Yale's Honeymoon Update II: Bellingham
Just whipped into Bellingham and made a beeline for a public library. Two days away from the great pacifier known as The Interweb is almost too much for me. And you Yahoo mail users know the deflationary letdown one feels when one logs onto one's Yahoo Mail account and sees:
Inbox (5)
Bulk (118)
For you non-Yahoo users, I'll explain that this means that I have 5 unread messages and 118 quarantined spam messages. And of those five, at least one is a rogue spam message that didn't get caught. It's pretty sweet that Yahoo has the know-how to catch all those spam messages, and easy enough to delete them all, but quite disarming to know that we live in a society with a 118/5 spam-to-meat ratio, if you follow me.
Anyway, back a few months ago I was all fired up about moving away to somewhere, and Bellingham was one of the candidates that sounded the best. Come to find out it's a quite wondrous place. Right on Puget Sound, nice university, nice downtown, all that shit. And it's sunny here today too, but with a very pleasant sea breeze. I tell you, it's been sunny all six or seven times I've been to the Seattle area, so it's hard for me to imagine how dreary it must get here. Still, having been here just a little while, I give it my highest compliment: "I'd move here in a heartbeat."
I must say, Seattle's sprawl areas are way prettier than Denver's. Well, I guess they look almost identical in terms of architectural style and so forth, but in Seattle, they're at least on hills and surrounded by big trees. In Denver, they're just out there in these flat, treeless expanses making you wonder aloud why the fuck anyone would want to live there.
And that Interstate 5, man, what a clusterfuck that is. We were on it from about noon to three today, and it was jacked almost the entire way from Seattle to Bellingham. No worse than I-25 from Colo. Springs to Fort Collins though, I suppose. God bless America and its car-choked arterials!
Shit, there are a whole line of wankers staring me down to use this computer, so I should sign off so Mr. Mouth Breather behind me can enjoy his last few days of being able to look at porn on the library computers. Next up, Vancougar, BC. Stay gold, yo.
Congratulations!
Dave and I were in Seattle a couple of weekends ago and drove up to Bellingham for a wedding. Having been in swamp for two years, the drive was amazing. Unfortunately, we spent our time in Bellingham in the banquet hall of a Hampton Inn.
The drive was a mess for us too. A gas truck caught on fire on I-5, which made getting out of Seattle a nightmare.
Next time you are in Portland and need to use a public library, I suggest the downtown branch. They did a remodel about four years ago and it is beautiful.
- Karlita July 24, 2003 09:15Bellingham: The place I stopped off about 12 years ago to get some coffee on my way back from Vancouver, only to be told by some dreaded, nose- ring festooned latte jerk: "There is no X in espresso." Hey, so sue me--that was when I still pronounced Oregon like Ore-i-gahn.
- Jerry Lundegaard July 24, 2003 13:20If anyone has a report on the state of the Break Espresso shop in Bellingham, I'd love to hear/read it. Putting that place together took up the last couple of months before I moved to NYC in January of two triple ought. And I can attest that I-5 is a total clusterfuck at both the north and south ends.
- mhaze July 24, 2003 13:33