Something happening here...

I heard the telltale whoosh of the Seattle Police Department’s SUVs on my street at about midnight. I grabbed my camera bag and went out to have a look. Three SUVs and a police van. I’d heard some strange shouts earlier, and I watched the police come and go from a house. I’m guessing it was a domestic something or other. Sorry for the technical jargon.

As I was standing at the corner I heard what sounded like the entire Capitol Hill SPD racing towards something else, sirens blaring. A few went by on 12th, but I could hear several others heading north on Broadway. I tried to catch a glimpse down Harrison, but all I could hear was the whoosh of their SUVs.

The police van drove off. I heard a thwack. I’m convinced the driver grazed one of the SUVs or a car. For his sake I hope it was the SUV. He drove off at speed, but he did a loop and came back, pausing briefly by one of the SUVs. My guess is he was thinking, shit, am I going to have to fill out an accident report. I hope not. Showing up for essential work during COVID is stress enough.

I decided to go home. I could hear a helicopter. I suspect it’s at the other scene. It’s still up, or its replacement. That’s well over an hour now. If I hadn’t had a Rainier and a whiskey with my Poké bowl, I would have hopped in my car and driven off to see what there is to see. That was a lot of police cars. If it were December 2019 I’d say the poké was disappointing. In COVID 2020, I’d say it was delicious.

The helicopter is still up. My amateurish deductive reasoning thinks it’s hovering over the U District or close to it.

I imagine there’s always two pilots in helicopters. I wonder if the SPD is rotating staff through an extra layer of quarantine. Perhaps 14 days off with no contact with others, ensuring that they are healthy. The U.S. military is surely doing something similar, or they should be.

I wasn’t going to post anything tonight, and I definitely didn’t intend to ramble on about cops and robbers.

(The helicopter just flew overhead, going south. The incident must be over.)

Where was I? Ahh yes. I wasn’t going to post anything tonight. We’re going to be in this for a while. I can’t keep up this screen time, most of it unproductive, obsessing over COVID stats. But I had a little coding accomplishment I figured I’d mention. I think I’ve changed the font of this website. I’ve been looking at typewriters for about a year, and I just haven’t pulled the trigger on one, so I decided to download a typewriter font. Totally coincidental to tonight’s theme, the font is called ‘Detective”.

I haven’t coded anything since the late ‘90s when I thought I should learn HTML. It was obviously going to be a handy skill to have. I enjoyed tinkering around with some of it, but I knew almost immediately that I wasn’t cut out for coding. But tonight I dusted off my nearly non-existent programming skills and added some code to this Squarespace site to change the font. It was easy, but only because a programmer named Kayleigh Noele has a really clear, well-written post explaining how to do it. Always credit people.

Ok, I’m tired. I thought of some other things I wanted to mention, but my eyelids are closing.