What are YOU doing here?

Gene seems unhappy to see me

Yes, it's Thursday and I'm not hiking. I went to the Senior Center and met seven other Trailblazers who wanted to find someplace that would be moderately healthy for us to go, with the air quality still bad. Very bad, to be exact. This morning when I woke and checked Bellingham's air quality, it had gone from the "unhealthy" range to the "unhealthy for sensitive groups" range. Great! That told me that, as the day wears on, it would continue to improve. But in checking to see if those numbers were continuing to fall, I discovered that it had returned to last night's miserable numbers and that it is bad everywhere we might go.

After much discussion, I decided that it would be best for me not to go anywhere at all, and the others decided to leave all their hiking paraphernalia in their cars and take a walk from the Senior Center down to Boulevard Park, just to get in some exercise. I decided that enough exercise to make me sweat would not be a good idea. So I went over to the coffee shop and got that look from my buddies.

The "acid ball" with Trailblazers

While sitting there with the guys, Melanie sent me this picture taken from their walk to the waterfront. This is actually part of a new addition to our city, called Waypoint Park. It's in construction right now, but out of curiosity I looked up what the heck that ball is. It turns out it was from an old pulp mill and is being repurposed as art.

As for the art, that comes by way of an industrial artifact from the closed Georgia-Pacific pulp and paper mill on the waterfront. An old piece of equipment known as the “acid ball” is being turned into a new beacon. About 30 feet in diameter, the round steel tank stored acid that helped break down wood chips at the mill. It will be moved to the new park and coated with luminescent glass beads to create a glowing beacon at night.

I don't think they have added the glass beads yet, but that will certainly make it interesting to see at night. Here's a picture of an artist's rendition of the finished park.

Waypoint Park sometime in the future

The park is supposed to be finished by November, but who knows? I will enjoy seeing it all lit up, for sure. Right now my cohorts are probably sitting in a coffee shop somewhere.

At the top of my stairs

I decided to just come home. When I climbed the sixteen steps to my apartment, this scene caught my eye, showing the hallway between the front porch and the back porch. Can you see the smog in the air? Sometime today it is supposed to get better, but it sure hasn't yet.
:-(