Merry Xmas-5,

Helen had her yearly epilepsy conference a few weeks ago, this time in Seattle.  I tagged along and split my time between telecommuting from the hotel and playing tourist, while she played Doctor.   Actually, I played Doctor one night.  Was invited to a dinner with her, and they printed me up a name tag, Bruce Winter, MD:

I took the Seattle Underground Tour where you walk around underneath the streets where the first Seattle buildings were built.    They had a toilet problem.  When the houses up on the hills flushed their fancy new 'crapper toilets'  while the tide was up, the toilets down in the business on the shore, like this one, spewed sewage geysers: 

When Seattle burned down, they fixed this problem by eroding dirt from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill to raise the downtown streets up by one story, leaving the first story of the buildings underground and open.   

I took this picture from the observation deck of the 76 story Coumbia tower (2nd tallest on the west coast).   The bottom of this picture shows that historic district area.  And in the upper center, if you squint real hard, you can see Paul and Mika's house:

I had a nice visit with Kim and McKenzie, including a visit to the Aquarium.   We stayed at Paul and Mika's our last night there.   They cooked us a wonderful salmon dinner.  Malcolm was able to get on an earlier flight from his conference in San Fransisco and join us for a few hours.  

Helen claims the the Winter/Kitamura ear, modeled here, are unique and similar.  I'm not so sure.

The town square in downtown was a busy place, with lots of pretty lights and Xmas carolers. 

They had all kinds of carolers, including an Irish tap dancing group with blinking lights.   I took the picture of them after firing up my James Bond jet backpack to get a better view: 

I requested and was granted a TMIO day (The Mountain Is Out, they really do have an acronym for that, as it is normally hidden in rain clouds).  I tried to direct these birds to go fly around the mountain for a dramatic flying birds by mountain picture, but they looked at me as if I was some sort of crazy tourist with a camera:

Helen escaped the conference long enough to make a trip down to Pikes Farmers market:

Actually, this is one of those trick conference photos, where they let you pretend they actually let you out of the conference, but really you are in front of a blue screen.  The dog is real though.  He is a Epilepsy trained dog, that can help their owner when he/she has a seizure.

This a self portrait shot of downtown reflected from a window in the Space Needle.   If you squint really really hard, you can see the Seattle football team loosing a game in the open air stadium (several of us were watching the scoreboard from one of the space needle telescopes):

Beautiful views from there.   This is a sunset towards Bermerton.  Also seen in this photo is a water spouting sea monster about to sink the Bermerton ferry:

A couple more iconic Space needle photos:

Yes Dad, that is a flower photo.   The rose was in the sea front rose garden, a bit weathered, but not bad for a rose in December.    I actually had another photo like this, with the needle in focus and the rose out of focus, but figured you would disapprove of an out of focus rose, so picked this one.

Merry Xmas to all

Love Bruce