opinionated atlases
I took myself to another movie last night! Isn't that exciting! It was a documentary I went to the U District AMC Theatre to see called Honeyland and it was superb. Like, it was the third solid-A documentary I have seen so far this year and it was still the best of them. If I had to make a top 10 for 2019 right now, it would be my #1.
It was nice and cool and even a bit rainy yesterday, although honestly whenever it rains in August it feels like a tease, because it's never enough rain and it never goes on for long enough. You know what I want? I want it to rain, like, nonstop for a week. That would make me happy. We don't even get that in winters anymore.
I walked up Denny Way from work to Fairview and caught the #64 express bus there at 4:49, getting to the theatre about two minutes into the trailers. It's times like this I am grateful for reserved seating. Not that it mattered a great deal here -- I was one of only four people in the theatre. This happens far too often anymore, particularly at excellent documentary films. Nobody goes to the theatre to see them anymore. Granted, usually it's not a big difference in viewing experience between the theatre and a TV screen, but in this case it absolutely made a difference. I have never seen better cinematography in any other documentary film.
I did like having some time on the bus for just one day, though -- I'm back on my bike for commuting today -- because it let me read the library book I am really into and can hardly put down: Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit. I only know about it because I was looking up transit information about Denver online a couple of weeks ago and happened upon a Denver-area publication's interview with the author about his chapter regarding their city and its apparently largely non-intuitive rail routes. But I immediately knew, this kind of book is my jam! So I put a hold on it at the library. And aside from honestly too many copy editing mistakes, I am riveted by it.
This is hardly a massively different type of book than An Atlas of Cities had been, but for some reason, I had to renew that book twice, thereby taking some nine weeks to finish it. But I already know I will get this one done in plenty of time before it's due back before needing to renew it. It's probably because of its much more immediate relevance to my own life and culture -- An Atlas of Cities is global in scope; Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit makes it clear in the very title it is focused on America. And it has plenty of information on Seattle itself, even outside the one chapter specifically dedicated to it. This guy is looking at all the 30 or so largest metropolitan areas of the country and making judgments on how successful their regional mass transit networks are, and somewhat surprisingly, he seems to have more positive than negative things to say about Seattle's transit networks. This almost certainly would have been much different had he written the book twenty years ago, but the creation of Sound Transit's Link Light Rail transformed transit around here, almost uniformly for the better, and the book's judgments include the wide expansion plans already under construction.
Anyway. I'm all about this book, and I'll be happy to have it handy to read on my flights to and from Denver this weekend. I often take books with me for travel and then hardly look at them, but I will certainly be reading this one, and may even have it finished by next week.
I just got back from lunch with Karen at the Six-Seven Restaurant at the Edgewater Hotel. We had a lunch scheduled last week that she had to cancel at the last minute, and we don't usually have them only a week apart -- it must have already been rescheduled from a conflict the previous week some weeks or months ago. I saw her to see Where'd You Go, Burnadette on Saturday anyway. I'm still glad we had lunch today. She was able to tell me about the new cat Anita just adopted.
I guess the cat is four years old but very playful, and since Nora, Karen and Dave's 18-year-old cat, died just last fall, their agreement is that the cat, which came back from the shelter with the name of Jill (I told her I would only like that as a cat name of Anita eventually got another one and named it Jack), will go with Anita once she eventually finds a place of her own. She recently moved back in with them after finishing college in Portland.
In any case, we spent some time talking about that, and I told Karen about travel plans to Denver this weekend and then to Las Vegas in another five weeks and then to Wallace, Idaho in December, and then, if all goes right, Australia in February. Lots of places to go!
Right now though, I just need to get this posted so I can get back to work.
[posted 1:24 pm]