Was Mount Rainier out on your birthday last year? Thanks to Seattleite Rob Ousbey, you can find out.

Rob runs the uber-popular @IsMtRainierOut account on Twitter. And every day for the last couple years, he’s been tweeting the answer to a very simple, very Seattle question:

If you look at the sky south of Seattle, can you see Mount Rainier?

“It’s a great proxy for everything else,” Rob told us. “When the mountain’s out, it means good weather. And good weather also means we’re gonna be happy, everybody’s gonna be convivial, it’s gonna be a good day.”

Rob uses pics of Rainier from the Space Needle panocam in his tweets. But it isn’t always easy to find just the right stunning photo to share on the days that Mount Rainier is — and isn’t — gracing us with her presence. So Rob uploaded those webcam pics into a tool that helps him quickly scan for one great pic per day. Then he thought, well, why not share it?

The result is ismtrainierout.com: Hundreds of photos of our favorite peak stacked and sorted for our scrolling pleasure. Go ahead. Have a look.

And if that’s not enough to satisfy your Rainier obsession, check out Rob’s roundup of the most liked and shared @IsMtRainierOut tweets of 2017. They’re really something.

A sh**hole countries reading list. A list of books got shared like crazy over the weekend, then seemed to disappear. It’s called “Sh**hole Countries: A Reading List,” and — yes — it lists books about countries President Trump reportedly insulted last week. A lot of people assumed it was an official creation by the Seattle Public Library (more on that in a minute), and by some time Sunday, the viral link to it had broken. What happened?

Well for starters, the list was not, in fact, an official library list. It was created by Seattleite David Wright. David works at the downtown library, but created the list on a library platform any cardholder can use to publish them. “It was purely me, as a private citizen…on my own time, my own computer, my own initiative,” David told us via email. And when he realized people were mistaking it for an official library post, he said, he added a disclaimer and “inadvertently broke the link.” Why did David feel the need to clarify that he wasn’t speaking for the Seattle Public Library? Read what the first couple sentences say about Trump to find out. 😬 (Bibliocommons.com)

TMI, DOL. Thanks to a report in The Seattle Times, we now know that the Washington State Department of Licensing has been handing over people’s info to federal immigration officials without a court order. The result? The department is promising not to do it again, and its deputy director resigned his post. (The Seattle Times)

‘This kind of place is disappearing.’ C&P Coffee in West Seattle is one of those places people fall in love with. So when its owners said their landlord was putting the building up for sale to developers, people spoke up. “We have been overwhelmed with offers of love and support from a community that recognizes how very important it is to provide a place for life to happen” the co-owners wrote. Now they’re fighting back with a crowdfunding campaign. (West Seattle Blog).

See Gaby draw. Artist Gabriel Campanario publishes all kinds of beautiful sketches in The Seattle Times. Now he’s got a video showing how he does it. (The Seattle Times)

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY 🙌

We’ll see you tomorrow. — The Evergrey