V2: Search Results

Bird!

Corner of 1st Ave and Pike St, Downtown - Sep 27, 2007

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Pig Will Eat Itself

Officially titled "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner". Harbor Steps, Downtown, Seattle, WA - July 28, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

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Planes, Trains, Automobies and Boats

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)

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Queen Anne,
Seattle

People just keep going, and going, and going, and...

Gasworks Park, Wallingford, Seattle, WA - July 3, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

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A shocking evening

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)

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With The Lights Out

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.