At Home in the Storm

Yes, there was some flooding. We're doing OK. Thanks for asking. 

 I don't talk that much about my neighborhood in the blog these days. Grubb Street is located on the East Hill of Kent, in the most northernly part near Panther Lake. When we moved in (years and years ago), the area was a mix of small farms, orchards, and houses with big yards and a lot of trees. Since then we've seen much more development. The horse farm at the corner became a huge development, and smaller developments have shown up on a lot of the side roads. Next door was when we moved in a wooded lot with a small cottage, but that plot is being developed into 13 huge houses with very small yards.

And despite the neighborhood disruptions, that development has been doing generally OK by us. We have a lot more sunlight in the yard for the gardens. The developers hooked up to our water main badly and we got some nasty water bills (which they offered to cover, which is nice). And at one point they cut my internet connection (Wire from the house across the street to a main line) with a backhoe as they were re-digging the sewer line, and again, put it back in working order by the end of the day. They did take down two huge pine trees on the properly line, which provided shade for the house during the summer. Those, I really miss. 

Anyway,

We have a horseshoe driveway in the front of the house, which is good for access and parking when friends come over. And in the center of that horseshoe, we have a couple more big pines and a dead/dying maple. The maple has been dead/dying for years, had split into two large trunks, and one of the two looks like it had be struck by lightning somewhere along the way. At the base we have a number of rhododendrons (the property two lots over was a rhododendron garden, and these are descendants). But we like the level of separation between the house and that street the maple and the other trees in the front provides. 

Cue the atmospheric river. 

The atmospheric river (A term that thrown around a lot out here these days) is a steady, heavy stream of water-laden air that starts in the Philippines, crosses Hawaii (gaining another title of "Pineapple Express") and then makes landfall between Alaska and California. Usually we don't get hit that hard. This past month, the Seattle area got hit hard. Our rivers in King County tend to be short and shallow, and our valleys steep and narrow, so that when we get hit with rains, the rivers swell quickly, to flood stage and beyond.

You've seen the pictures. The Skagit and Snoqualmie Rivers in the northern parts of the county overtopped their banks with the first wave of storms, swamping farms and communities.  Then the Cedar River, which runs down Maple Valley and through Renton itself, hit well over flood stage. And then the Green and White Rivers, which broke levees and flooded entire housing developments and warehouses. Pumpkins from an inundated farm upstream have been spotted floating down the Green. Roads through the passes have been closed due the flooded streams undercutting and collapsing the road surfaces. So, yeah, that's pretty bad.

As I say, we're OK from the flooding, being on a hill. The nearby Panther lake overflowed, flooding the local fields but not coming up over the road (there was work on the drainage system there about ten years back). But we were hammered by the wind coming through with the variety of storm fronts. 

And one of the massive trunks of the dead/dying maple snapped about 20 feet up and toppled. The good news is that it did not take out the power line. The bad news is that it blocked one of the entrances to the horseshoe driveway and took out our Internet connection and the mailboxes.

Oh, I haven't mentioned the mailboxes. We had three mailboxes out front, which, like everything else out here, have a history. The original post was put in by the neighbor's father-in-law in the 60s, and was fashioned by convicts guilty of drunk and disorderly charges (the neighbor's father-in-law was a local sheriff). When we moved in, we had to adjust it, and the Lovely Bride and the neighbor built a flower box support for the three boxes, using tools the neighbor had gotten under the GI Bill. Like I said, everything here has a story. And this is what was splintered and crushed by the falling tree, the mailboxes smashed and buried under a tangle of branches.

And we recovered. I managed to hack away most of the medium-sized branches, and was pleased to discover that my electric chainsaw worked after all these years, and that I had enough extension cords to reach from the garage to the front. We called a tree service that hauled away the huge main trunk and got a bid to take down the rest of the dying/dead maple. I spent a week cyber-crashing at a friend's house, mooching his Internet to do the day job. Eventually we got the Internet service restored (after long discussions about which corner of the house they needed to hook it up to). The Lovely Bride purchased new mailboxes, built a new support for the boxes (using a perfectly good piece of cedar planking we had in the garage), and restored the mail service (which will need to be adjusted and cemented in once the rain finally stops). 

And like I said, we're doing OK. It was a bit more eventful than we would have liked, but a way to end the old year and begin the new. And we're just waiting for the next big storm.

More later, 

Happy Holidays from Grubb Street

 We wish you all a happy, safe, and secure Holiday Season.

Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Luc Olivier Merson (1879), MFA, Boston.

More later,

Theatre: Woman, Waiting

Penelope, based on the writings in the Odyssey by Homer, Music, Lyrics & Arrangements by Alex Bechtel, Book by Alex Bechtel, Grace McLean, and Eva Steinmetz, Directed by Kelly Kitchens, Arts West, through December 19.

A second musical in a mere matter of days, but Penelope serves other ends than the big-ticket Come From Away. It is small, intimate, and personal, a one-woman performance based on Penelope, wife of Odysseus. Penelope is the one left behind when Odysseus goes off, first to war, then on his adventurous perambulations to get back home. Homer presents her as the prize at the end of the journey, but she is also just as cunning as her husband. Most notable is her putting off her would-be suitors by weaving her mourning shroud in the day, and unraveling it again in the evening. But she is all that and more. 

Chelsea LeValley is Penelope, and Penelope waits. She worries, fusses, prays, runs the city, bats away the oafish suitors, rages, raises a son, longs for her lost mate, and sustains. LeValley pulls it all off not only with an incredibly strong voice but through her physical actions - weaving, prostrating herself before the gods, and ranging from angry challenges to residing in the single chair in the center of the stage, a small table with a decanter of whiskey and a single glass. LeValley is one of the most gifted singers I've heard at the Arts West, which regularly does musical shows, and she dominates her material and her character's emotions.

She is literally backed up by on-stage musicians at the back of the stage, dressed in black, that serve as the Greek (of course) chorus and the voice of the goddess when she confronts the deities that have denied her news of her husband. Consisting of violin (Amanda Spires), Viola (Lauren Hall), Cello (Kumiko Chiba) and Drums (Mitchell Beck), and led by Music Director/Artistic Director Matthew Wright on the keyboards, they are ever-present and but reserved, letting LeValley take command of the proceedings. 

The songs themselves are clear, emotional and emotive. They have a folk-pop quality to them that verges on country, and LaValley's delivery feels grounded and midwestern. Accessible. She rolls through her emotions and uncertainties in every song, as she makes her way to her own fulfillment. The songs vary through the spectrum of emotions, an LaValley delivers every note perfectly. 

Penelope's domain is a raised circular stage in the center of the room, with stairs leading off at the third-points. The theatre put small tables around it, creating a cabaret feel as LeValley descends and wanders among the audience. There's a problem there, in that the tables (and their occupants) blocked the front rows of the audience, a lot. A small woman sitting next to me was totally stage-blocked by a very tall man at a table in front of her. I offered the woman my seat and clambered over the back of the seats to a higher, empty perch (The Lovely Bride, seated next to my original position, had a perfect seat, front row center with no one in front of her). 

The stage was relatively bare, giving LaValley the space she uses to the fullest, the musicians lined against a backdrop that both reminded me of a Maxfield Parish print and a Jeff Easley underpainting. Her gown matched the rich copperish browns of the backdrop, signifying it as Penelope's land. Before the performance, there is the audio of the waves crashing on the rocks beneath Penelope's home, reminding us both of the proximity of her husband and his distance. 

The plot does not follow the plot of the Odyssey save in its initial situation - this is Penelope's story, not her husband's. She is no prize to be won, but rather her own fully-formed character. Her story is about the emptiness of loneliness and the unknown fate of a loved one. It reminded of me when I have, twice now, left the Lovely Bride to join a company far away from her, leaving her to manage everything behind me as I went off to new adventures. Kate loved the performance, and I liked it a lot.

Penelope is about a woman, waiting, but also about a woman, sustaining, and discovering her inner strength against the fates and the gods and the emptiness in her bed and her life. Well worth attending.

More later, 

Play: Revival of the Fittest

 Come From Away by Irene Sankoff & David Hein, Directed by Brian Ivie Seattle Rep through Jan 4

So in the face of the atmospheric river pummeling the Seattle area, the Lovely Bride and I bundled ourselves out to the second performance for the Seattle Rep season, a revival of a musical we saw way back in 2015. OK, its a revival, I thought, I've seen more than enough versions of the same Shakespeare play, or works by August Wilson, so I thought I could manage a new version of a feel-good musical about 9/11. I can do this fairly dispassionately.

Not really. I was in tears after the first five minutes, and kept quietly weeping at points throughout the play. Looking at my original review, I had been emotionally touched, but it felt harder this time. Maybe its post-tramatic stress, maybe it was old memories being excavated, maybe it was just some things going on in my personal life, but I tired of trying to surreptitiously wipe the tears from my eyes and just let them run down my cheeks. The heck with it.

Everyone has their own 9/11 stories, like my parents had Pearl Harbor stories (coming home from church and hearing about it on the radio in the living room). And seeing the performance on Pearl Harbor Day may have had something to with my reaction as well. The one thing I haven't mentioned before about it in this space was the silence in the skies in the week that followed. We are on the opposite hill in the Green River valley from SeaTac, and just south of both the Renton airport and Boeing Field, so while we don't get a lot of airplane noise, there is enough of a background rumbling from time to time to make us aware of its existence. But in the week that followed 9/11, there was nothing. And oppressive silence. It was a ghost in my memory until the play brought it all back to me.

Anyway,

Come From Away is a feel-good musical about 9/11. After the four passenger jets hit, all air traffic was grounded, and planes in the air had to land ASAP. A lot of the transatlantic flights, like 38 planes, include jumbos, had to come down in Newfoundland, in a small airport near the town of Gander (back in the day before jet travel, planes would fly to Newfoundland, refuel, and make the jump across the Atlantic. My father went to war on a bomber that refueled there). So the airfield was larger than was then-needed for the present day, until 38 planes had to touch down and 9000 passengers were grounded for the better part of the week.

The musical is about those passengers and the nearby towns (Gander and others) who suddenly had to take care of the new arrivals. It is a normal day until all hell breaks loose as the passengers worry, panic, try to get in touch with loved ones, and find out what happened, while the townies struggle to get basic support for the new arrivals, with no idea how long the emergency would last. There are all sorts of stories spinning out of the situation - the pilot that can no longer fly, the mother whose son is fireman in NYC, a couple gets together, another couple breaks up, a rabbi has to set up a kosher kitchen, the local ASPCA has to deal with all the animals trapped in the luggage compartments (including a couple chimps). 

And the actors pull it off incredibly well. The cast - a massive (for modern theater) dozen actors, plus a six-member band are on stage for the duration of the performance, and move effortless between characters, such that I did not recognize them when they transformed. Accents and mannerisms are added and dropped with each costume changes. And a lot of the folk on stage are locals that I have seen at other performances in the Seattle Area, though even many of them are making "Their Seattle Rep debuts".  And that's something I love about local theatre, particularly if they create such strong performances.

And the performances are strong, the songs are excellent, and the action moves swiftly from beginning to end. There is not any dead spots here - most of the scenes are frenetic and even the slow songs have an emotional weight that pushes them through. There are strong Celtic/Irish/Nor'easter flavor to the music, including a lot of stomping and dancing. And the actors play their own instruments on-stage, which is something I don't remember from the original. It is a conceit that works incredibly well.

Is there one actor to single out? Not really, because they are ALL that good, and put everything out on the stage to a packed house. It was really an ensemble job, and all of them were frankly amazing. 

Can I quibble about anything? Sure. The revival felt over-produced as far as stagecraft. The original we saw (pre-Broadway) worked from a mostly-empty stage, with chairs and boxes brought on from the periphery. This version set up the framing device of a 10-year reunion by physically setting it in the Gander high school gym, complete with basketball hoops folded up along the walls. I don't know if all that was needed, since the action at the center quickly took hold and dominated the space.

So, is there a moral here? People pull together in times of stress and heartbreak? Canadians are basically nice? I can't exactly say, but this is revival that you should attend. It is more than worth it. Good job, mates. 

More later, 

Books: Seattle Time Capsules

 Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas, by Terra Hatfield, Jenny Kempson, and Natalie Ross, Sasquatch Press (at that time part of Penguin Random House), 2018

Filmlandia! by David Schmader, Sasquatch Books (at the time part of Penguin Random House, but soon to be sold toe Blue Star Press and given its freedom), 2023 

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces by James Rupp and Miguel Edwards, University of Washington Press, 2018

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography by David B Williams, University of Washington Press 2015

The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, Ballantine Books, 2013 (paperback 2023)

Seattle Noir edited by Curt Colbert, Akashic Books, 2009

Provenance: Various. I believe Seattleness and Art in Seattle's Public Spaces were gifts from the Lovely Bride (Seattleness has a Half-Price Books sticker on it). I found Too High and Too Steep at the Elliot Bay Bookstore when it was in Pioneer Square, The Mushroom Hunters was recommended by colleague Wolfgang Baur, and when I couldn't find it locally, ordered it from Amazon. Seattle Noir was a whim purchase at Barnes & Nobles when I was looking for something else, but it was shelved face-outward and caught my eye. I have no memory of where I found Filmlandia! - it just showed up one day and refused to leave until I read it. 

The Reviews: Books are times capsules. They can't help it. As soon as the last word is written, the final change is made, and the switch thrown and the electricity pumped into the presses, they are frozen in amber. They can be revised, they can be rewritten, but the sheer physicality of the book gives it permanence that no computer file can match. Historical books are trapped not only by their subject matter, but also that they represent the thinking of their times. Even those that want to be current (in PARTICULAR those that want to be current) are stopped at the point when they are finished. 

Anyway,

I've lived in Seattle (OK, a suburb of Seattle) for longer than I've lived anywhere else. I've got my 25-year chip, which allows me to complain about new people moving into the state. But I still have that newcomer's vibe of interest in the area, and picking up what I may have missed before I got here. So I've been accumulating books about Seattle, not out of a passion, but just finding them along the way.

So here are some books about my current home town:

Seattleness: A Cultural Atlas is an infographic book, in that it takes stuff about Seattle and its history and presents it in a variety of graphics - charts, maps, and tables. Some of them are cool. Some of them are obscure, some of them are historical, some of them are time capsules in that they are no longer applicable (listing of pinball parlors in Seattle, most of which are gone).

The infographics are good-looking, but are often more graphic than informative, and you have to do a little digging to understand what they are saying. But, it is immensely browsable, and worth keeping around, even as it slowly moves into the past. 

(They do hit on one subject that always irritated me - they talk for several pages about Shadowrun's Seattle. In the Shadowrun future, a virus transformed a large part of the population into orcs, elves, and dwarves. The orcs took over the Underground. The problem is, the REAL Underground (and Seattle has one), is located beneath Pioneer Square (created when they raised the streets), and FASA put a corporate pyramid on top of it. That's a nit, but in its defense I will point out that FASA, Shadowrun's publisher, was based in Chicago at the time.)

Filmlandia! A Movie Lover's Guide to the Films and Television of Seattle, Portland, and the Great Northwest. has a subtitle that pretty much describes it in full. It is a collection of short bits about productions filmed and/or set in Seattle area and the greater PNW.  Twin Peaks. Northern Exposure. Frasier (though only for one episode), Grey's Anatomy, An Officer and a Gentleman, 10 Things I Hate About You. Even the risible McQ in which John Wayne gets in a car chase up I-5 to South Lake Union, and there's no traffic. David Schmader was a columnist for The Stranger back in the day and does a good job. Yep, with all that old movie lore, it's a time capsule.

Art In Seattle's Public Spaces. Seattle is a land of public art. You're walking along, minding your own business, turn a corner, and BOOM! there's a mural or a statue or an installation right in your line of sight. In part that's because Seattle and King County have a 1 Percent for the Arts ordinance, where 1% of the budget for capital project improvement funds go to art. Nice plan, and it often means you get some monumental artwork (one my favorites is parked outside of Safeco Field, a Tsutakawa piece of a baseball glove with a hole in it. For many years, this was appropriate for the Mariners outfield). 

The book deals with public art in Seattle from SoDo (SOuth of DOwntown) to South Lake Union (now called Amazonia). Lots of pictures, ranging from the big orange Calder stabile in the Olympic Sculpture Garden to the Hammering Man outside the SAM to the Ken Griffey Jr statue outside Safeco. It includes plaques, large installations, and internal pieces within the city's buildings. The presentation is broken up by zones, south to north, and while massive, leaves out a lot of public works not in the city center - like Totten's Changing Form on Queen Anne Hill, Noguchi's Black Sun in Volunteer Park, or Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban in Fremont. 

What makes it a time capsule is that, despite the size of some of these art pieces, they do tend to move around. Pieces are sold, moved, reinstalled. The cover displays Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, which is, well, a gigantic typewriter eraser. Owned by the Paul Allen family, the sculpture was at one time near the Sculpture Park, but moved to Seattle Center, outside the MoPop (Museum of Popular Culture), and was then sold at auction after Allen's death. I cannot find out who bought it or where it went from there. There are similar/duplicate pieces in Washington DC and Las Vegas, but that one was Seattle's.

(Should I ever win the lottery (fat chance), I'd like to create a web site listing all of the publicly-viewable art in Greater Seattle, because I think it deserves it).

Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle's Topography. Denizens of the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being love-the-land tree-hugging environmentalists. But we've engaged in a lot of terraforming over the years, making low places higher and high places lower. This books hits the major ones - filling in the tidal flats south of the city, the Montlake Cut which dropped the level of Lake Washington 8 feet, and in particular the Denny Hill Regrade. 

Back at the turn of the previous century, the area north of Seattle's downtown was a large hill, which blocked future expansion and required too many horses to pull wagons up it. The answer from the city fathers was to use sluicing equipment from the gold rush to wash away the hill, load the dirt into barges, and take it out into the sound to dump it. By the time they finished, trucks had replaced horses as transport, and the area became a site of warehouses and used car lots for many decades until Amazon moved into the neighborhood (my first office at Amazon was on the 5th floor of a building on 6th Avenue, and I figure I was still under the original ground level). Williams, who writes a lot about nature in the Northwest, covers a lot of ground (heh) in describing the monumental early efforts that made Seattle what it is today. 

Seattle Noir is one of a series of local mystery novels offered by Akashic set in various cities, ranging from Baghdad to Baltimore and from Lagos to Las Vegas. It is collection of shorts set in the Seattle area, and it cool from the local angle - you've been in that neighborhood, you know what they're talking about, yeah, that feels like Seattle. And Seattle gives itself over to a lot of noir tropes - its power centers moving behind the scenes, its rain-spattered streets and continual gloom (mostly in October and November) creating a continual twilight broken by the neon of business and late-night lights of office workers. It sometimes feels like a city filmed in black and white. Noir town.

For me, though, noir is defined by people making ethical choices and being punished for it. Bogart loses the girl. MacMurray takes the rap. Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. What is the morally right choice often goes up against the societal rules. And some of the stories fit that mode. Others, not so much.

Similarly, a lot of good stories are here that are "pure Seattle" - Duwamish tribal rites and Chinatown in the1900s and roadhouses at the city limits. Stories that embrace both our history and our outlook. But there are a few that, while good, you have to to fill in the locational blanks without losing too much of the tale. They're still worth reading, but don't hit the mark as Seattle tales. 

There are a lot of good stories here "The Wrong End of the Gun", "The Taskmasters" and "Blue Sunday" all have that hard-boiled edge. The protagonists are strugglers, the challenges down to earth. Some of the stories could slot in anywhere with a change of street names, but a lot of them feel very Seattlish. Best of that group was "Blood Tide" and "Center of the Universe".

So this is a time capsule in that a lot of the stories take place in that mythical ancient Seattle, But also the way the city has changed from the more recent dotcom boom and conflict between New Seattle and Old, in the evolving conflict since the book was published. It's worth looking at, but not too deeply.

The Mushroom Hunters: A Hidden World of Food, Money and (Mostly Legal) Adventures was written about ten years back, and reflects a Seattle of that age, with a rising food culture situated at the borders of a wilderness. Ten years later, the food culture is more established, and the wilderness pushed back a few more miles. 

The book is about the people in the wild mushroom business - those who go out and harvest them and those who sell them to the restaurants that feature them. These are no white buttons grown in a controlled atmosphere of a former coal mine. These are wilderness mushrooms - morrels and lobsters and chanterelles and white truffles, found in the more undisturbed parts of the PNW, sprouting up at rare times and only under certain conditions. It requires a lot of hiking, watching, getting up at ungodly hours and driving deep into the hinters. It also requires a flexible regard to local laws and trespassing signs. Langdon Cook weaves a tales of the mushrooms and the various people who hunt them out, from bus-loaded tourists on a spree to Vietnamese expats setting up their own claims.

Its only ten years ago, and I can feel the ground has changed. A lot of the restaurants mentioned on the receiving end of the mushroom train are no more, while others remain but have changed ownership. And likely the basics of the mushroom trade have remained, but are buried by more exurban and suburban sprawl. Its a good snapshot of an age and a business out here in Seattle.

And that's it - a whole collection of Seattle books that have popped up. More may show up over time, whether they are our history or are trapped in the amber of the moment that fingers strike the keys and the files are sent to the publishers. All in all, a good collection.

More later, 

The Political Desk: Results

 I often use the term "hanging fire" in reporting these results. The term means a delay between an action and the results of that action. It comes from firearms, in that there is sometimes a delay between pulling the trigger and fully igniting the combustible gunpowder in the bullet itself. The delay in modern firearms may be a second or two, which is enough to cause the barrel to move off target and the shot to miss. In earlier muzzle-loading firearms, the gunpowder behind the cotton wad and solid bullet may not ignite immediately, with the same effect. In even earlier firearms like flintlocks, the gunpowder is on a pan external to the gun, and the powder may ignite with a bright flash but do nothing to fire the weapon. That's where we get the term "flash in a pan". 

And this is how the term applies to voting in Washington State. Ballots here need to be turned in at ballot boxes by 8 PM, or postmarked by midnight of election day in order to be counted. Older and more conservative voters tend to vote early in the process, while younger and more liberal voters tend to vote later. So if the race is close, it may be several days before the smoke clears (hey, another firearms allusion) and we get to see what happened. 

Case in point - Seattle Mayor. Progressive candidate Katie Wilson versus more centrist Bruce Harrell. On election night and the first drop of ballots, Harrell is up 54-46 percent, which in most terms would mean victory. But, late voters tend to skew further to the left. BUT this is an off-year election, and participation is often less than the big-ticket elections. AND there is a greater chance that last-minute mail-ins will not be postmarked in time because they've been gutting the post office (and announced laying off another 30k staffers because, you know, Christmas is such a slow season for the post office). In any event, I think that it will tighten up, and may even be a squeaker, but incumbent Harrell will stay mayor. [Edit - I wrote that paragraph on Wednesday after the election. A week later Katie Wilson not only caught up but passed Bruce Harrell (50-49.5). It may STILL require a machine recount (within 0.5% of total vote) and ultimately depend on verifying challenged ballots and counting late overseas-but-still-postmarked ballots, but it looks like Wilson made up an 8-point early debit to win.]

(And lest we think it that such a comeback was the result of mail-in voting, when I lived in Kenosha County, the initial election results (from Kenosha and Racine) showed huge margins for the Democratic candidates, from the urban vote, and the networks would declare it a win for the more conservative Republicans accounting for when the expected larger rural vote that would show up later. And they would be right.)

But let's look at the ballot at Grubb Street. This is as of Tuesday night, a week after the election.

Proposed Constitutional Amendment: Senate Joint Resolution No. 8201 (Amend the state constitution to let elderly care funding play the stock market as opposed to just investing in bonds): Approved 56-42 statewide. In King County the margin was 71-29.

King County Proposition No. 1 Medic One - Emergency Medical Services Replacement of Existing Levy: Yes 81-19

King County Public Hospital District No. 1 Proposition No. 1 Levy Lid Lift for Health Care Services: Approved 58-42

King County Executive: Girmay Zahilay 54-45.  The first night's count had it closer (50-48), but this was a choice between two good, similar candidates. 

Metropolitan King County Council District No. 5: Stephanie Fain 55-44 (This blog gave Fain the most tepid of recommendations, then her opponent pretty much flamed out with misleading claims and conservative backing.)

City of Kent Council Position No. 2: Satwinder Kaur  62-37.

City of Kent Council Position No. 6: Sharn Shoker 50-49 This blog endorsed her opponent in the primary but switched to Shoker in the general election, Then didn't mention it in the final summary. The management regrets the error. This is another close one, where Andy Song led the first night, then Shoker caught up and passed. So this one was Hanging Fire (see above). Unlikely that this content will come down to a recount, but this was another case of two good candidates.

Kent School District No. 415 Director District No. 4: Teresa Gregory 58-40

Kent School District No. 415 Director District No. 5: Laura Williams 65-34

Total voting in King County ran about 45% of registered voters, with a large percentage being turned in at ballot drops. 

OK, that's it. I'm going back to theatre reviews and talking about games, but I will pop back should anything change.

More later,

Game: All's Well

 The Well by Peter Schaefer, Shoeless Pete Games, 122-page softbound, 2021, Kickstarter

So folks by now know that I regularly post recent game arrivals here at Grubb Street. I buy most of them, either in Brick-and-Mortars or Kickstarter. I read most of them, though some more diligently than others. But I don't consider those mentions as real reviews because I haven't played them, and to give a game a review you really need to see or experience them in play. 

In any event, The Well. I kickstarted this way back, as well as a number of my colleagues on the Saturday Night group. One of my colleagues has done so to the tune that they rated a in-person gaming session with the designer, Peter Schaefer, who is local. So Peter came down from Mercer Island and ran us in a few sessions. And it was really good, and I actually had a personal epiphany involving it.

The Well is a nice, tight little RPG. Its world and purpose are extremely focused. Its mechanics are relatively simple and adaptable. The mechanics exist primarily to serve the world, and the world is an expression of those mechanics. Yeah, that sound pretentious, but that's the best way to explain it.

The world consists of Bastion, a single city, moving eternally down a bottomless shaft. What else is there? Doesn't matter. The city moves ever-downward, digging out new rooms and storehouses on the sides of the shaft, eventually exhausting their resources, and continuing downward into new territory, abandoning the older city behind it/above it. Think of a slug leaving a slime trail, where that trail is the earlier civilizations. They use the previous cityscapes as dumping grounds for trash and burial places for the dead.

OK, but the dead don't stay quiet, as the dead tend to not do. There are humanoid skeletons and zombies roaming the upper reaches, but also spiders which are constructed of boney bits, skull-shaped bats with wings of rotted meat, and piles of ropey, semi-liquified flesh prowling the halls. So adventurers known are gravediggers (that's you guys) pass up through the locked doors to find lost stuff. It's an inversion of the traditional going down into the dungeon to loot ancient civilizations - instead you're going up to loot your own recent past.

Completing a task is simple - roll a d6 against a target number set by the moderator (GM). If you roll a "6", roll again and add that number as well. There are no character stats in the traditional sense, but you can get additional dice to roll for proper tools (Axes, for example, add a +1 die when the action is murder) or specific skills (Mechanics, First Aid, and magic (involving painting runes)). In addition, you can propose a gambit, which is an potential situational penalty you come up with it (I get an extra die to hit my target with an arrow, but I risk running out of arrows would get you an additional dice). Depending the severity of what you offer, you can gain up to three dice. The downside is that if any of the dice you roll show a "1", the bad thing you propose happens. 

Your history and contacts provide springboards for the adventures themselves. There are a lot of factions in Bastion, and at start you have good relations with one of them and less-than-good relations with another. The ones that don't like you can give you grief, but the ones that DO like you can lean on you for jobs, which carry their own perils. 

Peter Schaefer, the designer, led our little group of gravediggers through two adventures over several Saturday nights. The first was to take a group of tourists (well, sensible upper-class citizens) above the city to find an old fountain from a previous age. The fountain had a particularly nasty mass of animated dead tissue called a tangle, and we beat a hasty retreat (I don't think we lost anyone, which was to our credit). The next time we heading up, it was to track down an escaped criminal. Everyone else had contacts to bring her back alive for trial. My group of criminals wanted her dead, and my orders were to bump her off. And I made a hash of it - blowing a couple straightforward opportunities and not taking any gambits in order to improve my odds. In the end she escaped and I was treated as an incompetent by my criminal gang. 

Did I say it had cool art? It has cool
art, by Kurt Komoda

  And my personal epiphany? I don't like playing a bad guy. As a GM, I have little trouble tormenting the players and having NPCs lie or betray them. But as a character, I tend towards the good, and will self-sabotage to get a more accommodating solution. I've done the bad guy thing before in betraying other players, but never really liked it.

 Anyway, the play of the game fits well within short timeframes, like convention games or an evening session or two, but has the potential to spread out into larger campaigns and issues. You can guide your character through the pitfalls of life as a gravedigger and retire, or end up source material for the undeadlies prowling the upper galleries. It is an excellent melding of traditional dungeoning and gritty urban roleplaying. Wilderness need not apply. Good times.

The book itself is very stylish, showing you can do stuff in black and white and still have it come off neat and professional. The interior art is evocative, in particular the monster illustrations.  The cover gets a nod for not being the traditional three people looking heroic on the cover. All-in-all, its an excellent presentation of an excellent game. 

You can get the pdf of the game at Peter's Itchio site, and get a gander at some of the cool art. Worth checking out.

More later,