Today's blogging brought to you from Seattle.

As a graduation present, Uncle Marc and Aunt Susan got me tickets to visit Carla, David, Max and Riley (Carla is my dad's younger sister) in Seattle. Cool. So here I am. Getting here was a bit of a problem - now that I think of it, I might have mentioned it in an earlier post. But I'm here, I've adapted to the time zone change, and I'm playing a lot of games with my 10-year-old cousin Max. Yesterday we spent a lot of the day up the coast a ways, hiking around this hill and pebbly beach and rocks covered with barnacles and seaweed.

I'm sort of surprised to see how much Seattle, or at least this neighborhood of it, reminds me of Nantes. There's the weather, which I was expecting - Seattle is famous for its rain, and Nantes was pretty bad too, at least in the winter. It must be something about being on a west coast. But it's more than that - this is a suburban neighborhood where all the houses are cramped in tiny lots, but they're all unique. They don't have that kind of gentrified sterility that comes from not being allowed to do the slightest little thing that hurts property values. And the roads - they're tiny. I'm amazed they aren't one-way. I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to park or turn in this neighborhood. And wonder of wonders, they even have roundabouts here and there. They are a common feature of French roads, used as a substitute for cloverleaf interchanges and sometimes even just stop lights, but the ones in this neighborhood might be the first I've ever seen in this country.