Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:44 on 8 October 2014

It’s both the job market and the allergies that pushed me away, probably in about equal measures.

Of the two, the job market is the one that, fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have thought could be that big an issue. I’m really not all that focused on material things, and am quite willing to downscale my life and live modestly.

But, it’s more than just that. If the job market is bad, people will not only offer jobs for less pay. They will also offer less benefits, in particular less vacation time. In general, such a market appeals to businesses who focus on maximizing profits by spending as little on their employees as possible. So you can expect to have a less comfortable office surrounding and worse resources to work with as well as lower pay and worse benefits.

You will be working under managers who tend to be clueless and inept, as well. The good ones tend to be working in other cities where they get better compensated for their talents (and don’t have to contend with the subpar benefits or resources, either).

A job takes up such a huge chunk of one’s waking life that all this extra suckiness really ends up making one’s whole life suck more. Particularly when the stingier time off benefits make for one spending more time in that sucky office.

So sure, Seattle sucks a lot when compared to Portland. It is in general more establishment and less bohemian. Access to nature is much more strictly meted out by ability to pay for it. The mass transit is nowhere near as good.

In the end, however, those minuses don’t matter so much. There’s more time available to get away from the office and out into nature, because the jobs come with better benefits.

Because the jobs in Seattle pay more, it’s possible for me to pay for that access to nature. (It sucks that many can’t pay and have the easy access, and I will continue to advocate for fixing that, but it’s possible for me to fix that problem for myself alone in the here and now, so why shouldn’t I?)

It’s also been possible to pay for the privilege of living someplace where I can use the ferry system and a bicycle to avoid the need to choose between driving in awful traffic and coping with subpar mass transit. Again, that’s not a fix for everyone, and it sucks that this is a privilege Seattle metes out to the few who can pay, but why shouldn’t I opt to fix the transport mess for myself if I am one of those few? Again, it doesn’t stop me from advocating for more general and widespread solutions.

There’s thing that suck about both Portland and Seattle. No place is perfect. It’s just that, for me, coping strategies generally exist for dealing with Seattle metro area’s suckiness much more than they do for Portland’s.

Published at 08:20 on 8 October 2014

Per this:

• The Tri-Cities would be the relationship I entered just because he had some money and offered me a home away from my parents, with whom I was bickering endlessly and sharing living quarters with had become most unpleasant. I knew it was not at all that good a match and wouldn’t last at the start, and I was right.
• Seattle would be a lifelong on-again, off-again, on-again romance. First and for a long time absolutely smitten, then disenchanted by subpar mass transit and housing choices, then further disenchanted when I realized how a chilly the social climate was there (particularly in comparison to the Bay Area). Then, finally, realizing that, despite all that it’s probably at this stage in my life the best achievable choice, provided we don’t shack up together and I just live in the neighborhood and visit him regularly.
• The San Francisco Bay Area would be a quick fling, motivated as more by my disenchantment with Seattle than anything. There’s still lot I find to like about him, but overall I learned he’s less good a match than Seattle was.
• Portland would be the dream romance I had often fantasized about that, excitedly, eventually manifested itself in reality. And which was in fact pretty damn awesome in most respects. Alas, it was also pretty damn awful in two critical respects: my grass pollen allergies, and the absolutely horrible local job market.
• Vancouver would be the dream romance that’s never happened.
• New York City would be a famous celebrity I had lunch with once, a celebrity that has a somewhat formidable reputation as being vain and snobbish, but someone I found to actually be a genuinely interesting person who I really enjoyed interacting with, despite being way too different to ever even think about having a serious relationship with. I still have his contact info and plan on getting in touch with him for another long lunch some time; I’m sure we’ll enjoy it as much as we did the last time.

Published at 19:45 on 7 October 2014

Today not only dawned foggy, but in some areas the fog never dissipated all day. That’s definitely a sign that it’s now autumn; it means the sun isn’t strong enough to ensure the that morning fogs always burn off.

Autumn is fog season in the Pacific Northwest, particular in the Puget Sound region. The salt water is still quite warm from the summer yet the nights keep getting longer and colder. All that warm water pumping moisture into air that can hold less and less of it causes the inevitable to happen frequently.

Published at 19:40 on 7 October 2014

Another condo in a better-than-average complex was listed right after my offer was accepted. And it, too, promptly sold.

That’s good, as it means I didn’t have the bad fortune to buy right at the peak of the local market: the extreme scarcity of desirable, townhouse-style condos persists. Yes: the odds of that happening are actually pretty small, but I’m paranoid enough after making this big a purchase that I do worry it might be the case.

Published at 22:59 on 2 October 2014

The deadline passed and not a peep from the seller about my offer. The most reasonable theory at this point is that he’s hoping to instigate a bidding war and get an offer that’s above asking price and quite possibly all-cash with no contingencies at all.

A bidding war that I will not participate in, that is. I have no intention of competing to be that or any other seller’s doormat.

Scratch that, it looks like I got it anyway, by increasing my offered price by under 1%. Being the first offer made probably also helped.

(And why can’t WordPress strike out a title?)

Published at 10:56 on 1 October 2014

Another town house near the ferry landing unexpectedly came up yesterday. It’s in one of the (by my standards) most desirable developments on the Island. On the minus site it is barely far enough back from the street to be suitably quiet. Far enough, but just barely.

Still worth an offer because such things are super-scarce and the particular development has basically all I want and nothing I don’t want. And the latter is important when buying any sort of condo, lest you be foreced to pay (via your home owner’s association dues) for stuff you have no interest in ever using.

So, offer made. It’s a strong offer, and the first offer made, but it does have the standard contingencies, and I’m not interested in participating in a feeding frenzy that leads to buyers competing with each other to be the seller’s doormat.

We’ll see what happens. It could easily go either way.

Published at 21:59 on 5 September 2014

After a half-year of keeping a close eye on the market, it’s becoming increasingly evident that housing available for purchase on Bainbridge Island breaks down to roughly three categories:

1. Large homes on large lots. More home and more lot than I could ever want or need, in fact.
2. Condos built one atop another, typically in a brutally modernist style (which I dislike) and with all-electric kitchens (I strongly prefer to cook with gas).
3. Townhomes of the sort I would like, but only a tiny number, demand vastly outpaces supply, and I have no interest in participating in a real-estate feeding frenzy that leaves me no time to do due diligence on my purchase.

In short, nothing suitable seems to really exist. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find something, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that any such result depends on getting lucky, i.e. the odds do not favor it.

There’s really no rentals that have everything on my list, but that’s not so important for a rental, because rental housing doesn’t come with the long-term commitment that owned housing does. And there are rentals that have more of what I want than my current rental does. They’re pretty scarce, but one comes on the market about every quarter.

So it’s looking increasingly like the Island is neither a short-term solution nor a long-term one but a medium-term one. That’s about what a better rental that still falls short of what I’d really like is worth.

Still better than Seattle proper; each time I visit, my general impression of Seattle tends to be that I’m glad I escaped that mess, and this impression is particularly strong every time I have to contend with the freeway system there or think about what an onerous budget obligation Seattle is getting itself into with their multi-billion-dollar boondoggle of a highway tunnel under downtown.

Not only will the latter cause taxes to be high (for something I didn’t want built in the first place), but the it will also sap the ability of Seattle to spend money improving its long-neglected mass transit infrastructure. So it seems inevitable that Seattle will continue to be lacking in what a city needs to be a livable place for me in the decades to come.

Thus, despite the advantages of there being more social activities of interest (which does have its temptations), it’s still not the sort of place I’d wish to live.

Published at 10:30 on 14 July 2014

I survived. Actually, the warmth was quite nice — provided I was sitting in the shade doing nothing and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. The rub is, I was often hiking off-trail wearing enclosed shoes and long pants to protect me from thorny shrubs (of which there are many in that area).

This is the week of a big annual convention put on by my employer. Today’s attendance is being made unpleasant by two facts:

1. The sandals, which I had thought were not provoking my tendonitis, proving that they actually were this morning. (I hadn’t worn them for the past few days, going barefoot when not wearing enclosed shoes, and my sore toe had gotten better all the while. This morning, on the walk from the ferry to the convention center, it stared getting sore again.)
2. The pissy and uptight staff at the convention center, who are continually trying to order me to put shoes on. Sorry, not gonna happen. I’ll be damned if I re-injure myself and jeopardize my ability to lead a weekend hike just to comply with some uptight firms’ prejudice against bare feet. They can take their prejudice and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Published at 09:32 on 9 July 2014

We’re in the middle of a long run of forecast above-normal temperatures and it’s absolutely delightful to be able to wear shorts and a sleeveless shirt and not feel the least bit cold.

But, there’s a caveat. More precisely, I love the sort of summer weather we have where I live. Which, being on an island surrounded by cool salt water is about five degrees cooler in summer than the nearest official reporting station. Which is Seattle. Which, in turn, has some of the coolest summers of any major US city.

The warm spell I’m savoring involves lows in the 50s and highs in the upper 70s to low 80s. Which in most of the USA would qualify as a cool spell or even a record cold spell for this time of the year.

I’ve never really liked hot weather, and the agreeable summers were one of the things that made this region so attractive to me decades ago when I was getting out of college.

Which makes the pending (or should I say impending) botanical survey near Leavenworth a bit ominous. Highs are forecast to be in the 95 to 100 degree range there in the next few days. Yuck. The survey will be at elevations about 1,000 feet higher, but we’re still talking about highs above 90 most days. Still yuck.

There won’t be much humidity, so it should cool off at night and won’t be as hellishly sweltering as, say, a Chicago heat wave. But nothing can make 95 degrees Fahrenheit comfortable, only somewhat less uncomfortable.

Published at 00:15 on 26 June 2014

Berry season has begun. The blackcaps* and best of all the thimbleberries† are ripening everywhere. Salmonberries have been ripe for several weeks now, but they don’t have the flavor of our other berries.

The wide variety of edible berries are one of the things I like best about this region. Many parts of the country are lucky to have one or two good wild edible berries. I can offhand think of nine types of native edible berries found on this island alone (so I’m probably overlooking a few), plus a couple of common introduced species.

* My namesake; I chose it because the species of blackcap they have in the Midwest is probably the first wild food I remember eating.

† A flavor, which together with the thoroughly non-native durian, I probably crave more than any other.