Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

So, you know that hour that went missing last weekend?  Wouldn’t you know that was the very hour that I had set aside for blogging.  And now here I am on Monday morning with a handful of photographs and no text.  I stare balefully at the clock on my Windows toolbar, knowing that, of all the clocks in the house, it’s the one who stole that hour.  It certainly had the opportunity, and since when does your laptop have to have a motive to simply swallow something?  This clock is now a Person Of Interest in the heretofore unexplained disappearance of many other hours.

Still, I made reasonably good use of the other hours of the weekend.  I had a really nice day paddling around Mercer Island in Lake Washington with some folks.  Here’s the GPS story, and here’s a slide show.

And Mrs. Perils and I got out on a walk Saturday, encountering some more interesting and quirky sights in the neighborhood between our place and Fremont. There’s a wooded and overgrown property near the house whose flowering schedule Mrs. Perils has committed to memory, and Saturday she was thinking their fawn lilies might be blooming. Almost, but not quite (Click any pic to enlarge):

Other things are more forthcoming, however. Crocuses and daffodils have been out for a while, and we espied these orchids:

Turning away from an atm machine, the creature on top of this building caught the corner of my eye:

OK, let’s go ahead and make this post an incomprehensible stew of time shards. Thursday, I was downtown for a meeting with a client who was holding court at the Four Seasons hotel. As I exited the elevator on his floor, I snuck this photo looking south on First Avenue. On the left, the 2-story silhouette is a moving sculpture called The Hammering Man, who stands at the entrance of the Seattle Art Museum:

Just across the street from the art museum, however, is the venerable Lusty Lady gentleman’s club. They always have a humorous come-on lettered on their marquee:

I snapped that photo on the way out of my meeting. The message had changed from the time I entered the meeting, and I wish I’d had time to photograph it - the message was “Package Stimulus”.

Update: The flowers above that I misidentified as orchids are actually irises.  Also, there’s a Flickr group devoted to photos of the Lusty Lady marquee, and here’s a picture showing “Package Stimulus” and the other side, which I missed in my haste, titled “Uncovery Plan”.