Longtime neighborhood resident Margaret Morton used to walk her dog Sapphire to Magnolia Village an average of three times a week from her home in the 3800 block of 33rd Ave. W. But it will be a long time - if ever - before she makes the trek again.Morton, 56, was severely injured Nov. 13 when a chimney collapsed on her during a remodeling project at her home, leaving her with brain injuries, said her sister, Arnett Morton, who has been living in the same house.Margaret is currently in a Mercer Island nursing home, but her sister and next-door neighbor, Joanne Beyer, have been left trying to cope with the aftermath of the accident.Margaret's medical expenses have been covered with insurance from her job as a dental-assistant instructor and program coordinator at the Seattle Vocational Institute, Arnett said. But other expenses such as mortgage and car payments aren't, and Arnett said she has been unable to get access to her sister's bank account to pay those bills.
Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, melancholy prostitutes, dead spouses, hiking, hangings and holy wars are only a few of the gifts folks can expect this holiday season - judging, that is, by what's selling at our neighborhood bookstores.Seeing that Seattle is a big book-buying city, it should be possible to take something of a spiritual and intellectual reading of our liberal, latte-sipping populace by finding out what sorts of literature we're gifting each other with in this holiday season."There's a lot of really hot books this year," said Georgiana Blomberg, owner of Magnolia's Bookstore in the Village. Historical fiction, historical biography and memoirs seem particularly popular right now, she said. Leading that list are such titles as "The March," by E.L. Doctorow, a fictionalized account of Gen. Sherman's "march to the sea," as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin's study of Lincoln, "Team of Rivals," and "The Year of Magical Thinking," writer Joan Didion's account of the recent sudden death of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne.
Sidewalks buckled by overgrown tree roots are a common sight all over Seattle, but for Magnolia resident Sylvia Cummings, a tree-buckled bit of concrete on a Queen Anne sidewalk proved to be hazardous to her health.Three years ago, she allegedly tripped on a damaged sidewalk on Boston Street near Queen Anne Avenue and landed on her face. The fall shattered an eye socket and left her with permanent nerve damage, said her lawyer, Tim Calla-han, who is suing both the city and the abutting property owner for damages."My client did file a claim with the city shortly after the fall," he added. "The city never did anything."That's not necessarily unusual, according to Sean Sheehan, director of the torts section in the City Attorney's Office. He couldn't comment specifically about Cummings' lawsuit, but there are roughly 20 similar claims filed against the city every year, Sheehan said. Only around 15 percent of them are settled, he added.
Lead-footed Magnolia motorists are not paying attention to the 35-miles-per-hour speed limit on the western half of the Magnolia Bridge, according to Capt. Joe Kessler, commander of the Seattle Police Department's traffic section.Police aren't pleased with the trend and have written more than 150 speeding tickets in just the past couple of months, he said, adding that the cops are working the bridge only an hour or so at a time. Most tickets are for driving 45 to 60 m.p.h., Kessler said. "And we've also had a number of accidents in the area." One of those involved a speeding motorist failing to negotiate a recently installed right-turn lane to Thorndyke Avenue West off the bridge road, he said. "While they were investigating that accident, they had another one."
Lacking in star power. Dramatically uncompelling. Too morally ambiguous. A box-office downer. These are just a few of the witless charges leveled at "Munich," Steven Spielberg's briefing for a descent into hell. The filmmaker who has always placed his faith in the transfiguring power of family and home now envisions a world war in which that power is drained of its sustaining force - or turns as deadly as any other weapon of mass destruction. Subtle, humane, brilliantly conceived, "Munich" takes a big chance: this is a movie that invites its audience to measure up to Spielberg's own scrupulous standards.
What's an arts maven to do when the city's foremost museum is closed? With the Seattle Art Museum shutting its downtown doors Jan. 4, 2006, not to reopen them until spring 2007, where will we go to slake our hunger for art? Not to worry! Seattle has a feast of other art venues, and this is the perfect opportunity to visit some of them and get to know some of the less-known art treasures that enrich our region.
This two-part series will examine the issue of LGBT senior housing and the unique challenges gay seniors face entering their retirement years.Part I will examine its history in Seattle along with the initial attempt to build an affordable, gay-affirmative senior housing complex on Capitol Hill.Part II, appearing next week, will examine the current attempt to revive this vision and the creative solutions seniors have come up with given the dearth of affordable and inclusive senior housing options.In 1996 David Schraer had a vision - to build a non-profit, community run LGBT Community Center that included affordable, gay-affirmative senior housing. As a result, he founded the Queen City Community Development Corporation."Queen City identified elders as the least served major group in the LGBT community," Schraer said. "We decided that we should find out what they needed [and] that was the impetus for the year-long Elder Initiative."Together with three other like-minded groups, Queen City held a series of forums over the course of a year to discover the needs and priorities of gay seniors in Seattle. Then, the groups approached senior service providers to discuss those needs and priorities. From this Elder Initiative sprung an idea nearly unheard of at the time.
What was your most memorable New Year's eve?That was the question we posed to Joyce Harding and Ron Costa, residents of Fred Lind Manor at 17th and Howell on Capitol Hill, and they came up with three, very different kinds of memorable observances of the incoming new year."It was not hard to come up with that," Harding said confidently. It was New Year's Eve of 1942. World War II was a year old and she had been married for four days to Gerald Harding, a radio man first class on a submarine tender, and he was due to go back to sea.Gerald was one of the lucky ones. He was a crewman on the battleship USS Nevada at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack. The Nevada was the only battleship of the nine on "Battleship Row" to get up steam and move.
Time-honored Japanese foods eaten to celebrate the New Year, or Oshogatsu, are called osechi, and the very first dish happily consumed on New Year's morning in every household is a steaming broth called ozoni. "The tradition is that the family enjoys ozoni together on the first morning of the New Year," said Barbara Nagaoka, a member of and employee at Blaine Memorial United Methodist Church on Beacon Hill. The prefix "o" in ozoni is an honorific denoting respect while zoni means "broth with toasted rice cakes," which are called mochi. The broth base is historically composed of dried bonito shavings called dashi and kombu, a dried kelp.
The housing market is hot, no question about that, and despite the dire predictions about the real estate bubble bursting, Southeast Seattle continues to thrive. Housing projects are sprouting up like dandelions on a summer lawn: Rainier Vista, Rainier Court, and Catherine's Place are just a few. But is the South End, once considered one of the few places in the city where working and middle class folks could get affordable housing, now priced out of reach for its residents? Ray Anderson, a broker with Springfield Associates Inc., a South End real estate firm, asserts that people truly want to live in diverse areas and stay close to the city.
The days are short, the skies are cloudy, and many of us are feeling the effects of not enough light. Ten percent of people in Seattle experience full-blown seasonal affective disorder (SAD), with symptoms including depression, low energy, difficulty waking up, craving for carbohydrates, weight gain and irritability. Another 20 percent experience milder versions, which is know as winter depression. In my neurofeedback practice, I see a lot more depressed people in the winter than in the summer. I am happy to be able to recommend a remedy that is free and feels good: take a daily walk outside in the brightest part of the afternoon.In a study done in Seattle, women who walked briskly outdoors for 20 minutes a day five days a week showed substantial relief from winter depression.
Peter Jackson, the man who made such a personal, cottage-industy triumph of "Lord of the Rings," has gone and remade "King Kong." The tech is as hi as it gets - we expected no less - and nothing in its deployment implies derision, or anything but reverence, for what O'Brien and company were able to accomplish seven Pleistocene decades ago. The first "Kong" is Jackson's favorite film, the movie that made him want to make movies of his own, and unlike the updated, charitably forgotten remake of 1976, Jackson's version restores the fable to its own proper zeitgeist, the Depression.
For 17 years, Seattle has had a temporary moratorium banning strip clubs from operating within city limits. Recently, a judge ruled that ban illegal and the moratorium was lifted - Seattle is now open for business, all businesses.The city reacted quickly and Mayor Nickels responded in a stealth-like manner by introducing a proposal that few heard about. The mayor wants to confine all new adult cabarets (a fancy way of saying strip clubs) to a 310-acre area south of downtown from Walker Street to the north, South Duwamish Street to the south, 4th Avenue to the west, and I-5/Airport Way to the east.One would think that since this is a rather large area, home to many businesses and bordering several neighborhoods, the public would have a say before anything is proposed. Yes, one would think this, but one would be wrong.
I beg to differ on Ron Sims.Now that the election is over and Ron Sims has been re-elected as county executive, it's time to flat out admit that Sims is one of the greatest politicians in the history of Washington state and one of the best in the nation.But the day after this column appears I will be called by countless people in the African American community to find out whether I was being blackmailed or bought. There is a disconnect between perception and reality here, and the African American community is the ultimate loser.African Americans don't see how Sims has totally reorganized Martin Luther King County government and put the county on a sound fiscal foundation. We don't see the environmental moves to save wetlands or his improvement of regional transportation as something that is done for us. All we hear from the radio talk shows and see in the newspaper commentaries is how Sims has somehow failed to help African Americans. The accusations are nasty, personal and too general with no specific steps Sims should take.I beg to differ.
There is nothing I like more than a slow surprise. One that gently unveils itself, like wind blown seeds that take root in your garden and end up being your most cherished flowers. My latest such discovery is Jay Stansell, an unpretentious man who faithfully showed up and coached our 8-year-old son's soccer team - rain or shine - two nights a week, plus Saturday games, for two months. He is a Fulbright Scholar and a modern day David who stood before Goliath in the form of the Supreme Court, fighting for the rights of Cambodian Kim Ho Ma and other "lifers." The term lifer refers to the lost citizenship status of certain Cambodians. For example, a lifer could be a foreign national who served prison time in the United States but could not be deported for lack of repatriation agreements with birthplace countries such as Cuba, Laos or Vietnam. A lifer can also be a person who has become stateless in countries in chaos such as Sri Lanka where the tsunami hit last year. However they become a lifer, these people are often faced with the United States refusing to release them into American society, locking them up instead.