Senior Services now offers Mazuma, a new program aimed at helping working-age adults invest for retirement. "Tomorrow's retirees are in a different solar system than their parents," says Gary Shinkoskey, a retired financial planner who will lead Mazuma workshops and provide follow-up investment coaching this fall. "No more big company pensions; the expense of living and housing is much higher; the kids keep needing and getting more financial help; parents may need help too; saving is more difficult; Social Security may be there but it will be taxed at a higher rate than now; and on and on. Unless one can expect a hefty inheritance, where's the money coming from in retirement?"
Our village sidewalks are rising up. There are gaps, uneven large areas, bulges, etc. These areas are scattered around the entire village. As you leave your car to see a doctor, dentist, shop or mail a letter, you must step over these raised and missing areas. I have tripped and been there to assist seniors trying to get to their doctor, etc., who have been thrown off balance by these surfaces.  <br
I want to assure your readers and the residents of the Magnolia area that the Postal Service has every intention to replace a mail collection box that previously was located behind the Magnolia Station. We had to remove the collection box because of a construction project that is underway. There is no place on our property on which to relocate a box.
No Indian summer for us here in the Puget Sound Region! There were a couple of hopeful warm days that should have led to a string of hot days, resplendent with cries of "too hot." Alas, no luck. The skies filled with gray wet fog in the morning hours, followed by some soft, yet brilliant cool, sun in the late afternoon. And then the first major rainfall descended upon us last Sunday and my day was consumed with overreaching guilt. I did not go and support the farmers at our local markets. This is the week of the Harvest full moon, and I let the fresh cold dampness keep me from venturing forth. Shameful.
I'm seeing my friend Jeane for lunch. The first time she and I met, she nodded, extending her hand but holding on to a smile. Immediately (and needlessly) I assumed she disliked me. There may be no greater penalty to a woman's ego than this assumption. Try to accept it, I told myself. But that's not what I did. Instead, I invited her to lunch. I wanted to know her. And I wanted her to know me: a woman who knows how hard it can be to shake off personal or, worse, professional mistakes made years ago even if you are now safely snuggled into middle age. Or a condominium in Ballard.
You know that feeling, the one where you're standing at the train station, or in an airport terminal, and the place is empty, and you'd like to think no one is there because you're really early, but you can't shake that awful feeling that you missed your train or plane. That's how I'm beginning to feel about the latest technology.I'm sort of proud of my geekiness, for an old guy. I know my way around a computer pretty well; I've even popped them open to add memory and upgrade processors. We have a wireless network in our house that I set up. Of course it's an Apple setup, so it's pretty easy, but you still have to wire up a lot of stuff to go wireless. Seems like a bit of an oxymoron.
I wrote last week about my father and his two brothers, good first-generation German boys, who despite harder lives than what's on offer for most white folks nowadays, hitched up their belts and worked away their newly minted American lives. I wrote about missing two of the three of them, and wishing they were still around so I could ask them what they made of George W. Bush's world. I ended up knowing a bit more about my mom and her siblings, because the Irish side of the family turned out to be more social and longer-lived.
RICHARD"Yes, I do read the Magnolia News. I lived in Magnolia for several years and now live in Queen Anne. As far as what might be added, perhaps some profiles of people who have done something in the community. It could be big or small, like someone helping out neighbors."< br>
Although 'Iphigenia in Tauris' has often been produced in European opera houses, until this year American performances have been extremely rare. In the fall of 2006, a new production appeared at Lyric Opera of Chicago and went on to performances in San Francisco and Houston. The imminent local production, directed by Stephen Wadsworth, marks Seattle Opera's first-ever co-production with the Metropolitan Opera. Wadsworth is well known to Seattle audiences for his Wagner productions, but he also gave Seattle a dazzling production of Gluck's "Orpheus" in 1988. After performances in Seattle in October 2007, this production of "Iphigenia in Tauris" will travel to New York for performances at the Met in November ... 90 years after the previous Met performances of Gluck's masterpiece.
Huzzah! Taproot ends its season with a splendid production of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." Wilde is one of the all-time masters of society drama presented as farce, and the Taproot staging of this, his final play, could hardly be better. Originally presented on a snowy Valentine's Day 1895 in London, it was greeted with howls of laughter and knowledgeable nods and smirks as the audience recognized its stinging commentary on contemporary social mores and values. Although the biting satire isn't as pertinent to today's social order, the play is still riotously funny, and Wilde's witty observations about marriage and class resound loudly.
The harsh reality of social bigotry faces off against the deep humanity of a Southern attorney and the coming-of-age of his innocent children. Marking the fourth offering of Intiman Theatre's American Cycle, the stage production of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a decent effort, but not one that will astonish you.Based on Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the 1962 film of the same title, the stage adaptation lacks the rich texture of its literary and screen predecessors.
Inquiring minds may want to know what happened to Richard Hugo House's Annual Inquiry. After much debate, the one-weekend program has been changed to a literary series that runs through March 2008."For the first eight or nine years of our existence, we did the annual inquiry as a weekend festival with many, many guests and panels, and workshops, and even an evening performance, all revolving around one theme. It was a lot of fun, a lot of work to put on, and, we were told, somewhat intimidating," said Alix Wilber, program director for Hugo House. "We didn't intend it to be intimidating, but many people told us that they felt they needed a Ph.D. just to come in the door."Hugo House's new literary series picks up some of the ideas that worked well in the Annual Inquiry and remolds the experience into what the organizers hope will be seen as a more audience-friendly event.
Many have tried to organize a neighborhood art walk like the highly successful First Thursday in Pioneer Square. After a variety of attempts by various people over the years, the 2TUE art walk on Capitol Hill has been up and running for a year. As the name suggests, the art walk takes place on the second Tuesday of the month. And the venues consist of a wide variety of art or art related venues. What is interesting is the fact that the three most prominent galleries on the Hill - Martin/Zambito, Bluebottle and Ballard/Featherstone galleries - do not participate. Two of the Hill's most prestigious alternative spaces, Crawl Space and Joe Bar Café, also are not part of the mix. Neither the Seattle Asian Art Museum nor the Frye Art Museum have extra hours on that day so the question remains can you have an Art Walk without recognized venues?
It might be a little hard to find, located on a side street that doesn't really lead to anywhere, a place you might not happen by unless you lived in the neighborhood. But when you do discover Redwood and look in, you'll probably wonder why you haven't known about it for years.That's an easy one. Even though the Redwood has the immediate, welcoming feel of a long-established neighborhood bar, complete with old advertising signs, it is only a year-and-a-half old.The place is a bar - a saloon -open only to patrons who are of legal drinking age. Which is too bad for anyone younger. The food is terrific and all made from scratch on the premises.
I recently carted eight trash bags of toys out of the house - never to be seen again - and apparently, neither my husband nor my children noticed a thing. The reason I find this curious is because when we were pregnant with our first daughter, my Jamaican husband informed me that - having been raised in a country and by parents that don't value materialism as much as we do here - he wasn't down with the whole "toy thing." Excuse me? I grew up in the good old US of A where parents - even poor ones - shower their children with all sorts of useless plastic junk in the name of guilt, love, education and keeping up with the Joneses. "What did you play with when you were a kid?" I asked my husband incredulously. "My brother," he replied equally incredulously.