Just how stormy is it?
If you really want to know and don’t have weather gadgets that can tell you … our favorite weather geek advises us there’s a close second. The National Weather Service posts “current observations” online from stations including Alki Point. Go to this page and look for K91S; I don’t even know what all the stats are, but the T column is temperature, the SP column is wind speed, the GS is wind gusts (when applicable). If you’re more inland, KBFI is Boeing Field, which is a little closer to much of West Seattle than the standard Sea-Tac stat cited in many spots for “official” city weather tracking. And if you want to go non-official, Weather Underground lists two people in WS with personal weather stations: one described as “North Admiral,” and “Weather at the Hoffmeisters’.”
Pushing for prints
Fingerprint payment usage must be lagging at the West Seattle (Morgan Junction) Thriftway. With signs, banners, and even a winnable car on display, it’s pushing people to sign up for Pay By Touch. Four and a half years after the store made national news as the first grocery store anywhere to sign up for the system, we have yet to personally witness a single person using it. However, the store owner is quoted in a variety of articles as saying they’ve processed tons of, shall we say, digit-al transactions. (Not us; we still are not ready to have our fingers, retinas, or any other body parts scanned and linked to our $.) Checking the Pay By Touch website, it appears the WS Thriftway folks remain “early adopters”; according to its “store locator” engine, this store remains the only store in Seattle deploying PBT (possibly even in the region; we tried Everett & Tacoma zip codes, and nothing came up).
Anybody wanna talk us out of it?
We love voting. Haven’t missed an even remotely noteworthy election in my (cough, mumble) years of voting. But it’s unfortunate that, when we vote, we don’t get to explain WHY we vote. So since we have the luxury of this here blog – on the offhand chance any decisionmakers might stumble onto it, we’re going to take some pixels to explain why we plan to break with the 34th District Dems’ recommendations on three local issues. (And if anyone cares to explain why you think we’re wrong, wrong, wrong, the comment section is all yours. We vote in person, so it’s not too late to win us back.)Read More
Junction vandals nabbed?
Not sure if the graffiti rampage mentioned here is the one we ranted about three months ago, or something more recent, but glad to see somebody finally behind bars for this particularly odorous form of crime.
Something new & completely cool
Speaking of boutiques (see below) … the proprietor(s) of Divina just let us know about the first edition of a new series of West Seattle Art Walks, coming up next week! It’s set for 6-8 pm one week from tonight (Thursday 11/9) starting at Divina, where walking maps will be available (along with vino and snax). Organizers plan to do this each month thereafter, on the 2nd Thursday. (Perhaps it could evolve into something like this.)
Thursday this-n-that
-The Seattle Weekly has two tales of West Seattle nightlife in its latest edition. One is a straightforward “Club Pick” piece about Skylark; the other is a fantastical journey into an alleged Beach Drive scene that you might actually start to believe, until the later paragraphs. (Kudos to the writer for quite an imagination. Best civically minded satire since Exit133.com took on Carl’s Jr.)
-Wonder if the rain will keep the Initiative 937 campaigners off the Fauntleroy walkover today. They’ve been up there sign-waving for two recent commutes … immediately causing me to feel excruciating guilt for being alone in my car (at least it’s a gas-thrifty little-bitty car, honest). But at least we’re not driving a big yellow truck like the McG crew (it was back in Yasuko’s north lot yesterday morning, with the addition of a guy having his own tailgating party outside it).
-Have you seen the bear under The Bridge yet?
Not till next year
Three months ago on one of our episodes of “As the Blog Turns,” we found out from Rob that Westwood Village had updated its website to trumpet the impending arrival of Taco del Mar and a mystery pizza joint. Ever since, the WS Blog Posse has strolled frequently around Westwood V, staring into the vacant spaces, trying to guess which ones would become TDM and “Gionnoni’s Pizza.” Turns out … it will be new construction … and it’s been delayed. A week or so after e-mailing WV management in search of answers, we just got this from the operations director:
They will eventually go into new space that is an extension of the current Payless Shoes/Sally Beauty building (where the gravel is next to Sally’s) along Barton Street. Unfortunately we have run into some permit and design issues and construction probably will not start until early next year – hopefully January. Given that schedule, they will open late spring/early summer 2007.
It was like a graveyard …
Only two little groups of trick-or-treaters at our house. One commenter a couple posts down says her neighborhood on the north end of WS (we’re on the south end) got more than a hundred. What happened at your place?
Halloween night drive-home sightings
All along just a few blocks of Fauntleroy, including the last stretch of The Bridge:
-The Walking on Logs peeps in spooky garb, including jack-o-lantern heads
-A spooky (well, spooky if you’re a Dem) yellow truck idling near Walking on Logs, with huge Mike McGavick campaign signs all over it (the same one was haunting the parking lot on the north side of Yasuko’s this morning)
-The former Rainier Roaster finally has a “Starbucks, Coming Soon” banner draped over the old RR sign
No trick-or-treaters yet in our neighborhood. Boo.
Ballot-measure boo-boo
Somebody at the pro-Seattle Prop 1 HQ must have thought it would impress us in West Seattle if they mailed us a big glossy color pamphlet telling us where in WS we might see benefits if the Prop 1 property tax passes. Just one little problem. If you got this pamphlet, take a look at the left side of the map inside — it suggests that Prop 1 will provide $ to “repaint crosswalks at the California/Alaskan Way Junction.” Hellooooooo? Alaskan Way is the street that runs along the foot of that viaduct thingy that is NOT included in Prop 1 (as the back of the flyer seeks to reassure us); at The Junction, Cali intersects with ALASKA STREET. The pro-Prop 1 website is a little odd too. Check out this page … did they simply run out of space at the bottom when it came time to talk about trees?
Junction road-work update
Signed up for the e-mail updates on the Cali Ave paving/crosswalk project, so we seem to have received this before it turned up on the city news release site:
Work on the east half of the mid-block crosswalk between SW Edmunds and SW Alaska has been completed. This entire mid-block crosswalk should be completed within the next two weeks.Read More
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