Last Hike: More open restrooms, fewer running fountains

Dear Diary,

Well, today was my last hike this month for you.  I went to twelve parks.  All have water fountains, and six also have restrooms:

• Matthews Beach (both)
• Meadowbrook Playfield (both)
• Victory Heights Playground (fountain)
• Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (both)
• Licton Springs Park (both)
• Northgate Park (fountain)
• Pinehurst Playground (fountain)
• Jackson Park (both)
• Little Brook Park (both)
• Cedar Park (fountain)
• Albert Davis Park (fountain)
• Virgil Flaim Park (fountain)

I also went back to the street fountain on N 45th St.

My object was to complete the Google Drive folder in which I keep the boring door shots and such from the hikes I just finished.  I hadn't re-visited the parks from the third region I hiked earlier in May, as I had the parks from the first two, and so didn't have photos of them at Google Drive.  That is now fixed, as is my lack of a photo of that street fountain (which still isn't running).

Two major changes among those parks, plus some minor ones I'll cover below.  The first major one is that I found the restroom open at Little Brook Park, and the lock placed in such a way that it would not prevent latching the door.  I think that's the first time I've seen it like that, and expand on that a bit below.  The second major change is that while the water is still running to the water fountain at Virgil Flaim Park, some enterprising person has vandalised the fountain such that it's probably now easier to fill bottles there, but certainly harder to drink from the fountain.

I have nothing to say about some of the parks listed above, so don't say anything about them in this page, except what I just said:  there are now photos at Google Drive showing whether the restrooms were open or the water fountains running as of my last visit.

Matthews Beach

As in every one of my visits to date - none of which have taken place in calendrical summer - I found the shower restrooms on the lake side of the restroom building closed.  As in most of my visits to date, I also found one of the single-user stalls on the other side boarded up.  The remaining single-user stall has one toilet, no urinal, one sink which splashed me when I used it, but not as badly as the south-facing sink at Soundview Playfield, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.

The water fountain was not running.

Meadowbrook Community Center, Playfield and Pool

This is the sign I photographed by night on "Hike 9C", this time by day so it can be read:

The mural is signed "Miller" as is another adjacent; I don't know more.

The people staffing the pool as a shower and restroom provider have been busily posting updates:

unlike most of the Community Centers, including this one, although this one has at least taken down its sign saying it would close for the inauguration:

Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms were open, as expected (even the hopelessly outdated - well, hmmm, some things on the map offered by the Seattle Department of Human Services that I hiked last January to check, some things have been updated, for example Meridian Playground's restrooms are now mapped as open, other things haven't, such as the U-District location of the Urban Rest Stop still shown as open - but anyway, my point was, that until today that map was very out of date, but even it showed Meadowbrook Playfield's restrooms as having re-opened).

Um, yeah, so the Meadowbrook Playfield men's room has two toilets with stall doors, one urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.

I found all three of Meadowbrook Playfield's water fountains this time, exactly where I'd found them before.  Two ran in October, but none are running now.

Maple Leaf Reservoir Park

The restrooms were open, and there was even an employee of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation there cleaning them.  When I update the maps tomorrow, I'll change this park's restrooms to half red, half blue.

Licton Springs Park

Unlike most of the restrooms closed in Ballard and southern "NE", but like University Playground and Little Brook, this park's restrooms have no sign on their doors announcing why they're closed.  The men's room's stuff is mostly around a bend from the door, but I could see most of the women's room - the stalls have doors, in both rooms, but one of the women's stall doors had swung open - and I saw no damage.  I've heard there's damage at University Playground but not heard a convincing explanation why that was the only restroom damage not fixed last year in North Seattle, and I've also heard a completely different reason for why those restrooms haven't opened.  I figure without even a half-assed sign like those at Ravenna Park's "upper" restrooms, there's no reason I should assume a park restroom is closed because it has to be.

Anyway.  Licton Springs's water fountains are still running.

Northgate Community Center and Park

After I visited this park as part of the third region, I complained vigourously about the way the people working for Curative Inc at a COVID testing site at the south end of the park had blocked off large parts of it.  Whether because someone at the city actually read that page (something I haven't seen signs of in months), or because someone else complained effectively, or maybe because there's an actual considerate human being among Curative's local employees, their tape is now much more carefully placed.  In particular, although it runs for some distance alongside the playground and the Community Center's front, it leaves paved paths into both areas open.  I was in a hurry, however - this was only the hike's halfway point - and took only a water fountain photo (still not running), and no photos of the tape or the Center's front, at which I didn't even look.  Sorry, dear Diary.

Pinehurst Playground

As my photo shows, the water fountain here is running rather low.  I had decided to try the water of parks whose water I hadn't tried yet, so I drained the second bottle I was carrying, but it was so hard to fill a bottle (it only got halfway, actually) that I gave up on filling two.

 

Jackson Park

I owe an apology to the Jackson Park café, which I failed miserably to describe on the basis of vague, hurried impressions on my first visit earlier this month.  (All my previous visits to this park had been too early in the morning or too late in the evening for the place to be open.)  I basically conveyed my surprise that it isn't what one normally thinks of as a "café".  Well, duh, because even though they call it that at Jackson Park, it's actually much more like a bar and grill, or at least a rather unpretentious restaurant.  It does have a few pastries, and while they're definitely not Little Debbie, they also aren't the hand-crafted wonders most actual cafés take pride in.  I got a grilled cheese sandwich to go, trying to make up for many uses of their driving range men's room, and it was pretty good blocks later.

That men's room is a single-user stall with one toilet, no urinal, one sink, one dryer, and one soap dispenser.  Jackson Park is almost entirely devoted to a sport, so this is a fair test, and I did not see yellow spots on the toilet seat.  Score one against my argument that it's a bad idea to eliminate urinals from park restrooms.

I also looked carefully at the buildings, and Open Street Map hasn't left out a building, but it may have misplaced it.  Again, the map:

The building on the upper left could be the building by the driving range, but it can't be, because it doesn't really face the driving range, which is that big lighter green area on the top left.  It also isn't anywhere near wide enough.  I'm not sure I can learn enough to fix things like this in Open Street Map, but it needs fixed.  Anyway, though, I thought that was a building between the wide lower building and the unmapped driving range building, but there is no third building in that sequence; what I described as a "workshop" was actually a conflation in my memory of "employees only" doors in both buildings, the second of which (the one behind the part of the driving range building I'm familiar with) is rather workshoppish.

Little Brook Park

As noted above, I found the restroom not only open, but for the first time opened in such a way that the lock that closes it at night doesn't also keep users from latching it by day.

I don't know how much of this to attribute to the presence of a parks department employee, whose job it is to provide fun for people in neighbourhoods.  Someone, probably him, had set up a stereo providing music, and a portable basketball hoop, at which he was trying to teach a couple of teenagers some moves.  The parks department slogan is, I think, "Neighborhood Rec'n"; at least that's what's on their trucks.  However, a quick Google search on that turned up 0 results, so I just don't know.

Anyway, my point is, I don't know whether Little Brook's restroom has actually opened for the season or not, let alone whether its door will be reliably carefully arranged in future.

It has one toilet with no meaningful door, no urinal, one sink, one dryer, and a spot where someone had stolen one soap dispenser.

Cedar Park

Awkwardly, I found myself following a family that includes a teenaged girl for about half a dozen blocks on the way to this park.

It has a water fountain that ran last October, but isn't running now.

Albert Davis Park

This park was officially closed for one week after its May 6 sweep.  Supposedly that closure was to enable parks department employees to start restoring the park from the damage done by an encampment that was there for more than a year.  The parks department web page says nothing now about a closure, so presumably it hasn't been extended.

I visited this park twice during the closure, in prime daylight hours, and saw neither department employees nor their trucks.  Now it turns out they didn't even bother to show up to take down their closure materials.  For shame!

Virgil Flaim Park

As I walked to this park, a visibly homeless man saw the bottle in one of my satchel pockets and asked if I had any water to spare.  I didn't - for one thing, I've been drinking from that bottle for months, and for another, there were only a few sips in it - but I assured him that the water fountain in Virgil Flaim Park, just a block away, was running.  I had walked too far to hear his reply.

This park had the only outdoor water fountain known to me running in Lake City.  (I visited the Fred Meyer in the area today, and it may have a water fountain that's running, but I didn't find one.  The Lake City branch of the Seattle Public Library, and the Lake City Community Center, are both open limited hours.)  It's still running, but no longer drinkable from.

Some clever and immoral person, probably a resident of one of the neighbouring RVs, has extracted the pipe that delivers water to the spigot, and routed it so it instead delivers water toward the ground.  I think it's probably turnable enough to be a great bottle-filler, but can't be made a useable drinking spout.  I was too disgusted - this really is the kind of vandalism homeless people are endlessly accused of, plain as day really our fault this time - to experiment, and far too disgusted to try to fill my own bottle as I'd planned.

[EDIT 6/11 - All wrong.  I went back June 8, and found that the water actually comes not from this detached pipe, but from a hole in the side of another pipe, which makes it useless for filling bottles as well as for drinking directly.  I'm pretty sure this was sabotage rather than metal theft, and the main victims are probably the nearby homeless, so the saboteur was probably someone housed who objects to the existence of homeless people.  I apologise for blaming the victims.]

And from there, or anyway a few blocks from there, I caught a bus away, got a picture of the still not running N 45th St water fountain, and went on.

I still have one project to do, which I hope to accomplish next week, but we'll see.  At any rate, I hope not to hike for you next month, dear Diary.  Tomorrow, I should be able to update the spreadsheet in the Google Drive folder, and also show you final May maps of open and closed restrooms and running and otherwise water fountains.  Until then good night.

Another Hike in Lake City

Dear Diary,

On Wednesday, May 12, I started by going back to Lake City for several reasons.  First, to see whether anything had changed with regard to Little Brook Park's closed restroom and shut-off water fountain.  Second, because I'd forgotten to check whether Albert Davis Park's water fountain was running while I was there.  And third...

See, I'd started using Open Street Map the day before.  This wasn't really practical on my phone, I had thought, while hiking, because Open Street Map doesn't have a phone app.  (It worked OK when I tried it Wednesday, though, although the auto-locator feature of Google Maps is often important, and OSM lacks that too.)  Also, and more importantly, I dreaded trying to edit images on my phone, so I couldn't really do anything with maps except use them to guide my hikes.  Hence maps showing up in you, dear Diary, a few weeks after I bought a laptop.

Well, one important difference between Open Street Map and Google Maps is that Open Street Map maps woods.  Because I still haven't figured out where one six-acre park property is, as mentioned in the previous page, I was looking for woods.  Now, the only unaccounted-for woods on the North Fork of Thornton Creek, which the property's name indicates, are outside the region I was hiking, between I-5 and Lake City Way, but I figured I should get some practise in looking for Open Street Map's woods so as to be prepared.

So on May 11 and 12 I went carefully through this region and the two I'd already done, looking for green, unaccounted-for, on Open Street Map when I magnified the map such that, usually, five north-south blocks (for example 35th to 40th Streets) filled the screen.  I only found three such places in the second region, southern "NW".  There were eight in the first region, southern "N" and southwestern "NE", all but one in Fremont, and most of those adjacent to Aurora Ave N.  And there were eleven in the region I was going back to, including some vast areas.  So that would be my test.

Here's the unaltered Open Street Map presentation of most of the part of Lake City I was hiking, at the same scale as the maps I've been showing you, dear Diary.  Can you spot the four places I wanted to investigate?

Here's the same map, marked with the places I looked at.  Note that Albert Davis Park is actually off the map to the south.

Finally, here's the front page of the day's newspaper, for recognising it better in the photos from the entire Wednesday hike:

Now let's get started.

Little Brook Park

The only change in the restroom and water fountain is that this time I photographed them with the newspaper I'd brought along.  I've already shown you, dear Diary, the first photo.

Here's the other:

(And isn't it wonderful to see in that headline that a local government actually cares about Seattle's homeless?)

That's all I did in Little Brook Park that day.

Private Yards and Schoolyards

Open Street Map doesn't show, at any level of magnification, people's private front, side, or back yards.  Except when it does.  Northern Lake City includes some very large housing developments.  Some of these have very large yards.  And for some reason Open Street Map thinks two of these are worth singling out in green.  It even names one of them.  If someone goes to "Sherwood dog area" as shown on Open Street Map, one block from Little Brook Park, this is what greets her:

The other, considerably larger, property Open Street Map greens is way off to the west.  I found one of similar size also near Little Brook, but OSM doesn't bother with that one.  The one they do green has this sign:

To be fair, OSM did warn me about the third place, that it was adjacent to a school, I just ignored that.  I didn't bother photographing their sign.

So at this point Open Street Map was 0 for 3, but then...

NE 133rd St trail

This one is in fact parklike and open to the public.  It's the block between 27th and 28th Avenues NE, which are the avenues on either side of the library, Albert Davis Park, and so on, and I can imagine reasons for cutting 133rd off there, but in any event, Lake City is under-parked, so every bit helps, even one as small as a single block of unimproved street.

 

It even has parklike signage, threatening all manner of evildoers but especially negligent dog walkers:

Albert Davis Park

I found a copy of the notice that was given of the sweep:

I did what I came for, and no, of course the water fountain wasn't running.

I observed that the boundaries of the notionally closed park remained unclear even with keep-out tape:

It only occurs to me as I write this that I visited this closed park twice during the week it was closed, a week that was supposed to serve the purpose of getting the park back into shape, both visits were during the day, and I didn't observe a single employee of the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation actually present, or at least not - it's not like I've memorised the faces of every parks department staffer - doing anything to improve the park's state.

Near the spot shown in the last photo is one piece of genuinely neat stuff, a "shrine" to Will Rogers at what it claims was the site of his last rodeo:

One thing that does bring to mind, though.  Both Will Rogers and Albert Davis were white men.  But I don't have a clue what Virgil Flaim looked like.  Hmmm.

Anyway, my errands in Lake City done, I took a bus to my next stop, Hubbard Homestead.  Which is the subject of your next page, dear Diary.

A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part I

Dear Diary,

From Licorice Fern Natural Area on NE 130th St, I went south to NE 125th St, and then east.  My first stop was the only Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation park in North Seattle that I knew about but didn't visit last year.

Map:

Thornton Creek Addition

Google Maps is quite sure where this park's address - 2318 NE 125th St - is, and who's there:  the Food Distribution Center of Greater Seattle Cares.  Actually, as Google Search knows, that center's address is 2212 NE 125th St.  Google Maps doesn't have a clue who's at 2212, but knows it's the address of, well, this park.  Whatever.

Google Search is right, and Google Maps is wrong.

Although if the food distribution people were never here, I don't know why I found three abandoned shopping carts on the premises.

Regardless, the parks department didn't want this property for its building, which according to Redfin is a 3-bedroom house prone to flooding.  Rather, for its frontage on the North Fork of Thornton Creek:

Of course, it also comes with a lawn.

I hope they don't just tear down the building - if nothing else, it contains three restrooms - and kind of hope, given that Lake City is pretty under-parked, they don't turn this nearly-an-acre site into Yet Another Thornton Creek Natural Area.  But they only bought it in 2019; time will tell.

Virgil Flaim Park

The parks department website comes through again.  Virgil Flaim was a Lake City resident who ran the Lake City Community Center for twenty years.  I don't know when the community centers became parks department properties, so don't know whether he was a department employee, but anyway, good for them for naming this park for him.

Since I've shown you pictures of this park before, dear Diary, I didn't worry too much about taking more this time; also, it was fairly crowded.  It has a water fountain, which is running:

and I took a couple of pictures of the greensward to show that there isn't a restroom being built there yet:

Albert Davis Park

The parks department website gives Davis, who definitely wasn't an employee, a long paragraph as a Lake City civic leader.

This park was the site of an encampment from before I first saw it last May (when the campers appeared to me mostly black), on through January (when they were considerably more mixed in race), to Thursday, May 6, one week ago, when it was swept largely in response to incidents the previous Thursday (and Friday).  Two people were shot (but survived), one of them in his RV adjacent to the camp, the other at an unrevealed location; if the identity or identities of the shooter or shooters is or are known, it's news to me.  But the Friday incident was a fire sparked by propane use at the park itself, which makes associating it with the park rather more obvious.

Seattle has a pattern that I doubt is unique to it, but that I've observed more here than elsewhere perhaps because I've been homeless so long here.  That is, some location gets associated with a lot of issues - violence, fires, drug dealers, prostitution, loud arguments, litter, you name it.  The city responds by, essentially, blaming the location.  What I don't understand is why city leaders, who ought to be wiser than I am, can't grasp that some poor people have a lot of issues.  If they don't want such people's places to become problematic, they shouldn't concentrate those people in one place; but because nobody wants poor neighbours, for precisely this reason, and also because they can't pay for one-acre lots, poor people get concentrated.  And so in location after location, Something Must Be Done, or at least Shoved Off To Somewhere Else.  The problem of sweeps is by no means limited to the homeless.  The SRO I lived in for nearly six years is closed to this day because faulty wiring caused a fire over five years ago.  (Though an employee told me it was because an alcoholic fell asleep while smoking.)  The building appears to be fine (the fire was after I was evicted, so I'm only going by what I see from outside), but nearly forty housing units are lost.  And then there's the Everspring Inn, to coverage of whose closure (initiated by the Seattle Police Department) I've put links into you before, dear Diary, but here are some more:  Crosscut, The Seattle Times.  Even if all the homeless were shot down tomorrow, this pattern would persist, and because of it, there would be more homeless soon enough.

Anyway, there are two important differences between park sweeps conducted by the Navigation Team and those conducted by the parks department.  The parks department has consistently been giving notice, and it gets the places it sweeps clean.  These are not unconnected:  if notice is given, the sweeps have fewer campers to deal with, and less difficulty making the distinction between valuable property and trash, a distinction homeless people are always going to make differently from how housed city employees do.

But that cleanliness meant that for the first time, I could take pictures in Albert Davis Park, so that's what I did.  Only not in the park, because after I'd walked across it, I found this sign:

It took a deal of work to photograph the fine print there at the lower right corner, but I did it:

So I only took pictures from the sidewalk outside the park.

In all the excitement, I completely forgot this park's water fountain, so I came back Wednesday, and hope to tell you, dear Diary, about that tomorrow.  Today I still have a lot to tell and show you, starting with the rest of the block Albert Davis Park is in.

A Tale of Three Lake Cities

Dear Diary,

I just got home from visiting a bunch of sites, including twelve parks, half of which I'd never photographed before.  So I'd tell you all about it, except that it's late and my house has quiet time starting quite a few minutes ago, which isn't really consistent with showing you a bunch of photos.

Instead, I'll summarise.

EDIT 5/11:  Map of the region, courtesy of the Open Street Map project.

Hike 1:  Northern Lake City.  One park:  Little Brook Park, photographed before.  Restroom closed, water fountain not running.  That water fountain ran in May of last year, but not in October.  I've always assumed it was turned off in summer, like the fountain in Burke-Gilman Playground Park, but then never turned back on.  However, it's possible that it's broken somewhere that doesn't show.  Or it really was forgotten last summer, but it's on the same water supply as the restroom, and the reason it's off now is that that hasn't been turned back on.  My point is that while this is proof that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation is not, in fact, re-enacting last year, it doesn't prove much else.

Hike 2:  Jackson Park and vicinity.  Three parks:  Flicker Haven Natural Area, Jackson Park and Licorice Fern Natural Area, none of which I'd shown you photographs of before, dear Diary.  Jackson Park has six restrooms (three pairs), all of which I found open (this is both the first time I've photographed the doors, and the first time I've seen one pair, because before today I'd only visited Jackson Park early, and the café doesn't open until later), and two water fountains, both of which I found running.

Little Brook Park is in a black neighbourhood, Jackson Park a white one, and their users reflect this.  On the other hand, Little Brook is publicly managed, Jackson privately.  So I wondered, is this an instance of racism or one of public incompetence and private competence?  It certainly seemed a straightforward tale of two more-or-less Lake Cities.  But then:

Hike 3:  Downtown Lake City (west of Lake City Way), whose population, both homeless and housed, is mixed in race.  Four parks:  Albert Davis Park, Lake City Mini Park, Thornton Creek Addition and Virgil Flaim Park.  I've photographed only "sanican"s and other plumbing in Albert Davis (and/or the Lake City Community Center) and Lake City Mini, and hadn't visited Thornton Creek Addition at all before today.  Albert Davis has a water fountain I didn't remember to check; it didn't run last year.  Albert Davis was swept a few days ago, and is now officially closed through Thursday; its SPU sink is no longer in a Lake City park, but its "sanican"s went to Lake City Mini, which also now has two working hand-washing stations.  Virgil Flaim has a water fountain that ran last October, and is running now.  The pair of park restrooms downtown Lake City badly needs to get before The Big One strikes has not yet been built in Virgil Flaim.  But also, the Lake City Community Center is keeping a few open hours thanks to the people from the charity God's Lil' Acre, and the Lake City branch of the Seattle Public Library has re-opened in the limited way a few libraries outside North Seattle had already done.

So at this point I didn't know what to think.  To complete the story, though:

Hike 4:  Across Pinehurst plateau.  Four parks:  Homewood Natural Area, Hubbard Homestead, Pinehurst Playground and Pinehurst Pocket Park.  I'd shown you photographs of all but the last, dear Diary.  Pinehurst Playground has a water fountain, which I found running (as it had last May and October), and a "sanican", but no hand-washing station.

All for now, dear Diary; some food for thought, and of course an incomplete summary of four or more upcoming pages in you.  Good night!

Hike 9B: Far Northeast

Dear Diary,

I'm going to try to consolidate two visits to Green Lake and Woodland Parks into one page, thus giving me a better chance of finishing with the January hikes before summer.  So hikes 8D and 9A are being postponed to accompany hike 10; all you need to know for now is that on January 20 I went northeast from Green Lake Park to Lake City.

Albert Davis Park and Lake City Community Center

Introduced May 28 in "Top of the City", part I, and later discussed November 17 in "Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us!"  Please assume these same pages for the rest of the parks in this page, dear Diary.  Each time I've visited this park, it's been the site of a large homeless camp.

All the "sanican"s here are in the park, but for some reason the map these hikes were meant to check thought they were in the community center, so I've used both names.

About the time I got to the main bloc of "sanican"s, so did a young man who informed me, as I puzzled over my first encounter with an SPU sink, that it didn't work.  Neither, quoth he (and I soon verified), did the hand-washing station.  Sensing a major story, I asked how long things had been this way.  "Well, that worked yesterday [the hand-washing station], and that [the sink] is new in general."  Nope, no story, just bad timing on my part and on my young informant's.  His timing was rescued by another guy who showed up with a small water bottle, which he tossed to my contact.  That gentleman then proceeded to do what ablutions he could do in public with maybe twelve ounces of water.

So I couldn't photograph that setup just yet, and instead started the surprisingly complex task of circling the community center so as to decide where to focus the postcard shot.  Along the way I came across a "sanican" that apparently had misbehaved enough to get it ostracised from all its peers, way off at the other end of the park:

By the time I got back, the group of young men was gone.

The open door at the end wasn't a malfunction, just an airing out:

Anyway, here's what I thought the community center's best face:

and here are the (mostly) closed doors:

Lake City Mini Park

Oops.  Apparently this one isn't in the page from November?  Anyway, also a big homeless encampment served by "sanican"s:

Of course I checked, and yes, this hand-washing station had water:

God's Lil' Acre

This not being a park, I haven't brought it up before.  It appears to be one of the crutches allowing the city to get away without proper park restrooms in Lake City during this pandemic, like the Dick's Drive-In mentioned in the November page.  It also appears to be more of an all-around charity, as opposed to the primary focus on hygiene of the two North Seattle branches of the Urban Rest Stop.

Anyway, my main interest in the charities was verifying that they were open, or more precisely documenting that they were open, giving the map that listed them credit where it's due.  So here's my best attempt at a postcard shot:

And here are the open doors:

Cedar Park

Not, that I've observed, a campsite.  But it does have a "sanican":

Just as the map said, then and today.

Little Brook Park

I've also observed no camping here.  Like Greenwood Park, covered January 25 in "Hikes 3C and 6A", it has only one restroom, designed so as to be latchable but with that capacity usually impeded, with nice big holes for peeping Toms to look through, oh, I could rant for days about these rooms' blatant inadequacies, but what's relevant here is that as simple boxes, they aren't at all winter ready, so:

My best try at making this bad building look good:

Now, arguably Meadowbrook Pool, Community Center and Playfield, and maybe even Matthews Beach, are in Lake City, but I took far too many photos at Meadowbrook, and didn't get to Matthews Beach at all that day.  So I'll stop here for now, dear Diary, but may still get to Meadowbrook tonight.