September 2012

The Ballard community center may be seeing more hours as the Mayor announced that his proposed 2013-14 budget includes $276,000 to help keep seven community centers open later.

Other centers include Northgate, Delridge, Miller, South Park, Van Asselt and Yesler. Each center will be open ten additional hours after school and late at night in order to serve younger people. According tot he press release, the centers were selected as part of a data-driven analysis that included crime stats and existing partnerships with the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative.

The budget also includes $1.68 million for the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, which would increase youth enrollment from 1,050 to 1,500. The Initiative provides enrolled youth with activities, mentoring, case management, employment services, and other targeted support.

“Protecting public safety means giving young people a safe place to socialize and services to help them succeed,” said McGinn in the press release. “With this budget we can make some targeted investments to help build safer communities.”

The second annual "Girls Fight Night Out! ROUND TWO" fundraiser held Wednesday night at West Seattle's elegant Sanctuary venue was a multifaceted event.

Women were offered training by West Seattle's Lisa Skvarla, co-owner of Lee’s Martial Arts, 3270 California Ave. SW, and this year's organization chair of AWSDA (Association for Women's Self Defense Advancement) training symposium in Bellevue Oct. 5 through 7, open to the public. She and another West Seattle resident, Ann Doherty, put together Girls Fight Night Out.

Note: AWSDA now stands for "American Women's Self Defense Association".

Jack Cesareo is an artist and he's on a journey, his second across America and he's traveling with a cupcake. Not a real cupcake. Well, it's real enough alright, but there's no actual cup or cake or frosting involved.

Like the traveling Expedia Gnome and other funny efforts Cesareo has taken his roughly five foot cupcake (and associated cakes) to Mount Rushmore, Old Faithful, Devils Tower in Wyoming, or just the odd roadside attraction like a giant red wagon, or an enormous mouse with some cheese he encountered in Wisconsin.

Cesaro lives in New York where his day job with the American Museum of Natural History keeps him busy. But every year for a month he takes off for his cupcake tour.

The idea grew out of something he made for a friend's band. "They were doing a piece at The Cake Shop on the lower East Side and I made it big so I could get inside of it." At that event he got a very positive reaction when he slowly emerged from it and "I realized I had a great piece of work here."

Update for Sept. 20
With the weather as nice as it was, we all probably should have been playing tennis instead of standing outside the court talking about it.

Nonetheless, the polished new courts at Steve Cox Memorial Park in White Center deserved a proper dedication, and it was given on the afternoon of Sept. 20.

With the help of a Community Development Block Grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, the courts that were hardly playable with undulating surfaces punctuated by the cracks of weather and time were given “a complete overhaul” in the words of Doug Williams with the King County Dept. of Natural Resources and Parks. They are the only lighted public courts in the area.

Emerald Paving was hired to resurface and repaint the courts, which include light blue lines (closer to the net than the white regulation lines) specifically for younger children who want to try out the game.

On Sept. 20, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced his plan to fund 450 additional youth participants in the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative and additional after school and late night hours at seven community centers across the city, including the Delridge Community Center.

Here are the details from the Mayor’s Office:

Tent City 3, the homeless encampment of 100 adult men and women, plus a few cats and dogs, put down stakes last August at Riverton Park United Methodist Church, 3118 S 140th St., Tukwila, where it will remain until November 17, its official 3-month allotment. It will then relocate to a different church in the Seattle area.

Like Tent City 4, its Eastside cousin, Tent City 3 is sponsored by the 501(c)(3) organizations Seattle Housing and Resources Effort (SHARE) and Women's Housing Equality and Enhancement League (WHEEL).

According to Wikipedia, "The original Tent City and Tent City 2, both created in the late 1990s, were created illegally and opposed by the City of Seattle. After being tolerated for some time, they were eventually forced to shut down."

Joshua McNichols, author of "The Urban Farm Handbook"

You may have noticed them as you drive around your Seattle neighborhood. They look like garage sales. But on closer inspection, you see those boxes aren't full of old crappy McDonald's toys -- but heirloom tomatoes! That's because this is the season of the "bulk produce buy."

A bulk produce buy is a new way to get local produce at wholesale prices in bulk. It emerged from the strong relationships developing between urban foodies and rural farmers.

Here's how most bulk produce buys work:

Someone -- an unpaid organizer -- develops a relationship with a farmer. They learn what that farmer grows and when it ripens. Around peak season, they find out when the farmer's coming over the Cascades with a load. In the case of tomatoes, buys often pigggyback on a load brought over for Whole Foods. The organizer offers to find homes for up to 2,000 pounds more. The farmers are happy for the extra volume –- after all, the grocery store can't take a whole trailer-full of tomatoes.

The Ballard Carnegie Free Library made its first step Wednesday to becoming an official landmark.

Though opposed by owner Karoline Morrison, the building was unanimously nominated at the Landmarks Preservation Board meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 19, to be registered as a historic landmark.

This is actually the second time the library has been nominated. Architect Larry Johnson, who submitted the current application, had also gotten the building nominated back in 1977. He had no idea until he was looking through a list of landmarks in 2006 that it never made designation.

“I think everyone in Seattle thought it was a landmark, but it wasn’t, it never made designation,” Larry Johnson said. “It fell in between the cracks back then.”

He joked that now he could play the hero and help get it designated this time.

However, Wednesday’s nomination only applied to the exterior and not the interior of the building. Board members believed that the interior had been too dramatically changed.

UPDATE, SUNDAY, SEPT. 23

CLICK ON PHOTO FOR SLIDESHOW

The Seattle Museum of Flight in Tukwila welcomed an A-list of astronauts, mission controllers, cosmonauts, and other officials this weekend for their "Wings of Heroes" gala and talks. The Sunday event, held under an enormous tent behind the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, was attended by space enthusiasts of all ages, many to hear Buzz Aldrin speak on a panel.

"Before any of us, myself in particular, could be up there, we certainly had to be preceded by the actions of the Soviet Union, like Sputnik (...) to President Kennedy's pronouncement (to Congress) on May 25 and on Sept. 12, 1962 at the Rice Hotel in Houston," said Aldrin.

"Humanity is destined to explore, to expand, into the universe, but doing so urgently requires a rekindling of America's space program, a unified space vision," he said. "When I was a young person I wasn't the only one in the neighborhood who looked upward and thought of going to the moon and stepping on other planets. I was a reader of science fiction.

UPDATE: Sunday, SEPT. 23:

CLICK ON PHOTO FOR SLIDESHOW

The Seattle Museum of Flight in Tukwila welcomed an A-list of astronauts, mission controllers, cosmonauts, and other officials this weekend for their "Wings of Heroes" gala and talks. The Sunday event, held under an enormous tent behind the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, was attended by space enthusiasts of all ages, many to hear Buzz Aldrin speak on a panel.

"Before any of us, myself in particular, could be up there, we certainly had to be preceded by the actions of the Soviet Union, like Sputnik (...) to President Kennedy's pronouncement (to Congress) on May 25 and on Sept. 12, 1962 at the Rice Hotel in Houston," said Aldrin.

"Humanity is destined to explore, to expand, into the universe, but doing so urgently requires a rekindling of America's space program, a unified space vision," he said. "When I was a young person I wasn't the only one in the neighborhood who looked upward and thought of going to the moon and stepping on other planets. I was a reader of science fiction.