Bitter Lake Reservoir Park Yesterday and Froula Park Today

Dear Diary,

Yesterday and today I hiked mostly for another set of pages I hope to write in you this month, but yesterday I also took the opportunity to visit a couple of isolated parks with plumbing, and both days I visited parks that are on reservoir grounds but, mysteriously, don't have plumbing of their own.

I told you, dear Diary, that I didn't expect the remainder of the hikes to paint as rosy a baseline picture as the first hike, through most of the NW parks, had.  I just hadn't expected things to go downhill quite so fast.  In the two parks I visited yesterday, I found two closed restrooms and one missing water fountain.  However, one water fountain I hadn't found working in the past is now working.  Still, it's a problem that isolated parks in northernmost Seattle offer even fewer restrooms than the tiny numbers the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has put there in the past.

Bitter Lake Playfield

Unlike Ballard Playground and Loyal Heights Playfield, whose restrooms are built into the Community Centers those parks contain, at Bitter Lake Playfield, there's a separate restroom building.  I've been told in the past that these restrooms were open 24 hours, presumably because they're so far from other parks with restrooms, and thus inconvenient to service.  (What I've seen with my own eyes is that they stayed open quite late, but I've yet to incorporate this park into any of my "all night long" hikes to really verify.)  However, in the past, they weren't open all year.

Last year, I visited those restrooms in early March, and they weren't open yet.  I complained because there was supposed to be a project to replace those restrooms (though not in such a way that the new ones could stay open all year), and it hadn't happened yet.

So of course this year I visited just about ready to explode, and I'm complaining because the project isn't done yet, and I had to use the "sanican"s instead.

To be fair, because the water fountain was running, I was able to use the soap from the hand-washing machine and the water from the water fountain to wash my hands, in much the same way as I'd described in "Hygiene Is a Luxury I Can't Afford", also about this park, nearly four years ago, but with far fewer mishaps this time.  Yes, in the ideal world the hand-washing machine would also provide water, but one can't have everything.

In any event, the parks department currently says "SPR anticipates the restroom and remainder of electrical work for the tennis court lights to be completed by mid-July", but, well, that didn't happen:

So I wondered if the department were simply running out the clock until the restrooms would have to close anyway.  Again in the ideal world, since we were told that the parks department was making a financial plan to enable all its restrooms to be open year-round, the delay could be while the contractor tries to figure out a way to fit heat into whatever space is available.  But in this real world, I doubt that's actually what's going on.

In any event, there's a water fountain missing.  It used to be roughly here:

adjacent to the then-playground area.  Maybe I missed it - the new playground area was in use the whole time, and I didn't want to intrude.  There are several photographs of it at the Google Drive folder, which also includes all the above photos; it has a round bowl, unlike the square-bowled double fountain that's definitely still there and that helped me wash my hands.

Carkeek Park

I was much less desperate when I visited Carkeek Park, which is fortunate because it's much further from the street grid than Bitter Lake Playfield is.  I found all its water fountains running.  Even the archaic stone-clad one at the Environmental Learning Center, which I've never found running before, now gives super-abundant water:

I didn't try to use that arching stream, but did fill my bottle from both of the others.  The one in the playground area gave fairly brownish-tinted water, which I threw away and replaced with water from the fountain in the Eddie McAbee entrance area, which was still mildly tinted but proved drinkable.

So that's the good news.  The bad news is that when Carkeek Park was planned, it was planned for two restroom pairs, but for one of those two to have doors that opened indoors.  As happens to all park buildings given enough time, the buildings those restrooms were in have closed to the public, and so Carkeek Park is left with only one restroom pair.  Last winter I celebrated because a building had re-opened to the public, but it turns out to have been a temporary expedient while a building in a different park was being renovated.

 "No Public Restroom".  They know what they're doing is wrong, and this is their response?

Dear Diary, does any of your readers think I'm blowing smoke?  The freaking map provided to visitors to Carkeek Park specifically displays a symbol it clearly identifies with restrooms, and displays it in connection with these buildings.

The good news, I suppose, is that they aren't adding insult to injury any more.  In the past there was a "sanican" in that area, but it was locked, because it was being used to store science projects for the school using the buildings.  It's no longer there.  It's pleasant to think that someone got a severe talking-to about the proper use of equipment the City of Seattle pays rent for.

Bitter Lake Reservoir Park

This is a weird park.  It's fundamentally a creation of Seattle Public Utilities, and I've actually spent a fair amount of time trying and failing to find the actual boundary between public and non-public areas there.  So I don't have a clue how big it is, and that's weird.  (For example, I know that Carkeek Park is very much the biggest one-restroom park in north Seattle.)  Also, it has fitness equipment I've never seen used, and a playground I haven't seen much used - quite unlike old or new at Bitter Lake Playfield.

They're aware that that playground isn't popular, and they're planning to renovate it, with a major stage to be reached in, of course, mid-July past, oops.

And yet the park as a whole is so popular that probably the single park photo I've most wanted to show you, dear Diary, but have been unable to, is the photo of its grand entrance from above, because every time I've been there, someone has always been in the frame.  At the moment that viewpoint is even grander, because the rowan trees framing it are in fruit, and while rowan berries are poisonous, they sure are pretty.  Alas, my phone has trouble photographing red, so their beauty is wasted in this substitute photo.

Froula Park

It has come to my attention that I've been misnaming this park.  I like to give parks the best name I can give them.  Most notably, the park the parks department calls "Ross Playground" is "Ross Playfield" on its scoreboard, and "Ross Park" on its park sign.  So I call it Ross Park.  Well, um, on the park sign of the park the parks department calls "Froula Playground", this is what we find:

My apologies.

I've also neglected this park more than I should have.  This time I saw a sign that I didn't remember, and certainly didn't tell you about, dear Diary.

Apparently Roosevelt Reservoir has hidden depths, if you'll pardon the pun, dear Diary.  Why did they feel the need to post that sign, and when did they do so?  Was that restroom ever open?  To whom?

It's hard to imagine Froula anything having mysteries, but it clearly does.

It also has swings.  I found years ago, long before your birth, dear Diary, that I actually still enjoy swinging.  But I got few opportunities to do it at University Playground, then near where I slept, because I was rarely OK with leaving my stuff unattended in order to use the swings, given the kinds of people I usually saw at that park.  Froula Park's swings are all too high off the ground for me to climb into easily, so they aren't really a solution, but I'll keep looking.

All for now, dear Diary.  I hope tomorrow to start writing in you the other series I've been hiking for, but we'll see.  Happy days and nights until we meet again.

Thyme Patch Park on Monday

Dear Diary,

On Monday I visited all the City of Seattle park restrooms and water fountains known to me (which means, more or less, those I found in 2020) in the area I think of as Northwest - specifically, west of 3rd Avenue NW - except for those in Carkeek Park, which I intend to get to a little later.  (The 3rd Ave limit means I omitted also Sandel Playground and Sunset Place.)

All the restrooms were open.  (How weird it still is for me to write that line.  It won't be true of subsequent hikes in this series, though.)

All but a few of the water fountains were running.

In other words, I found exactly the boring baseline I was looking for.

Parks visited:

• Ross Park (restroom pair and water fountain)
  
• Gilman Playground (restroom pair and water fountain)
  
• Ballard Commons (pseudo-restroom and water fountain)
  
• The Burke-Gilman Trail (water fountain)
• Ballard Playground (water fountain) and Community Center (restroom pair)
  
• Thyme Patch Park
• Webster Park (water fountain)
• Salmon Bay Park (restroom pair and water fountain)
  
• Loyal Heights Playfield (water fountains) and Community Center (restroom pair)
  
• Golden Gardens Park (restroom pairs and water fountains)
• Soundview Playfield (restroom pair and water fountain)
• Crown Hill Park (water fountain)
• Baker Park on Crown Hill

The links point to folders of photos of the plumbing features.  Those folders are in my Google Drive account.

I didn't, on this hike, visit the Ballard Locks, where there are federal restrooms, which in the past I've found reliably open, and federal water fountains, which in the past I've found reliably on.

Water fountain issues:

At Golden Gardens Park, the south water fountain, right next to the Eddie Vine Boat Ramp, is un-usably damaged, as it has been for some time.

At Crown Hill Park, the water fountains, which had run fine in the past, gave no water at all:

And at Baker Park on Crown Hill, there continues to be no sign of a water fountain.  In the past, I've been fortunate enough to meet someone who said they'd grown up near there, and never had seen a water fountain there.  But the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation continues to advertise such a water fountain:

Now that things are pretty much back to normal, the parks department should really redeem its word and put a water fountain there.   Until it either does so, or removes the claim on the park's Web page, I'm going to treat this as a defective water fountain on my maps.

That said, in NW things are, very much, back to normal.  N and NE will be less so, but this is still pretty much the boring baseline I expected.  Well done, parks department.

Some things I've done in the past which I didn't do this time:  I didn't test the restrooms' sinks and dryers, except at Ballard Community Center, where I had to, and found that the excessive water pressure in the water fountain was also in the restroom sink.

And I didn't look for neat stuff to photograph.  But a couple of pieces of it fell into my lap.  First of all, as always, doing the Ross Park restroom door shot also means photographing a mosaic:

And second, I accidentally walked right past Thyme Patch Park, one of those tiny one-lot nice parks, as I was looking for Webster Park.  I wrote how pleasant it is when I first visited it in 2020, and took photos of its art, but I hadn't been back.  On Monday it was a one-person park.  Someone was working in the attached P-patch, but left once I started eating tortilla chips fairly loudly; so I left when someone else showed up to work in the P-patch.  But as I was leaving, some red flowers caught my attention.  I don't think they actually show up in this photo, but here the photo is anyway:

All for now.  I still have three-quarters of this work left to do, and hiking for another of the pages I mean to write this month as well.  So we'll see how much I actually get done and when.  But until I have more to write about, happy days and pleasant nights, dear Diary.

Past hikes of North Seattle parks in these pages

Dear Diary,

On December 18, 2024, I decided to update this page, which I originally wrote in you on September 3, 2024.  The original page follows, until the obvious heading announces the update.

Dear Diary,

Ever since I signed up for job-hunting sites, you've been much more popular than you had been in the years when you were actually relevant to people's lives.  So I don't have a clue who reads you any more, and to what extent they're familiar with what I've actually done in the past.

Part of this is my own doing.  I compiled a publication history, 85K of text, put it onto Google Drive, and link to it in some of my resumes and in my LinkedIn profile.  Some of your pages, dear Diary, to which it refers, get visited pretty often.

But with regard to the hikes of North Seattle parks which I resumed yesterday, that history is incomplete.  So here goes.

One reason for this page to exist, besides completeness, is to clarify my terms for these hikes.  Those are, from most to fewest total places visited:  everything hike (trying to visit every park or park-like area); water fountain hike (visiting a list of parks with water fountains); restroom hike (visiting a list of parks with restrooms).

Finding plumbing - a series of 2020 hikes

As you remember, dear Diary, when I started writing you, it was because Seattle's then-mayor, Jenny Durkan, had advised homeless people like me (then) to use the parks' restrooms and water fountains to meet our needs during the lockdowns, but I'd found that the restrooms were often closed, and most of the water fountains weren't running.  Initially I focused on the most obvious parks near where I slept in Laurelhurst, and on Magnuson Park (which isn't near anywhere, but is anyway not utterly distant from there).  However, I eventually became curious:  Was what I was experiencing typical, or was my area an outlier?

At that time, I hadn't gathered many sources of information on Seattle parks.  It didn't take long to become acquainted with the City of Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's website, which I mined intensively and then critiqued.  But I acquired other sources largely as a result of these hikes.  Also, I quickly found that the website wasn't entirely reliable as to which parks had restrooms or water fountains.  So my goal, in these hikes, became to find absolutely every park in the areas I was hiking, find out whether they had plumbing, and write about them, possibly with photographs.  As a result, many North Seattle parks without plumbing are only documented in your pages, dear Diary, in the pages devoted to these hikes.

When I set out, I hoped to find a border to the "Durkan Drought" quickly, but I never did.  So I ended up hiking all of North Seattle.  By the time I finished that, I sort of had an explanation for the drought, so didn't need to go further.  As it turned out, the area I started from pretty much had a monopoly on closed restrooms, but nearly all the water fountains across North Seattle were shut off.  Strangely, the exceptions, the working water fountains, were geographically clustered.

Before I got all the initial hikes written into your pages, dear Diary, someone stole my phone, with all the remaining photos I hadn't yet shown you.  As a result, I had to re-visit a lot of parks.  Also, as I learnt more, I wanted to re-visit other parks, and added topics (including waterways, street ends, and park shelters).  So the list of pages devoted to this series of hikes is basically a great big mess, which is why I left most of it out of that publication history.  But here it is:

• Go North, Aging Man!
• Ravennawards 
• Back East, Where the Gardens Are Pretty
• Down by the Canal 
• Top of the City, Part I
• Top of the City, Part II 
• South to and from Northgate
• The Jackson Park Perimeter Trail
• Ravenna Boulevard 
• A Shower at Green Lake 
• At the Centre of the Universe, Does Gas Work? 
• Past Work and Gas Works
• History and Parks, part I 
• History and Parks, part II
• A Heavy Mile Stone
• A Lazy Day on Loyal Heights 
• The Ballard Seacoast: Parks Not Parks', part I
• The Ballard Seacoast: Parks Not Parks', part II 
• What Can a Hill Do with a Crown?
• Lake Union's North Shore: Waterways and Street Ends 
• South of North Once More, part I
• South of North Once More, part II: Woodland Park 
• Bad Apples in the Bonny Green Wood
• Blue Ridge, Land of Mystery 
• Top of the City, Part III
• To a Land of Water and Honey 
• Lake City Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us!
• Hygiene Is a Luxury I Can't Afford 
• "Standing Room Only", a page with five parts listed in the publication history, about park shelters
• The Kingdom of the Winds
• Six Parks in Search of Another 
• Meadowbrook Pond
• To the Beaches! 
• The End of the Tour
• Two Last Strays 
• "North Seattle Street Ends", a page with nine parts listed in the publication history

This is not the last time I set out on an "everything hike", but it's the last everything hike I've so far completed.

Checking a plumbing map - January 2021

In December 2020 I became aware of a City of Seattle Department of Human Services map professing to show which restrooms would be open in winter 2020-2021.  I decided to see how accurate it was.  It proved to be a substantially less reliable guide than the list of restrooms the parks department had promised to keep open in winter 2019-2020; in other words, the parks department did nothing differently because of the lockdowns, when it came to winter restrooms.  The pages in you, dear Diary, about these hikes, culminate in "How to Lie to the Homeless", a page with three parts.

This was basically a restroom hike, except that the map also mapped locations where charities had open restrooms, and locations where there wasn't a restroom, but was a "sanican", so the total areas I visited were more numerous than in a normal restroom hike.

All the pages are listed in the publication history.

Regional hikes - May 2021

This was the first series of hikes I tackled while housed.  Hiking housed has both advantages and disadvantages, as compared to hiking homeless.  It's much easier to take buses when I'm not smelly, for example; but it's much harder to get much done, having to go home each night.  When it's raining, it's much harder to set my satchels down and rest, but whether or not it's raining, steering a cart, which does enable rest under most circumstances (because it props my satchels up above the wet pavement), is too annoying.  (The kind of cart I used has endless wheel malfunctions, basically planned obsolescence, near as I can tell.)

So I decided to play to the strengths of housed hiking and do a series of regional everything hikes, visiting most City of Seattle properties, not just parks.  I soon expanded that to park-like places shown, primarily, on Open Street Map.  In May 2021 I more or less finished three regions, the ones headed in the map below with the numbers 43, 32 and 49 (which represent total areas visited).

One ancillary purpose of this series of hikes was to provide at least one photograph of most things, and especially of the many parks of which I hadn't previously shown you, dear Diary, any photographs at all.  So basically, for parks without plumbing, this series is best if the park's region is covered, otherwise the 2020 series above.

Finally, I'd gotten tired of the boring page titles I'd used for the January 2021 hikes, and tried some from a poem.  Those fell spectacularly flat, so I went back to boring titles, and have stayed there ever since, for the most part. 

But it quickly became clear that we were in another year of Durkan Drought (as I would've known if I'd still been homeless), so I switched gears.

The region headed 43

•  While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part I
• While Strolling in the Parks One Day, part II 
• All in the Dry Month of May
• A Roguish Pair of Eyes 
• Another Hike in Wallingford
• A Hike Near the I-5 Bridge, which I should've called "A Hike in Latona"
• Another Hike along Lake Union and the Fremont Cut
• Another Hike in Fremont 

The region headed 32

•  Hikes in southern NW: Introduction
• A Hike along Difficult Market Street 
• A Hike in Ross 
• A Hike in Southeastern Ballard
• A Hike along Easy Market Street 
• A Hike along Ballard's South Shore
  

The region headed 49

•  A Tale of Three Lake Cities
• Almost done... 
• A Visit to Little Brook Park
• A Hike in Jackson Park, part I 
• A Hike in Jackson Park, part II
• A Hike near Jackson Park 
• A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part I
• A Hike in Downtown Lake City, part II 
• A Hike across the Pinehurst Plateau
• Another Hike in Lake City 
• A Visit to Hubbard Homestead
• A Hike in Northgate, part I 
• A Hike in Northgate, part II
• A Hike in Victory - and Defeat 
• A Hike in Maple Leaf
• A Hike along Banner 
  

Water fountains, year 2 - May 2021

As I said, after three regions it was obvious that there was a new Durkan Drought going on, and it was rather more evil than the previous one.  In 2020, they'd had three plumbers working on turning water fountains on when the lockdowns began, and they just left on the fountains those plumbers had gotten to before stopping.  But by 2021, they'd figured out that homeless people were camping in or near parks in order to get access to the plumbing.  So they carefully turned water fountains on only in parks that didn't have open restrooms.

Late in my work on writing these hikes up I found out the rationale for the droughts.  Durkan's administration had willfully misread the CDC's advice on keeping water fountains clean.  The CDC had explicitly said water fountains should be washed once per day, but someone in Durkan's administration chose to believe that that really meant once per user, and explained (as if it needed explaining) that that was impossible.  No Seattle mayor is friendly to the homeless, but Jenny Durkan really went way out of her way to be hostile to homeless people, and this is just one of many examples.

Quite a few of the pages listed above under the regional hikes contributed to this set of hikes' concern with water fountains, but I don't have time this week to re-read and figure out which ones.

• Few Restrooms Closed, Only One Water Fountain Running in Today's Hike
• Public Water Fountains in North Seattle: Some Maps 
• Park Restrooms in North Seattle: Some Maps
• Running Water Fountains FOUND in N, and northern NW 
• Yesterday's Hike in More Detail
• NW finished; one more water fountain; one more closed restroom pair 
• A Different Hike: Seven Restrooms Closed, Two Fountains Running in Southern NE
• Details of southern NE Seattle, part I
• Details of southern NE Seattle, part II 
• Last Hike: More open restrooms, fewer running fountains
• Final May 2021 Water Fountain and Restroom Maps 
• Some explanations and links concerning the water fountain situation

There was a coda to this.  That summer got really hot, and Durkan finally had to back down from her two-year attempt to cure Seattleites of water addiction.

• Another RUNNING street fountain in today's hike
• Another running street fountain 
• New water fountain hikes coming
• Credit Where It's Due: Downtown Street Fountains 
• Foolish Mortal Tackles Street Fountains Again
• Today's hike: Most fountains running in southern NW 
• More details of yesterday's hike 
• Seattle's water fountains and the June heat wave 

"Foolish mortal" in the title is how I signal that a page corrects mistakes of mine.

Regional hikes redux - October 2022

I tackled two more regions from the eleven mapped above in autumn 2022.  I quickly gave up on the one headed 21 on the map, the far northwest of Seattle, because it was too hard to get there, and because that region had too many green areas on Open Street Map which turned out to be hard and time-consuming to find.  So basically I could get one OSM green area done per day, and that seemed excessive attention to a region that has almost no parks department plumbing.

On the other hand, I did a lot, but not quite all, of the other region, the U-District writ large, the one headed 33 on the map above.  Walking around there made me aware of changes at the UW that seemed to me to add up to an attempt to ensure that people like me, homeless people who'd basically spent our waking hours there before the pandemic, couldn't possibly do that again.  So when I got to campus, I started another series about UW buildings, and completed it for the West Campus, basically west of 15th Avenue NE.  However, this discouraged me considerably, and took so long that the autumn quarter ended, and I'd have to go photograph building hours all over again in January.

So the part of this region that I didn't cover is basically UW's Central and South campuses.  (The East Campus is in the region headed 23, instead.)

• New hikes of North Seattle
• Introduction to my hikes of the U-District and Ravenna 
• Three Hikes in Ravenna, part I: Northwest
• Three Hikes in Ravenna, part II: Northeast 
• Three Hikes in Ravenna, part III: Southeast
• Four or More Hikes in University Heights 
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part I: Northwest
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part II: West 
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part III: Southwest and Its Sweeps
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part IV: Centre 
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part V: East
• Six Hikes in Brooklyn, part VI: Southeast 

Restroom hikes, February to March 2023

On my days off from my last job to date, as a tax preparer, I hiked; and when tax season was over, I wrote the hikes up.  I didn't succeed in visiting all the parks with restrooms before the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation started opening the closed restrooms back up.

• Happy Birthday, Dear Diary! Seattle Parks Lied Again!
• My February Hikes
• My March Hikes
• Truth and fantasy about park restrooms in winter 

And that's the last hiking I did for you, dear Diary, until Monday, Labor Day, except for what's told here:  Seattle Parks Is Trying to Tell the Truth. Will I Survive the Shock?.  I hope to tell you about Monday's hike tomorrow.  Until then, good night and good day.

Water fountains, September 2024

Well, I wrote up Monday's hike and one more.  But, possibly because I'd chosen mystifying titles, nobody was reading those.  So it was easy to transfer the time I'd intended to devote to them to the page I'd planned about the buses.  And I've had basically no interest, this month, in finding out what's happening to park restrooms this winter.  I'm sorry, dear Diary, but not actually sorry enough to go hiking in the rain.  As other pages in you from earlier this year mention, I'm now in school, trying to put ever more distance between myself and homelessness, and this right now is my last long break before August.

Perhaps then, I'll do what I tried to do this past September:  find what I called then and still would call a "baseline".  Find out how the parks are operating in summer, so that if that winter I hike them again, I'll be able to tell what's different.  For that matter, locating water fountains (which are rather more mobile than restrooms) while the weather is nice.  If I can get that done next August and September, I can in turn realistically do winter hikes, after I graduate, next December.

Anyway.  Here are the two pages:

• Thyme Patch Park on Monday
• Bitter Lake Reservoir Park Yesterday and Froula Park Today

The first covers most of the parks in NW, the second a couple of parks in far north Seattle.

And while you've probably figured out the point, dear Diary, in case those titles confuse any more readers, you might as well tell them that after my happening on Thyme Patch Park on the first hike, I decided to call the rest of the pages after parks without plumbing that I hadn't visited for way too long.  The second page's title hammers on something I've mentioned to you before, that Seattle actually has parks (those exact two), not that far away, built on reservoir land, but without their own plumbing.

Well, good night, and good days and nights until we meet again, dear Diary.

The Grass Isn't Always Greener: Introduction

Dear Diary,

Yesterday I went on a long trip that included visits to two libraries in two counties.  I didn't bring water along on this trip, but did bring my bottles, so I could fill them along the way.

In Seattle's Central Library, I filled one without even thinking about it, and certainly without taking a photo.

But in a suburban library outside King County, that I was told had just re-opened last week, I was shocked to find this, and certainly did take a photo:

After seeing that, and other things nearby, I went on a long, and increasingly parched, hike with very dispiriting results.

People complain that the homeless flock to Seattle because it's "Free-attle", full of things homeless people can get for free here.  It hadn't occurred to me before that one of the things these complainers object to Seattle providing is free water.  But based on my hike yesterday and my pounding on the relevant park district's website already this morning, I fear it is.  Indeed, I wonder whether twenty years from now Seattle will be thought irresponsibly easy on the homeless because it won't have started charging them for the air they breathe.

I can't call the relevant agencies during the holiday weekend - in particular, the parks I visited yesterday (but not that library) could have lead as a better explanation for their paucity of fountains - and I can't really hike today, as I'd planned, because I still hurt from yesterday's unplanned hike.  I don't intend to let up on Seattle, and will still be doing water fountain hikes in North Seattle soon.  But as I get chances to go elsewhere, I'll take them, and as I learn more, I'll report it.  Because Seattle should also get what credit is due, and places that claim to be cities but are barbarously lacking in the basics of life, in things the Romans had already mastered two millennia ago, should get what shame is due.

Results of a relatively short hike, in Seattle but not North Seattle, tomorrow, I hope.  Until then, dear Diary.