Urban Living August 2015

I think there are some universally experienced aspects of urban living in large metropolises.

For example:

Rush hour traffic jams.

Here's one on our street this week.

The fellow working in the center of the photo has a rebar business and is cutting rebar with a circular saw.  That effectively prevents cyclists from using the sidewalk as a passing lane (which they often do if it's not, as it usually is, occupied by parked motorcycles or sidewalk businesses).

If you look carefully up the street you can see one motorcyclist taking advantage of a bit of available sidewalk.

And if you look very carefully you can just barely see tall L., with his white shirt and tie, half hidden by a telephone pole, holding a canvas grocery bag waiting for me.  He had made it past the rebar guy just before the guy started up his saw and the sparks started flying.

We live in a nice apartment.  And we live in an urban setting. I had expected cockroaches.  They are regular denizens of urban living.  And we've encountered a couple of them in our apartment.  And since 28,600 households in Seattle reported rat sightings last year we were not too surprised to hear evidences of their existence in our urban life here. We can hear them occasionally in the walls and ceilings which made it less of a surprise when, one evening, a largish, furry, brown creature skittered along the baseboards in the kitchen.

Sorry, no photo.  He declined to stop long enough for that.

We figured out where he was coming in through a gap in the kitchen cupboard baseboard, did some research, and then stuffed the gap with steel wool scrubbing pads (they are inside the grocery bag in the photo above) held in place by the Vietnamese version of duct tape.  That plus meticulousness in storage of food, the discovery of which cupboards are tight and which drawers are not, and keeping all surfaces absolutely free of crumbs is all part of managing the frequency of rodent visits.  So far, so good.

And our kitchen has never looked so consistently clean.

No rat visits lately.  But just in case, I make sure we sleep with our bedroom door closed.  :-)

Life is good.  There is lots to do.  And we are well and blessed.