Recapping Seattle 2006 - April May & June

[pwright1]

April




St. James Cathedral












UW




May














































June


































Hope you enjoyed. July and August next.

[fanofterps]

We have a nice city in Baltimore also but your town is beautiful by the pictures. I need to make a trip out west to see your great city.

[Yank in exile]

I see you managed to find the 10 days it didn't rain to take your photos.

How 'bout showing the way Seattle looks 90% of the time: i.e., grey and rainy?

Don't try to fool me with photos and meaningless stats in an attempt to claim that Seattle is beautiful and sunny most of the time; I live in Vancouver, after all.

[pwright1]

Grey & rainy 90% of the time? I don't think so. If it was really like that I wouldn't be living here. No city in North America is grey & rainy 90 percent of the time. And what meaningless stats?

[Yank in exile]

Look, I'm from Seattle, and what always kills me is the "Seattle booster" type citing some ridiculous statistics about how many sunny days the place has whenever anyone mentions how much it rains there.

Maybe it's not overcast literally 90% of the time in Seattle, but after a single Winter there it sure feels that way. Plus, that rain sort of "mists" down half the time (we used to joke about the days when you didn't really need an umbrella, just a Pendleton shirt—you know, like the grungers wore): it's worse than the Oregon "drizzle" in that it takes infinitely longer for an inch of rain to fall from the sky than it does in a good two-hour Front Range or Mid-Atlantic midsummer monsoon (where it clears up afterwards).

I'm leaving Vancouver next year and can't afford to go back to San Francisco. I have to stay on the West Coast, and I'm really not looking forward to living in Seattle, but SoCal sucks (yeah, I've lived there too) and Portland is just as rainy as Seattle but 100 times more lame.

We've had positively miserable weather here in the Northwest during the past few months, and if you're going to be perfectly honest about it you have to admit that it's not really that unusual.

Posting a bunch of sunny pics with buoyant people going through that "SAD rebound" mania we get when it's actually sort of nice misrepresents a place where most of the time we're all going about as grey-faced under our toques and umbrellas as a bunch of Londoners.

[pwright1]

I guess me coming from the eastcoast I find Seattle weather quite nice. No bitter cold, rare dustings of snow; if any at all. It's pacific northwest people like yourself who think Seattle's weather sucks. No bitter cold, no 2 feet of snow, no hot humid summers, no cockroaches. How could you possibly rag on Seattle weather? Green grass, geraniums, verbena and pansies still overflowing in my pots on the front porch. Don't lie and tell the world it rains here all the time when you and I know it doesn't. Its people like you who complain if its 40 degrees it's too cold or if it reaches 80 in the summer it's way too hot. Besides the thread says April, May and June. Is it mostly cloudy, rainy and ugly during those months?

[mhays]

While it's true that Seattle photos tend to be on drier days, the rain is nothing like as frequent as you're saying Yank. November wasn't just unusual -- it was an all-time record month!

I'm intimately familiar with Seattle weather because I walk over a mile to work each way (uphill each way in fact, in bare feet!). Even in the winter it's usually a dry walk. In the summer I might wear a jacket a half-dozen times.

[Yank in exile]

Originally Posted by mhays

I'm intimately familiar with Seattle weather because I walk over a mile to work each way (uphill each way in fact, in bare feet!). Even in the winter it's usually a dry walk. In the summer I might wear a jacket a half-dozen times.

Start telling me about that bridge you want to sell me, dude.

As to the amateur psychologist in the preceding post, if I want to be psychoanalysed I'll pay a professional. You sound like the Uptight Seattleite—minus the "diplomacy". Not to mention that you've just proved my point about the miserable weather making everyone perpetually cranky . . .

[seajer]

Originally Posted by Yank in exile

Start telling me about that bridge you want to sell me, dude.

As to the amateur psychologist in the preceding post, if I want to be psychoanalysed I'll pay a professional. You sound like the Uptight Seattleite—minus the "diplomacy". Not to mention that you've just proved my point about the miserable weather making everyone perpetually cranky . . .

No, not an amateur psychologist just someone who is happy where he is at the moment. If I were to become unhappy about that I would leave instead of trying to convince everyone else that they live somewhere miserable.

[JiminyCricket]

yank in excile, for god's sake, do we need to put you on a suicide watch? you might be the most depressing person i have ever read typing on a message board.

or are you just a complainer? if you honestly let something that you can't control get you down (i.e. the weather) then I feel sorry for you, I really do.

not to mention, your bitchfest is ruining a great picture thread that pwright has worked hard spending hours taking pictures, loading them on the computer, and sharing them with us. how about a little appreciation? YOU are the one being a jerk and "cranky."


And another thing, quit lumping the northwest into the same category. ever been to the tri-cities, wa area? the 5 inches of precipitation a year and more sunny days than Phoenix really is miserably gray all the time, isn't it?

[SeaGuy]

I have lived in Seattle for almost 20 years now, and find all of this arguing over the weather ridiculous and a waste of time. Your pictures remind me, even though I see it every day no matter if it's raining or sunny, what a beautiful city Seattle is, and why I love it so. Seattle is a great city and if you don't like the weather leave. I like the other guy from the East Coast find the weather to be just great, green year around, not to cold and certainly not too warm (with the exception of one long very hot spell in July). It's just beautiful city no matter what day of the year it is!

[Yank in exile]

Jeez . . . you people. OK, I've got a question for you: how many of you have had to make significant changes to your address books in the past few years because of friends who have moved away? How many of you are female? How many of you indulge in substances (OTC, prescription or "otherwise"), especially during the darker months of the year?

And just how many of you can be at work on a sunny day between April and June and not go into a panic about not being able to get into your yard to mow the lawn and trim the hedges before it starts raining again (which it will surely do by the time the weekend rolls around)?

First off, to the guy in Eastern Washington: look, I have family in the tri-cities. It's great visiting them—for one thing, you never need a night light with one of them in the room. But when I speak of the "Northwest" I believe it's pretty well understood that the "Pacific Northwest" we're talking about here essentially refers to the area West of the Cascades from the Siskiyous to the "Sunshine Coast" area of BC (God, what a misnomer that is!). Having spent a lot of Summers backpacking in the Cascades growing up I knew from an early age that the it's infinitely preferable to be eaten alive by mosquitos on the East side of the mountains in August than to be soaked to the skin dragging your waterlogged sleeping bag around all day long on the West side.

That said, I remember moving back to Seattle in the mid-90s to people complaining about parking and traffic problems that were laughable from my point of view, and realised that, unlike places that have had urban identities from the beginning (like SF or NY), Seattle was just a small town that recently had gotten big, and people were wasting their energy resenting the change instead of finding a creative way of dealing with it, like in a real city. All around me I saw angry people with pursed lips who wouldn't even exchange a few friendly words with strangers in a coffee shop or a grocery store—even your own neighbours, fer Chrissake—and this was in July with temperatures in the 80s.

One afternoon in November when I was making the three-block walk with my old college buddy from Buffalo from his home to that excellent Cuban coffee place on Queen Anne for his third double shot of the day, he allowed to me as to how he had figured how people managed to live in such a place. "This city runs on coffee, marijuana and porn," he said. Not being a consumer of anything but a strong cup of coffee in the morning myself, I really couldn't relate on a first-hand basis, but evidently it had some sort of resonance with him. Within a year he and his wife had moved away before, as he put it, "we either kill ourselves or each other." I've had at least two or three friends every year move away from here that very reason, even when they're perfectly happy with their professonal lives. They just can't take the climate.

I remember the first trip I made after moving North to visit friends in San Francisco one year in late March. I hit the Siskiyous by noon, and a few hours later I was descending into Redding, seeing green fields, leaves on the trees and sunshine; and I could finally turn off the heater in my car. By the time I reached Vallejo at sunset I could feel the energy of being in a place where there is an actual city in a place where they saw the light of day during the better part of the year—a place where, not incidentally, I was taken more seriously as a professional even though I lack a Y-chromosome than I ever was in insular, puerile Oregon, Washington or British Columbia.

The night after I returned (when, btw, it was pissing down rain as usual) I caught one of the clients of the business I worked for in my backyard looking in my bedroom window watching me undress (he had evidently followed me home from a shop in my neighbourhood one day—where I saw him and had quite properly acknowledged and said hello to him as a matter of business—and discovered where I lived). A few months later someone (I wonder who) broke into my house and overlooked thousands of dollars worth of jewellery and electronics to steal my underwear. I suppose you all think that's funny, but when you're a woman who lives alone it's not exactly something that makes you feel real safe. This client of my boss was another East Coast transplant who evidently must have been running a little short in those days and unable to afford his usual quota of weed and whackoff material, and so decided to terrorise me in the process of making himself feel better. Nothing like that had ever happened to me in San Francisco, even when I wasn't married.

The further North you go, the more delightful it gets for anyone who isn't a white heterosexual male. As a woman, I've noted that, the more homophobic a population is, the worse they treat even straight women like myself. Gay friends of mine here in Vancouver won't even put a rainbow flag in their window or a diversity sticker on their cars, even though there is no shortage of "Scottish and Proud" and other ethnic bullshit pasted on innumerable bumpers in the areas. "We aren't interested in getting shot," one gay couple told me, here in Canada—you know, where gay marriage is legal and where they have stricter gun laws than the US.

Over the course of four weeks here in Vancouver from mid-November to the week before Christmas we had Pineapple Express flooding and landslides into local reservoirs resulting in no potable water for a municipality of 2 million for two weeks, followed by a paralysing snowstorm that ended just in time for hurricane force winds and power outages that lasted from 12 hours to several days in the GVRD. We've had people literally coming to blows over bottled water in the shops (a far cry from the way people pulled together after the Loma Prieta earthquake in California) and a whole metropolitan area snarled with traffic jams from accidents cause by eejits who haven't the slightest clue how to drive in snow and who literally bought their drivers' licences from the Provincial government without examination upon arrival in Canada. Oh, and in the last ten days we've had even more snow and even an afternoon of sleet. If I wanted to drive in sleet I could be in Boston or some other real place, not freakin' Vancouver or Seattle.

So, great: post a bunch of happy-face pics of normally dreary Seattle and get more of you disaffected straight men from other parts of the US to move out here to eventually get all creepy and predatory on us poor women (or get aggro on the gay guys who are actually getting some) after you've gone stir-crazy from being cooped up indoors the better part of the year.

Any of you who don't indulge in chemical assistance and porn to keep yourselves happy are free to tell me I'm full of it. And slag me all you want. I've already decided not to waste any more time on these internet fora in the New Year. I have to get my house ready to put on the market so I can get the hell out of BC. Because of the transient nature of the population here (mostly due to Canadians who decide they'd rather freeze their asses off on the prairies or in Ontario than end up suicidal from constant rain), most people here won't have anything to do with you if you weren't born and raised here, and I have to admit I don't blame them. Unfortunately, the business community for the most part feels the same way and I have to get out of here before I end up on the streets. My main regret is that, short of winning a lottery that I don't play anyway, I can't afford to return to a decent urban context in a latitude far enough South that people don't need Prozac, bong hits or triple shots (or some combination thereof) just to get out of bed in the morning.

[Seattle FTW]

lol @ Yank In Exile

[velciane]

wow...

[waaz1]

perhaps the reason its sunny in the the pictures is because he didnt want to go out and take pictures in the rain?

[Black Box]

Yank, I just hope you find what you're looking for. Take care and go EASY. Good luck.

[ratbear]

Thanks for giving us men in Seattle one less bitch to deal with! You must be such a treat to hang out with. You sound like a bitter old hag that wasn't able to hack it in the professional world, and now try to justify that by inventing bogeymen to prop up your self worth. Call us armchair psychologists, but it's obvious from your rantings that you are a raving cunt that can't figure out why you feel so miserable no matter where you move to.

By the way, I am not a provinicial booster that tries to convince people that the weather in Seattle is great year round. It does rain here, excessively. The difference between me and you is that I am not a neurotic harpy that tries to control everything around me, including the weather.

If only your stalker was a little more adventursome and decided to meet you face to face.

[mhays]

Seattle's not for everyone. Already knew that.

[Car Free 2]

I understand that not everyone likes the Pacific Northwest, due to its climate. What I don't understand is the need for people like Yank in Exile to convince those of use who chose to live here why we shouldn't like it here, or how we're somehow objectively disordered for not sharing his/her love of sunnier climes. Personally, I do fine in Seattle sans porn or dope, and I drink just as much coffee when I visit family in Jacksonville, Florida as I do here in Seattle.

Yank in exile, what about Reno, NV or Sacramento? Two sunny places on (or close) to the West Coast that are much cheaper than SF or LA.

[PeterSmith]

I am almost ashamed to say how inaccurate my impression of Seattle was before I started venturing around this forum a few days ago. Seattle is so much more vibrant, beautiful, and interesting than I had once thought...and my previous impressions were pretty high too. Even still, Seattle has truly surprised me. It looks like a fantastic city. It just got bumped up on my priority list of places to visit. Great pics, pwright. You're a gifted photographer.