Well into summer vacation, kids have won every video game on their PlayStation 2, lost all their toys in the sandbox and are sick of asking mom and dad to take them to the pool. It's usually raining anyway.With nearly two months of summer remaining, what kinds of community activities are available to Magnolia youngsters? Instead of riding your bike down the street to Jimmy's house and begging his older brother to take you to Wild Waves, kids can check out the summer activities available through Seattle Parks and Recreation. Parks offers a range of things to do including reading activities, nature camps, swimming lessons and various other sports camps. Most activities are close to home and don't cost a thing.
On July 12, a sunny Tuesday, Professor Dumbledore and dozens of Harry Potter fans gathered at Caffè Appassionato atop the Hill in support of forest-friendly publishing. The National Wildlife Federation and the Boreal Songbird Initiative cosponsored the event to encourage awareness of a new trend in green publishing."It is hard to imagine that a book of this size, the number of copies that are printed, could be printed on virgin fiber," said Paula Del Giudice, director of the West office of the National Wildlife Federation. He was referring to the paper that American Harry Potter books are printed on. "There is so much recycled paper available."The goal of the event was to urge publishers to print more books on recycled paper and, specifically, to protect the Boreal Forest of Canada and Alaska. Kids wrote letters to the CEO of Scholastic Publishing, the U.S. publisher of Harry Potter, and asked him to print the upcoming Potter books on recycled, forest-friendly paper.
Here's a list of the top 25 finishers among runners in Saturday's Crown of Queen Anne Fun Run & Walk. Unfortunately, race times are not available. One of the event volunteers, who'd risen before 4 a.m. in preparation for his duties, lost the printout. Don't blame the Queen Anne Helpline. The blame finger, points, in fact, to the publisher of this newspaper, who sired the young man who lost the critical piece of paper.
Saturday was not your typical, laid-back, summer Saturday on upper Queen Anne. Not with the 20th annual Crown of Queen Anne Fun Run & Walk, a children's parade, a sidewalk sale and community picnic.The predawn drizzle gave way to a cloudy but dry morning.More than 350 runners and walkers gathered at Queen Anne Lutheran Church to prepare for the Queen Anne Helpline's Fun Run & Walk. At 8 a.m. walkers left the starting line at Fifth Avenue West and West Halladay. Runners took off on the 3.3-mile course 20 minutes later. The first male runner to cross the finish line, for the second year in a row, was Nick Kirschner. The first female was Erika Daligcon. Michael Proulx placed first for 12 and under, and David Danbom, 70, took the honors for the highest finisher by age. Helpline director Pat Sobeck estimates this year's event netted $9,000 or more for the organization.Then came the children's parade.
The straightforward outlines that define the new park at Roy Street and Queen Anne Avenue have a charming yet powerful simplicity. The outer edges are defined by crude logs and concrete blocks. Virginia creeper plants that are starting to grow up on the north concrete wall will provide a soft and colorful background. Of course there is the ubiquitous trash receptacle, which does add a jarring vertical element to this flat new park. And then, standing proud and alone, there is a concrete planter filled with fresh bedding out plants. Not much to celebrate, some would say. Yet if you suspend your aesthetics for just a moment, the elements have defined the space as a place. After years of being an abandoned, chainlink-fenced corner, with odd bits of rubble strewn throughout the enclosure, the space now has been cleaned up, opened up, and is ripe for further refinements.
No, this isn't about gardening. My green thumb comes from eating spinach with my fingers. I'm talking about the changes in Magnolia's cuisine scene.Depending on your point of view, you may see the changes as blooming, or as a patch of weeds if you're longing for the good old days, but we can most likely all agree that our neighborhood is evolving.When we moved to Seattle 25 years ago, I referred to our city as Des Moines (Iowa) West, a derisive refer-ence to Seattle's dearth of ethnic and fine-food restaurants. Seattle seemed to be where recipes came to die. Having a special event? It was pretty much Rossellini's 610, and Canlis for fine dining. If you couldn't afford that, it was Denny's. If I took my wife to Denny's for our anniversary, it would be our last. For Mexican food, there was Guadalajara in downtown Seattle, and maybe one or two other pretenders, and there was good Asian food in the International District. Otherwise, it was chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy - a stick-to-your-ribs meal, to be sure, but way down the scale on excitement.If Seattle was Des Moines West, then Magnolia had to be Waterloo, Neb., tantamount to the epicurean badlands.
It's no secret that five years of George W. Bush's economic policies have gone a long ways toward creating a two-tiered society of rich Ameri-cans and poor Americans, while the middle class - the heart of the American Dream since the 1930s - is shrinking: a few families going up, a lot more falling through the gaping cracks in our culture's fraying, outdated safety net.In a column written in this space almost two years ago, I compared the new American economy with Argentina, a place where the poor have carried the bloated rich on their thin, straining backs for more than a century. An economics professor at a local university, not wishing to see his name linked with a notion so radical - that our own rich folks are cannibalizing our culture at the expense of the rest of us - dropped me a personal note."You are on the money," he stated, "but the model is Mexico, not Argentina."Great, I thought, it's not some semi-faraway dictatorship - it's the half-hearted "democracy" right next door that treats its own poor so badly they flock here by the millions.Fast forward 24 months and things have changed. For the worse.
A U.S. District Court judge personally took charge of the Columbia River System after ruling that the latest Bush Administration proposal to recover endangered salmon runs is illegal. In other words, the judge isn't buying what the Administration has tried selling repeatedly. That's no surprise after a fair-minded read, but it begs the question: When do we stop pleading and start planning? Planning is what's necessary, and it is an approach that I've strongly advocated for years in my Salmon Planning Act that remains dammed behind Republican legislative spill gates in the House of Representatives. It's past time to open the spillway.We need a credible, serious, long-range salmon recovery plan based on science, economic analysis and community dialogue, not special interests producing banners and monologues. This is the only way we can ever hope to achieve results in the best interests of salmon, agriculture and the rest of the Northwest economy.
Bayview-Kinnear Park sits directly below the Kerry Park viewpoint at Prospect Street and Third Avenue West. From the Kerry overlook it's easy to mistake the verdant, treesy zone as one big back yard absentmindedly attached to the nearby houses.The 1-acre park is connected to the viewpoint by two staircases and a grassy hillside and has a ballfield and playground. A new design calls for extensive additional seating, new play equipment and hiking trails on the unused slope between the park and the viewpoint.That requires money, of course, and fundraising efforts to make the park renovation a reality continue.
Well into summer vacation, kids have beat every video game on their PlayStation 2, lost all their toys in the sandbox, wearied of earning a measly 25 cents a day selling lemonade and grown sick of asking mom to take them to the pool. It's usually raining anyway. With nearly two months of the summer left, what kinds of community activities are available to youngsters? Instead of riding your bike down the street to Jimmy's house begging his older brother to take you to Wild Waves, check out the summer activities available through Seattle Parks and Recreation. Parks offers a range of things to do - reading activities, discovering-nature camps, swimming lessons and other sports camps. Most activities are close to home and don't cost a thing.
Magnolia resident John Cain is fed up about something that's partially his own fault. He took part in an effort to spruce up the neighborhood more than decade ago when angled parking in the middle of Thorndyke Ave-nue West was replaced with six landscapedmedium strips between 23rd Avenue West and West Plymouth Street.Dirt from a tunnel dug for an expanded West Point sewer plant was used for the medium strips, which were edged with railroad ties, Cain said. "Then we started to plant this stuff," he added, gesturing in disgust at an overgrown medium strip half a block from his home on West Boston Street.One of the medium strips between 23rd Avenue West and West Plymouth Street is nicely mowed these days, thanks to a nearby neighbor, Cain said. But the rest have turned into a mess of overgrown flowerbeds, grass and weeds as neighborhood interest has waned or disappeared altogether, he said. "So anyway, I called the mayor's office to get someone out here to do something."He's still waiting, but a fix won't be easy, as Cain found out at a meeting last week of the Magnolia Community Club's new land-use task force.
The United States Army Reserve at Fort Lawton is set to become just another part of Seattle's history later this year. A federal Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) has included the 38-acre complex at the edge of Discovery Park on a list of nationwide military installations it wants to shut down. What would happen to the property afterward is still up in the air, according to Mike DeCesare, the communications director for Congressman Jim McDermott. "There's been all kinds of talk about possi-bilities for it," DeCesare said.But getting bumped off the closure list isn't one of them because Congress has to OK or reject the entire package to avoid "various political footballs," he added. Congressional members can't cherry-pick at the list, which was prepared with careful consideration by the independent commission, DeCesare said.
I really love to cook. I miss the days, before I had children, when I could leisurely grocery shop and plan long, drawn-out dinners - often far in advance of the meal itself, since it seemed the most intriguing dishes always had something that needed to be cured or stewed or marinated for 24 hours prior to being eaten. I enjoyed having guests for dinner on a weekend night, as it would leave me with the entire day free to prepare a meal that would be that much more wonderful and unique.And then, there were four of us....Nowadays, even with two small children at home, I still get a thrill from cooking, although I know that I'll have maybe 30 or 40 minutes to put a meal together. I still pass the time in a checkout line reading the store copy of Saveur, rather than the latest Vogue or Elle or gossip magazine (although, believe me, there remains room in my life for that guilty pleasure). Most of all, I still enjoy having friends over for sit-down dinners, even if it means that one of my angels may unexpectedly join us.
Since catching a promotional preview of "Wedding Crashers" a couple of weeks ago, I've had the same conversation several times. The person or persons ask me whether I've seen it, and I say yes, a grin beginning to form on my face. They ask how it is, and I say it's indecently hilarious, the grin now a smile. They say, "Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are in it, right?" and I say, "Yes, and Christopher Walken - as if further enticement were needed." I'm chuckling by now, and they start to believe it is funny; yet almost every time, I get the distinct feeling they don't quite dare.
I am fortunate to take care of several residents of Heritage House in the Market, an assisted living facility next to the clinic annex. For this month's article, my patient, Grace, invited me up to her tidy room to share her memories and her wisdom with me.Grace, how old are you?I'm 99. I was born in November 1905.Where were you born?I was born in Green Lake, at home. My family had a nice house; a nice yard, with cherry trees. We were just down the street from the Green Lake Library. My sisters and I practically lived there. I used to think there wouldn't be any books left to read when we were grown ups because we would have read them all. The librarian, Mrs. Cole, was a big influence on me. I read that she passed away some years ago, and I wished I had let her know that before she died. What a big influence she was.