Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

So, the news here is that the fire alarms went off when we were about to eat dinner last night, and we trooped out (as one does, especially if they are that loud and include strobes), and after a bit could come back in and have our soup. Standing in the rain, we had assumed it was false alarm number eight or so since we've lived here, and hoped the cats weren't too bothered. There was a faint smell of smoke in the halls as we were coming back, and this morning it turns out that not only was it a real though small fire, but the firefighters found a body in the apartment. The building sent email telling us that they will be remedying water damage today, and that they can't comment on police anything, so all we know beyond that is what we saw on the websites of local news stations.

I was accosted on my way out of the building to get lunch by a couple of reporters for one of those stations. I admitted to having been here, and said it was no big deal and that we had thought until this morning that it was just another false alarm, and in fact her station had been our main source of information. The reporter pressed me on my statement that it was no big deal, and I (unplanned and probably not the best move, but words just come out sometimes) said "I'm from New York City. I've had a shooting death in the building I lived in." When she tried again, with something like "but doesn't it bother you that they don't know what's going on?" I asked her a rhetorical question to which I knew she couldn't tell the truth, namely "Is it your job to scare people?" and after she said no told her to find someone else to talk to.

The thing is, it really doesn't feel like a big deal emotionally; I saw fire engines, but we see fire engines every time the alarms go off. This is a large building, and I don't know most of my neighbors even to say hello to. The reporter was I think assuming that I would read this as "happened near me physically, therefore is relevant," but what little we know sounds like this was personal, not the sort of "wrong place at the wrong time" that makes me worry about that location.

We went to the Bellevue art museum yesterday, because I wanted to see the exhibit "The Art of Gaman." It's a collection of art made from scrap and found materials by prisoners in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II; I saw an article in The Stranger and decided it sounded interesting.

Almost everything on display is small; it ranges from practical things like scissors and teapots made from scrap metal, since the prisoners were allowed to bring almost nothing with them, to tiny painted brooches, and dolls made from reused kimono fabrics. The curators provide background where they can, sometimes include pre- or post-War art careers; some of the artists are unknown, or known only in the sense that other work by the same artist is known, but nothing about the artist's life.

This is a traveling exhibit; I don't know where else it may be going, and googling on "the Art of Gaman" found me various articles from other museums and cities where it's been shown over the last few years. It's at the Bellevue Art Museum until October 12. If you have a King County library card, you can get a free pass for museum admission for two. (These are for specific days, but I had a wide choice of dates, including Saturdays and Sundays.)

As long as we were there, we also went to an origami exhibit: this was a mix of naturalistic works, including a frog, a gecko, and a dinosaur skeleton, and geometric abstractions. Some of the pieces were traditional one-sheet-of-paper origami, others used many sheets or combined paper with bits of other materials (the frog was sprayed with something metallic). There's also an example of an origami-inspired plastic tent, and pictures of a space telescope whose design is based on computational origami. Unlike The Art of Gaman, I wouldn't make a special trip for the origami exhibit, but I enjoyed it.

I visited roadnotes in the hospital yesterday, and again today. They removed her breathing tube while I was there yesterday (though they made me and baldanders and I leave the room for the actual process), which made her feel a lot better, and made communication much easier. (She'd been writing brief notes on a pad of paper, but they were hard to read, not like her usual neat handwriting.) She's likely to be in the hospital for another couple of weeks, recovering from the surgery and rebuilding her strength.

I did about half a workout yesterday afternoon (when I got back from the hospital) and the other half this morning. This isn't quite as emotionally satisfying as doing it all at once, but I suspect it's equally good for me.

On the way back from the hospital this afternoon, I got off the bus a couple of stops early to pick blackberries. I ate a bunch as I gathered—ripe, sun-warmed berries are wonderful—and put some in a plastic bag to bring home. Either nobody else is gathering there right now, or the berries are ripening incredibly fast. Possibly a bit of both; yesterday was both hot and sunny.

( gym details, in case you care )

It was a bright, sunny, clear day, the sort we're not supposed to get around here in January. I got to the top of the hill and could see the Cascades to the east. Better yet, I had about ten minutes to wait for my bus, from a spot where I could see them in the sunlight. It still seems weird and cool that I can be five blocks from home and see glaciers.

On the bus over to my doctor's office, I caught a glimpse of Mount Rainier, which is fifty miles away and only visible on really clear days. On the way back, the Olympics were hazily visible to the west, and Rainier was a lot more visible, and the nearer Cascades were quite clear, from the bus window and from the transit center when I got off.

That it was 50 degrees (10 C) at three this afternoon was a bonus. But that sometimes happens where I grew up; the mountains are still a pleasant surprise.

I had finished lunch today (at an indifferent Chinese restaurant) and noticed sunshine outside. So I quickly paid and went outside to find a sunny spot to stand in while it lasted. This being downtown Bellevue, the first bright spot I noticed when I got outside was a reflection off a tall building, but there was enough direct sunlight to cast nice sharp shadows. I walked over to the sidewalk, south a little, and took this photo with my phone camera:



Not a particularly great photo, but this is really not what I expected from the Pacific Northwest, three days before the winter solstice.

I was going to say "I have voted," but I haven't dropped it in the mailbox yet. I miss walking into a school and using an actual voting machine, but that's sentiment; mail-in paper ballots seem like a reasonable way of holding an election.

My ballot has three city council seats, with two candidates for each; the neighborhood is absolutely full of lawn signs for one seat, has a significant number of the second, and nothing on the third. It also has three school board seats, one of them uncontested, and lawn signs for both candidates for one seat and neither candidate for the other. School board candidates tend to all have "I am in favor of good schools and petting kittens" platforms, and in one case I decided on the basis of "the one who isn't a mortgage underwriter." Someone else lost my vote in significant part because he has a website, but it comes up entirely blank in Firefox even after I tell NoScript to allow everything for that page. (Again, fairly generic candidate statements.)

I think these are officially non-partisan offices*, but candidates can and do say that they are endorsed by the King County Democrats. And one explicitly states that he is the Socialist Workers Party candidate for a port commissioner seat. (He has a wonderful platform, but it's generic in a different sense than the "we want good schools and fluffy kittens" ones: the Seattle Port Commission doesn't have much to do with abortion rights or preventing vigilantism.) As a newcomer, I first spent some time looking into what the port commission does; with limited data, it seems less dysfunctional than the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but that's a low bar.

So, I don't know what if any of this is anomalous. Yes, Seattle just set a record for most rain during September (dataset goes to 1945, there is no official weather station in Bellevue), in what struck me as a wet but not exceptional month.

What's catching my attention is that autumn seems both late and very drawn out. Most of the trees are still green, though there are some gorgeous trees covered entirely in bright red leaves a couple of blocks south, which I was looking at while I exercised today), but I started seeing bits of yellow and orange on healthy trees in mid-August. Trees which still have those leaves, this isn't like the old sugar maple in Inwood Hill Park that always turned color early and dropped its leaves early.

I had fresh local nectarine in my yogurt yesterday morning, and fresh local raspberries this morning. Yes, the vendor at the farmers' market told me this was the last week for berries, but another farmer (not there this past Saturday) had told me the same two weeks earlier. We were also told that there would probably be no nectarines next week, but plums are likely into November.

Someone told me back in August that this was the best summer in several years, in terms of fruit and vegetables. He was talking about how much fruit and how good it was; is it usual for there to be nectarines and berries through much if not all of September?

Meanwhile, rhododendrons are flowering. Not one random blossom: this went from a single branch I saw on one bush, and a few separated blossoms on another, to a small bushes that are behaving entirely as if it's spring, with bright flowers on all or most of their branches: bright purple on 102nd Avenue near the QFC, and two bushes with white flowers on NE 6th Street near the Westin. I also saw a couple of anomalous yellow irises (one plant, next to that first rhododendron branch last week). The periwinkles go merrily along, a blossom here and a few there; back in New York and Boston, those are spring flowers, and the occasional patch with a few blossoms left is a June thing, not a September one. cattitude and I keep stopping and looking at periwinkle patches, no longer surprised, but just because we like periwinkles.

[Yes, this is a small thing, but I'll want to remember it, and I don't think I have anything useful to add about the Republicans trying to hold us all for ransom via the government shutdown.]

Mostly I am having a nice, lazy holiday, reading my hosts' books, enjoying walking around some of the interesting bits of Montreal, and eating tasty things. Interesting not in the sense of impressive architecture or historical monuments, just nice bits of park and streets whose proportions feel right. Downtown Bellevue is full of new, tall buildings and traffic patterns optimized for cars and weird for pedestrians. (Lots of Seattle feels more comfortable, in that sense, but I'm not spending a lot of time in Wallingford, and Pioneer Square is rather touristy.)

I warned my freelance client that I would be away for this chunk of time; he sent me something on Thursday with a cover note saying "I know you'll be away until the 16th but figured I might as well send the files now."

At the moment, I am taking a break from the break, and proofreading an OCR'd poetry book, a few pages at a time; it takes a different sort of attention than the work I usually do on prose, in part because with that, the line between proofreading and copyediting is fuzzy. Here, I'm going to say "that should be a hyphen, not an em dash" and "check capitalization," but (for a variety of reasons) I'm not suggesting "this would read better if you changed it."

But rysmiel is awake, and it's time for tea and second breakfast. More poetry later, possibly even before I go back to Bellevue.