Nothing Like the Sun

Last week, I managed to get away to the San Juan Islands for a couple of days. The planned whale-watching was a bust, but I enjoyed the change of scene.

I traveled up via the Victoria Clipper, which turned out to be much more convenient and comfortable than the route I'd initially thought I'd have to take--an hours-long bus ride north to Anacortes and a ferry from Fidalgo to San Juan Island. Instead, I just caught an early-morning city bus down to Pier 69, checked in, and settled in for a two-and-a-half hour, 65-mile catamaran ride up the Sound to ( Friday Harbor )

I'm all about the pic-posts, today. The latest is a tribute to dlasky and everyone else who contributed to a certain neighborhood art project:

( Didn't I say that Seattle needed murals? )
Nice work, guys.

06/26/08 EDIT: The post has been updated today, including a more complete representation of the mural.

As planned, I went down to Oregon last weekend to scrounge up a few more primary votes for Barack Obama. I caught a ride there on Friday with a coworker and her friend, who'd been recruited for the same purpose.
( My Working Vacation )

Izzy's learned to ( fetch )

Over the weekend, I splurged on a new digital camera to replace the one that died on me right before the holidays. I upgraded to a Panasonic Lumix, which comes with 18x optical zoom and a raft of other shiny features.

Since then, I've been seeking out the kinds of difficult shots that my old camera invariably failed to capture: nighttime scenes, faraway mountains, people in motion, etc.

Wednesday night presented a particularly irresistible challenge, in the form of a lunar eclipse. I spent about a half an hour leaning back against a wall, struggling to keep my hands steady and focus on that slowly reddening hunk of rock up there. Here's what I managed to catch:

( the poxyclipse )

It's still not quite what my eyes saw, but it's amazingly close.

During late August and early September, this year, somebody started plastering walls around Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood with posters of what I swear to God is Slavoj Zizek's ugly mug:



If showing up as the featured commentator on the Children of Men DVD and writing ad copy for the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue didn't adequately dramatize the Lacanian theorist's pop-cultural ambitions, I guess maybe someone around here figured that giving him the Andy Warhol treatment alongside posters for the Shins and the White Stripes would do it ...

I just want to say "thanks" to everyone who participated in my recent Name That Kitten poll. A plurality suggested calling her "Esme", a name which appealed to me because it was both simple and unusual.

After several days of trying, though, I have to admit that the name just doesn't suit her. Instead, I've come to the conclusion that this one's an "Izzy":

( yet more kitten pictures )
"Izzy" just seems to better match her wild hair, frenetic energy, and overall air of juvenile delinquency*.

Also, it's easier to pronounce ...

*That last photo, where Izzy looks so determined? She's clawing her way up my pantleg. Which is all well and cute, now, since she still weighs almost nothing, and since her claws are still too short to cut through my jeans. However ...

I've lived at two addresses in Seattle, about a block apart from one another, both handsome old former residential hotels built during the 1920s.

The first one was an ivy-covered building on a cobblestoned side street. The landlady kept vases of fresh flowers on every landing, and each floor's common spaces were painted in a different color theme. On the minus side, the apartments were small and outrageously expensive.

My current building has many attractive qualities, including cutesy '20s and Northwest-themed murals on every floor: the Kalakala plying the Sound, a propeller plane banking by Mt. Rainier, bathers at Alki, etc. The rent's not even all that bad, as Seattle goes.

But it looks like I'm about ready for another move.

( Thoughts During a Blackout )

You can gauge my affection for this neighborhood by the fact that I'm now considering a move to a third address about five blocks away. And thanks to jmargethe, who's just about to move out of the apartment in question, I know that the place would be a step up from my current digs in pretty much every way.