A Couple Secrets...
There are a couple of secrets about this city that I thought I would enlighten the rest of the world...

Rain - not so much
This last week was 45 degrees, bright blue and sunny. I think Seattlites like the myth that it's constantly rainy so that the rest of us stay away. I saw the Cascades, Mt. Rainer and the Olympics almost every day last week. (Today was pea soup but it burned off by noon.)

"Slightly terrifying" is how I would describe driving on the downtown hills of Seattle. (I'm pretty sure this is why they invented automatics.) The angle at which the roads are paved probably isn't legal - your stomach flips going down them and your brakes had better be new to stop on them. (It's a little worse than night skiing - see earlier entry - because of the pedestrians.) While having a conversation with a friend Friday after work, I saw a skater zip down this hill (neither of which, the skater nor the hill are legal) and take a turn at an incredible speed and slam into the car being thrown out of site. I jumped up thinking we should go do something when the skater reappeared to see if he had done any damage to the car. Crazy. Both. The Skate and the Hill.

A sleepy fishing village...
Once upon a time, there was a sleepy little city in the Pacific Northwest that was the home of many types of people, mostly Japanese, Chinese and Scandinavians. This sleepy little fishing village of Seattle become the home to Microsoft, Boeing, the grunge scene, the tech boom, etc. Like many immigrant groups, those in the fishing industry send money home to their families like immigrants have always done. It turns out, according to my colleague who did a college paper on the amount of money that goes back to other countries, something like half of the money in the fishing industry returns to Scandahoovia... No wonder they're the wealthiest of the European nations - they're being supported by Seattlites! (Kidding...kind of.)

Lots of Scandinavians
It's kind of like Meeeennesota. (See the paragraph above.)

Those are all the secrets for now.