Dry Ice Factory

Well, I'm not sure that it's the right story for the day, but why limit ourselves? I'm listening to Bach's St. John Passion. There are a lot of notes in it! Approximately 106 minutes worth. Somber and lovely, the whole lot of them. Earlier I bought a piece of glasswork at the Fremont Sunday Market and had a so-so pork taco with rice and beans from the Hermosa booth. I browsed through the plants at the nursery down the street, mostly as an excuse to meander in the sun. Then I embarked on the epic first lawn-mowing of the year. There's always still plenty of water in the grass at this time of year, so it takes a while to mow through it. Later is the Fans with Beer pubmeet. Maybe I'll do some proofreading before that. It's a beautiful day around here!

Has anybody else noticed that the days are getting markedly shorter? (Well, except of course for those of you living where the days are getting noticeably longer instead.) Hope this changes soon, as the days are pretty much too damned short around here these days, these days.

Signed,

Palely Loitering

My feet are wet after walking to work in the rain this morning, which means my boots are no longer waterproof. On the other hand, my first thought on seeing the steady downpour as I walked out the front door was, "I won't have to water the tree in the traffic circle this week!"

We've had a series of lovely sunny days lately, and this morning was the first time this year that I've walked to work without a warmth-layer of clothing on. It was 62 F when the radio woke me at 6am. By the time I got to my desk after my half hour walk, I was sweating. So today it seems like summer, and I ain't complaining. I am skeptical, however. The rule of thumb in Seattle is that the rain stops on July 5th (i.e., right after it has rained on your Fourth of July barbecue.) This can't last ... can it?

Or so announced the subject-line on some spam I trapped today, but I had just been outside looking at another: Mt Rainier. Why is it that we don't have a Rainier cam on the UW homepage? The view down Rainier Vista was ... glorious.

Also spotted on the walk: several people walking around with little flags of the People's Republic of China. President Hu Jintao of the PRC is in Seattle today practicing what the New York Times called "checkbook diplomacy." You know, buying Boeing jets and Windows licenses. Here Seattle plays the hussy, possibly more shameless than glorious.

But it's a beautiful day out there. It smells like fresh money.