For the past few months I've been writing for Walking in Seattle, a blog that focuses on news and issues relevant to pedestrians and other walkers in the city.

When I started the blog, I expected to mostly use it to share various walking routes in the city as a way to get me to go out and discover new places to walk and then to share them with others. As the blog has evolved it has included more references to content from local news sources.

It takes a lot of time to write for Walking in Seattle, but it's something I've enjoyed doing. Also, the content fills a niche, as the number of subscribers in Google Reader has grown above 30 (this blog by comparison has 9).

Over the next few months I will be making some improvements to Walking in Seattle and hope to continue to deliver good content for people interested in walking in Seattle.

I've never been that interested in trick-or-treating, but apparently Seattle is the best city in the country to do it according to a study by an online housing blog. The study calculates the "Zillow Trick-or-Treat Housing Index" using four equally weighted data variables: Zillow Home Value Index, population density, Walk Score, and local crime data from Relocation Essentials. Based on those variables, the Index represents cities that will provide the most candy, with the least walking and safety risks. San Francisco, Portland, San Jose, and Denver rounded out the top 5 cities.

The study ranked the individual neighborhoods in each of the top 20 cities as well. The top 5 Seattle neighborhoods to trick-or-treat in are Wallingford, Ballard, Queen Anne, Roosevelt, and Ravenna. I'm not at all surprised that Wallingford is at the top of the list since it's very family friendly and there are lots of nice homes in the area. Ballard is a very safe and walkable area as well, with lots of families. We were in the Queen Anne area this past weekend and saw lots of Halloween decorations on many of the houses there. Halloween and trick-or-treating seem to be a big deal here in Seattle.

Last week my Dad said I should fly back to Texas if the Rangers made it to the World Series and he could get me a ticket, but I figured it wasn't possible since plane tickets would cost over $450. Then the Rangers won the ALCS last Friday night to make it to their first World Series in franchise history. And then the San Francisco Giants won the NLCS on Saturday night. My friend Megan said I should fly back for a World Series game and that gave me the idea to ask if she could get me free round trip airfare through Southwest Airlines since she works there. Luckily she had a free pass and was incredibly nice to offer it to me! So, that means I'll be going to Game 3 of the World Series this Saturday between the Texas Rangers and the San Francisco Giants! Who would have thought two of my favorite baseball teams would make it to the World Series in the same year?!

So, I'll be flying in tomorrow night around 8:30 pm and leave Sunday morning at 9:10 am, with a stop in Albuquerque each way. Not only will I see the first ever World Series game at the Ballpark in Arlington, but I'll get to see my niece, Evie! She's already over 8 months old and starting to stand on her own and even make word-like sounds! I'm really excited about seeing her, my sister, and Mom and Dad. I'll also be having dinner with Megan after she picks me up from the airport. It should be a lot of fun!

The Texas Rangers have made it all the way to the World Series and it has been a lot of fun to watch them over the last few weeks. While we both rooted for the Rangers back in Texas, when we moved here we decided to adopt the Mariners as our favorite team. Until this year, neither of these two teams had made it to the World Series, they're not exactly the most successful franchises.

The Mariners just finished a 100-loss season, so it wasn't that much fun watching them this last summer. It is exciting to have a good baseball team to root for now, though, and to be able to watch the Rangers in the playoffs on national TV. I wish they could've been more successful when we lived there, but we'll be rooting for them this World Series.

Troy and I went to a pumpkin patch this past Saturday. There are tons of them in the area and we'd never been to one before, so we decided to go to the Craven Farm in Snohomish, about 30 miles to the northeast. The drive was pretty with lots of colorful trees all red, orange, and yellow. We got there and the parking lot was intimidatingly full. Once we got inside, there was so much stuff going on and so many people there that we didn't know what to do first.

We made our way to the pumpkin patch that seemed to go on for miles. I couldn't believe how many pumpkins of all shapes and sizes there were! Some were as small as two fists and others were the size of two basketballs. There were probably over 5,000 pumpkins there to choose from. I guess we could have bought one to carve or make food from, but we didn't bother with it. Last time we had a carved pumpkin in our apartment, it started to smell after a few days.

Other things we could have done included a hay ride, corn maze, pumpkin slinging, face painting, and seeing baby livestock. I was interested in the corn maze, but we didn't have rain boots on and it was probably pretty muddy in there from the recent rain we've had. I snacked on some roasted corn and Troy got two donuts, including a pumpkin one.

The only thing I was disappointed with was the lack of a nice set for taking pictures. It sounds corny, but I wanted a picture of Troy and I sitting on some hay with pumpkins around us. Oh well, maybe next year we can try out a different pumpkin patch. It was a fun experience this year and definitely worth doing at least once.

We know a few people who subscribe to receive a weekly produce box from a nearby farm. There are several farms that deliver a box of fresh, in-season produce to anyone who subscribes. Lesley got a coupon for a free produce box from Full Circle Farm, so we decided to give it a try. We eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, at least compared to how much we used to eat, so this seemed worth a try.

I picked the box up after work on Thursday and brought it home. It was a pretty big box so we had to rearrange the fridge to fit everything inside. The box included quite a lot of vegetables and fruit:

• Yukon Gold Potatoes, Organic - 1.5 pounds
  Farmer's Own Organics, Seattle, Washington.


• Bunched Carrots, Organic - 1 bunch
  Lakeside Organic Gardens, Watsonville, California.


• Green Chard, Organic - 1 bunch
  Full Circle Farm, Carnation, Washington.


• Celery, Organic - 1 each
  Full Circle Farm, Carnation, Washington.


• Spinach, Organic - 1 bunch
  Full Circle Farm, Carnation, Washington.


• Green Bell Peppers, Organic - 2 each
  Siri and Sons, Clackamas, Oregon.


• Romaine Lettuce, Organic - 1 bunch
  Lakeside Organic Gardens, Watsonville, California.


• Delicata Squash, Organic - 1 each
  Full Circle Farm, Carnation, Washington.


• Red Flame Grapes, Organic - 0.75 pound
  Delano Farms, Delano, California.


• Dapple Dandy Pluots, Organic - 3 each
  Okanogan Producers, Okanogan, Washington.


• D'anjou Pears, Organic - 3 each
  Nicholson's Orchard Fresh, Peshastin, Washington.


• Fuji Apples, Organic - 3 each
  Earth Conscious Organics, Brewster, Washington.

We knew what we'd be receiving, so we planned ahead so that we'd be able to cook with most of this. We've never cooked with some of these before, like the delicata squash, so we'll be trying new recipes. It's an overwhelming amount of food, however, so I hope we're able to cook with it all.

With our coupon, we were automatically signed up for to get a new box every two weeks. It costs $32 each time, so I'm not sure how long we'll stay subscribed, but considering the amount of food, the price is probably competitive with the grocery store. It's also nice to get two weeks worth of high-quality produce without having to go to the store to pick it out. And, since the contents of the produce box vary depending on what is in season, we'll have the chance to try out a lot of different kinds of fruit and vegetables, and to try to new recipes to use them.

According to a recent Travel + Leisure review, Sea-Tac International Airport is the best in the nation in terms of delays, with only 10.6% of flights being delayed. By comparison, 22.3% of flights are delayed at D/FW International Airport, the 3rd worst in the nation. According to the survey, the best time to fly in or out of Sea-Tac is before 10:00 am. The worst time window is 6–8 p.m.

Sea-Tac is one of the best airports I've been in. I've always liked that it's smaller than the gigantic D/FW Airport and isn't nearly as hard to get around between the terminals and concourses. It's still definitely large enough to get most places we want to go via direct flights. Sea-Tac rarely changes the terminal or gate on you at the last minute, which is nice. I've always been able to get through security rather quickly and most flights I can remember have been on time. The only exception to that was our flight out for Christmas in 2008 with the terrible snow storm that hit the area that winter. I also really like Alaska Airlines, which has its main hub at Sea-Tac.

Sea-Tac also has a lot of public art inside it, making it one of the most unique airports I've seen. Free Wi-Fi is available throughout the terminals, which comes in handy while waiting 1-2 hours for flights. It is also served well by Link Light Rail from downtown Seattle, although we've never actually taken it to or from the airport the entire way. We hope to do that this Christmas.

All of these factors add up to a generally stress-free traveling experience, which is not very common at other airports.

And because I like interesting statistics, here are the top 10 domestic routes out of Sea-Tac in 2009 by number of passengers (from Wikipedia):

1. Los Angeles, CA - 744,000
2. San Francisco, CA - 719,000
3. Anchorage, AK - 681,000
4. Denver, CO - 650,000
5. Chicago, IL (O'Hare) - 589,000
6. Phoenix, AZ - 550,000
7. Las Vegas, NV - 540,000
8. Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN - 519,000
9. Spokane, WA - 503,000
10. Dallas/Fort Worth, TX - 484,000

The weather was beautiful yesterday - clear skies filled with crisp fall air. Since I chose to drive to work, I wasn't able to enjoy the weather as much as I could've if I walked and took the bus to work. I was driving home with my window rolled down and when I turned on a street near our apartment, I heard a noise that I immediately knew was the sound of one of our car's hubcaps falling off.

This wasn't totally unexpected as our car's wheel covers have been cracked almost since the car was new, and each visit to the tire shop to have our tires rotated came with a warning that our hubcaps were cracked. In fact, last time I was told that if I didn't take the wheel covers off, they would come off on the road.

I was able to park on the next block to go pick the wheel cover up off the street. We had been planning to get new wheel covers soon anyway, so I suppose this was just a good reminder to do that.

I've had my orthotics for 5 weeks now and yesterday was my follow up appointment with my podiatrist. I told him I wasn't too thrilled with my orthotics and that they haven't helped my feet improve that much. My left heel still hurts every now and then and it doesn't seem to correspond with times of extended activity on my feet. He said most people have about a 50% improvement by now and I'm maybe 30% better.

So he said to try a cortisone shot that should make the inflammation and swelling go down so theoretically the muscle can heal faster. I wasn't expecting to get a shot yesterday, so when he suggested it I got a little nervous because I hate getting shots. But it wasn't too bad because I was able to lay down and he told me to breathe deeply several times before he did it. I didn't react as badly as I normally do, maybe because it was in my heel instead of in my arm, or maybe it was because he prepared me pretty well. It was numb all of last night. He said I could stop wearing the night splint for a little while too so we can see what the cortisone does.

I'm not that optimistic this will help in the long run though. Everyone I've talked to says a cortisone shot is just a big band-aid over a bigger problem. But I guess I'm willing to try anything at this point... It didn't hurt when I was walking to work this morning, which was nice. I have another appointment in two weeks to see how it's doing.

The Seattle Public Library has Kill-A-Watt's to borrow. A Kill-A-Watt is a device that you can plug other electronic devices into and it will tell you how much electrical power it uses. I've known about these for a while, but it's not relly worth buying at around $25, so it's really nice that they can be rented from the library.

Over the past several days, I've been plugging all of our electronics into it to see how much power they consume. While electricity is very inexpensive here at around $0.05 per kWh, it's still cool to know how much electricity our electronics are using.

We weren't able to measure any high-voltage appliances, but certainly our refrigerator and oven use a lot of electricity. Of the appliances we were able to measure, our microwave and vacuum use the most power when in use, but we don't use them very often, so they don't account for a very large portion of our electrical consumption.

I was most interested in finding out how much standby power our devices used when turned off. Over time, these phantom loads from TVs, microwaves, and video game systems can add up to quite a lot of power. Some estimates are that standby power costs Americans $3 billion annually and accounts for as much as 10% of residential electrical consumption.

We found that the biggest things that steal electricity when not in use our CD player (particularly the clock), computer equipment (especially the modem and router), and our cable box. In fact, somehow just the clock on our CD player uses more power than our laptop does when powered on.

Contrary to things we'd heard, many things didn't use electricity when not in use - our cell phone chargers and other electronics chargers didn't show any electric consumption when our devices weren't charging.

Now that we have a better understanding of how much electricity our things use, we'll try to make better decisions about how we use them. For example, it's not very hard to switch off our surge protectors at night when we're not using them, and in doing so we could save over 10% off of our annual electricity bills (we only spend around $157 annually anyway). We'll also likely keep our CD player clock off now that we know how much power it wastes.

Anyway, it's cool that we were able to borrow the Kill A Watt from the library and now we're a little more educated on how we're using electricity.

We spent last Saturday exploring Wallingford, one of Seattle's many historic walkable neighborhoods.

We headed out on the bus, which took us pretty much straight to Mighty-O Donuts, one of the best doughnut places in Seattle. A neat thing about their donuts is that not only are they very good, but they also don't use any animal products. I really liked my apple fritter. Lesley got an apple spice donut that was good. After doughnuts, Lesley got some tea, and we walked to a nearby park. We enjoyed our tea and time sitting in the park. Then we walked around the neighborhood some. Like many of Seattle's older residential neighborhoods, there are a lot of unique homes with beautiful landscaping.

For lunch we went to a taco truck called Rancho Bravo Tacos in the area and had some pretty good burritos - the best we've had in Seattle.

We then walked up the main drag of Wallingford, 45th St, which is lined with a mile of shops and restaurants. We stopped in a Hawaiian store with shirts and food from the islands. We also stopped in a stationery store, which had some cute cards, and a travel store with a lot of books and maps.

In the middle of Wallingford is the Wallingford Center, which used to be a school and now has a few stores inside. Outside are plenty of benches, as there were throughout the neighborhood. I enjoyed spending time sitting outside before walking around the neighborhood more, passing through a very busy kid-filled playground/soccer field, and by an old school.

There is a two-screen theater in the neighborhood, which we almost went to, but the movies weren't playing at a good time.

We went to Archee McPhee, a popular novelty store, for the first time. We didn't buy any bacon-scented air freshener, but I really enjoyed looking at the various rubber animals, listening to the Mr. T voice box, and dreaming of buying the bacon tuxedo for someone.

We also stopped at Bottleworks, a shop with a lot of different kinds of beer, where we bought a few individual bottles to take home and try, and stopped by a wine store. We then sat outside more at Wallingford Center and watching the cars, bikes, and people go by.

One of our favorite Thai places in the city, Djan's, is in Wallingford, but for dinner we decided to go somewhere different to Jhanjay. Lesley had pad see eew and I had a ginger stir-fry. After dinner, we stopped at the main grocery store in the area (with a giant "WALLINGFORD" sign) to get some food for the next day, and then we took the bus home.

We had a good time in Wallingford. Based on the types of stores and the playgrounds and children we saw, it's apparent that more families live there than in other Seattle neighborhoods we've spent time in. The neighborhood is more kid-friendly and has fewer apartments and condos than other dense neighborhoods in the city. Unlike other urban neighborhoods close to downtown (Capitol Hill, Fremont, Ballard, etc), Wallingford lacks a notable landmark. It's still one of Seattle's most walkable and pleasant neighborhoods.

Quick Wallingford facts:

• Population: 20,433


• Population density per square mile: 11,544


• 2009 Median Home Price: $411,000


• 2008 Median Condo Sales Price: $299,000


• 10th most walkable neighborhood in Seattle

Sources:
1. Seattle Metropolitan Real Estate
2. Walk Score: Seattle's Most Walkable Neighborhoods

Our lease for our current 550 square foot studio apartment is up at the end of February. We're not as satisfied with it as we used to be because of several things. For one thing, it's small and we technically don't even have a bedroom. We have a small area for the bed, which sits against two walls and the dresser is right at the foot of it. We're also running out of storage space because we have gotten a fake Christmas tree, some floor fans, and more drinking glasses and other kitchen stuff since moving here.

Secondly, we're tired of being directly above the community grill area a few floors down. When someone uses the grill the smoke always rises up and inevitably gets into our apartment because we usually have the windows open for ventilation. This always causes us to have to close the windows, which sometimes makes it pretty hot in here during the summer.

Thirdly, people make a lot of noise near the grill area and in the alley between our complex and the recording studio, especially if they've had a few drinks. The noise from the studio itself is also obnoxious.

We'll definitely be moving to at least a one bedroom apartment instead of a studio. We still like this complex overall. It's a nice building and the unit is nice with pretty new appliances and nice wooden cabinets and a big window facing the sunset to the West. The neighborhood is growing on us, especially with the addition of South Lake Union Park and more businesses opening nearby because of Amazon. It's very convenient to get to downtown and walking to work is really nice. We won't rule out looking at other buildings or in other neighborhoods though, such as Capitol Hill or Lower Queen Anne.

We're also considering the possibility of getting a two bedroom and using one of the rooms as a guest room for visitors. Having an extra room would make it a lot cheaper for friends and family to visit more often or for longer because they wouldn't have to pay for hotels. However, it would cost about $250-$300 more per month for an extra room and we're not sure it would result in more frequent visitors in the next year. We would also have the large extra costs of purchasing a second set of bedroom furniture, a mattress, etc. And we don't really have a use for a second room for the rest of the year. Perhaps in 2012 we might get a two bedroom apartment.

I'm also interested in buying a house or townhouse in the next few years. After a down payment, monthly house payments can be almost the same as apartment rent, depending on how big the house is and how close to downtown it is. I guess we'll just have to see what prices are and what would be affordable at that time.