August 2009

Get to know your neighbors tomorrow by sharing good eats, great entertainment and a night out on the street by joining in on this year’s national August Night Out to promote safer neighborhoods.

The event focuses on crime prevention and is designed to heighten crime prevention awareness, increase neighborhood support in anti-crime efforts and to unite communities. There are several planned for the Ballard area and the community is welcome to join one or all.

East Ballard

This year the East Ballard Community Association is making it easier for any single block in East Ballard to join in on August Night Out.

Offering tools on their blog site, the group is directing neighbors to register their block with the Seattle Police Department to permit their street to be blocked off for the block party event.

“You can get the permit free online and you use the flyer to designate what street is doing the night out,” Shannon Dunn, East Ballard Community Association member said.

East Ballard provides the following ideas:

Tomorrow, Aug. 4, will be the first annual Community Resource Fair in conjunction with National Night Out to be held at High Point Commons Park.

This is an effort by High Point Community Center to provide information about community resources while bringing neighbors together in the High Point Neighborhood, according to organizers.

Food and activities will be provided. 

The details:

Tuesday, Aug. 4, from 6 to 8 p.m. Set-up begins at 5 p.m.

Space provided:   One six foot table and two chairs.

Where:   Outdoors at High Point Commons Park, Southwest Graham Street and 32nd Avenue Southwest. 


How to Register:

High Point Community Center, 6920 34th Ave. S.W., 98126

Contact:  Rebecca J. Hall, 206-684-4665 

Fee:  Free – Requested item for a raffle for attendees, i.e., (discount for a program, water bottle, 10 percent rate reduction, etc) or contribute towards the food and paper goods for the event. 

Email hallr@seattle.gov.

The Seattle Department of Transportation will close the northbound, left and center lanes on the Aurora Bridge today from 12:30 to 2 p.m.for temporary expansion joint repair.

The northbound, right-hand lane will remain open to traffic.

My heart goes out to those folks in business these days. It’s a big job. With so much emphasis on doing the right thing and “going green,” I imagine the pressure, from inside and out, must be pretty daunting.

That’s why it was so great to meet Adria Shimada, owner of recently-opened Parfait Organic Artisan Ice Cream.

“I create ice cream with the same integrity as you would a fine croissant”, explained Shimada, who actually fell in love with food while living in Paris for a year and knows what a fine croissant tastes like.

Shimada made the whole process of creating ice cream with organic and local sources sound easy, but I know it wasn’t. In a world where most all ice cream is created from a non-organic pre-made base, she makes everything from scratch.

As she lists her sources for organic milk (Fresh Breeze) and eggs (Steibrs), fresh blueberries and mint (Full Circle farms) and all of the other ingredients in her delicious treats, I realize that for her it’s not about “going green” or looking for niche market, it’s about sharing closely-held standards and doing what she loves.

Bianca is a six month old toy Maltese and she goes everywhere with her owner Jorge Barraca.

We encountered her on her way to Westcrest Off Leash Park that she visits as much "As two or three times a day." When she hears car keys she runs for the door because it is time to go somewhere.

Home Depot is one of her favorite places. Barraca gets a large flat cart and she jumps on for a ride. All of the shoppers and employees are kind to the cute pup and her other family members, two toy Chihuahuas.

Once when Barraca visited Home Depot he mentioned that his chihuahua was sick and a kind employee gave him some medicine.

Barraca said, "She is so silly, she sees herself in the mirror or the glass and she barks and barks."

When you call her she just lays down. Most dogs sleep on the bed, not Bianca. She likes to sleep under the bed on her back with her feet pushing up like she is 'Super Pup' holding up the bed.

How to nominate your pet for Pet of the Week:

Urban Market
6757 8th Ave. N.W.
206 420-8104
Daily 8 a.m. - 8 p.m.

What better time than these sizzling days to pick up dinner on your way home? The heat wave can suck the joy squarely out of cooking, with even we die hard grillers feeling uninspired about standing over 400 degree embers.

Luckily, Ballard's new Take 5 Urban Market wants to make dinner for us. In fact, not only do they want to, they already have, and all we have to do is go get it.

The focused menu offers an ample variety, without the menu overload that dilutes quality of small delis.

We always wonder how it is that small restaurants and delis, particularly when obviously not overloaded with customers, can offer 30 items and keep it all fresh. Try and ask about the availability of the weirdest item on the uber-menu of some places; if they have it, then you're in trouble. Do they freeze it? Is it five thousand years old?

On a festival-filled, gloriously sunny Saturday in July, I was inside the Greenwood Library learning how to earthquake retrofit a home. While others were strolling Art in the Garden or eating their way through the Bite of Seattle, 10 homeowners were studying the City of Seattle’s project impact home assessment checklist.

There were no food booths or ribbon-cuttings, no mayoral speeches or dancing, just two guys, lots of hand-outs and props that included plywood and power tools. They promised to end the class with “motivational slides,” clearly a euphemism for photographs of homes that weren’t retrofitted in time.

I lived in a wood-framed structure for 21 years in Ballard blissfully unaware of whether my pony wall was bolted to the foundation. Then my life changed. The day that I first allowed myself to look at the For Sale flyer of the 1920 home, one of its neighbors pulled up beside me, her son beside her. “My husband is the listing agent,” she said. “He’s home right now if you’d like to see it.”

I waved my blackberry-picking stained hands and told her we weren’t looking for at least a year, but the woman looked familiar.

Many have probably noticed the ubiquitous Animals First Foundation booth at the various street fairs in West Seattle and surrounding communities. Hanging by its table is a large black poster board of snapshots of dogs with names like “Cherry” and “Louie,” some looking content, others with those puppy-dog eyes that seem to say, “Please take me home.”

The West Seattle based 501 (c)(3) foundation’s Web site features black outlines of birds flying through an ominous sky like those in the opening shot of Citizen Kane’s idyllic Xanadu. And while Animals First is mostly about dogs, and to a small extent, cats, fostering, healing, and placing them, its Web site features vegan recipes, Canadian seal hunt opposition information, and stories including “The Dark Side of Turkey Farms,” and “CPR for Pets.”

“Our goal is more encompassing than finding homes for dogs and cats,” said Animals First Foundation president, Heather Enajibi, an Auburn resident who grew up in West Seattle and attended Highline High School. Carina Borja, a West Seattle resident, is the founder.

Go on, you probably have one by now.

It’s so hot; the farmers are feeding their chickens’ crushed ice so they won’t lay hardboiled eggs.

Man, was it hot.

I guess I’m a “heat wimp.” But if I’m going to tolerate that kind of heat, I want to be on vacation next to swim-able water. (Quite frankly, my only pet peeve with this area of the world – the water is too dang cold!)

It’s so hot, the trees were whistling for the dogs.

And I’ll never say I want to live in Arizona again. I’ll never curse those in between days again when it is cloudy and overcast. Remember when it wasn’t too hot, nor to cold? Do you remember those days?

It’s so hot; birds have to use potholders to pull the worms out of the ground.

This umbrella trick (shown above) worked out well for our recent heat wave here in Seattle. Our big, in-ground miniature garden can normally tolerate the full sun but, with the extreme heat this week, we knew our prized trees just weren't used to it.

Besides the risk of getting scorched by the sun, we were afraid the ground might dry out too often, and too fast, and put undue stress on the plants.

After more that 30 years of tending to people's hair as a barber in the Junction, Michael Hunter has retired to travel the country.

Hunter began working at the West Alaska Barber Shop, 4310 S.W. Alaska St., in 1978 after a stint as a server at the former Pioneer Banque restaurant. He bought the business a year and a half later. In 1989 he opened Hairways at 4430 California Ave. S. W.

“It was always an old-fashioned barber shop with a barber pole outside,” said Hunter, 58, who lived many years in Arbor Heights. "I had one bench and was a one-man band. It was a gathering place for guys to talk, to complain about taxes and politicians.”

Hunter attributes his retirement plans in part to meeting a lady and wanting to travel with her.

“I have taken just two vacations in the last 20 years, and haven’t seen a lot of the United States,” he said. “We will make a big circle, Yellowstone, the Badlands, New York City.”

He said over the years his customers were from “many walks of life.”