a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Southern China Air is the world’s third largest airline, and will soon offer direct flights from San Francisco to Guangzhou .. in southern China, of course. Guangzhou is about an hour’s train ride from Hong Kong. Check out the Guangzhou blog entry I made back in 2011 of a quick trip there. The new SFO> Guangzhou flight will operate 4 times a week non-stop using a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
I was finally well enough to travel to my project in San Francisco on Monday morning, and off I went. It was already bright and sunny at 5.30 am when my taxi picked me up, and the airport was crowded with summer travelers. It was a very warm 99 °F (38 °C) here in Walnut Creek today. At the end of the day when I got to the hotel room and opened my roller bag that had been in the rental car’s trunk all day, my clothes were warm to the touch – as if it had come out of my tumble dryer !
We walked around Pike and Pine Streets on Capitol Hill to check out how the building boom (of apartments) is progressing – along with the interesting people that are out and about on the street. Here are a few pictures.
My windows are back – so now I can spy on everyone walking by in the street in front of the house again. I could also sit on my little porch, we don’t do that anymore now, do we? Life has become too fretful and frantic.
It’s getting warm enough here in Seattle now (78 °F/ 26° C) so that I need to open my windows late afternoon and into the evening to let the cooler air in.
I check out these free-standing lattice radio antenna towers every time I walk over to Trader Joe’s (grocery store) across the street from them. The ground elevation there is about 410 ft above sea level, to which can be added the heights of each of the three towers – 594 ft (181 m), 637 ft (194 m) and 682 ft (208 m) for an elevation of the top of the towers of about 1,000 ft. A slowly blinking red light at the top warns low-flying objects (as well as UFOs) at night to steer clear !
There was a commercial for a 2016 Subaru Forester on TV tonight with haunting music that I had to look up. I did it the old-fashioned way* : by memorizing a sentence or two and typing it into Google to look up the lyrics. It worked after a few tries, and here it is : Time Will Tell (on YouTube). The singer-songwriter is Gregory Alan Isakov, whom I had not heard of. And lo and behold, he was born in Johannesburg in the year when I finished high school, immigrated to the USA as a child and was raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has sung with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Man! I thought .. you sing such a mean song, one that reaches in and plucks at the strings of my heart.
*Apps such as Soundhound lets one’s iPhone ‘listen’ to music to identify the song
Check these out .. the Wall Street Journal reports that apartments for sale in Hong Kong (we call them condominiums/ ‘condos’ in the USA) are as expensive as ever : US$500,000 for a ‘mosquito’ apartment that comes in under
200 sq. feet.
(I did not make it out to San Francisco on Monday due to a bad cold). My old house’s wood-frame windows with their double glazing (two panes of glass filled with gas) had started to fog up inside with water vapor some time ago, and so it had become time to send them in for repairs.
I was barely up when Bryan and Paul (the famous and well-known among friends here ‘Double Dog’ contractors) showed up and in a shockingly short time had the four sets of double hung windows out of their frames. The Cherry Creek Window van (company that will repair the windows) was already waiting outside and took them in. So .. can someone not come and easily steal my house’s windows? I wanted to know from Bryan. The answer : the thieves would have to be inside the house – but then why would they? the windows are made for your house in a custom size.
So now I have a house with a hurricane-battened-down-the-hatches look for a few days until the windows come back!