Good: Magnolia, aka Outer Mongolia

I love the neighborhood I live in. It has a small-town sort of character, and is pretty much the polar opposite of those neighborhoods ruined by their own neighborhood association rules & regs, where every house is beige or grey and cheap-looking and has a ginormous garage set back exactly the same distance from the street and the same grass-and-two-trees landscaping.

It is also a place where it is easy to get lost. Magnolia is very hilly, and the many streets wind around and reconnect and stop and start in unpredictable ways. Therefore, it is hard to take the same walk twice, which is excellent. Every time I venture out I see things I have not seen before.

It’s odd that I get lost in Magnolia so easily, because I don’t tend to get lost in other places. Also, people ask me for directions all the time, like multiple times per week. Either I look like I know how to get places, or I look like I won’t knife bewildered tourists just for bothering me.

It was nice and sunny Sunday afternoon, so I picked up my camera and headed out. Only six short blocks from my home, I happened upon an intersection that claims this view:

Downtown looks so much nicer when it’s off in the distance in a light haze than when I’m there working.

A bit further up, looking off the hill the other direction, I caught sight of a cruise ship, heading off to Alaska on one of the last trips of the season:



From that vantage point, it looks like the whole neighborhood is going to slide down the hill into the water. It isn’t really. Well, probably not today.

At this point, I was already slightly lost. I wasn’t really aiming to take pictures of distant scenery. I was looking for a specific house, which I have seen several times before, because I must capture it with my camera. It is an extraordinary example of what can be accomplished with a lot of money and little to no taste.

A few weeks ago, at the Interbay car wash, a man asked me how to get to the “Ballard Troll.” I gave him excellent directions to Fremont, home of the “Fremont Troll,” and he couldn’t possibly not have found it because it’s under the end of a REALLY BIG BRIDGE. I’m pretty sure there is no Ballard Troll.

The houses around here are in a vast range of styles, but in spite of that, or more probably because of that, most everything actually fits together quite harmoniously. It takes something really jarringly bad to look bad when it can’t stand out simply by not being exactly the same as everything else. Here's a nice-looking place:



By now, I was totally disoriented, probably about a half-mile from home. A dressed-up lady driving a fancy car pulled over and rolled down her window. She was having trouble finding an address. She had some directions, but they were sketchy and made no sense whatsoever. I was no help, which was disappointing to me because I am usually good at giving directions, and probably even more so to her. I pointed her in what I thought was the general direction, based on the numbering of a street I had just passed and the location of the sun.

I get the feeling that some of my neighbors really wish they lived in some other state or country. This doesn’t look very “Seattle” to me:



One day, downtown, a man who knew very little English asked me how to get to the Mexican consulate. I had no trouble getting him there.

Back in Outer Mongolia, I saw some flowers that were interesting, but I didn’t get a good picture of them, and a guy with a mean-looking dog was walking toward me so I decided to move on. Is there such a thing as purple daisies, or were they something else? I know nothing about botany.

When I was in Marrakech, where it is famously easy to get lost, I had been there for about two days when a quartet of senior citizens approached me. They didn’t know how to get back to the Djemaa al Fna, the main plaza. I was able to give them clear and concise instruction in French, a language I do not speak.

Really, who doesn't want some sort of tower or turret?:



In the park in the middle of Magnolia, I saw a toddler wearing a fabulous fish costume. When you’ve got a great Halloween costume, it’s never too soon to start wearing it. It looked like a shiny blue and purple fish was swimming in the grass. I didn’t get a picture, because, a, my camera batteries were dead, and b, you can’t go around taking pictures of kids you don’t know. Just imagine it.

Anyway, I never did find the awful house. I do have some ideas about where it might be, though, so we’ll return to that fine treat another day. In the meantime, maybe I should get out a map and learn to navigate the neighborhood I’ve lived in for six years.