Monday night miscellaneous mentions
-Last power update for the night: The pocket just west of Westwood Village is back on. The pocket near Home Depot (Delridge & Orchard) is not (at least, as of our drive thru the area a few hours ago). Meantime, the sinkhole saga on the hill over Lincoln Park seems to be even worse, at least for one homeowner featured again in tomorrow’s P-I.
-While checking out the Delridge/Orchard outage, we took an unintended turn and wound up on Puget Ridge. More than a decade in WS, and we’ve never been in the South Seattle Community College area before, believe it or not … hard to tell at night, but seems like some people up there must have a heck of a view.
-Non-outage related business notes: First, Bakery Nouveau. Ducked in on its second day of ops today to have a look (unfortunately we’d just had lunch so no room for a taste). Several of the items in the case at the time looked incredibly scrumptious, such as a chevre/garlic/pine nuts galette-type thing (sorry, our culinary vocabulary fails us), slices of dark chocolate cake, and brown sugar pecan brioche (gotta stop by tomorrow morning and see if they’ve got any more of those for breakfast). Also in business notes, the former Jan-Michael salon (and long-ago “frozen custard stand”) just north of Thriftway in Morgan Junction has finally revealed its new identity … a mortgage company moving from its prior spot a few blocks south on Cali.
Some WS’ers going into night 5
Partial post-dusk survey so far: Lincoln Park Way (heading west along the north edge of the park) still out, as is the Lowman Beach area, and the southernmost stretch of Beach Drive, which now not only carries the “ROAD CLOSED” sign at Atlas (two blocks south of the tree blockage as shown in photo below) but also a LOCAL ACCESS ONLY sign at the three-way intersection by LB. Though our neighborhood and most around us over Lincoln Park have the power back, a stretch of Sullivan heading east from the south end of California remains dark. Heading out shortly to look for other pockets; let us know if you’re in one. Meantime, here’s the latest City Light bulletin of sorts. And if you haven’t already heard, those warnings about deadly carbon monoxide were on the mark; 4 people were found dead in a Burien home this afternoon.
The culprit
North-side view of the tree that’s blocking Beach Drive:
We have a casualty
Sometime Friday night, after the power had been out 18 hours or so, we shone a flashlight into our fish tank. Its lone inhabitant, a big tough algae-eater of the variety collectively known as “pleco,” was pressed up against the glass next to the (nonworking of course) tank heater. We tried tapping the glass. No response. One member of the WSB Posse grew despondent. Another member offered a theory about cold-blooded creatures going dormant when temperatures dropped. So we decided not to declare The Fish dead until and unless we saw incontrovertible proof when the power came back on.
As of midday today, we have that proof. Seems The Fish had wedged itself between the heater and the tank wall as the water temperature fell, and as soon as we lifted the heater away, The Fish fell lifeless to the tank’s briny deep.
Tears and a backyard burial ensued. It was a tough fish, procured from Petco in The Junction about three years ago. It outlived more than a dozen aquarium-mates, for a variety of reasons (in some cases, we suspected homicide, er, fish-icide, and The Fish earned the nickname “Psycho Pleco”). If we venture into fish-caretaking again in the future, we will be sure to secure a backup power source for the tank, in case this sort of thing recurs. RIP, PP.
BREAKING NEWS! Unplugged no longer
OK, sympathies to those of you (hopefully those FEW of you) who are still not back on. But as of just a few moments ago — 10:33 am to be precise, three minutes before we arrived home from our latest tour of the wi-fi “hot spots” — our power is back on. Hard to describe our neighborhood as anything but “upper Fauntleroy” — uphill from Lincoln Park. Now begins a day of trying to warm the house back up again, cleaning out the fridge (we’d already put most of the food out for trash pickup after taking photos in case we get to file an insurance claim). And dancing in the streets! More later …
Unplugged, morning 4
As we drove over Charlestown Hill this morning, headed to clean up at the home of a friend who only lost power till Saturday, we saw a rainbow over the Sound, just past West Point. A promise of power to come? Sure hope so. The challenges involved in restoring it are mentioned in a brief WS anecdote from the very end of this Times article today, and there’s a longer account, focusing on the Arbor Heights effort, in this P-I article. Radio reports this morning suggested City Light hopes to be down to 5,000 homes/businesses without power by tonight.
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