Canada-bound

The weather in Seattle has decided to revert to its pre-spring incarnation with dark grey skies, winds, and major downpours. So we're feeling a little bit of cabin fever and have opted to head up to Vancouver for the day. So far, the weather is still a crap-a-thon on the way up, but at least we'll soon be rained on in another country. :-) We plan to hit Robson Street, maybe Chinatown, and wrap up with our customary dinner at Gotham Steakhouse in downtown with their awesome onion bread. We're 18 miles from the border crossing at Blaine. Oh Canada, here we come!

Update - Sunday morning

We did hit Gotham, twice. Once for beverages while we waited for alterations next door at Holt Renfrew, and later for dinner. I had the slab of salmon with a butter sauce, which actually was just so-so. I prefer a little more seasoning.

Jason, who makes awesome salmon and has basically spoiled me for any other kind but his, opted for lobster tails. We shared the sauteed button mushrooms and sauteed sugar snap peas, which were both delicious! The peas were crisp, just-sauteed, sweet, and flavorful. The service and atmosphere were great as usual. The waitstaff is nice and professional, but not stuffy. I had a great seat on the comfy couch by the front windows, with Jason across from me on their overstuffed chair. I had cheesecake with berry sauce for dessert (sorry, no picture), which basically filled me to the bursting point before we hit the road for home.

I slept (as usual) until the border, where we just missed the Nexus line closing by 7 minutes: it closes at 9pm. So we had to do something we haven't done since getting Nexus cards a couple years ago: wait in line at the border! Horrors! :-) It took about 15 minutes, which wasn't too bad, but that's an eternity compared to our usual 2-4 question session and quick wave through. For some reason, traffic on the other side heading into Canada was packed. It looked like at least an hour wait. I joked that maybe the administration had done something else idiotic while we'd been gone and we were seeing the front edge of a mass exodus from the U.S.

I took over driving duties at a gas station on the other side where we had the choice of paying $3.15, $3.08 or $2.98 per gallon for premium. What the hell?! A war, thousands dead and injured, billions spent, no foreseeable end to it all, neglected domestic issues, a prescription drug benefit program that stinks, AND $3/gallon gas?! Who okayed this moron?! But I digress.

Filling up cost $50 exactly. I almost felt bad until I looked over at the guy at the next pump gassing up his motor home to the tune of $100.01. Sheesh! I also noticed he had Veteran plates. Wonder what he thinks of Bush and all this. Wanted to ask but that's a bit personal for the pumps.

We made it home about 11:25pm. All in all, it was a great day trip.

Back after a break

Took a nice break there. Just didn't feel like cluttering up cyberspace with uninspired musings. But now I've got lots of things on my mind. :-) Like this great book on Paris by writer Adam Gopnik given to me by a co-worker. Paris to the Moon details the author's five years on a dream assigment: writing about Paris life for the New Yorker. Gopnik is a masterful storyteller, deftly weaving the profound and mundane in the same paragraph. It makes me long for Paris even more because he talks about all these great places there that I didn't even know about. So much Paris, so little time. :-)

This is one of my favorite pictures from Paris. I have seen this scene so many times in movies and on TV, so it was great to stand there myself and experience it, on a beautiful day, to boot!

Now I'm going to brainstorm ways of creating a Paris-related assignment of my own. Where there's a will...

The future of the USPS

Early adopter that I am, here's my latest favorite tech gadget, courtesy of the United States Postal Service of all things. This is a picture of one of the new Automated Postal Centers that are cropping up around the city. It's basically an electronic kiosk, similar to an ATM, that let's you figure out how much postage is required for packages, buy stamps, and send it off, right from the post office lobby, anytime, day or night.

What's so great about a fancy kiosk? No more waiting in lines! Mail things when you want, not when the post office is open. I took this picture after mailing some domestic and international letters at 8pm tonight. How convenient is that?! No spending your lunch hour in line at the post office or trying to rush there after work. In this age of e-mail and online bill payments, perhaps that's not as much of an issue for some people. But tech maven that I am, I have a thing for fountain pens and still handwrite letters and cards. So the post office still plays a prominent role in my life.

And I seem to have an uncanny ability to get in line behind urban luddites: customers who have seemingly beamed here from 1973 and have never used an ATM touchpad before, or who spend six minutes deciding exactly which type of first class stamps they want, or who get to the front with seven unsealed packages that lack zip codes or return addresses, or who otherwise violate the rules of postal customerdom. It's infuriating for those of us who are accustomed to technology-enhanced, near-instant gratification and who think that everything, postal transactions included, should take approximately 7 seconds. Maybe 9 if it's your first time doing it.

So for those reasons, I'm LOVING the Automated Postal Center. Sure, the Glass Half Empty view is that it's yet another way to take a job or two from a postal worker, but the Glass Half Full view is that it may also free one or two postal workers to do other more labor-intensive tasks, thus speeding things up for other customers overall. Plus, the kiosk likely creates a job for the person who has to service the machine when the inevitable glitches crop up. That's the beauty of technology and the knowledge economy. Some jobs are lost, new ones are created. Sure, it's woe unto the folks who are not ready to operate in this kind of economy, but that's a diatribe for another day.

So look around the next time you're at the post office and you hear someone ask how much 37-cent stamps are. Again. An Automated Postal Center may keep you and your packages on the move.

Death of a dream: monorail voted down

I'm in a bit of a funk over the outcome of the local election on November 8. In a 65% to 35% vote, Seattle voted to shut down the Seattle Monorail Project, just two months from the start of construction. Two months! People outside this area are flabbergasted (links to PDF of article from London) that it even had to be voted on five times and that the Mayor and City Council wouldn't support it.

Part of what's so frustrating is that so many people bought into the lie that the money spent to date on the Project was "wasted", even before the vote. $70 million of the $180 million spent bought property that will now be resold, likely at a higher return for taxpayers. The rest paid for all of the technical work, engineering, environmental impact review, public outreach and and coordination with other agencies that brought the Project to the brink of construction in a record 3 years. The national average for getting to this point is 7-12 years (!) and at a cost a lot higher than $180 million. Unbelievable. Now that we're not going forward, it will be wasted.

While I was in Paris, I met with the Communications Director for the Paris Metro system (That's him to the right. Yes, I'm on the job, even while on vacation).

He's worked for the Metropolitan system for 33 years (!) so he's seen all the ups and downs transit projects go through in getting built and expanded. Despite my rusty French, I was able to tell him about the monorail we were trying to build, how everyone was upset about the proposed cost, etc. It took him all of 5 minutes to assess the situation: "Ce n'est pas un problème financier. C'est un problème politique." It's not a financial problem. It's a political problem. Mais oui

Basically he said regional leaders lacked the political will to make the monorail happen and that while it had great public support, it lacked a politial sponsor willing to see it through and deflect the inevitable opposition.

One example he gave was that they were extending a line (of a decades old successful system) and still ran into opposition from a neighborhood activist who felt the construction was too noise, too disruptive and unnecessary. After some delay, the concerns were assuaged and the project continued. "Because this is what happens: people complain," he explained. "About the construction, the cost, the disruption. You deal with it and move forward. Once it's running, people love the system again and clamor for extensions to other areas."

Small consolation that apparently only people in foreign countries with excellent transit systems understand the benefits of the project we were trying to build.

Here's a shot of J. in a Metro station in Paris. I took several pictures in the trains. They were great! Clean, efficient, timely, affordable, and easy to navigate. We walked and rode the trains everywhere. Midway through the trip, my car-loving husband even remarked, "These trains are so convenient, I don't even miss driving. If I lived here, I wouldn't even need a car." Yeah, that's what having great transit will do for you. Too bad we'll never know what that feels like here in Seattle.

Oh yeah: the post-Paris buzz is definitely gone.

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