Here are the bars, but there are no restaurants, it seems.

You might also consider having a lunch or dinner at home with a relatively few friends and family, and little or no booze, and on a different night, hitting the bars. With a different group of friends.

So you can sit around and discuss Life and have talks about what it means to be a year older with your wise and prudent friends and relations. And not miss out on getting hammered with your other friends who know how to stand on the table and take their top off.

I've actually come up with this idea by experimenting with birthday parties with 1 and 2 year olds. There's generally two crowds -- grandma and the aunts vs all your kid's rowdy peers, and it's best to have two parties to keep them apart.

(See what I I did there?")

Rickibot and Tom Sackett are both right.

One important point is that power steering and power brakes don't work without the engine on, and so you're really dead in the water if you have to get out of the way of anything while you're sitting there.

Motorcyclists are advised to keep their hand on the clutch rather than put it in neutral at stop lights, in spite of how fatiguing this can be on your left hand. Cars constantly come flying up behind stopped motorcyclists and hit them, and so you want to be ready to ride away fast until the car behind you comes to a complete stop.

Leaving all that aside, most all hybrid and even a couple non-hybrid cars have a computer-controlled engine shutdown that starts it up only when you need it.

A countdown sign on traffic lights telling drivers if they have more than a minute before the light turns green would be very useful to save fuel and reduce pollution. Same thing on drawbridges and anything else you have to stop and wait for. As rickibot mentions, when you don't know how long the wait is going to be, you tend to keep the motor running. But if you're assured that you won't have to go for 2 minutes and 34 seconds, you would be happy to shut it off. As long as the idiot behind you has stopped.

Feed the dogs the same things you feed them every day. Or better yet, have fun activities like swimming or the dog park, but no food.

It's totally fine if your dogs are used to eating a lot of random stuff; then their stomachs can handle it. Historically dogs lived off human table scraps and garbage heaps.

But if they're like most pet dogs today, they probably eat the same dog food day after day. If all of a sudden you give them a lot of new, special food, even quality meat or treats, it could severely upset their digestive tract.

And by "upset" I mean you'll have some very bad news squirting out both ends for at least a day, maybe two. It's not pretty. The smell can be beyond your worst nightmare. If you have carpets -- oh, carpets! -- God help you.

I say this from bitter, bitter experience. If you must have food at the party, give them some of their regular kibble, but make a big show of it: smile, have them do a trick, act like it's the best food you've ever given them. They'll love it.

Dogs are simple creatures and they thrive more on human interaction than on any thing you could give them.

Are you kidding me?

Neat.

Did you try contacting one of these sites? They have things like lists of agencies in the FAQ and so on.

There are tech savvy people at Clear. They run the thing, right? Someone there must know how it works. And you're paying them. Why don't you ask Clear?

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/neighborhoodtraffic.htm

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/sdotfaqs.htm#nto

http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/ntcp_calming.htm