Archive
Spirit of Washington dinner train
It’s almost the end of the line for the Spirit of Washington dinner train, which offers passengers a unique wine and dine experience on a nostalgic train ride between Renton and the Columbia Winery in Woodinville. To accommodate the additional lanes to Interstate 405, King County is negotiating with the owner of the rails on which the dinner train operates, to buy the corridor.
I first learned of the dinner train from a brochure I picked up at the ferry dock in downtown Seattle when we first moved to the area, and balked at the idea of dining in what seemed like a hokey tourist trap. I just not interested in paying a premium to dine alongside Lake Washington and to cross a railroad trestle in Bellevue. After hearing that the train would be discontinuing service, however, I have started to reconsider my position. And now the nostalgic train ride on the east side sounds like a great idea. We tried to reserve for this morning, but they were booked up, and a phone call to the toll-free number on the site confirmed that I’d need to book at least a week in advance.
This morning, I also noticed that a link had been added to the web site, urging supporters to help save the dinner train. The owners are asking the community to write to King County and ask that the train route be maintained.
Kubota Garden
The Kubota Japanese strolling garden in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood.
We always aspire to challenging and invigorating nature hikes up the trails of Cougar Mountain and the region’s other majestic peaks, but the serenity of a Japanese garden, with its scenic, meandering paths, is always good consolation for an afternoon with a curious toddler. Japanese gardens are said to use patterns and metaphor, instead of just floral arrangements. The Kubota Japanese Garden in South Seattle has some flowering plants but the emphasis is on pattern. It fuses the principles of traditional Japanese landscaping with Pacific Northwest plants to create a graceful and intriguing space for solace. The garden includes a wide array of perennials, making it a great place for a stroll, even in the colder months.
The Year of the Boar
Chinese Lunar New Year starts this Sunday, February 18 and ends on February 6, 2008.
Happy year of the boar!
Boars are said to be honest, trustworthy and intelligent. And even for those of us who weren’t born in a boar year, 2007 is our year too, because there’s a little bit of pig in all of us.
Valentine’s day notebook
For a smart and hearty twist on Valentine’s Day, we’ll forgo the flowers and candy this year and make a special dessert, like one of the cakes we used to admire outside boulanger–pâtissier windows in France. I got the idea from Fred and Adele, who stopped by on a dreary evening in December of 2006, bearing an early Christmas gift for Tiggy and a tantilizing, homemade broyé du Poitou, still warm from the oven and covered with a quaint tea towel. What a wonderful idea!
The gesture was thoughtful, practical and environmentally friendly, since there was nothing to unwrap and nothing went to waste. Our guests chose to share the flour of their labor with us, and we, in turn, got to share a warm holiday experience that didn’t involve the exchange of hokey greetings and sentiments like, “If we could rearrange the alphabet, we’d put U and S together: US.”
Vista Ultimate
I upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate last week. The latest version of the Windows operating system offers several enhancements to security, stability and support, as well as behind-the-scenes improvements that make Vista fun and simple to use. To be honest, I am more caught up with the fun and the simple. Naturally, I want the guarantee that my computer won’t crash and that applications will run at their best, but it’s also important that my time computing is as appealing and as straightforward as possible. With Vista, I was even impressed with the clean, novel packaging.
The new Start menu is clutter-free and has some amazing new icons. Scroll over any menu option and you get a summary of what it does. A translucent, high-definition icon related to the menu item pops up. Scrolling over “search,” for instance, brings up an explanation of search, as well as a sharp magnifying glass on top of the menu. And I like the see-through frames. They make working so much fun.
Nuts and bolts
Installing Vista was simple. I had little to do with upgrading my laptop from XP, but D said it was quite smooth and much easier to install on my portable computer than on his tormented and over-the-hill PC. It took only a couple of hours, followed by some tweaking and downloading the day after. Well I never! Those ads for Mac (with the Mac looking young and put-together and the PC wearing a hospital gown) weren’t entirely truthful!
Picture perfect
Vista includes the Windows Photo Gallery application for organizing digital images and videos, and applying quick fixes to photo color and framing.
Pimp my Laptop
Vista comes with all sorts of gadgets (small applications, like clocks and stocks) to personalize your screen. I now have the local weather (in Celsius), a calendar and a clock displayed on my sidebar. Of course, I don’t need a clock gadget, considering that the time is displayed on the lower right-hand corner of the screen, but I liked the clean look of the analogue dials. You can also display multiple stocks and news, or keep your screen gadget-free.
Vista comes with scalable desktop icons and some beautiful “wide-screen” images. You can also set a video to the background background, but this takes up processor power.
Instant Search
The Start menu now includes a search box, to find applications, documents and emails on your PC. As with the search function in XP, the Vista search narrows the search results as you type more characters. With Vista, however, you can also use Instant Search to launch applications. To launch Word, for instance, I’d type w-o-r-d, then click enter. This is simpler than searching for the blue and white icon with the big bold “W.” The Word icon was always present in the list of recently used items on the left side of my XP Start menu, but other icons would often be upstaged by new icons, and when I needed to launch them again, I’d have to hunt them down.
I have not yet tried out any of the new games available on Vista and I’m still discovering subtle improvements to the user interface.
28 days earlier
Putting together an itinerary for our upcoming Paris trip is making me muse over the pleasures we used to enjoy when we lived in the French capital, and those annoying experiences which, most likely, would still touch a nerve. Of course, a lot has changed since we used to call Paris home. It’s amazing how much places continue to evolve in your absence. Considering the profound impact that Paris has had on me and my lifestyle, you’d think it would be unable to move on without me. Two aspects of our day-to-day lives in Paris, for which we cultivated strong feelings of love and frustration, were public transportation and l’art de table.
Le transport
Lots of changes are afoot in Paris to revitalize mass transit. Before we left the 18th district, the RATP had started installing electronic boards on metro platforms to inform passengers of the estimated wait time before the next available train. And it was about time. After seeing displays on platforms in other cities a few years earlier, I found it surprising that subways in cities like New York and Paris didn’t offer riders more precise information about how long riders would have to wait for a train. I become really impatient if I feel I’m idling on a subway platform, with no visibility on when the next rain will arrive. That’s because whenever the train is unreasonably late, I face the same dilemma: get out and walk, I’d now doubt hear the train pulling up to the platform below. Stay and wait, and the train would never come.
Other big improvements were implemented after our departure, like the new, extended metro hours on weekends, and the new tramway around Paris. I’ll probably get to take advantage of this, and other changes, during our visit in March.
I’m optimistic, although common sense dictates that no matter how much efficiency these improvements bring to mass transit, they won’t cure our fellow straphangers of their bad habits. I’m not referring to the screwball riders – like one late-night passenger we encountered who spent the entire trip talking on a dead cell phone about the most shocking things he could dream up, seemingly to surprise the other passengers – but the inconsiderate people. D is especially fond of the riders who try to board a metro car, sometimes while the train is still pulling into the station, before letting passengers off. Then there are the imbeciles who rush up to the train, slam themselves into the side of the car and pry the doors open as the train is pulling away from the platform, as if blithefully unaware that the loud buzz meant that the doors were closing. Naturally, some of the worst offenders are the ones who wedge themselves through turnstiles behind paying passengers. The first time someone did this to me, I started screaming and hollering because I thought I was being attacked. I hadn’t realized how common this practice was in Paris, and that most people just accept it.
Dining in and eating out
After about a year in France, I started eagerly hunting down elusive products that are readily available in American supermarkets, gems like peanut butter and sour cream, fat-free cooking sprays, butter substitutes and barbecue sauce. I suppose these things were so tempting because I no longer had easy access to them, but the desire quickly waned, once I discovered that if I searched hard enough, I could purchase these items, for a premium, and how easily I got along without them. And I was sufficiently distracted browsing the rich array of choices available in our neighborhood supermarkets, and discovering different cuts of meat and the local butcher. The thrill of shopping in French specialty shops will still be there. I just hope most of my old favorites will still be in business.
We used to patronize a popular restaurant chain with bistro locations all over the city. The prices were reasonable and the menu proposed a decent selection of grilled fish and meats, so we’d always leave feeling content and with the scent of smoke and barbeque filtering out of our clothes. We’d request a table in the non-smoking section and away from the kitchen, but invariably, we would find ourselves sitting down to feast next to a table in the smoking section, with a patron chain-smoking between bites of her charcoal-grilled steak. I am curious to see how our dining experiences will change in light of laws passed in France to ban smoking in restaurants and public places.
IA-K
IA-K has launched a new website, www.ia-k.fr, to showcase the wide array of imaging and printing solutions provided to retail customers and businesses in France. The site uses bold colors to promote the company’s high-quality graphics solutions for marketing and general printing.
Sebastien Saugey plans to enhance the website with more content, including additional company and contact information. “This is only a beginning,” he commented.
Sebastien launched IA-K in 2005 to provide graphic design expertise and imaging and printing solutions to retail customers, graphics professionals and small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in Metropolitan France. Popular applications include point-of-sale, business brochures and other marketing communications. The company is based in Milly-La-Foret, a town that lies roughly 50 kilometers south of Paris.
Sammamish River Trail
The stretch of the Sammamish River Trail in Redmond is one of my favorite spots for dog-walking and daydreaming. I love sauntering along the trail’s asphalt surface, knowing that I can walk for miles without having to stop for honking cars and without leaving the city.
A wonderful stop along the trail is little clearing near the city hall campus, not far from the Redmond Senior Center. There’s a wooden bench and a water fountain, as well as a panel outlining the history of the slough. Safely removed from the busy pathway, I can spend moment with my head in the clouds, and take in the wildlife as well as the public art on the city hall campus. I have spotted salmon jumping out of the murky water and interesting birds perched on rocks and in trees lining the river banks. There are benches and picnic tables on the grass behind the city hall building, but I rarely have the luxury of lingering in the same spot for too long. Foot and bicycle traffic can get pretty heavy along the trail, especially in clement weather.
V, A, A, T and D family blog 