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let me tell you about my city
Feb. 28th, 2008 08:43 amI love my city, and my commute this morning seemed like an unexpected series of reminders why.
For one thing, let me clear up a misconception about Seattle: it does not, in fact, rain all the time in this city. Seattle is more often grey than rainy. Rain happens... oh, let's see... well, it rained yesterday, but only for half the day, and that was the first time it'd rained during the day in a few weeks, unless I'm mistaken. Grey however, that's a pretty frequent occurrence. But the thing is (and I think folks from Boston and possibly the UK, maybe a few other coastal cities, can back me up on this) there are about a thousand different kinds of grey that a day can be. Today, Seattle is this remarkable sort of soft grey, where the clouds all blend into each other, some dark, some almost yellowish, some pure white, and everything farther than a few blocks away gets misted and soft-edged like a dream. It's the perfect kind of Seattle morning, I think. Across the lake, or across the sound, everything looks fuzzy and half-awake, but the buildings up close are sharp and lit with this wonderfully diffuse light that made me wish I'd brought my camera to work.
Why am I going on about this? Essentially, I felt like utter crap this morning, so I stopped off at the little Italian Gelato place between my apartment and the bus-stop and bought a real coffee (as opposed to Starbucks or the crappy coffee at my office) to trick myself into leaving the apartment. Because otherwise I was absolutely not going to go. The nice gentleman there paused in his morning coffee to make me an Americano (is that just an Italian way of saying "coffee for people who don't understand coffee?") that was so delicious I didn't need any sugar to cover the taste of it (a novelty if you're used to bad-office-coffee, as I am), and which I promptly drank all of, on the bus, on an empty stomach. Which explains why I am now absolutely fizzing with energy, while at the same time wishing I'd been a bit more sensible because I now have a stomach ache. But I am also awake.
The other reason I'm going on about this is that while drinking the very strong coffee, I read a collection of Douglas Adams' essays, and I have a terrible habit of picking up the way people write into my thinking. So now I can't have a single thought without it wanting to turn into one of his essays, and to be honest I'm just not half as clever as he is, so this is what you get. Rambling about clouds and coffee. Because that's about all my brain can handle this morning.
And now I have to login and start actually working. But before I do, I'll leave you with one last, absolutely delightful thought:
I finished the Dratted Fic last night. 41,150 words of absolute crap that needs more editing than I probably have breath in my body, but I've got a draft. And that's a very good thing.
For one thing, let me clear up a misconception about Seattle: it does not, in fact, rain all the time in this city. Seattle is more often grey than rainy. Rain happens... oh, let's see... well, it rained yesterday, but only for half the day, and that was the first time it'd rained during the day in a few weeks, unless I'm mistaken. Grey however, that's a pretty frequent occurrence. But the thing is (and I think folks from Boston and possibly the UK, maybe a few other coastal cities, can back me up on this) there are about a thousand different kinds of grey that a day can be. Today, Seattle is this remarkable sort of soft grey, where the clouds all blend into each other, some dark, some almost yellowish, some pure white, and everything farther than a few blocks away gets misted and soft-edged like a dream. It's the perfect kind of Seattle morning, I think. Across the lake, or across the sound, everything looks fuzzy and half-awake, but the buildings up close are sharp and lit with this wonderfully diffuse light that made me wish I'd brought my camera to work.
Why am I going on about this? Essentially, I felt like utter crap this morning, so I stopped off at the little Italian Gelato place between my apartment and the bus-stop and bought a real coffee (as opposed to Starbucks or the crappy coffee at my office) to trick myself into leaving the apartment. Because otherwise I was absolutely not going to go. The nice gentleman there paused in his morning coffee to make me an Americano (is that just an Italian way of saying "coffee for people who don't understand coffee?") that was so delicious I didn't need any sugar to cover the taste of it (a novelty if you're used to bad-office-coffee, as I am), and which I promptly drank all of, on the bus, on an empty stomach. Which explains why I am now absolutely fizzing with energy, while at the same time wishing I'd been a bit more sensible because I now have a stomach ache. But I am also awake.
The other reason I'm going on about this is that while drinking the very strong coffee, I read a collection of Douglas Adams' essays, and I have a terrible habit of picking up the way people write into my thinking. So now I can't have a single thought without it wanting to turn into one of his essays, and to be honest I'm just not half as clever as he is, so this is what you get. Rambling about clouds and coffee. Because that's about all my brain can handle this morning.
And now I have to login and start actually working. But before I do, I'll leave you with one last, absolutely delightful thought:
I finished the Dratted Fic last night. 41,150 words of absolute crap that needs more editing than I probably have breath in my body, but I've got a draft. And that's a very good thing.
