Birthday flowers in Kirkland

Desk drops are the birthday order most likely to go wrong, and almost never because of the flowers. Kirkland's employment is hybrid to the bone: a large share of the downtown and Google-campus population is in the building Tuesday through Thursday and at a kitchen table in Juanita or Redmond Ridge on Monday and Friday. Before you send to an office, find out whether the person is actually in that day — a Friday desk drop into an empty pod is a bouquet that spends the weekend in a dark room. Lobbies here mostly run on badges rather than front desks, so give us a phone number for the recipient or a colleague who can come down. Kirkland Urban and Carillon Point are the two addresses downtown where there is usually someone at the entry to sign for a delivery and stage it. For a hospital birthday — a nurse, a tech, a scheduler at EvergreenHealth — the delivery goes to the department's front desk or the break room, never onto a patient floor, and the order needs the department name, because that campus opens on both NE 128th Street and Totem Lake Boulevard and staff are not paged by first name. The same logic applies at Lake Washington Institute of Technology on 132nd Avenue NE and Northwest University on 108th Avenue NE: department first, then the person.

Home deliveries here are a topography problem. Kirkland climbs from the lake in shelves, and the 2011 annexation of Finn Hill, North Juanita and Kingsgate added a whole northern tier of them, which is why the city reads as two very different ZIPs. In 98033 you get downtown, Norkirk, Market, Moss Bay and Houghton — older bungalows with real porches, plus a growing band of condo and apartment buildings along Lake Street South, Central Way and 6th Street where a front desk or a call box decides whether the delivery lands. In 98034 you get Juanita, Finn Hill, Kingsgate and Totem Lake, where Holmes Point and the lanes off Juanita Drive NE run down toward the water in long private driveways, some of them gated, several of them shared by four houses with one visible number. Bridle Trails, on the Bellevue line by the state park, has horse properties where the house is a hundred yards off the road. Give us the gate code, the unit number and a note about where the porch actually is, and add a phone number: it rains here from October to May, and a driver who can reach someone will get the box under cover instead of leaving it on wet concrete.