The roads here in Seattle are mostly asphalt and as I've mentioned before, they're often terrible. I talked to someone about it once and he said that every few years they'll repave the road with new asphalt but it only takes a few months for snow tires and ice to create cracks and bring back the same potholes that were there before.

Recently, though, the city has been repaving some of the major roads around here with concrete. As they were digging up the layers of asphalt, I noticed that these layers had just been laid on top of bricks, so the roads are pretty old. They had to remove these bricks to lay concrete and had a few lanes closed while doing one side of the street. The side they did in concrete was very smooth, so I was excited to see what things would look like when they finished both sides.

However, for some reason, it appears that they continued repaving these roads with asphalt. But, wait, why? Why didn't they just continue repaving with concrete? I don't know. Maybe they'll go back later and dig up the asphalt and finish repaving with concrete? Who knows. We don't drive that much, so it's actually not a big deal as long as they keep the sidewalks open, but I wonder why they'd ever use asphalt again.

The nation's first Art Walk began in Seattle and First Thursday is still a strong local tradition. The First Thursday of every month, more than 50 art galleries in Pioneer Square stay open late to share their art with the public.

I've been to a few galleries here, but have wanted to do First Thursday ever since we moved here and just haven't been able. Finally, last week, we went to check it out.

There's a wide variety of contemporary art represented, including sculpture, blown glass, and painting. We probably visited less than a third of all the galleries but there were some neat artistic concepts that I hadn't seen before. Some of the art was strange, some was neat, some was uninteresting, and some was impressive. Some of the galleries were very busy and, being a bit small, became crowded. Some of the other people seemed to be art connoisseurs, but not the majority. I really enjoyed going and am looking forward to going back and seeing some of the galleries we missed.

Our neighborhood has developed a lot over the last few years and is continuing to grow. As part of a plan to be more of a community, the Cascade Farmer's Market was launched on June 26th, and will continue every Thursday until the end of September from 3-7pm. Most other neighborhoods already have farmer's markets in place and have been successful, so hopefully ours will too.

So, we decided to go last Thursday and see what it was like. It's on Pontius, just east of the Cascade Playground. It wasn't nearly as big as the other ones we've been do, but it was decent. We bought some freshly picked raspberries, a cherry strudel which was delicious, and a pint of blackberry ice cream from the Whidbey Island Ice Cream Company. It was all very good and I'm looking forward to going again in the future.

Every year there is a big party at Gas Works Park for Independence Day called the "WaMu (now Chase) Family Fourth." We thought about going this year and staying, since we walked around Lake Union last year and saw it, but didn't stop. However, this year the only fireworks in Seattle would be on Lake Union, which meant that it would be even busier than last year. So we ended up just staying home most of the day and went out around 8:30 to find a spot either south or east of the lake.

We went up onto the I-5 overpass that leads to Capitol Hill, but eventually police closed the bridge to both cars and pedestrians, so we couldn't stay. It was definitely one of the best views, so it was annoying that they made us leave. After that we went down to the lake and stopped somewhere along Fairview and ended up having a decent view of all the fireworks. It wasn't too crowded where we stopped, which was nice. A boat and a couple of buildings were in the way a little bit, but not that bad.

The show lasted about 20 minutes and seemed better than last year. We were also close enough to hear the music that was playing along with the fireworks, which was pretty cool. I'm kind of glad we ended up not going to Gas Works Park because of the huge crowd of about 50,000 with traffic jams from the afternoon to 1:30 in the morning.

Here are some pictures from last night:

Mount Si is possibly the best-known hike in the area, but with a 3,200 foot elevation gain plus an optional 300 foot rock climb, we had been a little intimidated to hike it. Yesterday, though, we finally decided to do it. Since the weather was going to be sort of warm (though we didn't know how warm), we set out early. When we arrived around 8:15, there were already around 75 cars in the parking lot.

The trail is well worn and has a pretty consistent 15% grade, which is probably about as steep as the hill we have to climb to get to Capitol Hill (which has already seemed really steep to me). And it goes on for 4 miles. The weather was pretty comfortable when we started, but we got warm as we went along. It was a workout, but we made it to the top in just over two hours. We didn't do the rock climb at the top, called the Haystack, but we sat and ate some food we brought and enjoyed the view. Going back down was tiring on our legs and knees, but less physically exhausting, and Lesley was pretty tired by the end of it. We had frozen some Gatorade overnight and left it in the car, so it was melted but still cold when we got to the car. The whole hike, including the stop at the top, took us a little less than 5 hours. Unfortunately, even though it was only around 80 outside, having the car air conditioning running would've felt great, but for some reason it wasn't working.

Anyway, today our legs are a little sore, but not too bad. I'm hoping we can do some other reasonably challenging hikes like this soon.

We're trying to decide if we want to hike tomorrow. Well, we know we want to, but we don't know if it will be too hot. We were planning to do a fairly difficult hike and the high tomorrow is forecast to be somewhere between 84 and 90. That's kind of a wide range to plan for, considering it's only a day away.

But, the weather here is complicated. Most forecasts for Seattle have the weather around 85 degrees. But, we're actually hiking just 30 miles east of here, which could be cooler or several degrees warmer than Seattle (90ºF according to one forecast). And on the coast, less than 100 miles due west of Seattle, the forecast high for Friday is only 70º. East of Seattle, past the Cascade mountain range, the forecast high for Friday is around 98º. So, over 190 miles or so, the forecast high varies by 28 degrees.

The water and mountains cause amazing weather variability in weather in other seasons as well. The coast (near an actual rainforest in Olympic National Park) gets more than 12 inches of rain per month for 5 months out of the year. It's so much rain that the Weather.com bar graph can't accurately fit the full bars.

The rain in "rainy Seattle" tops out at 6 inches on average in the month of December. But North Bend, just 30 miles east of the city and part of the Cascade foothills gets 50% more precipitation every month of the year. You could say that Seattle is the driest place around. Unless you count Sequim, just 50 miles directly northwest of Seattle but in a natural rain shadow provided by the Olympic mountains, which gets about 16 inches of rain per year compared to Seattle's 38 inches, which is still more than the 9 inches of precip that falls in Wenatchee just over the Cascade mountains. So, over the same 190 miles between Wenatchee and the coast, the precipitation varies by more than an order of magnitude (113" on the coast, 9" in Wenatchee).

In the winter, all of that precipitation is snow on the mountains. But at slightly lower elevations it might be snow or it might be rain. In December when there was that crazy snowstorm in Seattle, though the city streets had an inch or so of ice, my coworkers who lived on the Eastside had feet of snow around their homes.

I remember on the local weather in Texas, meteorologists would tell the weather nearby: "It's 90 in Denison, 91 in Fort Worth, and 89 in Dallas." And I thought that was stupid because there was never a big variation. But here, there is a big variation because the mountains and the water have a big affect on weather patterns. So, though I'd like to know if it will be cool enough to hike tomorrow, I can understand why forecasting here tends to be varied and inaccurate.