A Quirky City

06 Apr, 2006
Posted at 21.38 PDT

It’s no secret among my friends that I love my adopted city. I moved up here from Florida in August of 2001, and haven’t regretted it in the least. The Pacific Northwest just agrees with me. There are things I miss, (and I’m sure my friends here could give you the list even better than I), above all else the daily afternoon thunderstorms throughout central Florida’s endless, stifling summer (which runs more or less from the end of March through the end of October. Don’t ever let anyone tell you seasons are tied to the solstices and equinoxes, for they patently are not. Spring equinox does not magically herald the beginning of Spring. Practically speaking, it signifies the equinox happens during Spring, not causes it).

For years my favorite daily ritual was to curl up in a cushy chair with a pot of coffee, the Florida room’s jalousie windows cracked open a bit, a copy of the New Yorker in hand, and sit back and read while the house shook and windows rattled from all the lightning strikes and subsequent booms of thunder—often striking within a mile. (I especially miss the ones where the flash of light and boom of thunder were nearly indistinguishable. Talk about getting your heart thumping!) Central Florida is the lightning capital of the world, and I miss those storms more than anything else. I remember the sharp tang of ozone in the air, and that wonderful anticipation as the distant thunder would roll in closer and closer as the anvil clouds slid across the landscape. The afternoon heat could make you feel as if you were smothering in a humid, unbreathable blanket of air, and then the first breezes would reach you, preceding the thunderstorm, and the temperature would drop twenty degrees in the space of minutes, like someone threw a switch on the outdoor’s air conditioning.

But Seattle has its charms too. For one, I have yet to see a roach here in nearly five years. People here swear they exist, but they’ve never experienced the bowel-loosening terror of hearing a Palmetto bug droning around your bedroom at two o’clock in the morning like some antediluvian insect bomber searching for a mammalian target. Yech. And the damn things fly at you when you spray them. Just what you need in the middle of the night, an insect with a kamikaze complex. If anything can make one question the existence of God, it’s a giant two inch long cockroach attacking you in the middle of the night when you try to put it out of your misery. Just what was She thinking when She dreamed up that one?

None of those here, thank goodness.

Actually, the whole point of this little entry—before I ran off on all those tangents—was supposed to be an odd thing I’ve thought about often since moving here, namely Seattle’s quirky loyalty to electric trolley buses. Electric buses used to be popular in the U.S. but are now largely confined to Europe, and a few cities here on the West coast. It’s not likely Seattle will get rid of them anytime soon as they are far more efficient at climbing the city’s insanely steep hills than conventional buses.

When I first moved here what stood out most sharply for me were the overhead electric wires running over the roads everywhere in the city. And with over 140 electric trolley buses and more than 60 miles of electrified routes, you do see them everywhere here. I wasn’t too sure what to make of them at first. Many people consider them unsightly, but their appearance has really grown on me over time. In an odd way, it makes being on the streets of the city feel more intimate. They’re only wires, but you can’t help but be aware of them in the visual background, and they end up lending an air of a roof to streets, a visual demarcation between the man-made and the limitless sky.

Seattle’s a city with a ceiling, in a manner of speaking.

The nearly silent buses that run along them also add to the city’s charm and feeling of being different from other cities in the country. You’ll often find yourself catching a glimpse of bright blue light from the corner of your eye as a bus crosses a connection on the overhead wires and spits out an arc, or hearing the twang of tension singing through the wires as the buses pass by. They seem old-fashioned, but also symbolize to me Seattle’s tendency to raise its middle finger to trends in the rest of the country. Everyone else may have succumbed to the strong-arm tactics of the major auto manufacturers, but Seattle has headed off on a bit of a transportational tangent. They’re generally slow to hop onto the bandwagon here, and that is to the residents’ credit.

At any rate, longtime residents may not notice them, but as an outsider, I certainly do. Friends complain occasionally about Seattle’s public transportation, but compared to what I remember of Orlando’s, this place is heaven. In point of fact, I’d never even been on public transportation in the U.S. until I moved here. Orlando’s was that bad.

There are enough oddities to this city to fill a double dozen future posts. Maybe I’ll get around to noting them someday.

Seattle/Quirks | Permanent Link

Windows Bites (the Dust)

06 Apr, 2006
Posted at 19.14 PDT

Naturally, immediately upon Apple releasing their beta of Boot Camp, my coworkers and I had to install it and Microsoft’s Windows on our shiny new Intel iMacs. I certainly have to give Apple credit where it is due: they have taken what is to a Mac user an inherently distateful idea, and made it pretty damn slick.

Partitioning and installation of Windows XP was as painless as it could possibly be made. Several coworkers remarked it was the fastest, smoothest install of the OS they’d ever seen. I tooled around in it a bit, getting this and that up and running, then left for the day. This morning I rebooted into XP to check it out again, and within five minutes had a Blue Screen of Death. Needless to say, I rebooted into OS X and simply deleted it.

Next!

Macintosh | Permanent Link