Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:50 on 22 April 2013

I took a quick ride down to one of my favorite spots in the Seattle park system this evening, to the Arboretum where Foster Island ends and Union Bay begins.

Alas, it won’t stay as nice as it currently is for much longer. Seattle has acquiesced to the tripling of the width of the freeway they made the mistake of allowing to be built through that park in the first place. Naturally, the neighborhood of upscale homes immediately adjacent will have an expensive tunnel built to conduct the freeway under it. (Why preserve public amenities when there is private wealth to pander to?)

That is the sort of thing I am very glad to be bidding farewell to.

Published at 20:29 on 17 April 2013

Well, missing parts of Seattle, that is, particularly the wealth of historic buildings, which I’ve always appreciated. If only the City of Seattle didn’t have so many other aspects (already hashed to death in precious posts, so I won’t rehash them here) which I just can’t stand.

And that’s the rub: I’ve never really found a city that I can truly love wholeheartedly. I thought I had, back in my twenties, when I moved to Seattle. Eventually a long-distance romantic relationship opened my eyes to all the ways in which Seattle is just plain dysfunctional, things that had been grating on me but which I had accepted.

By then, I was in my thirties, and thought I had found another place I could love, Portland. I even bought a home there. Then discovered just how hellish a place it is in May and June when the grass pollen levels go through the roof, and just how difficult a place it is to find a good job.

All in all, I’m glad to be out of Portland and have absolutely no intention of ever moving back there; it suits me even less well than Seattle does.

Bellingham would be ideal, if I could find a good stable job there. But that’s an awfully big if, and past experience has taught me that a good job can degrade into an intolerable one quite easily as people come and go. Jobs are so scarce there that that would leave me with the dilemma of either moving yet again (possibly taking a bath in the real estate market) or sticking it out with a bad work situation.

Which pretty much gets me to where I am today, deciding that better access to nature matters more than most of the urban amenities of Seattle. Which, in general, it does — but an evening walk through the Madrona neighborhood reminds me that there still will be things I’m giving up that, all in all, I’d rather not.

Published at 12:50 on 14 April 2013

Hardly any apartment on Bainbridge Island has a gas stove, so I’ve purchased a portable induction cooktop so that I won’t have to fight with a conventional electric stove on a daily basis. Of course, I wanted to test it out as soon as it arrived to make sure it wasn’t defective.

Executive summary: induction works much better than a conventional electric stove, but it’s not going to unseat gas as the best cooking method.

First, the good news. It’s true: induction is at least as responsive as gas. When a pot reaches the desired temperature, just turn it down and it will go down. Instantly. Gone is the feeling of driving a car where you have to turn the steering a quarter-mile before the next turn you wish to make.

Now, the quirky stuff. There’s actually less temperature memory then even gas, to the point where you can’t just turn the stove off when you’re done, unless you want the food to get cool right away. An induction stove doesn’t get hot, so if you turn the burner completely off, the cool stove top will quickly suck much of the heat out of the pot via conduction.

Now, the negatives. First, the one everyone already knows: you can’t use any old pot on an induction stove; only magnetic ones will do. Moreover, you can’t use round-bottomed things like woks; only a flat-bottomed cooking vessel has enough metal close enough to the induction coil.

Not so well known is that induction stoves are noisy. Because they contain lots of heat-sensitive electronics, and there’s a hot pot bottom in contact with them, they need cooling fans to stop that conducted heat from building up inside and shortening the lifetime of that electronics. Cook with induction and you will have the sound of a fan going in your kitchen whenever the stove is on. What I find most annoying about this is that I’m used to using sound cues to know when I need to turn the heat down (or up), and the fan noise makes it much harder to hear the boiling or simmering noises.

Take those disadvantages, and to them add that induction stoves are by far the most costly kind (costing at least twice what conventional electric stoves do), and it becomes clear that they will never have more than a niche market.

Just look at electric stoves: there’s enough of a penchant for sacrificing quality in the name of lower price that the extremely modest savings (compared to the total cost of a home) of not running a gas pipe to the kitchen and installing a range that maybe costs 10% more means that there’s a huge number of homes with natural gas service yet which have electric stoves. In a market dominated by that sort of mentality, why would one expect builders to install a stove that costs at least 100% more?

Induction’s niche will be customers like yours truly: people who appreciate just how poorly conventional electric stoves perform, want nothing to do with them, yet for whatever reason do not have gas available in the kitchen as a cooking fuel.

Published at 19:33 on 22 February 2013

I received my Hornit bicycle horn today, and damn, is the thing ever loud. Painfully loud, in fact. As it needs to be; there’s a layer of glass and steel and a fog of oblivion it needs to penetrate.

It’s already been installed, with the trigger button in the somewhat odd location of the underside of the left side of the handlebar grips of each bike (I bought extra trigger buttons and mounts, so I can shift the horn to the bike I am using). Reason for putting it there is it’s easy to hit the button with my thumb while using the rest of my fingers for braking.

I will definitely be braking at least 90% of the time I use the thing. A horn is not a substitute for slowing down to avoid a crash; it’s an adjunct. It’s a way of announcing “Wake up! I am here! Pay attention!”. If push comes to shove, a car will win any disagreement with a bicycle, and decisively. The differences in mass and shielding are just too great.

But, if more bicyclists had loud horns and used them to blast oblivious drivers of motor vehicles, it would have the positive effect of getting more drivers to watch for vehicles other than large, motorized one; that is the real virtue of equipping bicycles with loud horns.

Published at 20:04 on 18 February 2013

Today I had a chance to drive on Highway 9 north of Arlington. The first time I drove that stretch of road, about 25 years ago, I was shocked at how quickly it changes character. Between Arlington and the Seattle suburbs, it was a wide, straight 2-lane highway with paved shoulders.

Past Arlington, it was like a different road altogether. The road abruptly became not much more than 20 feet wide as it started climbing into the foothills. The speed limit dropped from 55 to 35. Many curves were far slower than that. Bridges were typically wooden and single-laned. The traffic volume also dropped to practically nothing at about the point the road changed character.

Well, it’s still not as straight and fast there as it is south of Arlington, but it’s been widened to some degree; it’s probably more like 22 or 24 feet now. There’s been a depressing amount of suburban development in those hills (well, two subdivisions, but that alone is depressing considering how rural it used to be).

But there’s still a 10 mile stretch that’s as narrow and windy as it ever was, and I was floored when I discovered that the last of the one-lane bridges was still there. This time, I had to wait for traffic coming the other way (I don’t think I ever had to way back when; there was almost no traffic on that stretch then).

It’s not going to last, however. Not that I’m surprised.

What really frosts me is that the need for widening and straightening on that stretch of highway is driven by the suburbanization. The logging-road-with-a-layer-of-blacktop that was the old highway had plenty of extra capacity to handle the odd logging truck or weekend vacationer from the city. If the land had stayed rural, that old road would still have no trouble handling the little traffic using it.

Being a state highway, it is my taxes which are helping to pay for those upgrades. If the full cost was charged back to those moving to the remote subdivisions above Clear Lake, I doubt those subdivisions would have happened: the fees would have rendered them economically uncompetitive.

It puts the lie to the capitalist individualist rhetoric against growth management laws: even if you just focus on economics and ignore the environmental costs of sprawl, it’s not just a matter of a freely-chosen set of economic transactions between landowners, builders, and home-buyers. If those homes had been built up against existing developed land in Burlington or Arlington, it would have taken much less (dozens of miles less, in fact) road building to serve them, and the road-building would have been done mostly at the municipal level, paid for by local property taxes.

Published at 09:17 on 16 February 2013

And no, it’s not just because there are no suburbs here with the names “Clackamas” or “Gresham”.

One of the standard amenities of a major city is a rapid transit system which runs on a right-of-way independent from the streets and highways and which has more than token coverage of the metro area. That latter aspect means multiple lines, so when the lines converge in the inner city, headways end up being very frequent.

I chose the wording above deliberately. It’s a standard amenity of a major city. As such, cities that lack the amenity can be characterized as being deficient in what services a city should offer to its residents.

If all goes as planned and there are no bumps in the road, Seattle may be at such a point in thirty years or so. By which time I will be age 80, and probably have only a limited ability to enjoy such an amenity (and I will have no ability to enjoy it before then, because it won’t exist).

And the other two options for getting around in Seattle basically suck, too. Driving sucks, because the roads are congested and parking is difficult in many areas. Bicycling sucks, because street maintenance has been badly neglected, the city is spread out, and there’s steep hills almost always involved.

Every option for getting around Seattle sucks; there simply is no escape. It’s one aspect of why I’m not planning to stay in this city for the long term.

Published at 08:39 on 2 February 2013

… somewhere west of the Cascades,

… either on the US side of the border, in a borderless world, or in a Canada that did not have the immigration hurdles the current Canada does.

… with San Francisco’s urban form. No, scratch that, not possible: SF is the way it is in part because of when it started growing rapidly, and that is about a half-century earlier than any of the Northwest cities started doing so. So make it with an dense urban form dominated by neighborhoods like Portland’s Northwest District or Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

… not ringed by a huge moat of urban sprawl; the country begins relatively close to the urban center.

… with a good, comprehensive mass transit system that could take you to that edge of the city where the country begins.

… without the Willamette Valley’s hellish late spring grass pollen counts.

I would live there and be very happy, even if it were a bit more expensive than I’d like, even if it were in the Willamette Valley and hotter in the summer than I like. Because there’s lots I like about cities.

But no such big city exists. All the ones which do exist are fundamentally broken.

Seattle’s the least-bad match, but the way in which it is broken speaks volumes as to how I don’t belong there, because a city gets to be broken in the way Seattle does only if the vast preponderance of its residents lack the sort of values that would lead them to demand things go in a different direction.

Sure, one cannot demand absolute perfection, but I’m not demanding absolute perfection above. Nothing I’ve described above is fundamentally impossible in the current, statist, capitalist world.

With the exception of the bit alluding to immigration hassles, in fact, it comes very close to describing the real-world city of Vancouver, BC. So what I’m describing is hardly unrealistic in any sense of the imagination.

It just doesn’t happen to exist. Hence, my focus on living out of the city.

And having said that, I now promise to write a good anarchistic political rant here sometime soon. Things have been awfully skewed towards the personal as of late, and it’s time to re-establish some form of balance here.

Published at 09:20 on 30 January 2013

I floated a carefully crafted proposal to mostly telecommute that was devoid of any mention of in-person meeting intervals but which contained wording about only wishing to do so if it did not damage my career with my employer. That prompted acceptance of the concept, with the general idea of fortnightly appearances in person.

That interval is precisely twice as frequent as the desired interval for making periodic trips from Bellingham. Moreover, if the current week is any indication, it seems as if there’s a high chance the interval will end up being more frequent than once every other week, which means that ease of travel to the city really needs to be of paramount importance.

One thing I’m entertaining doing in response to the elitist class privilege aspect of Bainbridge Island is to rent a two-bedroom apartment then take a roommate, charging a rate based on income as evidenced by paystubs or some other such sliding-scale basis. Or maybe just charge no more than what the going rate in Seattle would be. The general idea would be to start out by at least doing something small to undermine such privilege.

Though at this stage it’s still very much up in the air, and although the odds probably do favor Bainbridge at this point, it’s not entirely unforeseeable that I’ll chose some other option, perhaps even to give up on leaving the city for another year or two in hopes of building further employer confidence over the concept of working remotely so that I can move further afield and leave the Seattle metro area entirely.

Published at 09:17 on 30 January 2013

I found this while doing some searches on intentional communities in the Pacific Northwest:

Seattle….it’s an interesting and progressive city, but I don’t think I’d want to live there.  Of course, we’re not really looking to live in a big city, but if we were to change our minds, I don’t see us in Seattle.  One of the biggest disappointments of Seattle was the public transit.  From what I saw, they just don’t have it quite together yet.  They are very late in adopting some kind of light rail or subway system and are planning a very expensive project to retrofit it into the downtown area.  There is a very short monorail through downtown that really doesn’t take you very far, and it was built for the World’s Fair in the 1960’s, so it is a bit outdated.  And pricey – it is $4 for a ride of 1 mile. More of a tourist attraction than a functional mode of transit.

Though for me it’s not quite the same: I actually did want to live here, to do what I’ve done since June of 2011: find a good job, do a good job at it, then switch to telecommuting. Which I plan to follow up by leaving Seattle.

Seattle has been a great place for me to engage in a desired life transition. But as a place to settle long-term, no thanks. As such, there’s a very good chance that it’s now served its purpose for me, thus it is time to seriously consider exiting.

Published at 21:18 on 19 January 2013

I spent the afternoon investigating another island alternative to Seattle, should my desire to telecommute from Bellingham for one reason or another not come to pass: Bainbridge Island.

It’s not as culturally compatible with what I desire as Vashon Island is, but all in all it is a far more practical location and could be a workable solution. Vashon’s sole town is in the center of the island, miles (and an arduous hill) from the nearest ferry landing, and that ferry goes not to Downtown Seattle but to one of Seattle’s outer neighborhoods, a significant bus ride from Downtown. There are a few foot ferries that run from Vashon Island to Downtown, but the key word is few: miss them, and you’ve gone from a little bit late to incredibly late.

Bainbridge Island, by contrast, has its sole town on the same harbor the ferry docks at, and every run of that ferry goes directly to the dock in Downtown Seattle. So I would be able to walk from my apartment or condo on the island to the ferry, and then walk from the ferry to my office Downtown. No worrying about missing the one or two useful ferry runs of the day, or about timing transfers from bus to boat.

Bainbridge, like Vashon, is a once-rural island that has turned mostly into exurban hobby farms. Thus, it still has the minus of not having any large and truly wild areas on-island. In Bainbridge’s case, however, that doesn’t matter so much, because the far side of the island is connected by a bridge to the Kitsap Peninsula, which in turn is connected by a bridge to the Olympic Peninsula. It ends up being possible to drive to some very nice hinterlands without having to compete for limited vehicle space on the ferries with all the other summer weekenders.

In fact, that limited vehicle space acts as a sort of limiting valve for how busy the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas can get on summer weekends, meaning less crowds (and a very low chance of traffic congestion) for me.

So, a condo on Bainbridge could work for me. There’s no food co-op there, but the one grocery store on the island is one of those rare supermarkets which really does live up to its claim of having a full and comprehensive selection of organic and natural foods. (I’ve seen such things before on islands.) And there’s the basic selection of businesses any town of 10 or 20 thousand people would be expected to have (in addition to lots of upscale boutiques). I wouldn’t have to live a life revolving around a car for my daily routine.

But, Bainbridge is still very much part of the Seattle metro area. It’s easier access to nature (compared to the big city across the water) is a privilege rationed out on the basis of the ability to pay a significant premium; it’s one of the most expensive places to live in the Pacific Northwest.

I have a good job and no kids to support, so I could afford to live in an apartment or condo there. That’s not the issue. The issue is that a greater urban area which reserves basics like access to nature and a home in a quiet, unpolluted neighborhood so much according to socioeconomic class is not an urban area in keeping with my core values.

In Bellingham, by contrast, everyone lives a bicycle ride (not a drive in a car) away from large wild areas. The children of the poor and the working class can ride their bikes on the trail to Larrabee State Park as easily as the wealthy California retirees. There’s even a mobile home court which abuts a green space in Bellingham; housing close to nature is not strictly limited to the affluent, either.

So, Bainbridge would work as an alternative, but it’s very much a “Plan B” alternative. My primary desire involves shaking the dust of Seattle’s elitist class privilege from my feet.