Some dude standing in front of my childhood home in Seattle, Washington.
The stone wall wasn't there when we lived there 60 years ago. There was a gentle slope, a slope that was a real struggle for ten year old me to push the mower up. It was steep enough that to go cross wise, the mower would be crab-walking, which leads to a ragged cut, which means you get it cut it again anyway.
". . . a great big old [bank] building . . . During the 1930s, this building had probably been considered tall and futuristic. Now it was medium-sized and retro-quaint. . . . It was on a steep downtown slope. On the downhill side you walked into the first floor, but on the uphill side the pedestrian entrance was on the fourth story."
That sounds specific enough that he might be referencing a real building. An inquiry on redditreceives several responses. Downtown Seattle has numerous steep hills, so there are several buildings that might fit the description, but the Exchange Building seems to be the best.
The picture of the building at the top is a Google Maps 3D view. None of the pictures I found gave a good view of the four story difference between the front door and the back, or if they did, they didn't show the whole building. This one is isn't perfect, but it's the best I could come up with.
I am riding in the back of a car (a taxi, perhaps?) with one other guy and two women. The guy is sitting on my left and the girls are sitting on my right. We are in the right hand lane of a heavily used multi-lane road in an urban area. The road is flat and straight. The sun is shining. Traffic slows because there is some kind of drawbridge up ahead and it is opening, or rather closing. It closes and traffic starts flowing, but then it inexplicably opens a few of inches, which causes a hiccup in traffic.
The bridge mechanism works by sliding two sections apart, nothing goes up or down. The opening in the bridge runs at a 45 degree angle across the roadway. The closer end of the slant is in our lane and it slants forward as it crosses the other three or four (or five) lanes of traffic. There is about a six inch gap between the two sections of roadway. You can see the water through the gap. There are no gates or warning signs of any kind. The bridge stops moving and people start driving across the gap.
I am sitting forward on my seat and I turn to look at the woman sitting next to the passenger side door. I want to see what she looks like. She is an attractive blond, but not beautiful. I am smiling at her, but she doesn’t return my smile. Matter of fact she looks rather cool. I am surprised. I don’t look at the other woman, who has brown hair, presumably because I can see what she looks like well enough because I am sitting next to her.
We pull into an area where there are bunch of (like a hundred) communal sinks. There is no one else there. The sinks are like counter height tables big enough for three people to wash their hands on each side. Each table has one big sink that takes up the whole table top. There is a trellis structure running the length of the table that contains the valves and faucets. It is maybe a foot or two high with a six inch gap or so underneath where the water comes out. There are some legs that hold it up off the bottom of the sink.
The faucet nozzles are hidden inside this structure. They have some kind of clamshell mechanism that allows them to open wide for spraying or close down for a stream. I reach up under the trellis and flip the two nozzles closed and that fixes the problem with the bridge.
Update September 2017 replaced missing picture with something similar.
Drove up to Seattle this weekend to watch a football game between the University of Washington Huskies and the Oregon State University Beavers, and to visit with darling daughter. A friend of ours is an alumni of OSU, our daughters are long time friends and they both attend UW, so it seemed like a fine idea.
The stadium is U-shaped with open end of the U facing East towards Union Bay. Our seats were in the bottom of the U right near the top row, so we had a view past the jumbo-tron of the boats out in the bay. The stadium is huge. It dwarfs Autzen stadium in Eugene (72,000 to 54,000), which is where my son goes to school. The Beavers are from Corvallis.
The Huskies have not been doing too well this season, and the Beavers clobbered them pretty good. For example: the Huskies completed a long pass to the one yard line, but in the next four plays they could not move the ball into the endzone. Final score was 34 to 13.
There was another play where they attempted a field goal from the hash marks. I know perspective can sometimes distort your view of things seen from a distance, but it looked to me like the kicker wasn't compensating enough for being so far left of center, and sure enough the ball went left of the goal posts.
I'm not much of a football fan. I find it difficult to follow the game. There is some action, and then there is a delay before the next play, and during that delay my mind wanders, so half the time I don't even see the next play come off. On top of that I was tired from my morning's foray into the briar patch and I ended up watching many of the plays on the jumbo-tron instead of on the field. Easier to see, it's brighter.
The OSU contingent occupied an entire sector of the bottom of the U and could be easily identified by their bright orange clothes. I estimate they took up 10% of the U (the lower level), and maybe 6% of the entire stadium. The picture may have been taken during another OSU game: you can see the orange contingent in the same section of the stadium. Outside of the UW student seating and the OSU contingent, the stadium was about half full.
It was a beautiful day (much like the picture above). The weather was cool when the game started but by the time the fourth quarter rolled around it was cold. I had thought about bringing extra clothes, but I thought, naw, I have been overprepared too many times. No one else is bringing extra stuff, if it gets cold we can all freeze together. The worst part was the dang blasted aluminum seats. Another example of corporate bean counters saving a few long term pennies for the corporation and the people get it in the shorts, literally. Whoever came up with this idea should be forced to sit on these things in freezing weather for eternity.
Two biggish orange helicopters flew through the stadium prior to the start of the game. We joked they were OSU choppers, but I think they were probably Coast Guard choppers.
The marching bands were a big improvement over our local high school band. They played loud military marching band music. I could hear them, mostly. And they did not have these fancy percussion instruments sitting on the sidelines. The only thing that wasn't marching were the directors. They had five or six or them standing on ladders placed all around the field. That isn't really kosher in my book, but I suppose it's tolerable.
We stayed to the bitter end. The Husky fans started bailing after half time and come the fourth quarter there was a continuous stream of them heading for the exits.
I don't really understand why other people enjoy football games so much. I find they are most interesting when the outcome is in doubt, when you have two teams that are evenly matched and the score is close enough that either team could end up winning. In the case where one team has established so large a lead that the outcome is no longer in any real doubt, I lose interest. Okay, sure, there have been the rare cases where the dominate team has fallen on their faces and underdogs have rallied and come out victorious, but those cases are few and far between. So why continue a game whose outcome is no longer in doubt?
Once upon a time a man asked Conan The Barbarian what is best? And Conan's reply was: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women! It's a paraphrase of Genghis Khan, but I think there is something here. It is not enough to just prove yourself better than your enemy, but to drive them into the ground so they are no longer a threat.
Genghis Khan: It is not sufficient that I succeed--all others must fail.
