Category: Seattle

Here’s The Seattle Times reporting on the celebrations, just a few yards from where I live:

The thunderous rat-tat-tat of firecrackers, the smell of gunpowder and the thumping of drums filled the streets of the Chinatown International District on Saturday as throngs flocked to celebrate the Lunar New Year and the beginning of the Year of the Pig.
In Union Station’s Great Hall on South Jackson Street, children in costumes from China, Japan, Korea and other Asian nations performed traditional dances.

Oh, well. Roll on the Rat….

I love it when the National Weather Service tests its “watches, warnings & advisories” system. Like tonight, for instance:

Clicking on the “Read watches…” brings up the comforting message:

UPDATE: Well, maybe it’s not a test – maybe the NWS was just slow to link up the map to text warnings. Apparently they had had another big earthquake off the Kuril Islands – an 8.2 this time. (You may remember there was an M8.3 less than 100 miles away back on November 15.) The Tsunami Warning Center has a map up, and WCATWC is showing all sorts of graphical stuff but no explanatory text. Japan is bracing itself for a possible surge.

From The Seattle Times

Puget Sound-area residents spent much of Wednesday bracing for another anticipated snowstorm…. But the predicted snow was interrupted off and on with rain and November became Seattle’s wettest month on record. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported a monthly total of 15.37 inches late Wednesday, breaking the previous record of 15.33 inches….
At 10 p.m. Wednesday, snow was still falling in many parts of the city. Queen Anne Avenue, the major thoroughfare on Queen Anne Hill, was closed because of snow and police officers were chaining up the tires on their cruisers…. But by [Thursday morning] rain [will be] starting to wash away the snow that had accumulated since Sunday.

I must say that this is the first time I’ve seen snow chains on the rear wheels of bendy buses. Quite impressive. I wonder what happens to the bending mechanism if one of those buses starts to skid…..

I’m blogging this from a Starbucks in Seattle (on Stewart between 6th and 7th). The weather is just about perfect. And every time I look up, there’s another bendi-bus going by….