I Just Called to say. "I Love You!"

Okay Okay, I hear ya loud and clear. I just need the time and place to do it. BTW - I won't be telling him I love him because that might be a wee bit premature. I'm just saying. I mean after all, I haven't even kissed him. And we all know the kiss is the tell tale (or is it tale tell) sign.

My favorite suggestion came to me via email from The Chicken Lady. I spit my tea out (Note: I have left the dark side of coffee momentarily for the even darker side of Tea. Since my trip across the pond I have now found myself addicted to making tea. It's a sickness, really. And in fact have passed up - if you can believe it - trips to Starbucks in liu of tea. PMDude suggested the world might be ending considering this drastic shift in my daily actions.)

Chicken Lady's suggestion: Ask him over for a sleepover and tell him you do NOT have a futon.

Any Hoooo....

While all of you left excellent suggestions, I believe my days of dreaming that he "accidentally" finds out are over. I have attempted to set up a dinner "date" with him, but got the oddest response. None. I really don't understand this guy sometimes. But whatever. He's responded to a few other of my emails (and that's not to say I've sent a hundred, only 98 or so - joking. That's a joke. Laugh people!)

I'm moving on from this for this week - and the crowd in unison breathes a sighs in relief - to something even mo' better....SeaFair weekend. Some colleagues from the UK office are in town, and I offered to be a tour guide for one of them. What? I'd do it for you too if you came to town. I love showing off Seattle. It'd be even better if it were nice out, but what's a girl to do.

And in other news, and perhaps no one really cares, but why is it that we, in the great country, only concern ourselves with the safety of people when a tragedy happens? Why then is that the time we start looking at the relevance of structural damage? Are human lives that unimportant to our government?

I am, of course, talking about the tragedy in Minnesota. The local news here, and perhaps in your neck of the woods, is now examining just how bad our local bridges are. The thing is, we've known some of them are ready to fall at any given moment and yet NOW, now that people have lost their lives, they're starting to take it seriously.

Case in point. We have a very old, decaying structure here in Seattle that was severely damaged in the "GREAT QUAKE OF 2001". Since that time, the tax payers of this area have paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars for studies to determine if the Alaskan Way Viaduct will fall (see photo to the right. It's the road looking thingy in front of Seattle) Frankly, any moron who's every been on it can tell it you will fall. Newton figured that out with this little thing called gravity. The key is, when and how. So, since the quake, our government has studied over and over again how bad it is. THEN, in typical Seattle government fashion, they decided to put the replacement options up for a vote. Two options, tear down the existing viaduct and rebuild it (oh and I should mention the viaduct is on the Seattle waterfront which is prime real estate)? Or build a tunnel? Of the two, the tunnel was EXTREMELY expensive.

Now, when the debate over which option to build was going on, of course, the opposition of each found "holes" in the theories for the options of the others. For example the people opposing the tunnel idea found case studies (less we mention the Boston Big Dig) in which the seawalls aren't sturdy enough and so could cause a cave in.

So, they put it to the voters. BUT, before they did, the government said the tunnel option isn't an option. But voters, please go to the polls and vote on which option you want: tunnel or viaduct.

Yes. You read that correctly. Even before the vote, they had already determined that the tunnel was not an option. So you ask yourself, why then, have we spent over a million dollars having a vote that doesn't count?

ARGH!

My point to all this, is - yes, there is a point, I'm only going the girly route to get there. That is to say not the direct route. I heard on the radio today a theory that the government could be just waiting for the thing to fall, loss of life would ensue of course because these things never EVER fall when no one's on them. And so the federal government would then chip in the money to replace it. I felt a chill go down my spine. Could our local government be that devious? To offer up as a sacrifice to the asphalt gods, lives of innocent people who just want to get to work on time? The thought scares me, but doesn't surprise me.