Truth and fantasy about park restrooms in winter

Dear Diary,

I've now mapped the park restrooms that were promised to be open in North Seattle last winter:

and then modified that map by what I found in February and in March:

The big circles that are obvious on the map represent differences between what I found and what we were all told last November.  Eight of those differences are restrooms closed that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's spokes-person claimed would be open; and two are restrooms open that she did not claim would be.

1. Little Brook Park.  We were told the unheated wooden box of a restroom this park has would be open this past winter, and to emphasise the point, responsibility for keeping it open was given to both the Northwest and the Northeast parks maintenance crews.  However, someone on one of those crews sensibly enough put a closure sign up instead.  Lake City still needs real park restrooms, which should be in Virgil Flaim Park; it doesn't need jokes about the inadequate room it has instead.
   
2. Jackson Park.  The parks department tends to ignore this park in many ways, including lists of restrooms; in particular, the restrooms there are maintained, opened and closed by employees of a private lessee, not by the parks department.  So this is more an apparent difference than a real one, but still, there's restrooms in a city-owned park that were open this past winter but not in the posted list, so it's still a difference.
3. Sandel Playground.  Both in 2020-2021 and in 2022-2023 I found the restrooms there locked; in both years they were supposed to open.  I think this is a disagreement between the parks department's PR people and the northwest maintenance crew.  I hope they settle it before next winter.
4. Green Lake Park, Bathhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open in winter and summer, but not in spring and fall, so again, I wasn't surprised to find them open despite their omission from the posted list, but it's still a difference.
   
5. Salmon Bay Park.  I'm not sure whether this building has heat, but it doesn't have much room for it, and these restrooms haven't customarily been open in winter.  I'm guessing this lie was meant to appease people in Ballard who want the homeless to have somewhere to go besides the library and the bushes.  Maybe including Ballard's city council member?  Or maybe it was much less than that, just a joke on me, as previously suggested.  Mind, dear Diary, I still don't have a clue why the indoor restrooms with doors that open to the outdoors, in the Ballard Community Center, close each winter, unless it's out of hatred towards homeless people.  But we weren't promised Ballard Community Center last winter, and we were promised Salmon Bay Park.
   
6. Green Lake Park, Shellhouse restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the building they're in is currently behind a construction fence.
7. Ravenna Park, lower restrooms.  These are customarily open year-round, but the men's room has been locked for years, and the women's room was locked too when I went there this past winter.
8. Woodland Park, Citywide Athletics Building ("Rio") restrooms.  These have also been locked for years, and have acquired an impressive amount of graffiti on this subject.  Now, closing restrooms in winter that could be kept open is supposed to enable the parks maintenance crews to clean graffiti up, so I'm not sure why they're neglecting these examples.  Nor am I clear on why the athletes were left without restrooms this past winter, considering that a perfectly reasonable alternative (Woodland Park Cloverleaf) is available a few blocks north, and was opened winter 2020-2021.
9. University Playground.  The restrooms have been closed for years, since the pandemic began and probably since before then.  They've been fenced in, in the recent past; they're now welded shut.  A blatant lie.
10. Gas Works Park.  A little further along than the Green Lake Small Crafts Center (whose restrooms are referred to by the name of the nearby Shellhouse); here it's the place where the building was that's now surrounded by a construction fence.

In the past, I've suggested that the parks department's pathological inability to tell the truth about its winter restrooms resulted from a sorcerer's spell.  This year, there's perhaps a more prosaic explanation.  This past winter, visitors to parks all over southern North Seattle, south of 65th, say, got to experience what park visitors in Lake City experience all the time:  no restrooms.  As many were closed despite claims they'd be open, as were open:  Green Lake Shellhouse, Woodland "Rio", Gas Works, lower Ravenna, and University were all promised but closed; Woodland Pink Palace and 50th, Green Lake 64th, Wallingford and - I presume, not having gotten there myself - Laurelhurst were all promised and open.  Now, something similar happens in West Seattle on a regular basis, and West Seattle typically has more political power in Seattle than southern North Seattle does.  But maybe the parks department didn't like the optics of admitting how far someone needing a restroom would have to walk, in southern North Seattle, so it decorated truth with fantasy.

Or maybe it didn't like admitting how few open restroom locations in North Seattle it was using our tax dollars to support this winter, so it added a few it knew wouldn't be open.  We were promised 25.  We got 18.  (Jackson Park's restrooms aren't supported by tax dollars.)  In 2019-2020, we got 23.  We got 72% of what was promised, and 78% of three years ago.  In my experience, in school, these would usually be passing grades, but they aren't in my current job.  Are they passing grades in parks department jobs?

At least this year, there isn't an agency serving the homeless that relies on the parks department to tell the truth about its own property.  So with any luck, my former peers weren't misled by those lies.  I wonder who else was.

Good night, dear Diary.  I don't know when I'll be back, so have a happy spring, by day and night both.

My March Hikes

Dear Diary,

This page concerns four hikes I made in March.  The first two started pretty late, so didn't cover many parks.  The fourth was too late to observe the parks in winter, and anyway had to be cut short because I had to make it to an appointment for work.  (Three of my four Wednesdays "off" in the last month of tax season ended up with appointments anyway.)  So only the third was a really useful hike, but I have things to tell you from the others as well.

March 5th

On this day, having started late, I only made it to Jackson Park, Northacres Park and Playfield, Bitter Lake Playfield, and Sandel Playground; the links are to the folders at Google Drive with most of the photos.  I already talked about Sandel.  All the others deserve attention here.

Jackson Park

As usual, this park's water fountains were on:

Northacres Park and Playfield

As usual, this park's specially winter-adapted water fountains:

had been shut down for the winter:

My best guess is that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation didn't deliberately set out to waste this special quality of these fountains.  Rather, I'm thinking they attached them to a restroom building that at that time was heated, but whose heating since broke down and wasn't fixed.  On the other hand, the recently installed set of similar fountains (without explicit labels) at Cal Anderson Park have been shut down every winter since they appeared, so maybe the parks department actually does buy winter-proof fountains without any intention of using their winter-proof qualities.  I don't know.

Bitter Lake Playfield

There's nothing unusual about Bitter Lake's restrooms as well as water fountains being shut down in winter.

Except that that building wasn't supposed to look like that any more:

Maybe there wasn't a plan to heat the building, but at least the restrooms were going to be de-gendered.  (And presumably lose their urinals.)  What happened?

Several projects have been rescheduled, of course, not just this one.  What confuses me is the question whether there are limits to this rescheduling.  Later in this page I'm showing you some torn-down restroom buildings, dear Diary.  Will those projects be rescheduled before the replacements are put up?

March 12th

That day I had a lot to do other than hike, so the only park I made it to was Salmon Bay Park, for the second time, an hour earlier than the first, as discussed in the first page about this set of hikes.

March 19th

I only reached five parks on my last Sunday off during tax season, but two are kind of large:  Gas Works Park, Wallingford Playfield, Meridian Playground, Woodland Park and Green Lake Park.  Also the street fountain on 45th, which wasn't running.

Gas Works Park

The main decorative motif in the core area of Gas Works Park where the actual gas works are, as well as the restrooms, water fountains, playground and so forth, is currently fences.  The parks department claims that this is because construction on the long-planned renovations in that area has begun:

But it seems to me all that's happened so far is, um, destruction:

So this is one of the projects I'm worried about.

To be fair, the parks department has deployed lots of "sanican"s to the parking lot, as well as at least one hand-washing station.

Woodland Park

The list of restrooms to be open this winter posted by Christina Hirsch in November includes three entries in this park:  "Woodland Park 50th", which is near some of the picnic shelters; "Woodland Park Pink Palace", which is near the rest of the picnic shelters - both in the western part of the non-zoo part of the park (and both of which I did indeed find open).  And "Woodland Park Rio".  That refers to the restrooms whose doors open to the outside in the Citywide Athletics Building, toward the southern end of the park's easternmost part, the athletic fields.  These restrooms:

I'm not clear on why, this past winter, there were restrooms for the people hiking on the west side of the block, but none for the much greater number doing athletic stuff on the east side.  Last time I went these rounds, the restrooms at the centre of the baseball cloverleaf were opened, daylight hours more or less, to substitute for "Rio"'s closure.  This time, I found the building's attached water fountain running, which certainly suggests it has some kind of heat.  But on March 19th, 2023, I didn't find the cloverleaf restrooms open, in full daylight at 3:18 P.M.

As with the restrooms in lower Ravenna Park, these "Rio" rooms have been closed for well over a year now.  The list I'm checking was actively revised; why did the reviser not know about these two closures?

Green Lake Park

Another revision in that list concerned Green Lake Park.  Customarily, the "Bathhouse" restrooms, that is, those with doors opening to the outside at the Bathhouse Theatre building where the Public Theatre presents shows, have been open in winter.  This winter's list omitted them, but in fact they were, as usual, open, at least on March 19th:

Flipside, the list of open restrooms for last winter did include the "Green Lake Shellhouse".  But...

I'm not sure, but I think the building with the restrooms was still standing when I visited.  To be fair, the row of "sanican"s nearby has two hand-washing stations.

Now, Green Lake Park has its own mini-rescheduling situation.  The Community Center was supposed to be renovated.  This resulted in a truly horrifying story I've already told you, dear Diary, or anyway a truly horrifying part of an even more horrifying story, in which I found out the water wasn't running in the men's room only after using the toilet there.  During an atmospheric river.  Let's just say the Community Center's renovations matter to me.  So now, having already inflicted damage preparing for those renovations, they're not doing them after all.  All this I already knew.

But imagine my surprise to find that instead a different set of restrooms at Green Lake Park is fenced away, to be torn down and replaced.  Green Lake Park just can't win for losing, can it?

March 22nd

Before I took any photos that day, I saw a man come out of the restroom in Greenwood Park.  Which is just like the restroom in Little Brook Park, essentially a wooden box, certainly not heated.  So this was proof that the parks department had pivoted back to its regular roster of restrooms to open.

Obstinately, I kept hiking anyway.  Again, I made it to five parks:  Sandel Playground, Greenwood Park, Licton Springs Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, and Waldo J. Dahl Playfield.

Of course, I found four of these parks had open restrooms.  That's what happens outside winter, right?  (Well, except in Ravenna Park, and Gas Works Park, and ...)

And except in Licton Springs Park:

Notice, dear Diary, that this sign doesn't make any promises as to when the actual construction part will happen.

All for now, dear Diary.  What remains for this set of pages is to do some mapping and see if there's anything worth saying about that.  Probably Sunday or Monday.

But I'm currently, as the placeholder with which I started this page indicated, focusing on other areas of my life.  Longer term, I am promised at least eight weeks off work this summer, and intend to spend at least one of them doing something I haven't yet done for you at all, a summer hike of North Seattle.  I also hope to visit a few counties I may write about the rest of this year.

So probably one page early next week, and then maybe none for a while.  Happy days and nights as spring continues, dear Diary!

My February Hikes

Dear Diary,

To start with, I planned to tackle all the parks with restrooms in one region of North Seattle, that is, NE, N and NW, in one day off each.  In reality, on February 19th I visited the majority of NE parks; on February 26, the majority of NW (adding one on the 28th); on March 5 a few in NE and N; on March 12 only Salmon Bay Park; and on March 19 most of N.  (In each region I started in the north, to keep myself from focusing as usual on the closer-together parks further south.)  On March 22 (my day off had switched), I visited the parks of Greenwood and east of there, which were most of what was left, but it was already too late to evaluate their restrooms' winter availability.

In your previous page, dear Diary, I focused on the lists of park restrooms open in winter posted by Christina Hirsch in 2019 and in 2022.  In particular, I noted that of four restrooms or restroom pairs added to the 2022 list in North Seattle, three appeared to be outright lies (University Playground's restroom doors welded shut; Little Brook Park's restroom posted as seasonally closed; Salmon Bay Park's restrooms locked on two visits) and one, at best, a conflict between Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation management and the parks maintenance workers who actually open, clean, do minor repairs on, and close the restrooms, that is, Sandel Playground's restrooms, which now in two winters (2020-2021 and 2022-2023) have been advertised as open but have instead been closed.

However, I found other interesting things on these hikes, including but not limited to more lies, and so plan two other pages to tell you about them, dear Diary.  This is the first, and covers NE and NW.

February 19th

I've now uploaded most of the photos to Google Drive.  For this hike, that means Magnuson Park, Matthews Beach, Little Brook Park, all visited between 1 and 4 pm; then University Playground, Cowen Park, Ravenna Park, Burke-Gilman Playground Park and View Ridge Playfield, between 4 P.M. and 9 P.M.  (The restrooms at Burke-Gilman Playground Park, which I reached at 7:20 P.M., both had visible seasonal closure notices still up; those at View Ridge Playfield, which I reached at 8:04 P.M., stay open all the time, 24/7.  For which I was very grateful by that time, because all the other open restrooms - Magnuson Park's beach restrooms and Matthews Beach's - had been early in the hike.)

I found the street-style fountain near the intersection of the Burke-Gilman Trail and 30th Ave NE not running.  I didn't check the park-style fountain further south.

Other notes:

Magnuson Park

As the previous page noted, without going out of my way re water fountains, I found four that were running, of which three were attached to heated buildings.  The fourth was in Magnuson Park.  It was running strongly:

I was concerned enough about this - cold weather was then forecast - to write to Rachel Schulkin, PR at the parks department.  But I thought there was a real chance that someone in charge at Magnuson Park was doing a controlled experiment, comparing an attached fountain with a free-standing one.  So I told her the fountains should be turned off unless they represented such an experiment.

I think I was worrying too much.  I've told you before, dear Diary, that while homeless I began tracking low temperatures in spreadsheets - a succession of these as the electronic gadgets where I kept them broke or were stolen.  (And as my standards changed.  I originally just listed temperature readings from signs I passed on my way to campus.)  The surviving version goes back to 2019, and I still go to some trouble to keep that spreadsheet up.

Now, 2022 was distinctive compared to the other years I still have, and as best I remember going further back.  I track three thermometers:  one at the roof of the UW's Atmospheric Sciences building, measured every minute by UW personnel; one at Boeing Field, measured every five minutes by the National Weather Service; and one at NOAA's building on the UW campus, a couple blocks south of the Atmospheric Sciences building and much closer to the water, measured every hour also by the National Weather Service.  Historically, my comments on the spreadsheet concerned almost only missed readings at one or another of these.  UW was usually the highest, NOAA often the lowest.  But in 2022, NOAA's readings started going haywire, very often dropping by 8º Fahrenheit for a single reading, sometimes two or three times in 24 hours.  I noted these but only recorded more believable lows.  My complaints about NOAA's readings got ever more baroque as these "swoops" became more frequent and more extreme (for a time they were consistently 11º F in extent).  Finally October 1st to 6th, neither NOAA nor UW gave credible readings; readings at both ranged 11º to 15º F throughout those days.  From October 7th to November 23rd, NOAA was credible, the UW not; but on November 24th, NOAA swooped eight times, and this pattern of frequent swoops making it un-useable as a data source has been its pattern basically ever since, except for a few weeks around New Year's.  On November 28th, the UW came back, and has been steady ever since.  I've since learnt, from my work on the counties, that actually the Weather Service has multiple stations whose temperature readings regularly swoop; I suspect the main brand of thermometer NWS relies on is maybe not up to being used outside for years on end.

Anyway, though, this melange of sources reported a bunch of temperatures in the 20s before February 19 of this year.  November 9th, 2022:  NOAA 29º (Boeing 30º).  November 18th through 20th (both NOAA and Boeing).  December 1st and 2nd, also the 15th and 16th (all Boeing; UW higher).  December 21st through 24th (both UW and Boeing, and going down to 16º).  January 30th, 2023 (both UW, at 29º, and Boeing, at 21º).  So when I found that fountain running on February 19th, one of two things had to be true:  Either it was equal to 16º temperatures, or it was being closely supervised by someone able and willing to turn it off when such temperatures threatened.

So I shouldn't have worried so much.  It looks like Seattle parks could have a lot more running water fountains in typical Seattle winters, although if the explanation is close supervision, that probably doesn't scale up too well.

I didn't find the showers at either Magnuson or Matthews beaches running.

Ravenna Park

Both the 2019 list and the 2022 list said Ravenna Park's lower restrooms were open.  I know from when you began, dear Diary, that the 2019 list was telling the truth.  The 2022 list was not, and I can't imagine why a list that had clearly been actively compiled included the long-term-closed restrooms at Ravenna Park.

February 26th

Again, most of the photos are now at Google Drive, including Carkeek Park, Golden Gardens Park, Soundview Playfield, Loyal Heights Community Center, Salmon Bay Park, Ballard Community Center, Ballard Commons, and also the street water fountain at Greenwood Ave and 85th St, which was near a place where I changed buses, and which I found running very strongly:

Carkeek Park

Carkeek Park is distinctive among the parks of North Seattle with regard to its restrooms:  It's the largest park with only one restroom location.  Jackson Park, the next largest, has only one location for restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and all its restrooms are in one small part of the park, but most of the park is a golf course, which apparently makes that OK.  Otherwise, the next smaller park with only one set of restrooms is Maple Leaf Reservoir Park, one-seventh the size of Carkeek Park.

The reason Carkeek Park can get away with having so few restrooms is partly that most of what's interesting in that park is near those restrooms - the beach, the playground, the picnic shelters.  It's also partly that, like Jackson Park, it used to have park restrooms whose doors open indoors.  But then the Environmental Learning Center at Carkeek Park, which is way off at the other end of the park, much closer to city streets, closed to the public, leaving Carkeek with only one set of restrooms.

So what's new is that one of the ELC buildings has re-opened to the public:

In 2010 it was open Tuesdays through Saturdays, but 10 A.M. to 4 P.M.  So the current schedule is nearly as many hours, though, as in many libraries, it's managed this largely by expanding morning hours.

The front of this building has a lot of glass:

Through this I could see the doors of the restrooms, and could also see a couple of people working.  But they weren't formally open, and I didn't want to bother them (partly because, after all, I hoped to finish NW that day).

Golden Gardens Park

I vaguely remember that the showers here were running, unlike those at Matthews Beach and Magnuson Park.  But my photos don't document this, and it could be a false memory.

February 28th

Gilman Playground

As with Burke-Gilman Playground Park, I got here outside my usual hours limits (6:06 P.M.), but it was OK because there were still closure signs on the doors.  At Google Drive see here.

All for now, dear Diary.  I'll write up the March hikes in the coming days as my schedule allows.  Until then, happy nights and days.

Happy Birthday, Dear Diary! Seattle Parks Lied Again!

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry for neglecting you for so long, and especially given that I left you on a cliffhanger, not knowing whether I'd become homeless over a month ago or had gotten a job at long last.

Well, it was the latter.  I've spent years of my life preparing people's taxes, and got a job by being willing to keep a tax office open the entirety of its open hours.  Which left me only one day off per week.

So I spent those days off hiking, but didn't even get around to uploading the photos to Google Drive timely, much less telling you, Dear Diary, about the hikes, with all the maps and other paraphernalia we've gotten used to.

Now that tax season is over, mirabile dictu, I still have a job, but with considerably fewer hours.  And I wanted to congratulate you on your third birthday, Dear Diary, with a preview of those hikes' results.

I'd told you before about the announcement by Christina Hirsch in November 2022 of which park restrooms would be open this winter.  It's her second such announcement, the first having appeared in 2019.  The 2019 list turned out to be a much better guide to which park restrooms in North Seattle were open during the winter of 2020-2021 than the map the city was then promoting as answering that question.  But by now, things have changed.  The 2022 list omits a few restrooms the 2019 list included:  Ballard Commons (which was fenced closed until March 12 of this year); Cal Anderson Park (sort of:  it's listed this time as having had "portables", but the 2019 list had no such note); Discovery Park's beach restrooms; Green Lake Park's Bathhouse restrooms (which I nevertheless found open).

And it adds a ton of others, eighteen, near as I can count.  Only four of these are in North Seattle, and in my own November 2022 discussion I expressed surprise about three of these.  I didn't find any of the four actually open.

On Sunday, February 19th, at 3:08 P.M., Little Brook Park's restroom (yes, only one) was closed with a seasonal closure sign posted:

At 4:17 P.M. that day, I found University Playground's restrooms not only closed, but welded closed:

On Sunday, February 26th at 6:33 P.M., I found Salmon Bay Park's restrooms closed.  I didn't think they looked like they'd been used recently, but the thing is, park restroom hours are 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. most times of the year, and I was trying, in these hikes, to be extremely fair to Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation, by limiting my hikes to 8 A.M. to 6 P.M.  So I went back to Salmon Bay Park on Sunday, March 12th at 5:47 P.M.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, March 5th, I'd reached Sandel Playground at 6:06 P.M., technically outside my limits, but I mean, really.  Of the many lies I caught the parks department in during the winter of 2020-2021, the only one that took Ms. Hirsch's colleague Rachel Schulkin by surprise was that Sandel Playground's restrooms were closed.  They hadn't been in the 2019 list, but in 2020-2021 they were supposed to have been open, and weren't.  The same happened in 2022-2023:

I wasn't able to get back to Sandel Playground before 6 P.M. until Wednesday, March 22nd, and having already found Greenwood Park's restroom, a twin to Little Brook Park's, open that day, was unsurprised to find Sandel Playground's restrooms open too.

Basically, I think none of the four additions in North Seattle was real, and three were outright lies.  The question I had, though, was whether that was Ms. Hirsch's little joke on you, dear Diary, and me, or whether the parks department was really inflating its winter restroom numbers city-wide.  I thought if those four were the only additions, that would be a give-away, but actually there were fourteen other additions, none of which I got a chance to visit.  Dear Diary, you've been visited a lot ever since I signed up at an active job-hunting site, but I'm not sure how many of those visits have been by actual human beings.  But if anyone who reads this can comment on whether restrooms were open this past winter in the following parks, I'd be very grateful:

1. Alki Beach - Was listed only once in 2019, but with three locations in 2022.  So two of 63rd, 57th and Bath House should've been open besides the one that was open then.
2. Alki Beach - The other new one.
3. Beer Sheva Park.
4. Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park.
5. Hiawatha.
6. Magnolia Community Center.  The 2019 list included only Community Centers which had restrooms with doors that open to the outside, which are more obviously park restrooms than other Community Center restrooms.  I don't know that all the Community Centers in the 2022 list have such outside-opening restrooms, though.
7. Montlake Community Center.
8. Mount Baker Park.
9. Pratt Park.  This park's restrooms were definitely under construction when I first visited the place in winter 2021-2022.  It's at least plausible that the old ones didn't have heat while the new ones do.  (It's thoroughly implausible that Cal Anderson Park's restrooms went from having heat to not having it.)
   
10. Queen Anne Bowl.
11. Riverview Playfield.
12. Seward Park Picnic Shelters.
13. South Park Community Center.
14. Volunteer Park Bandstand.

Anyway, parks in North Seattle whose restrooms' openness I didn't check in winter 2022-2023:  I didn't visit Meadowbrook Playfield or Laurelhurst Community Center at all; I didn't visit Ross Park, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park (which Hirsch's lists call Maple Leaf Playground), Dahl Playfield, Licton Springs Park, Greenwood Park, or Sandel Playground, within the hours I'd limited myself to, before the spring openings.  Of these, Laurelhurst, Maple Leaf, Dahl and Sandel were supposed to be open, and I'm guessing the first three of those actually were open, though Maple Leaf is often closed on Sundays both in winter and at other times of year.  Ross, Meadowbrook, Licton Springs and Greenwood weren't supposed to be open, and of those, only Meadowbrook could reasonably have been opened.  (Licton Springs's restrooms, of course, have been torn down.)

I also in November called attention to Matthews Beach, which is consistently supposed to have open restrooms in winter, but I never found them so in 2020-2021.  I did find them open this time.  They're two single-stall all-gender rooms, one of which had been boarded over in 2020-2021; both were open on February 19th.

This time I only paid attention to water fountains conveniently near restrooms, but also to the street fountains.  I found four park water fountains running.  Three were attached to heated buildings - one of the golf buildings at Jackson Park, the cloverleaf restrooms of Woodland Park and the beach restrooms of Magnuson Park.  The fourth is free-standing, and I'm frankly amazed it was still running on February 19th, at Magnuson Park's central restrooms.  I don't remember what I found re street fountains - I think, one running, one not, but no idea which.

All for now, and pedants would say I've missed your birthday anyhow, but here's to a good year ahead for you, dear Diary!

Dear Diary,

The deadline I imposed on myself to tell you all about the private colleges and universities was today.  But three I e-mailed on Sunday haven't gotten back to me and will have to be called, as will one I just worked on that doesn't seem to have any public e-mail addresses to write to, and way too many of the rest.  And it's much too late to call anywhere until Monday.

I tried to find ones I could work on without e-mailing or calling, but there just don't seem to be enough of those to make spending the evening on them worthwhile.  So all I can do is wish you, and anyone who reads you, a 

Happy Thanksgiving!

The day itself, I'll be photographing as many of the parks of UW's Central and South campuses as I can stand to, given that there probably won't be an open men's room within a mile of campus that day.  (Not only are all the men's rooms in the U-District parks closed, but so is Gas Works Park's.  I think Wallingford Playfield and Laurelhurst Community Center are the only parks in southeastern North Seattle expected to have open men's rooms this winter; Ravenna Park also, for women.  Of course, most days of the winter the University branch of the Seattle Public Library will also be open, as will some UW buildings.)

Speaking of closures, Victor Steinbrueck Park downtown is due to close for most of a year pretty soon for renovations, which are supposed to take advantage of the removal of a public restroom and are not supposed to replace the destroyed water fountain there.  While the homeless in eastern North Seattle suffer, it's good to know downtown hygiene is also going nowhere, isn't it, city leaders?

So I'll spend much of the rest of the weekend reading, and watching the Korean drama I've now started, and not being public-spirited at all.  And next week, can get back to work on the libraries, the UW buildings, and job-hunting.

Make a happy holiday, dear Diary, and anyone who reads you, and any homeless people roundabout who find a way to survive the holiday, and happy days and nights until we meet again.

 

Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna

Dear Diary,

Whoopee!  I'm almost ready to tell you about my hikes of one week ago.  Within a few days I hope to be completely ready; as things stand, I'm ready for the first three parts, anyway.

I liked the scale of the maps I made for downtown so much that I decided to standardise on that scale.  It's proving useful for North Seattle as well, but inconveniently, I don't yet know enough to make maps on that scale as large enough as I want them.

So these hikes are going to be narrated with more than one map per page.  Here's an overview:

"Three Hikes in Ravenna" will be illustrated by maps A, B and D.  I intend to begin writing the three parts of this page I plan tonight.

"Three Hikes in University Heights" will be illustrated by maps A and C.  I intend to begin writing the one part of this page I plan tomorrow.

"Four [or more] Hikes in Brooklyn" will be illustrated by map E.  I hope to begin writing it on Tuesday, October 18.

And whenever I can, which will probably be months from now, "Many Hikes on Campus" will be illustrated by maps E, F and G.

Spoiler:  There's very little news.  The water fountain in "lower" Ravenna Park has completely stopped working, possibly because of vandalism; however, its water is running non-stop, so it's as wasteful as it can reasonably be.  Otherwise, the park water fountains in this area - "upper" Ravenna Park, Cowen Park, University Playground and Christie Park - all work fine.  The shell of the street fountain that used to be in front of the University Temple is still behind the fence of that vacant lot.  The restrooms in "upper" Ravenna Park and the women's room in "lower" Ravenna Park are all open; the men's room in "lower" Ravenna Park and both restrooms at each of Cowen Park and University Playground are not open.  (Come winter, the only open park restroom in this area will be the women's room in "lower" Ravenna, if that.)  Oh, and most of North Passage Point is fenced off because concrete chips are falling from the bottom of the I-5 bridge.

There is, however, one very little bit of big news, which I hope to tell you about in detail before months from now, dear Diary.  The University of Washington's Seattle campus, to quote someone to whom I described you yesterday, "is becoming a locked campus".  So for the time being, while I can't photograph any of the popular parks on campus because they're thronged all day long, I'm visiting the buildings instead, and observing their hours.  Just in the few days I've been doing this, I've seen several hours changes, but in broad outline, the quote is true.  Concretely, I spent my days at the UW mostly in five buildings, at least fourteen hours inside per day.  If I become homeless again in the near future, one of those buildings will be closed to me, and the other four's hours have been cut very much.  I've already found a few examples of other buildings becoming more accessible, but none in ways that would actually make a difference.  So I'd certainly have to spend holidays outside, and weekends during breaks outside, and probably could spend no more than twelve hours per day inside during regular quarters, and no more than eight in summer quarter and breaks.

Between this, the park restrooms' closures, and the closure of the Urban Rest Stop's U-District branch, it's become immensely harder to be homeless in the U-District lately.  No doubt if I were to ask anyone who made the relevant decisions about this, they'd say it was all a coincidence.  They'd mention COVID-19, the difficulty of hiring anyone (people are so hard to find right now that I've managed to stay unemployed for seven months!), and budget tightness.  But, well, to whatever extent I'm a journalist at all, I'm not the kind of journalist who asks people like that questions like that.  I'm just going to document what I can of the facts I observe, and leave your readers to decide what they mean.

This problem is much bigger than the libraries, but I hope anyway to tell you, dear Diary, about the public university libraries - meaning the major state schools, mainly UW but also Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington State University in Vancouver, Evergreen State College (which now offers some masters' degrees, so I'm counting it as a university), and also the campuses without libraries of Central Washington University and Western Washington University in Everett and Eastern Washington University in Sammamish.  Tuesday, October 18.

As a reminder, here's the key I'm using:

To unpack:

Open land (without concern for how easy it is to walk through) is green if it's represented by the City of Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation.  It's blue if it's owned by any other governmental unit.  And it's black if it's privately owned.

Open land is also olive green if it's owned by the Seattle parks department, if it's closed to the public in some way (usually a fence, for open land).  Similarly, it's whatever that different bluish colour is called if it's owned by some other governmental unit, and dark gray if it's privately owned.

Buildings are the same colours but only in outline.  (Usually, closed buildings are just locked.)

Restrooms are shown as small rectangular outlines.  There are four cases:  Are they on open land, or somewhere else?  And are they open to the public (at least some of the time) or are they closed?  In practise, I needn't have worried quite so much.  Essentially all buildings open to the public have working restrooms, though not all such buildings have public working restrooms.  A restroom that isn't working or isn't public is red.  (The careful reader will notice that this is a change from the key.  Sorry, but I'd rather spend time writing up the results of the hikes than updating that key.)  A public restroom that is working is the colour of the owner, or if it's on open or closed land (which is usually the case), it's white.

Water fountains are shown as small round outlines.  They have the same colour pattern as restrooms.

All for now, dear Diary.  Let me try to get at least part of "Three Hikes in Ravenna" written up tonight.  But if not, have a good night, and I should manage to write the first part by tomorrow morning.

The Parks of Seattle's Downtown, part IIIB: Southwest (more parks)

Dear Diary,

Last week through yesterday, I worked on the spreadsheet mentioned in your previous page, but yesterday I got a little more focused on this downtown project.  I'd found that it'll take weeks to get the spreadsheet to where I want it before I publish it at Google Drive, so in the meantime I wanted results I could use sooner.

Meanwhile, the simple fact is that I don't really like the parks of Belltown - the north-central part of downtown Seattle as I've defined those things for these pages, part VI - all that much, which makes it hard to motivate myself to hike to them on the few dry-ish days to photograph them.  I'll try to do that next weekend, weather allowing.  My current temporary job is apparently to continue the rest of this month, so I remain constrained by that.

Still, today, with actual dry weather, I wanted something more challenging and perhaps enjoyable.  My goals for today were to visit all the places the spreadsheet had told me about, which should've been covered in the existing parts of this series, and to trace the Elliott Bay Trail from its southern end to the part I told you about already.  I got to, for some definition of "got to", seven of the nine places, although I'll put off telling you, dear Diary, about one, because it fits into central downtown, and I have an errand at the Central Library soon which I might as well expand into taking some photos.  Today's parks and similar places turn out to be hard to like too.  Three were closed to the public when I visited today, and one probably never fully existed.  But at least they were mostly new to me, and I hope they'll interest you and anyone who reads you.

(Various agencies) The Elliott Bay Trail

Pages around the Web claim that this trail starts at Broad St, or at Lumen Field, which is more or less between S Royal Brougham Way and the line of S Lane St.  The Broad St claim sort of makes sense, as we'll see, but the Lumen Field one doesn't.  A current version of the Seattle Bike Map gets it right.

South of S Atlantic St, Alaskan Way S has bike lanes on each side of the road, physically separated from the traffic only by those flimsy-looking stick-like things.  North of Atlantic, where Alaskan rises and then descends, there's a relatively wide trail separate from the traffic, which doesn't rise and descend.  This trail, like much of the trail between W Garfield St and Smith Cove Park, is sandwiched between fences, although here there's Port of Seattle property on only one side, railroad tracks on the other.  The main reward for taking this part of the trail is the view ahead, of downtown:

The Port is the trail's lead agency, and I assume it owns this segment.  The main thing enlivening it, besides the view, is a series of markers attesting bits of nautical history.

At S King St, this part of the trail emerges on the west side of Alaskan Way S and ends, and another part starts, which is much more like the Burke-Gilman Trail:  no fence, cyclists and walkers separated, the cyclists getting smooth pavement, the walkers regular sidewalk.  There's also some landscaping.  I suspect the part the Seattle Department of Transportation reports owning in the 2020 Real Property Report actually starts here.

At S Main St, the sidewalk, which had been to the trail's east, switches to the west, towards the buildings, and gets much wider, essentially becoming the sidewalk of the popular parts of Seattle's downtown waterfront.

And then two blocks later, at Yesler Way, the sidewalk continues, but the bike trail is just cut off.

It's cut off by construction.  From here all the way to Broad St, the prior existence of the Elliott Bay Trail is not proven by facts now on the ground.  I'm pretty sure, in fact, that from Bell St to Broad St it never did exist, or at best merged with the sidewalk on the west side of Alaskan Way.  But I'll take this segment by segment.

The construction barricades block mostly the west side of Alaskan Way from Yesler to Marion St.  They curve between Marion and Madison St, and then from Madison St to Pine St they block mostly the east side of Alaskan Way.  My hypothesis is that the Elliott Bay Trail did exist before the construction began, and that it crossed the street somewhere between Marion and Madison.  My evidence is pretty scanty.

For the first part, Yesler to Marion, it's mostly the way the trail suddenly stops.  I don't believe it was originally built that way.

Counter-evidence:  Much of the road on the west side of Alaskan between Marion and Madison looks pre-construction in age to me, and shows no trail markings.  So unless the crossing was at or near Marion, there may not have been a trail on that block.

For the second part, Madison to Pine, I have two bits of evidence.  First, the SDOT listing in the Real Property Report gives 1100 Alaskan Way as the address of the part of the trail it owns.  This is Alaskan and Spring St, a block north of Madison.

Second, something that looks a great deal like parts of the Burke-Gilman Trail exists, a few yards from the east side of Alaskan Way, right up against the buildings there, from Pine St to a few yards south of Bell St.  Where it actually does just stop:

I saw no cyclists on this segment tonight, but did see a whole lot of people riding scooters, or whatever those things are called.  There are a couple of directional signs similar to those on the BGT on this segment of whatever-it-is, too.

From Bell to Broad:  I found nothing.  The pavement of the wide sidewalk on the west side of Alaskan there is continuous, much more amenable to cycling than the pavement further south, and I suspect cyclists are meant to cross again, although there were still a lot of pedestrians that far north.  But there are no trail markings and no directional signs on this segment.

What I actually saw half a dozen cyclists leaving the Elliott Bay Trail at Broad St do, though, was take to the streets - most to Alaskan, one to Broad.  I also saw a group of at least half a dozen cyclists heading north on Alaskan in the street.

So although the bike map is right about the trail beginning at Atlantic, it's wrong that it exists continuously from there to Broad.  I seriously doubt it really ever has.

(SDOT) Habitat Bench on Seattle Waterfront

The Port of Seattle has a fence along the trail all the way from Atlantic to S Jackson St; it calls that entire area "Pier 46".  When I showed up too close to the fence at Atlantic, a guy came out to warn me away.  Most addresses south of Jackson are in the 400s S (the Port claims that everything behind that fence, all the way down to Atlantic, is at 401, but OpenStreetMap makes the falsehood of that plain), and most addresses north of Atlantic are in the 1200s S.  So SDOT's property at 601 Alaskan Way S, almost an acre in size, is somewhere behind that fence.  It's meant as "Wildlife/Fish Habitat", and my guess is that curious visitors might conflict with that.

(SDOT) Washington St Boat Landing

This is one of SDOT's few parks to have been blest with its own Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation web page.  That page's text is an exemplar of the decay happening to many public things along the waterfront, not least, but also not limited to, the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the old Waterfront Park:

"No boats land here any more. At this site just south of the Washington State Ferry Terminal, you'll find only a historic pergola built for the long-defunct Seattle Harbor Department in 1920, and views of Elliott Bay and the Olympic Mountains. Note particularly the truncated ships' prows decorating the pergola high in front. Out in the water, you can still see the upright posts delineating the pier that was originally attached to the site. Immediately adjacent, the Port of Seattle's small Alaska Square has been closed to public access because its concrete has collapsed in places."

Well, actually, though, it's worse than that:

The whole park is closed by very sturdy fences, obviously for the long haul.

Someone is paying for a "sanican", not one of the two brands the city uses, in a parking lot adjacent to the south:

(The Anne E. Casey Foundation) Waterfall Garden Park

The Anne E. Casey Foundation was funded by the family of UPS's founder, and although I'm not sure what this park has to do with the foundation's mission, it was built on the site of UPS's first headquarters for the company's seventieth anniversary, in 1977.  And at the company's centenary, some of its employees participated in a United Way Day of Giving, or some such, by working on the park.  They hired some temps to help, of whom I was one (it's one of my few weird temp jobs), and I still have a T-shirt commemorating the event:

I rarely wear that shirt, not liking to advertise big corporations on my clothing, and so it survived my years of homelessness much more intact than shirts I'd preferred, and I wore it today.

Unfortunately, the park didn't co-operate with this bit of sentimentality.  Its signage indicates its short hours, maintained, so it's said, in order to keep homeless people from camping there.

But at 3:18 P.M., on a Sunday, this is what I found:

Speaking of sturdy fences.  Also, the waterfall about which the Alliance for Pioneer Square, another outfit that doesn't much like homeless people, brags - well, I didn't catch as much of it as I'd hoped (i.e., any of it) in that photo, but those rocks sure looked dry to me.

So I have no idea whether the park was closed because it's Sunday and that kind of thing happens, or because of COVID-19, or because it's winter, or because UPS, no longer headquartered here, maybe thinks Seattle is overrun with homeless people, or maybe because AECF is having hard times, or what.  I only know that it was closed, and I wasn't the only person who knew the time and noticed, while I was there.

The amenities I saw through the fence included benches and trash cans, which latter put them one up on Sound Transit, anyway.

Previously mentioned

I found a street fountain running, as it should be, in Pioneer Square.

The affordable housing project being built near or in part of Fortson Square is being built for the main agency in town that helps American Indian homeless people.  Their fences are covered with quotations from old anti-Indian laws. 

City Hall Park, though as far as I know no longer city-owned, still has the city's "Temporarily Closed" signs up.  Nope, now it's "Permanently Closed", as far as the parks department is concerned, anyhow.

Terrace St starts at City Hall Park, and I took it to my next destination.

(?) Goat Hill

This is a name I like for three more or less linked bits of land that all have grass (two also have trees) and are all on steep parts of First Hill.  Two are separated by 6th Ave; the western of those is separated from one to its northwest by a private office building.  I don't know who owns the land.  The easternmost part has signs barring camping from the City of Seattle, but the Goat Hill Parking Garage east of the northernmost is entirely for King County employees.  Anyway, I'm pretty sure none of these three is privately owned.

The northernmost, northeast (actually north) from 5th Ave & Terrace St, was on my list as a separate destination, because OpenStreetMap puts a "Goat Hill P-Patch" there.  It certainly isn't an official Department of Neighborhoods P-Patch (and King County runs none, any more than any parks, within Seattle city limits), but it certainly is some sort of P-Patch.  Look:

They've got raised beds, and a lockbox, and a hose, and a shelter (that blue thing).

The other two are ones I remember walking past many times to get to various downtown destinations.  This one, west (southwest) of 6th Ave between Yesler and that garage, is largely trees:

I found evidence that someone had recently been swept from there (a pile of trash that included packaging for a mattress), which means that for whatever reason - because it's not an official park, because they've become too busy, or because they've gotten lazy - the current sweepers didn't leave this place as clean as I've seen them leave parks earlier this year.

The easternmost parcel, east (northeast) of 6th Ave, is grassier:

That's where I found the no-camping signs.

There are gravelled trails through each parcel, and connecting the two that are west of 6th Ave.  So I have at least that much justification for treating them as parks here - someone has put at least some money into their parkishness - besides the obvious fact that they offer trees and grass just a couple of blocks from City Hall Park as was.

I considered putting them into southeast - that easternmost one is across the street from the trail to Kobe Terrace - but they were the only thing I'd have had to add to that set, so it made more sense to group them with this one, about as close.

Well, all for now, dear Diary.  Good night, and good days until we meet again, which should be soon after I get to Central Library.

Bitter Lake Playfield and Licton Springs Park Today - and Tonight

Dear Diary,

Today I had to go to Home Depot to deal with some problems left (I hope) by a departing housemate (the topic of the public good has been on my mind a whole lot lately), and decided to extend the trip to include Bitter Lake Playfield, which isn't especially close to Home Depot, but also isn't especially close to anywhere else I go either, so why not?  While there I tried to talk myself into going to all three of the Greenwood parks with plumbing, but finally settled for going only to the one some of whose plumbing was closed earlier this year.  So that's why those two parks today.

I took the scenic route to Aurora, meaning I went through Woodland Park.  Still no sweep, still no sweep announcements.  I don't get it, but maybe some official drove up to a sign I saw there:

and actually paid attention.  (Maybe the photo isn't as clear as I intended:  someone has added to the base sign "IN THE NAME OF LOVE".)  Or maybe they're waiting for the rain to return, to make the sweep even more cruel.  I don't know.

Anyway, the other two parks present very different (though, underneath, related) pictures, so I should probably separate them, but before I do:  Most of the photos of Bitter Lake, and one of the photos of Licton Springs, are at the Google Drive folders (Bitter Lake, Licton Springs), so are securely dated.

Bitter Lake Playfield

Last time I was at this park, I found a running water fountain near the playground that I hadn't previously noticed.  This was during the second year's part of what I've called the Durkan Drought; near as I can figure, that fountain was replacing fountains at Northacres Park that had been running during the first year's part, but not the second.

I also found what looked like metal thieves' work on one of the two bowls of the water fountain I'd already known about, and concluded that neither bowl was likely to run soon, because I assumed their plumbing must be so linked that one running while the other lacked a spout and piping would produce flooding.

Well, turns out the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has standardised on a smarter design of water fountain than that.  Look, dear Diary:

This is a good thing, too, because both the non-running bowl of this fountain, and the fountain near the playground, have clogged drains, so their bowls are full.  (The lower of the above shots got my newspaper section wet.)  Here's the playground fountain:

I also found the restrooms open.  Now, they'd been open in spring, so this wasn't a great surprise, but there are some issues about those restrooms.  First, last autumn they weren't open because of construction delays, and I found one of the "sanican" substitutes burnt (or maybe that was winter?), just as I found such a "sanican" substitute burnt at University Playground yesterday.  Second, ever since last summer I've suspected these restrooms of being open 24 hours, on two grounds:  people there at the time said they were, and they were open far too late on that visit to be locked by parks department personnel.  (But locking them could still be left for hired security guys, as at Green Lake Park last winter.)

So I went back to Bitter Lake Playfield tonight.  I wasn't there noticeably later than on my first visit over a year ago, so this still isn't conclusive, but I found them open later than 9 P.M. again.

And yes, I realise those photos don't prove anything here, but they're both at the Google Drive folder, where their times survive uploading.

Anyway, that brings me to the third issue about Bitter Lake Playfield's restrooms.  They'll probably be under construction again next year.  It looks like designs are being finalised for a complete rebuild of the playground and restroom building (that's what the large sign on the women's room gate is about).  The existing building was closed last winter, though for "historic low usage" rather than unreadiness for Seattle's winters, so will probably be closed this winter, and then under construction until that's done.  Which means the next time I can afford to visit the park at 2 A.M. or some other such decisive time is probably going to be too late.

The reason the "sanican" was burnt last autumn or winter, I assume, has to do with the reason "historic low usage" was such a stupid criterion then:  There's been a huge and famous homeless camp at that Playfield throughout the pandemic.  Except that when the parks department began to flex some muscle to get them to move, many moved to the school property next door; and when sweeps of other parks really got going, still more did.  A sweep of Bitter Lake has been long postponed because our wonderful mayor declared that encampments on school property were the exclusive business of the Seattle Public Schools, which neither have staff to deal with this kind of thing at all, nor want to be demonised for sweeps.  Another issue, though, was that the border between the Playfield and the School seems not to have been clear.  That, at least, someone has decided is settled:

And today, for the first time in my experience, all the tents were on the School side of that fence.

But they had left some parting gifts behind on the Playfield side:

This is clearly homeless-encampment trash - it includes several mattress-like items - and it struck me as, on top of the burnt "sanican", more than a little mean-spirited.  The people who will have to clean it up are not the people who make decisions the campers object to, and the decision-makers are unlikely even to notice the .1% increase in parks trash costs that results.

Anyway, Bitter Lake for today represents a very different scenario from Licton Springs, though both sets of restrooms would normally close in November (and for the same reason).

Licton Springs Park

Most of the photos I took of Licton Springs aren't at the Google Drive folder, and that doesn't matter, because my news here is old and, apparently, to everyone but me, unimportant.

The Seattle Fire Department announced on September 4th, on Twitter, a fire under control at Licton Springs Park, in a "cinder block type structure".  Near as I can tell, nobody else, not even some neighbourhood blog, has reported on this fire.

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation already knows how to deal with this kind of thing, from years of practice at Magnuson Park:

Unfortunately, here the water fountains, which ran during both phases of the Durkan Drought, are attached to the restroom building, so are inside the fence.

One commenter on Twitter wondered if the fire was started by a "vagrant's campfire".  This would not be an unreasonable thing to wonder, in the abstract, but having seen the results even two months later, I doubt it.  This fire burned hot, and it created a whole lot of ash, which has drifted all over the place.  I think at some level this fire was arson, whether in complaint against the closure of the restrooms, or as a way of preventing future homeless camps there like the slobs whose obnoxiously messy occupation in 2020 (largely on top of federally protected wetlands) was what led the parks department to close the restrooms this spring in the first place.  Arson is traditionally for profit, and I don't see that here, but this fire has in common with arson that - at least in my uninformed opinion - it was planned.

More photos trying, and probably failing, to back these claims up:

At any rate, now I see that University Playground's restrooms still have at least one step to go before demolition:  a fence.

I would not be optimistic about any specific fenced-in restroom, however.  The tower building at Magnuson Park has, after all, been fenced in for five years, and is considerably more urgent, from any sensible parks perspective, to fix, than either Licton Springs's or University's restrooms.  The boarded-up doors at Woodland Park's "Rio" (Citywide Athletic Building) men's room and one of the single-user stalls at Matthews Park probably represent smaller versions of the same 'We might get to it someday, if funds allow' situation.

Some meta notes

I've been finding that photo-heavy Blogspot pages - specifically, yours, dear Diary, and Cliff Mass's weather blog's - are essentially impossible for me to load with all their photos at the same time, at the moment.  This appears not to represent my house's Wi-Fi choking (I get similar results on my phone without Wi-Fi), so I suspect Blogspot itself is unable, at present, to deal properly with blogs like this one.  My apologies to anyone else affected by this.  I still prefer to show you the photos, dear Diary, because I don't have much storage on the phone with which I take them - which has now taken to reminding me, with most shots, that it's taking time to store them - and because I assume sooner or later Blogspot will take care of the problem.

Anyway, I spent so much time today in North Seattle that I can't even finish the other page(s) meant to back up my claims about throwing amenities away, let alone the pages actually explaining those claims, before the election.  At some level, this is right:  your remit, after all, dear Diary, is North Seattle parks, and that other page isn't even about North Seattle.  But I can't actually keep spending entire weekends on you anyway, and you should learn the value of solidarity, so I hope you'll bear with me that this is the second-last "today" post for some time to come.  Until the last, good night and good days, dear Diary.

Anyone who wants references to the events discussed above in the parks mentioned, and is reading on a phone, should please ask his or her browser to behave like a desktop one, and then re-load this page.  Desktop readers get access to "labels", what everyone else in the world calls tags, which enable pulling up other pages with related topics.  I don't have time tonight to do all the links I did with last night's post (for which I'd hoped for far more readers than it looks like it'll get).

On the off chance that anyone reads this page who cares how I plan to vote:  for the big four races that have led The Seattle Times to wax apocalyptic, and have led to so much advertising advocacy, a straight left ticket - I want to see whether the progressive project can succeed under even optimum conditions, before changing my basic allegiance, and also at least two of the progressives' opponents have openly broken laws recently - even though all the opponents, but none of the progressives, have sent me mail; but the remaining races, I now have very little time to decide about.  

Anyway, dear Diary, don't expect such late posts in future:  the troublesome housemate who left was my next door and only real neighbour in this house, but his room won't stay empty forever, and one major reason I'm typing so late is that I also had to do laundry almost so late (it finished before this page!), after that second visit today to Bitter Lake, and might as well violate quiet time some more, circumstances I'll try not to let happen again.  So again, good night.