Results tagged “Queen Anne” from V2

A few times every January and February the skies clear, the nights get bitterly cold (or as close to it as we're comfortable with here in the weather-wussified Northwest), and mountains you forget are off in the distance become incredibly crisp, sharp backdrops that pop out around unexpected corners all over the city, looking so incredible that you'd almost think they were newly painted backdrops instead of snow-coated granite behemoths many miles in the distance. It's a good reminder of why we live in this rain-soaked and overcast city. All four of these shots were taken yesterday (Jan 21, 2008) and all have much larger pop-up images available.

That's MOUNTAIN, with a capital 'M'. (Kerry Park, Queen Anne)

Today was the final day for the Queen Anne house, one year after the horrendous November that ended the boat adventure and culminated with three inches of snow and ice.

Nature was slightly better behaved tonight, and bid a fond adieu while I wrapped up the cleaning.

Every night, within minutes of 8:00 pm, flock upon flock of crows pass over our house flying south, toward what must be a very large roosting ground near downtown. It starts with a few birds cawing and soon turns into a swarm of black as hundreds of birds silently flap past. Wave upon wave of birds come over the rooftops to the north and swoop past the tree line to the south, on to their nightly endeavors. This lasts for about fifteen minutes, after which the air clears, the sun sets, and only the occasional late straggler caws en route to the gathering.

The pictures really don't do it justice.

All taken from our back porch in Queen Anne - July 26, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

Unassembled Boeing airplanes (in bright green primer), Burlington Northern rail cars (some carrying the planes!), many boats moored in Smith Cove marina, and of course lots of commuters traveling over the Magnolia Bridge and parked in the various lots. Taken from our back porch in Queen Anne - July 25, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

We don't often see thunderstorms in this area of the country. Something to do with the geography messing with weather patterns that normally form them. When we do get a storm, it generally consists of one or two flashes of lighting, a rumble of thunder, and everyone gasping at how wild it was. Last night was something of an anomaly, however, as we had a whole string of storms rolling along the foothills of the Cascades and up the Puget Sound corridor. These two pictures were of a cell that was located somewhere over the Kitsap Peninsula. I set up the nice digital SLR on a tripod out on the back deck, opened up the shutter and crossed my fingers. Among the hundred or so useless shots I managed to capture a few strikes.

Kitsap Peninsula (as viewed from Queen Anne, Seattle), Washington - July 12, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

Yesterday I returned to the neighborhood to discover the entire area without power. The main grocery store remained open with generators providing power to the cash registers, coolers, and just enough lights to give the appearance of a cheap horror flick. Early in the day a cement truck had struck a power pole and made a big mess of the neighborhood, but that was cleaned up quickly and power was restored, only to have 9000+ houses lose power again at about 3:30 pm for an unrelated reason (however, at the time we didn't realize it was an unrelated incident and everyone assumed there were some issues with rewiring the first accident.) Here's the Seattle P-I article about the outage.

The power came back on just before 6 pm for about thirty seconds, followed by an exceptionally loud explosion like a cache of M-80s being detonated all at once and everything going dead once again. I rushed to the back porch expecting to see a transformer on fire, but instead saw a large tree in the thickets smoking with ash fluttering around. Neighbors said they had heard similar noises after two earlier attempts to restore power but no one had identified the source until this time because numerous other trees blocked the view from the street.

Here's the offending tree. That's an approximately 75-foot tall wild cherry tree, which was leaning against three uninsulated high-voltage lines that run down the hillside to the street below. There's no road or pathway there - just lots of briers, raspberries, creeper vines and trees.

You can almost smell the burnt leaves and bark.

About twenty minutes later (after spending a fair bit of time trying to find a phone book to look up the City Light phone number) a utility truck came driving down the street and we were able to wave them down and point out the source of the outage. Read on for lots more pictures about their efforts to get the tree out of the way.

KIRO-TV tower, Queen Anne Ave N, Queen Anne, Seattle, WA - June 12, 2007 (click image to enlarge)