helmetiblog

I love the wind and the rain. Most of the time I find either and both of them exhilarating. While I was at Western (university, not prison) I would walk around campus during the fall and winter months and watch passers-by' implicit and explicit reactions to the typical weather. Most would walk with quickened pace, head down, edges of the mouth toward the ground rather than the sky. (It being this side of Washington, umbrellas were few.) I enjoyed these walks, purposing to engage those who would with eye contact and a smile.

[Pausing for an aside, I've never witnessed nor been part of anything approaching the natural phenomenons recently capturing our natural attention. I'm not talking about that level of intensity of force. I have been through several major storms (the inaugural day storm in the Puget Sound region in January of 1993, and one more recently in Buenos Aires that destroyed buildings and interrupted life for weeks in early 2002, for example), each time probably enjoying it a bit too much, but I'm not speaking to any catastrophic situation.]

I thought it perhaps peculiar to the university or its culture, this dourness I would witness. But after having lived a bit more, travelled accordingly and seldom having shied from wet and blustery opportunity, it seems to me fairly universal that pedestrians over a certain age (well below mine currently) don't enjoy the opportunity to revel in these immediately tangible forces of nature. Maybe everyone's worried about implications to their health, or traffic, or appearance, or belongings, or some other factor I've failed to consider. Maybe I'm the odd one, after all, for my cheerfulness. But either way, from the look of things outside the window, I'll enjoy the trip home more than most.

On Sunday a friend and I went to look at colors for my new house. These are my rough translations from the paint cards we picked out at Lowes. What do you think?

have you ridden the bus in to Seattle from Issaquah? it's amazing how very different it can be one day to the next. yesterday the p&r lot was full so I parked in a space of an office a few blocks away, under a sign warning of towing. we stopped to pick up passengers from a stranded coach along I-90 and were packed in so tightly it was difficult to breathe. (my car was still there after work, much prayer later). today there was plenty of parking, a leisurely ride in and a completely different morning. with so much change in the air, it's interesting to notice those things that are the same, and I just haven't noticed. yesterday seemed right to walk across town to get to work, and it was unbelievable to me how active the city was, how tall the buildings were, how I could walk for a mile along the waterfront to get to work, etc. I hesitate to call it a renaissance, but I like Seattle on foot in the morning.