyptian," wiggling his tiny hips and so on. I guess he was deep in
the process of imprinting at this stage - he looks so serious. Once he started dancing, though, he flashed everyone a great big smile and
just kept on dancing. These festivals are great family fare and lots of families bring their kids and animals and let them pretty much
have free reign.
Skip Peri and his new band "The Shimmers." That's Skip in the middle and the drummer,
alas, was way behind and invisible from this camera angle. The rhythm guitar guy (left) was
all over the place whereas the bass player (as they all seem to) just planted his feet and
played in one place. Skip's vocals and lyrics are incredibly rich, vibrant and poignant. He's
received rave reviews from all the usual music review sources and has been writing and
playing since 2000, all Seattle except for a few spots in Oregon and one back East.
Leaving Seattle Center heading for Second Avenue the Olympics loom large in this view.
The weather allows mountain views about half the time, not because it's cloudy but because
they're mountains and clouds tend to hang right over them obscuring their view. If the image
has an odd tinge in the foreground it's because I used Photoshop's magic wand to capture
the darker areas (I exposed for the mountains and sky) and lightened them slightly.
Here's both a far and near view of West Seattle through some of the trees lining Second
Avenue about three blocks from Seattle Center. Nearly anywhere in Seattle one can stand
there's a view of some other neighborhood or water or mountains or all three. That's
Elliott Bay in between and some of the balconies of Belltown condos on the sides.
Further along (south) on Second Avenue is this view down to the Victoria Clipper ferry
terminal with West Seattle and portions of Alki Beach in the distance. The construction on
the left is yet another high-rise Belltown condominium with minimum prices starting in the
very high one-hundreds.
This older warehouse-turned-condominium features this blue corrugated barrel on the sidewalk which catches the
runoff from the roof area and provides a slow watering reservoir for the urban green island which surrounds it. Just
another example of the eclectic nature of the architecture in this section of town. Oh, and that's West Seattle across
Elliott Bay in the distance, from here it's about a mile from shore to shore.
On any given street in Belltown one can find these street lamp posts with a Belltown logo.
None of them are the same and all of them look like examples of welder's art. More proof
of the urban eclecticism which - I believe - has come to define Belltown - that and the fact
that living here you can walk nearly anywhere close in - to Capitol Hill, to Seattle Center,
or to the rest of downtown. That and the fact that most of Belltown is inside the "free ride"
area for the buses means it's a very, very convenient section of town to live in if you really
don't want a yard.
And yet another gorgeous Western Sunset from the roof deck. The lower section of red from the center to the right is actually sky with
the clouds which typically hang over the Olympics defining the dark gray line. The Sound is in front for this entire wide angle view
and is mostly visible in the left and center areas as a lighter blue. The neighborhood is heavily populated with 50-foot and higher
Douglas Fir trees - the native tree for the Northwest.
Posted: Wed - July 21, 2004 at 11:38 AM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM