The weather, it just gets worse. Hoping for summer? Keep hope alive! Remember spring? Surely, we must have had one. (Missed it last year; we were in the bathroom.) Wait, a dim memory: a vague recollection of a spring-like afternoon last week. It comes back to us now. We were on upper Queen Anne. A whole street of yellow blossoms catches our eye. Goldenchain, they call those trees, don't they? Laburnum, in the garden store.......

What is it about Seattle and innovative cabbies? It was a cabbie who co-came-up-with the idea for the monorail (along with a poet), and now we've got a cabbie jumping into the digital age: along with books, mp3s and pornography, you can now shop for cabs online. Using TaxiDriversDirect.com, you can find direct contact info for cabbies by day/time. Screw central dispatch: call 'em direct (at least 30 minutes in advance) and arrange for them......

We'll admit it--we programmed Orange Cab into our cell phone just because we thought it was funny--it's not Yellow Cab and what do oranges have to do with Seattle? As with most major decisions in our lives, we made it capriciously and with great good luck. We've also noticed that our cabbies are uniformly pleasant to talk to. We've never had to talk when we don't want to, we've never had to endure political......