When the Curves franchise at Queen Anne Avenue and Boston Street closed recently, it was a blow to the approximately 300 members of the women-only fitness center.But five of them decided to do something about the loss, formed Girls Can Do LLC, bought the franchise and are set to open a new location in an office complex at 101 Nickerson St., said Claudia Mitchell, one of the new owners.The former owners of the Queen Anne Curves were four naturopaths, but they decided to get out of the business, said Jennie Donahe, also one of the new owners. The lease was up, but that was only one of the reasons the previous owners decided to close the business, she said. "The rent was incredibly high," Donahe said of the old location.On top of everything else, the owner of the property found a new tenant, said Kammie McArthur, another of the new owners. "So we didn't have the option to stay," she said of a development that forced the women to find a new location before they could buy the franchise.But the women found the location on Nickerson Street, clearing the way for the buy-out.
When Seattle resident Bradley Enghaus made arrangements to have his home checked out by a master home environmentalist, he had visions of receiving a white-coated scientific expert at the front door, armed with a Geiger counter-like instrument for measuring the levels of dust in his living room.What he got was Kerrie Carbary, a volunteer with the American Lung Association's Master Home Environmentalist (MHE) program, which sends its volunteers to make house calls and assist residents in assessing environmental health problems and making recommendations that help reduce exposure to indoor pollutants.Carbary, who arrived at Enghaus' Central District home with no scientific instruments but several handouts, including a list of tips to improve indoor air quality, said many people who call her office expect their living areas to be subjected to a scientific inspection.She's not that kind of environmentalist, said Carbary, who jokingly refers to herself as the "cleaning police." Her job is to focus not on how much dust and mold there is in a place but educate people on how to get rid of it and make sure it doesn't come back. Being exposed to pollutants in the home is a potentially serious problem that can put people at risk for everything from asthma to learning disabilities to cancer, she said.
With the recent events around the Viaduct-tunnel, no tunnel, tunnel-lite, revoked funds, Gregoire vs. Nickels; I am reminded that the timing for the Airport Way Visioning Project (AWVP) couldn't have been better. While so many transportation issues seem to flounder, there are others trying to move forward, being proactive rather than reactive.What is the AWVP, you ask? It's a project put forth by the Georgetown Merchants Association (GMA) and was successfully funded by the Department of Neighborhood's Small and Simple Fund. It was an idea about the future use, and possible reshaping of, Airport Way South, the street that runs through the heart of Georgetown's historic business district.Since the GMA formed, all of nine months ago, the issue that comes up over and over again is parking, or lack of it. This was a topic that we tackled at one of our first meetings: we had representatives from SDOT listen to our needs and possible solutions. Most of our suggestions were flatly refused.
Home baked bread fills a house with one of life's most evocative aromas. These cold, wet days call for warm, cozy kitchens and homemade breads can uplift kitchens and spirits with cheer. Into the loafChoosing a loaf of bread can seem to be as complicated as choosing a computer. Nutrition and ingredient information can be lengthy. This is particularly true when buying processed foods, including bakery goods. So taking a look at breads in the marketplace and ingredients for a home-baked bread can be just the ticket before the next storm blows in.Flour is what makes bread the often called staff of life. Standard, all-purpose flour is white flour made from ground wheat kernels, often with some malted barley flour for color and flavor. The germ and bran have been removed; this allows flour to keep for a longer time without becoming rancid. Bleaching with chlorine dioxide makes flour very white and speeds maturity. Mature flours are said to have better baking properties. Unbleached white flour is creamy in color and matures naturally. Home bakers should see little difference in goods baked with either as both are fortified with vitamins and minerals to replace those removed when the flour was refined.Grocery stores stock all-purpose flour as well as pastry, bread-machine, pasta, milled vs. stone-ground, pre-sifted, quick-mixing, cake and bread flours as well as whole wheat and whole wheat pastry flours. The rule to follow when buying flour is this: stick to the recipe or manufacturer's instructions when using a bread machine. Unless a specialty flour is called for, use all-purpose flour or whole-wheat flour, depending upon the recipe. All-purpose flour is very forgiving; it's made to be used in a wide variety of baked products.
Seattle has never been the same since (fill in the blank) left us. Some nostalgia buffs would stump for Frederick & Nelson; others, Ivar Haglund or Bob Murray's Dog House or Chubby & Tubby.In "Vanishing Seattle," Seattle writer Clark Humphrey has come up with more than 200 photos of past Seattle icons, both people and places, and provides an insider's commentary on what we've lost.An ode to the cityThe 128-page book is an ode to Seattle before it was so darned "livable" - and expensive. As Humphrey notes, "Real estate hyperinflation helped obliterate the remaining vestiges of the city's more downscale past."Humphrey - editor of the Belltown Messenger, former staffer for The Stranger and retro Seattle hunter and gatherer - has linked up with Arcadia Publishing to produce the book.
I was pleasantly surprised when the last guy I dated - we'll call him "Steve" - said he was glad I didn't have kids. He'd already done the "Dad-thing" and had no interest in doing it again.Fine by me. Don't get me wrong, I love kids - other people's kids. I love to indulge them, wind them up and send them home - so I can get ready for my date with Steve.Children are fabulous, and recently I've discovered yet even one more reason I love the little urchins. In dating, I've learned, children give invaluable insights into a parent's character.An involved dadI dated one man a third and fourth time based almost entirely on the caring way he spoke of his sons. Certainly, there weren't many other reasons. As he checked in by cell phone with his preteen boys at bedtime, a nurturing side to his personality emerged - a side otherwise buried deep behind his dating persona.As a parent, he cared, but he didn't overdo. An occasional anecdote can be charming, but hearing the minutiae of shopping for exactly the right Sparkly Strawberry doll or Astro-Dino action figure causes my eyes to glaze over. I love kids, but some things only a parent, or grandparent, can enjoy.
Karen Gielen worked at Boeing for 27 years. She started as a parts buyer, but by the end of her career (Gielen left Boeing in May 2005), she was heading up a multinational team working on international treaties that hindered the airplane giant's ability to do global business.Gielen said she loved the job and was good at it.Lots of travel was involved, and along the way, Gielen couldn't help but notice how different some parts of the world were from others.And how poor so many folks were.That initial observation eventually spawned Gielen's desire to do something to help the poor and hungry around the globe.Gielen joined RESULTS, whose motto is "Peace begins when hunger ends."
Condominiums are part of the mix in urban housing. They provide options for first-time homebuyers who can't afford a detached dwelling, empty nesters ready to downscale, and busy single professionals with no time for home maintenance. However, when condos are created by converting existing apartment buildings into units for sale, tenants are displaced with 90 days notice and $500 in relocation assistance - hardly enough time or money to find a new home in Seattle's tight rental market.While condos can be a boon to people making 80 percent of the area median income or more (median income is $52,010 for a single person, $74,300 for a family of four), there is no shortage of condos available for them. It's those making less than 60 percent of median income who are most likely to lose their homes due to condo conversions.Here's s typical scenario: A developer buys an apartment building for $150,000 a unit, holds onto the building for a year or so while raising rents to cover loan payments, then makes some superficial improvements, kicks out the tenants (many of whom are longtime elderly residents on fixed incomes), and sells the units to buyers for over $250,000 (the median price of one-bedroom condos converted since 2004). The elderly are particularly vulnerable because they tend to be concentrated in the city center where most of the condo conversions are happening.
All you need to know about George W. Bush's recent State of the Union address is that after making the central point of his speech a plea to balky senators to give his escalation of the war in Iraq "a chance," the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted the very next day to pass a resolution calling his plan "not in the national interest." And that many of the Republicans voting against the Senate measure said they, too, had reservations about the escalation.By the end of the week, Bush's somewhat pathetic plea was all but forgotten, drowned out in the headlines by some 3,000 boisterous anti-war demonstrators here in Seattle and what organizers claimed were a half-million congregating within view of the White House.Next week, our area will see another major anti-war event as the court-martial of Army Lt. Ehren Watada, the first officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, takes place at nearby Fort Lewis.A diminished presenceThe overwhelming sense of this year's State of the Union was that Bush has become not irrelevant exactly, but diminished - far more so than his lame-duck status alone would suggest. Except for the wary respect for the executive power he still wields, nobody would take Dubya seriously any longer. Nobody. Not Sen. John McCain, not Vice President Dick Cheney, not his wife Laura, not his dog Barney. Bush has lost all credibility with the public, and once that's gone for a politician, there's no recovering it.
Programs for young people were discussed along with community beautification. People mentioned transportation options and the importance of keeping drugs out of schools.Those were among the priorities established Thursday night in the gym of the Rainier Beach Community Center at the fourth annual Rainier Beach Community Action Meeting, where community members came to break bread and discuss issues surrounding the community. The meeting focused on evaluating priorities established at the 2006 Community Action Meeting and setting new ones for 2007.Ideas were plentiful: more intervention specialists in schools for kids at risk of becoming addicted to drugs; Attention to environmental issues; helping the academic programs at Rainier Beach High School measure up to its athletic programs; promoting multiple transportation resources for residents.The Rainier Beach neighborhood was the focus of the evening, as residents talked enthusiastically - and sometimes despairingly - about planned changes.
The rising price of gas over the last couple of years hasn't bothered 51-year-old Lyle Rudensey one bit.The 16-year Columbia City resident - who taught a Biodiesel Home Brew workshop last Saturday, Jan. 27, at the Greenwood Senior Center, 525 N. 85th St. - is an expert at making his own biodiesel fuel in his detached garage.He uses the fuel to keep his Volkswagen Jetta wagon running. And Rudensey gets between 40 and 48 miles to the gallon. He estimates the cost of his fuel at 65 cents per gallon.That's right. In this day of $2.50 per gallon of gas, Rudensey makes his own for a quarter of the cost."I use used restaurant vegetable oil," Rudensey explained. He said his fuel comes primarily from Thai, Italian and Chinese restaurants. "My car smells like chop suey."A positive changeRudensey said he was inspired by Dan Freeman, who started selling biodiesel fuel about six years ago under the moniker of Dr. Dan's Alternative Fuel Works, in Ballard."Thousands of people are making their own fuel. We are all trying to learn to make it better. I talk to people doing this as far away as Australia," Rudensey said.
Keith Robbins knows bars and dance clubs.Robbins, a Magnolia resident and owner of Tini Bigs martini palace on the corner of First and Denny, has also run a dance club and/or bar in the adjoining space just north of Tini B's for the past 17 years.You might remember the space as the Romper Room. Or maybe you were a customer for its latest incarnation, Watertown. Or it's even possible that you ate some gourmet burgers there when the name was the Hardened Artery.All of that is history now.Welcome to the Hula Hula-a tiki bar, not a dance club."The Watertown was a dance club; now it's a lounge serving food and drinks because [tiki bars] are fun," Robbins said early one recent evening as his new (opened this month) lounge was filling up. "Everybody in this business tends to be really serious-we just wanna have some fun."Robbins, born and raised in Seattle and a Queen Anne High School graduate, is a youthful-looking man pushing, but so far not quite reaching, 50. He currently lives in Magnolia, and he has been in the restaurant-bar business for the past 20 years, starting his career as a waiter and bartender before switching to the ownership side of things.
It was all supposed to be hush-hush, but a reservist major who lives nearby has discovered that the historic military chapel in Discovery Park is going to be used as a temporary hutch for rabbits captured in Woodland Park.Maj. Brian Harris said he first noticed lights in the long-closed chapel a week or so ago, and he asked people who came to church in several cars the next day what was happening. The people weren't eager to talk, according to the major."I thought it was kind of strange because they wouldn't tell me what was going on," added Harris, who said that he saw numerous cages and bales of hay in the building.The people - all volunteers, according to Seattle Parks and Recreation - finally came clean and told him the rabbits picked up in Woodland Park would be sterilized and allowed to recuperate in the chapel before they were shipped off to a rabbit sanctuary, he said.But Harris also said he was urged not talk to talk about the halfway-house hutch "because people might think it was inappropriate."Harris is one of those people.
Reading the ads for the January sales brought to mind the great pilgrimage that takes place in London every January when people from all over the country flock to Har-rods. At least once in a lifetime even the most parsimonious person makes a purchase at Harrods. How else to lay hands on one of those green and gold plastic carrier bags which, for the rest of its life, wraps the meanest contents in a stylish package. The world's greatest department store began life as a grocery store on Brompton Road in London. When Henry Charles Harrod took it over in 1849. He had two assistants and enjoyed a weekly income of 20 pounds. None of his customers then could have imagined how lustrous the name would become.The Great Exhibition of 1851 brought the Crystal Palace to Hyde Park and attracted visitors and builders. The solid, prosperous terraces they built were inhabited by equally solid, prosperous householders. They and their servants all ate well, and Harrods prospered. In 1867 Henry's son, Charles Digby Harrod, expanded his lines of business to include patent medicines, perfume and stationery. The premises were extended into adjoining shops and the back garden. Another significant item was the extension of credit to fashionable inhabitants of the quarter. The present retail palace was erected in 1901.
Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" naturally centers on the swans, those women in white tutus, and the lead swan, Odette. But what is Odette without a Prince Siegfried to partner her through love and heartbreak?This year, three new Princes take to the stage at Pacific Northwest Ballet, each with a different Odette/Odile. These three young men have to make Siegfried as real and as important to the audience as the swan on his arm. Principal dancer Casey Herd partners principal dancer Carla Körbes, principal dancer Le Yin partners principal dancer Noelani Pantastico, and corps member Lucien Postlewaite partners principal dancer Kaori Nakamura. Last week, the new Siegfrieds stole a half-hour from a hectic rehearsal schedule to discuss what it means to be the Prince in a four-act story ballet.For all of them, Siegfried's character is set by his first appearance in Act I, when his royal and rather demanding mother tells him that he must marry one of the visiting princesses coming to the ball. The Prince, distracted by a flight of swans overhead, dismisses the potential brides and decides to go hunting in the forest.