Lifestyle Changes (phase 2)

If my life was fiction, I would have been going through a deus ex machina experience this summer. For three years I have been plodding along, diligently checking job listings, filling out online applications, emailing resumes, and attempting to find the legendary "hidden job market" where, they say, 90% of all jobs are found. Knowing all the time I should be doing something to change course instead of following the track of my own front tire.

Lifestyle Changes - Phase 1

After losing my full-time real job in September 2010, I worked a part-time low-wage no-benefits restaurant job for two years, from March 2011 to February 2013. I've been receiving at least partial unemployment comp. benefits for most of that time, except for about six weeks last summer, when I was working a bit more than forty hours a week in two jobs. It must be the combination of working part-time and the federal emergency benefits programs that have allowed me to claim for so long, but over this past summer I was always vaguely aware that my time was running out - in August I would move to Tier 3 benefits, which had been reduced by 20% because of sequester budget cuts. Sometime in July, in checking up on what I had coming, I found out that because the unemployment rate in Washington state had fallen below 7%, Tier 3 benefits would be phased out completely. My claim schedule fell just outside the deadline to qualify, meaning I would have no income after the end of August, with less than $1500 left in savings.

Here's where the deus ex machina comes into action. In mid-June I had received a phone call from my sister, with the news that my mother had died in an Alzheimers-care facility in the mid-West. Already aware that I was running out of money, I decided I couldn't travel from Bellingham to be with my family. My sister, who for several years had been looking after our mother's care, and her taxes and accounts, later informed me that Mom had left us a life insurance policy and some other investments, to be divided equally between us. Mom had also asked to be cremated, with instructions for burial in a family plot near Seattle.

This was the reason for my trip to Seattle last month, paid for from my half of the insurance money, which turned out to be more than I earned the whole two years I worked my coffee-shop job.

I keep thinking of that Cyndi Lauper song:  Money Changes Everything.

Several times I've thought about buying a car, for about a half-minute at a time. But parking isn't secure in my neighborhood, and to me a car still represents expenses, risks and liability, not convenience and freedom. I thought about moving to an apartment with laundry facilities, and looked around a little bit. But in the meantime, I made some other plans and commitments. Now my schedule for fall is filling up, and the weekly bus-trip to the laundromat in Bellingham is so much a habit that I decided to wait on making that major change, too.

In fact, the first thing I did when I found out I had enough money to live on for a while and didn't need unemployment comp. and an EBT card any more, was to check on the autumn class schedule at the community college and register for some business and foreign language classes. Soon I will be a bicycle-commuting student again.

I've also noticed my attitude is getting less meek and laid-back. Once when an SUV-driver yelled something rude at me while cutting in front of me turning in to a parking lot, I yelled back. Now if store clerks seem to be trying to hustle me out of a shop when I'm browsing through clearance racks, or baristas get snippy when I loiter in a cafe, I think "I don't have to put us with this crap anymore." I think I'd better get a grip on myself.

Chihuly Glass

Back in Seattle - we spent a day at the Seattle Center, including a visit to the exhibit of Dale Chihuly's glass works, which pretty much speak for themselves.

My sister, along with her husband and daughter, took an elevator ride to the top of the Space Needle. Being a local, I skipped that tourist trip. Instead I listened to a band of Peruvian buskers with guitars and wood or reed pipes, playing "Hotel California" while I enjoyed a Starbuck's frappucino in the outdoor cafe.

Last Day in Seattle

Check-out time at the College Inn is eleven in the morning, but my train to Bellingham didn't board until about seven in the evening. I'd packed a week's worth of clothing and essentials in two light panniers, which could be strapped together to make one piece of luggage for the train. These were easy to carry on the back rack of my bike, but turned out to be uncomfortably large and heavy to lug around town for several hours.

To spare my back and biceps, I saved a trip to the Burke Museum of Natural History, at the University of Washington, for my last day. After checking my panniers at the desk, I spent about three hours in the museum. Admission is $10 for the public; UW students get in free. The museum has permanent displays of Pacific Northwest plant and animal fossils, and exhibits on geology, volcanoes and earthquakes. The bottom level showcases artifacts from different cultures with many similar traits, from all around the Pacific Rim, including Alaska, BC coastal and Puget Sound tribes, Japan, Hawaii, New Zealand and more. I didn't take any photos in the museum, but appreciated the refresher survey course on the natural history of my home state.

  

After a snack and coffee in the cafe, I caught a Metro bus to downtown Seattle, then walked toward Pioneer Square, stopping in at the Seattle Public Library on Third Avenue to check my email. In the summer, footsore tourists can choose from several types of wheeled tours. I spotted a pretty white horse carriage with a driver in black jacket and top hat and a team of white horses, an old wooden open trolley, and an amphibious "Ducks Bus" all from one street corner in Pioneer Square - in addition to several energetic and good-natured pedicab drivers.

Car traffic and construction made street conditions congested, noisy, dirty and confusing in Pioneer Square. Besides, there was a football game of some sort going on at that new stadium they built a while back to replace the KingDome. I think it was the Seahawks, but it might have been soccer. There were lots of people wearing that vivid green shade that so many bicyclists prefer.

King Street Station has been cleaned up and refurbished, with most work completed early this summer. The old sound-dampening low ceiling panels were torn out, and high arches and ornate plaster trim restored. The waiting area was light and airy in the evening sun, without the cavernous echo people used to complain about. Or maybe I'm thinking of the KingDome.

My train was delayed for about an hour. During the wait, several green-wrapped airplane fuselages, about the same size as a train car, passed through. I guess they must have been on the way from the Everett Boeing plant, for another phase of assembly at the Renton plant. I don't think this was the reason for the late arrival of my train. Oddly, we were delayed again a bit north of Everett because a boat fell off a truck while crossing the railroad tracks.

Strange how paths can cross.

Nostalgia Tripping

August was a scrambled-up month for me. It seemed I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen, for replies to messages, checks in the mail, meetings and dates, and run-around errands. In the middle of the month I took a week-long trip to Seattle to meet up with my sister and her family, and revisit some of my favorite places.

For many years I've often found myself thinking of places I've been, and felt an impulse to go back, just to be there and see the place again. When I was in college in Seattle I used to spend whole days on the weekend, taking the bus to some neighborhood across town, then walking at random around the business and residential blocks. My favorite bus route was the #43, which ran from the Central District to Downtown, up Pike Street and along Broadway on Capitol Hill, through Roanoke to the University District, up 45th Street through Wallingford, past the Woodland Park Zoo and Phinney Ridge, down to Ballard, then out to Shilshole and Golden Gardens. I think it still takes mostly the same route, and it's a great tour of the city if you have a week or ten days to explore all the destinations along the way.

Now that I've taken up bicycling I find myself following the same impulse. Sometimes I recall a certain stretch of road, not any particular destination, but I want to get out on my bike just to see the seasonal changes in the light, the trees and understory, the sounds of birds and animals, the small farms and gardens along the roadside. And more often recently, the road construction or home building projects, or disturbances from landslides or flooding.

Maybe this is a remnant of some migratory urge left over from our semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer days. Still, I did find it very disorienting and tiring being away from my Bellingham-to-Ferndale routines. Every day around 5:00pm, when I was out and around in Seattle, I'd begin to feel it was about time to head back to my hotel - a Ferndale habit, because if I'm out without my bike I need to watch the time and make sure I can make bus connections to get back to the Cordata transit center in time to catch the last bus home.

This trip was another excursion when I rode my bike to Fairhaven, then left it parked at the Amtrak station. I considered biking part or all of the way to Seattle, but decided to conserve my energy for visiting and walking tours. Besides, I suspect my family thinks this bicycle fixation of mine has gone on a bit too long. My car on the Amtrak Cascades train was about half-filled with summer travelers, mostly single, middle-aged (or older) women riding from Vancouver BC to Seattle or Portland. I got stuck with an aisle seat, but all the way my head was swiveling from water views on the right, to showplace house views on the left.

My sister and her husband and college-age daughter stayed at a Holiday Inn near the Seattle Center, a convenient central location for them, but I remembered that area being part of the seedy drugs-and-prostitution strip (it's improved now), so I chose to stay at The College Inn, in the University District.  The College Inn Pub and Cafe was a traditional cool graduate-student hangout when I was a mousy undergrad, and I was too timid to go inside, but now I'm past caring. At street level now is a Thai restaurant, a pub, and a coffee shop and convenience store, with a small but expensive grocery/convenience store across the street. In mid-August, during the last week of summer quarter, it was very quiet and private, but I'm told during the school year, when the Huskies have football or basketball games, it turns very loud and rowdy, just like the rest of the neighborhood.

The College Inn is a one-hundred-twenty year old Tudor style building, built around the same time as some of the first University of Washington buildings, for the Alaska-Yukon Exhibition. It's billed as a "euro-style" hotel, meaning you get a sink in your room, with men's and women's showers and bathrooms down the hall on each floor. There's no air conditioning, but my room was comfortable enough with the ceiling fan on and windows open a few inches at night. There's a nice, light, free continental breakfast in the fourth floor lounge from 7-9am. The hallways are a gallery of fascinating historic photos of early Seattle, showing the early stages of digging the Montlake Cut between Lake Union and Lake Washington, and the Ship Canal that connected Lake Union and Puget Sound when the Ballard Locks were built.

A little sight-seeing around the University of Washington campus.

The HUB lawn became a favorite resting place for weary students in the 1970's, when student activists demanded the right to walk, lounge and play frisbee on the grass.

Relic in the basement of Denny Hall

The Quad Buildings - grotesques, not gargoyles. This is either Savery or Smith Hall, I forget.

There is a student bike shop in the HUB (Husky Union Building), and covered bike lockers for rent on campus, as well as open bike racks. This one offers a repair station with a tire pump and assorted tools.











After you cross 47th Street on University Avenue (The Ave), there are a few blocks that get a bit dodgy, with aggressive pan-handlers and hustlers, then the street-life settles down a bit and becomes a bit shabby but more genteel.

A neighborhood bike shop

University Heights Elementary School, which was shut down and turned into a community center in the 1980's. It's going through another round of rehabilitation now.