Nov. to Nov.: Nica-steam to nasty-slush...

Exactly a year ago yesterday,
my wife and I said good-bye to friends at the airport in Managua.

Tres amigos had come to visit us in Nicaragua, and after a week-and-a-half of inside jokes and sweaty afternoons, they returned to Gringolandia... How strange it was that day to bid them farewell at the airport; they were going and we were staying?! (By that point we had been in Nicaragua for a little over five months, and the reality of living there hadn't fully sunk in yet.)

During their visit we had rented a car all together, but when they flew back al norte, we returned to our carless ways, taking a recycled yellow school-bus back to León...
Bus-drivers throughout Central America are known for their, uh, 'fearless' driving...
However, the diesel-scented machismo is tempered by a virtuous/cutesy side, attested to by the interior decor: Note the sticker of Tweety-bird ("Piolín" en español) decked out in hip-hop attire, accompanied by backwards-baseball-capped Bugs Bunny, and of course, on the right--blurry but still identifiable--la Virgencita...
Yeah, I bet you didn't realize that la madre de dios and Looney-tunes characters could harmoniously share wall-space, eh?


One place we took our friends during their stay was the Masaya Volcanic National Park, a tremendous smoking crater that occasionally burps up bolders that smash tourists' cars in the parking lot. Fortunately, the day we hiked around the crater was incident-free...And incidentally, (remember that I've recently become a bird-nerd), a colony of parakeets has adapted to the sulfurous atmosphere and lives in the crater's interior cliff walls...

And now, from one volcano to another, one year later: Yes, I know that I'm slightly obsessed with taking photos of Mt. Rainier from our balcony...but hey, remember Monet, the (overly-)celebrated Impressionist painter? Well, he was 'obsessed' with multiple images of the same thing, creating dozens of paintings of the façade of the Rouen cathedral, fascinated by the changing light conditions...and they're considered masterpieces...So, seriously, all self-justification aside, the scene of snow-covered roofs and the cloudy 'hat' on the mountain is definitely wintry, no?

What a difference a year (and a few degrees of latitude) makes!

The above photo was from yesterday morning--after a snow/ice storm that is unusual for Seattle in November.
(And it's official now: November 2006 has been the wettest month on record here--normally Seattle gets around 5 inches of rain in Nov.; this year there's been almost 16"--almost half the yearly total!)

Just a few white inches, but enough to shut down roads and schools in this hilly place...

We were happiily stuck in our apartment all day--vehicles couldn't get in or out of the hilly complex...on the road, there were vehicles abandoned from the night before...

The temperature stayed below freezing all day, although the sun did come out...

...and when it did, in the afternoon, we had a little visitor on the balcony: I had never before seen a hummingbird that wasn't, well, humming.
This was the first time we'd ever seen one perched...sitting...still.
(A humming snowbird? Or, rather, a non-humming bird, sitting and sunning himself...a sunning cold bird)
And because he was so still, my wife got worried and thought that maybe he was sick and had come to our balcony to die.

Well, he must have found a warm place to sleep, because we saw him again this morning, buzzing around in a most live fashion...He couldn't eat on our balcony, though, because a while back a crow stole our little nectar-feeder...

Now, after one bird-photo, another: Tango, our Senegal parrot, is doing well, getting tamer and tamer by the day, loving to do acrobatics on my hand. He's even 'squeaking on command' now--I've conditioned him to go 'kweek-kweek' when I squeeze his sides... And one last bird-photo, of Paquito-the-parrotlet, who's become my wife's shoulder-guardian. But he also has a little rubber-ducky nemesis:

As I wrap up tonight's 'column,' it's 'slushing' outside--a mix of sleet, snow, and rain is falling--finally thawing the freeze that began Monday...It's going to be in the balmy 40's tomorrow...

So tomorrow's view from the balcony toward the west, looking at the SeaTac airport control tower, won't look like this anymore...

If any of you ever come visit,
as you can see, it won't take us long
to come pick you up at the airport...

...if we still live here...

...as view-obsessed as I am,
apartments are,
alas,
never permanent...

...like snow, which,
alas,
must melt away...

Too many 'alases' tonight...too trite...
telling me it's time to sign off.