Snowed In

Every so often Seattle experiences a snow storm and each time we react as though it had never happened before. The buses get stuck, people abandon their cars on the interstate and walk home, businesses and schools close, and we’re just plain shocked by the whole experience.  Year after year.  And we know that once the weather warms up and the snow melts and the bodyshops work their magic on our cars’ sheet metal we will completely forget about the whole mess and we will be just as astonished the next time it happens.

It’s perplexing.

Nicklesville

One of the Emerald City’s institutions is a tent village for homeless people that goes by the name Nicklesville, named for a former mayor who incurred the wrath of the populace after it came out that the city snowplows did a great job on the street he lived on after snowstorms but generally didn’t include much of the rest of the city in their snow removal routes.  The mayor’s performance on homelessness also was suspect, earning him naming rights for the homeless settlement in the photograph, something that brings to mind the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression.

Nicklesville roams and wanders through the Emerald City, staying in one neighborhood after another because Nicklesvillians tend to be regarded with considerable mistrust and suspicion by the munchkins of whatever neighborhood in which they land.  They often pitch their tents in church parking lots,  many Christians still tending to think they owe some respect, and temporary use of real estate, to their fellow human beings.  Now that messrs. Bezos, Balmer, and Allen (of Amazon, Microsoft, and formerly of Microsoft, respectively) were successful in their efforts to help defeat the recent attempt to institute a state income tax, we are cheered by the hope that there will be an unending supply of economic trickledown to help the homeless.  We only hope their tents don’t leak while the economic miracle works its magic, the Seattle drizzle seems to be the most commonly encountered trickledown, at least if you live in Nicklesville.

Catacombs

Bordering Lake Washington are aggregations of bedroom communities with  uniformly-inoffensive housing for the professionals who commute into the city to make their money.  Once home again, they can retreat behind their doors to watch their landscape services sculpt their plants and lawns into covenant-approved uniformity.  Like ancient Rome’s catacombs, the suburbs beyond the city limits are well-suited for storing bodies until resurrection.

Autumn Hydrangea

Winter Fern

Pumpkins

Yesterday’s Sounders game was such a sad occasion that the day’s pumpkin photo was displaced by something more evocative of the end of the season, albeit possibly prematurely because there is a game coming up to complete the two-game series.  The scheduling of the game was pretty strange, 5 PM on Halloween, which means our youngest fans were torn between watching the boys in green or going trick or treating.  There are many reasons American soccer has yet to reach its potential, and maybe the MLS is one of them.  Nonetheless, last night was a beautiful  autumn evening in Seattle, so even though the boys lost we didn’t have to watch the affair in the rain (always a strong possibility for late October in Seattle).  And, as someone reminded me last night, at least the MLS abandoned their former very strange shoot-out system of ending games.  Maybe one of these days they will improve the officiating and figure out how to schedule a proper play-off series.

Last Rose of the Year

On the last day of October the roses are nearing their end, and the Sounders FC lost their first play off match.  Hopefully they’ll rebound in the next one, it’s too early to put away the game scarves.

Lawson Gardens

Mabel

Nasturtium Tears

The Seattle autumn has arrived, along with clouds, fog, mist and wind.  With long, northern winter nights ahead of us, even plants in the garden seem a little weepy about the prospects.

I think if Man Ray had photographed a Nasturtium it might have looked a bit like this one. [click on image for higher resolution version]