WESTWARD HO! - VISIT #1

I've recently returned from yet another jaunt to the west coast to visit friends, by train as usual.

First stop was in Seattle.  Kathy, Bob, and I clambered over about a mile of rocky beach to see the unique treehouse that Pete Nelson built for the show "Treehouse Masters" in 2011.  The story was that a couple owned a piece of beachfront property that wasn't large enough to build a conventional house, so Nelson created a treehouse in the general shape of a lighthouse.  There didn't appear to be anyone home when we arrived.

Neat, huh?

The shoreline has the wreckage of several homes that lost the battle with storms and gravity, and a number of really nice homes still perched on the cliff.  One caught our eye especially for the statue the homeowner had built.

Known as "The Architect", it's supposedly the likeness of the home's builder.  Now that's odd.

But the most fun for me was a visit Kathy and I made to the Chihuly Gardens, where the artist and his students have created some magical structures from blown glass.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Chihuly  I was truly blown away (pun intended) by all the shapes and forms of his pieces.  Herewith a sampling of the ones indoors in the museum (with apologies for the poor photography):

 (This is a detail of the piece below.)

Better still were the pieces displayed outside in the 'gardens':

 (Every curl is an individually-blown shape; all hung on a steel superstructure.)

 (Can you spot the glass ferns among the real ones?)

But the masterpiece, for me, was in the airplane hanger-sized 'conservatory':

Breath-takingly awesome.

The Chihuly Museum and Gardens are in the large complex of attraction around the Space Needle.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Space+Needle/@47.620506,-122.349277,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x5490151f4ed5b7f9:0xdb2ba8689ed0920d?hl=en

Including the EMP museum, which I really need to visit next time.  Really freaky structure - which is wrapped around the monorail tracks.

As I've said before, there are a lot of homeless in Seattle.  But, not surprisingly, there are lots of wealthy folks as well.  Take the houses I mentioned before along the shoreline in the Magnolia district, or these floating houses along the shore of Union Lake.

But enough commentary - back to sightseeing.

I visited the waterfront area, home to the 'wheel',

and the Pike Place Market, a rambling twisty structure housing hundreds of vendors selling (like any flea market) a large assortment of flowers, food and gee-gaws of all kinds.  It also contains this very precisely-labeled public restroom.

Outside a fireboat was making an exuberant display, for no apparent reason.

And in a park near one end of the Market there was this sculpture.

It's entitled the 'Tree of Life', and there are leaf-shaped cut-outs, but it still looks like a diving whale to me.  I guess I'd never make it as an art critic.

And of course I cannot stop and smell them, but I will stop and photograph flowers, especially if they're yellow.

On to Sacramento!

DEATH OF A TREE

I had to have a large pine removed from the back of my property yesterday.  Several feet in diameter at the base, it stood about 35-40 feet tall, and was pretty large when we moved into this house in 1987.  It had been struck by lightning at least once but that had only twisted the top.  But now it was looking poorly and I certainly didn't want it to come crashing into the back porch.

If you've never seen this done, it's a little scary to watch.  Some little guy shimmies up the tree with a huge chainsaw dangling from his belt, cutting branches as he goes up.  They're lowered by ropes to the ground.  Then he cuts off the top, and shimmies back down the now bare trunk, cutting off chunks as he descends.  The rest of the crew chop up the wood into manageable pieces for the chipper.  The whole affair took less than three hours.  Here's the sequence in pictures.

AND, they did it without any damage to the row of Hostas lined up a few feet from the base.

BUT, now there's less shade in the morning.  I need to plant some replacements.

9TH STREET ITALIAN FESTIVAL

I spent an enjoyable afternoon at Phila's 9th Street Italian Festival, roughly half a mile of food, music, and vendors selling the usual mix of jewelry, art, and various tchotchkies.

There were a number of musical stages and acts, some groups

and some solo acts

Others were DJ operations, and the music and sunshine combined to get people dancing, to everything from 'Wobble Baby'

to the Mummers' Strut

Down at the South end of the Festival, Geno's had something of a line

PAT'S not so much

I'm not sure if this means Geno's is more popular, or that Pat's just has quicker service.  But there was much to tempt.  Yum!