Good news! There was a mostly silent airship in the skies for this weekend's Seafair festivities. It was the Soaring Dreams Airship, a blimp covered with art, and an icon for the philanthropic partnership of Portraits of Hope and Ameriquest Mortgage Company.Does this mean that we might be phasing out the yearly cacophony of the Blue Angels? President Bush has told us that we are at war. While only the Congress has the power to declare war - well, that is another subject.My current concern is the scarcity of fuel and why we expend it, with such profligacy, for four days in the jets that create very disturbing noise over our communities. Just today I forgot about the timing of this noise and had to rush out to the garden to find my aging kitty after the Blue Angels had roared over the treetops on Queen Anne Hill.
To quote Magnolia girls coach Jack Sutermeister, "Softball is back."Jack, along with Bob Christie, really got softball up and running 10 years ago, and helped to resurrect it again this season.  A special thanks to both of them along with all the volunteer coaches and sponsors from single A to Senior Majors who stepped up to help.Thank you also to Gail LaRussa and Lori Bjorklund for stepping up to be the softball coordinators and representing softball at MLL board meetings.
Dinner one recent Saturday night consisted of many surprises. Because it was in the seafood-rich Northwest, all of the offerings were once denizens of the deep.Was this repast offered by some trendy new bistro? No, it was being served in the hospitality area of Don Schumacher Racing (DSR) at the recent CARQUEST Auto Parts NHRA Nationals at Pacific Raceways in Kent.The Kent stop was the 14th of 23 events in the $50-million NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series, and DSR is the largest team in NHRA history, with nine racing vehicles.
When was the last time you received a meaningful, personalized letter in the mail? Many of you likely are stretching your memory, perhaps back to a recent holiday or your last birthday when you found a few cards from friends and loved ones sitting in your mailbox among the direct marketing pap, like gold nuggets shining through silt.Letters - real letters with a return address and receiver address inked out by hand on a stamped envelope containing a page or two of greetings and thoughts by someone you most likely know - seem just as rare as precious metal in a mountain stream in this e-dress dominant era.There's no doubt that e-mail changed how humans communicate with one another soon after it became hip to fire off electronic messages to friends and strangers around 1994.
a mustachioed clown distributing tasty worm sandwiches.
Magnolia Cub Scout Troop 85 acting as the parade's official Color Guard.
Cruising through Magnolia neighborhoods in the passenger seat of Merlin Cavender's historic Model A Ford, I imagine myself adorned in a silk v-neck dress, silk stockings and a maroon beret as I wave to people on the sidewalks."Here, you want some air conditioning?" Merlin asks as he grins and cracks open the front windshield. Earlier, Merlin and his wife Dianne, both longtime Magnolia residents, lead me to their back yard to show off their Model A, Merlin leaning over to unlatch the engine cover to emphasize the simplicity. It still looked complicated to me.
Describing it as "absurd," the Magnolia Community Club has joined a growing chorus of individuals, neighborhood groups and politicians who have proven highly critical of the proposal to move Southwest Airlines operations from Sea-Tac International Airport to Boeing Field."We're very concerned this could happen," MCC president Vic Barry said. Just how concerned is laid out in a nine-page letter the organization fired off on Aug. 1 to King County Executive Ron Sims.Sims announced the proposal last month after months of secretive talks with the low-cost carrier, and the MCC expressed surprise at his initial support of the idea.The MCC letter notes that Magnolia would be affected by the change. That's because existing air traffic to the King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is also known, has sparked noise complaints from the neighborhood for years.But the MCC also points out that the shift in Southwest Airlines operations would have an impact on other neighborhoods such as Queen Anne, West Seattle, Georgetown, Tukwila, Mt. Baker, Southcenter, Kent and parts of Renton and Auburn.
Robbie Pease's digital photographs capture the rich, luminous colors of unreconstructed nature. Lush green leaves surround pink and lavender and violet petals that seem stolen from the palette of American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. It's hard to believe the pictures are not doctored."I don't mess with them," says Pease, a Magnolia resident for the past five years. He is 37. The survivor of a brutal hit-and-run accident when he was 18, he is the sort of artist about whom people drop such words as "inspirational" and "courageous."All true. Yet don't let that get in the way of the fact that he is damn good, too. He has an exquisite eye, and that ineffable knack - Mapplethorpe had it, as did Ansel Adams and Walker Evans - for suffusing his work with a sense of infinite patience and serenity. And he's only been at it a year.
It's a lazy summer afternoon.Perhaps it's the heat. Perhaps it's the way the mid-afternoon light seems to permeate even the deepest of shadows. Regardless, this weather encourages the kind of quiet introspection that is the writer's bread and butter.Sitting on his back porch in west Magnolia, Larry Karp shifts in his plastic deck chair to adjust the cushion against his back. From inside the house come the sounds of his wife, Myra, finishing up with a group on a tour of their personally restored collection of antique music boxes.The former director of Obstetrics and Perinatal Medicine at Swedish Hospital, Karp retired in 1995 from a 25-year career in medicine to pursue his childhood dream of writing novels. His first mystery, "The Music Box Murders," was published by Worldwide Library in 2000. He released two more novels in the series, "Scamming the Birdman" and "Midnight Special," before his publisher folded.
Good news! There was a mostly silent airship in the skies for this weekend's Seafair festivities. It was the Soaring Dreams Airship, a blimp covered with art, and an icon for the philanthropic partnership of Portraits of Hope and Ameriquest Mortgage Company.Does this mean that we might be phasing out the yearly cacophony of the Blue Angels? President Bush has told us that we are at war. While only the Congress has the power to declare war - well, that is another subject. My current concern is the scarcity of fuel and why we expend it, with such profligacy, for four days in the jets that create very disturbing noise over our communities. Just today I forgot about the timing of this noise and had to rush out to the garden to find my aging kitty after the Blue Angels had roared over the treetops on Queen Anne Hill. Poor Cleopatra, obviously frightened beyond our human comprehension, rushed into the house in a crouched position.
Being a plant growing in Marshall Park, I've been able to eavesdrop on many human conversations. Once I heard two old men saying that after the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, ocean alewives died en masse on Chicago's Lake Michigan beaches, causing a horrible stink, and zebra mussels entered the lake, clogging water-intake pipes, clinging to boats and making an expensive nuisance of themselves. Another time I heard two visiting Egyptian women saying the Aswan Dam was destroying the fertility of the Nile Valley and wasn't creating the anticipated amount of hydroelectric power, due to extreme evaporation. A week ago I heard a couple from Downers Grove, Ill., complaining about their park district's plans to improve a tiny, pristine forest preserve by adding workout stations to its nature trail every 50 feet, parallel bars and stuff like that. The couple wanted the forest left as wild as possible, but the park people didn't understand that. Humans don't seem able to leave anything alone, and do poorly when they mess with my mother, Nature.
Dinner one recent Saturday night consisted of many surprises. Because it was in the seafood-rich Northwest, all of the offerings were once denizens of the deep.Was this repast offered by some trendy new bistro? No, it was being served in the hospitality area of Don Schumacher Racing (DSR) at the recent CARQUEST Auto Parts NHRA Nationals at Pacific Raceways in Kent.The Kent stop was the 14th of 23 events in the $50-million NHRA POWERade Drag Racing Series, and DSR is the largest team in NHRA history, with nine racing vehicles.
My mother will be 87 this Nov. 5, God willing.She and I have gotten along well for the past 15 years, and I'll be riding the Empire Builder - if Bush hasn't killed Amtrak (he wants to) - back to Cincinnati, Ohio, to celebrate with what's left of my family. (Death has cut a swath through the old folks lately, taking first my godmother and then my favorite aunt.)My good relationship with Mom was hard-earned, and the work of tolerance and understanding was done on both sides of the parent-child divide. She and I had our troubles back in the day. What must have seemed to her like overnight, I transformed from an obedient, religious little first son, into a teenager who wasn't in a gang only because there weren't any gangs for me to get jumped into in 1964 Cincinnati. At least not in my neighborhood.I spent a large segment of my teens in and out of minor trouble, if not with the law, with neighbors and local merchants. I got into a fight at the Catholic high school my parents forced me to attend (my girlfriend was at the public school up the street) that ended when I broke my much bigger antagonist's leg in three places.
When was the last time you received a meaningful, personalized letter in the mail? My guess is that many of you are stretching your memory, perhaps back to a recent holiday or your last birthday, when you most likely found a few cards from friends and loved ones sitting in your mailbox among the direct-marketing pap, like gold nuggets shining through silt. Letters, real letters with a return address and receiver address inked out by hand on a stamped envelope containing a page or two of greetings and thoughts by someone you most likely know, seem as rare as precious metal in a mountain stream in this e-dress-dominant era.