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Tuesday, the 12th of November, 2002

It's raining, with thunder and lightning and all that good hard wet stuff. Seattle has a reputation for rain, but we don't get a solid downpour very often. Visitors just think it rains all the time because they aren't used to the sort of general grey dampness that fills the city from October through May. It's not really rain, though - if I owned an umbrella, I'd never need to use it.

The rain is nice. I sometimes think Seattleites just say it rains all the time to keep the Californians away. This sometimes backfires, as the wet climate is one of the things that brought me here in the first place.

Sunday, the 10th of November, 2002

Saturday, the 9th of November, 2002

Wednesday, the 6th of November, 2002

I spent Saturday with other volunteers for Biodiversity Northwest helping destroy a road. The City of Seattle brought bulldozers in a month earlier and tore away the blacktop and supporting packed earth; we swarmed over the ribbon of bare ground and planted it with 1800 trees and shrubs.

The road ran through a wetland area in the Cedar River Watershed, which supplies most of Seattle's water. The city began buying up land in the area during the 1960s, finishing the process only in 1996 when they bought the last of the land from the Forest Service. It's now a protected wilderness area, and the city is five years into a fifty-year "habitat conservation plan" which bans logging in the area and requires the restoration of damaged ecosystems.

I like living in a dense urban core, and I love the wilderness, but I can't stand the vast half-developed sprawl that takes up most of the space between them. I dream, intensely, of acquiring some power, political or financial, which would allow me to push the city's boundaries back, tear apart the sprawl, and regrow the wild land there. This is a small step - one little mile of road - but I did it, with my own hands, in company with two dozen like-minded people. My hope is that in fifty years I won't even be able to find the spot to see how the new forest has developed.

Friday, the 1st of November, 2002

A big scary ball of thermonuclear orangeness is crushing its way down past the Olympic Peninsula.

And I am sitting at my desk writing code.

There is something wrong with this picture.

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