News of the week

 Miniature world

1.  Ten days and counting without measurable rain in Seattle, the longest dry streak since last October. I need to find the sprinklers. The good news is we're scheduled to have a new roof put on later this week.  That sounds like a big job but supposedly takes just two days, which includes tearing off and hauling away the old shingles.  It will be a noisy dawn-to-dusk beehive around here once they get started. More on that later.

2. Update on Big Bertha. Contractors say the giant tunneling machine won’t get moving again until next spring at the earliest, already sixteen months behind schedule.  It's unclear if the taxpayers will pay for the cost overruns, but now we know the bickering between the Washington DOT and the tunnel contractor will be settled in court.

 3.  Seattle's first female police chief was nominated this week.  Her name is Kathleen O'Toole, a one-time Boston police commissioner and former inspector general for Ireland's national police force. She seems like a smart, no-nonsense leader and just what the demoralized police department needs. I hope our dithering politics don't drive her crazy! Of course, Boston had their own "big dig" nightmare once.

4.  Good news, but a little late. I read in the paper this morning that Seattle council members have sided with neighborhood activists to finally set a lower height limit for new homes in single-family zones.  Many new houses in "urban village" areas loom over their neighbor's property and look nothing like what is already there.  Thirty-foot modern houses are built on lots as small as 1,000 square feet by using obscure mortgage and tax records the developers discovered on archived city maps.  (The double-edge sword of all that careful archiving.) The trees, side and back yards that made the neighborhood pleasant are torn out to squeeze in a big box of a house. 

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got, 
till it's gone...

Joni Mitchell
Big Yellow Taxi