A song in the air
The trilling of birds outside my window reminds me that one of the joys of spring/summer is upon us … watching and hearing a variety of little beauties as they emerge from winter hibernation and/or return from migration. I am no expert but I know the names of the main players — especially the gorgeous Steller’s jays that love to hop around our tiny yardspaces, the great blue herons that turn up along the Beach Drive shores during low tides, and the flickers (woodpeckers) with their splashes of red. And of course, we have eagles. My great fear is that these birds’ visibility and viability will dwindle as has been the case with sea life; when we moved to WS more than a decade ago, it wasn’t hard to spot sea lions on almost any given day, including their fin-waving “rafting” group behavior on occasion, but now it’s a rarity.
Anyway, enjoy the birds. Looks like the real “pros” have identified this as prime time too.
Taxi!!!!
The Elliott Bay Water Taxi home page now links to the full array of info for this year’s sailing season, which starts a week from Monday. Can’t wait. But we notice at least one change … note the line “The Water Taxi does not issue [Metro] transfers.” In previous years, a crew member has gone around during the trip and offered transfers, which sometimes meant a cheaper ride back, if you were only going downtown for an hour or so — maybe that was the problem.
Yet more Junction change
While checking out the Cupcake Royale/Talarico’s Pizza progress in the Junction the other night, we noticed some remod is going on in the former Urban Fitness space. Just looked up construction permits for that address — and one permit is for Super Supplements! Checked out their site, and sure enough, the vitamin megastore is coming soon to that spot.
Brushes with fame
Continuing my blogroll theme … here’s an amusing post relating to West Seattle’s most famous rock star (be sure to scroll past the photo), whose palatial spread happens to be on “our side” of WS …
Fun tonight!
Checking the latest edition of the Alki News Beacon, I see there’s a big event tonight at the Alki Community Center. Even a casual drive-by reveals that a lot has changed at the city’s busiest beach since the last “warm season” — so it could be worth your while.
In search of direction
As much as we love Alki’s own Statuette of Liberty, spending time debating which way it faces seems just a bit out o’whack.
However, if you’re wondering about our viewpoint, we vote for east. The Mayans built their temples so shrines would face that way, since that’s where the sun rises. So what the heck. Let’s build the statue a pyramid pedestal too. Then someday tourists will marvel over the mystical ruins of Alki, and … OK, sorry, got carried away there.
Open-shut case
Tomorrow night (Thursday), Madison Middle School here in West Seattle is the site of the first hearing on the latest Seattle Public Schools closure plan-in-the-works. From the sound of articles like this, more SPS parents are resigned to the idea of closures. Why aren’t we putting pressure on higher-up leaders for more school $ instead? Why are our city and state leaders running around wasting even one iota of breath on a whiny sports team that wants hundreds of millions of dollars, when schools are so deeply in need? Reminds me of the poignant old bumper sticker that said something like, “It’ll be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the military has to have a bake sale to build a bomb.” Let’s make a new version: “It’ll be a great day when schools have all the $ they need and sports teams have to have bake sales to get new stadiums.”
Construction zones
Stroll through the Junction and you can get a good closeup look at what’s going on inside the ex-Ben-&-Jerry’s-turning-cupcake-joint and the ex-New-Luck-Toy-turning-pizzeria. The former isn’t really much more than a ripped-out shell, though a flyer on the window promises a “mid-May” opening; the latter has made much more progress, and the past two nights, windows fronting on Cali Ave have been so wide open, you could literally stick your head in and watch crews working into the night. Looks like it’s going to be gorgeous in there, BTW. Which reminds me, the very last paragraph of this Seattle Weekly article has a report about who’s behind the pizzeria, in case you missed it.
I think they’re missing the point
Oh goody, a new transportation tax idea.
The reason many of us don’t take buses to work is NOT the fact they don’t run every 10 minutes. My challenges alone include safety, odd scheduling, and route quirks (unless you work downtown, you have to deal with some kind of transfer). And then, as the afore-linked article mentions, there’s the little problem of, where will the buses go once the Viaduct goes …
I just know this will all eventually turn into a water-taxi ride followed by a very long walk. Which STILL will likely get me to work before a Byzantine series of bus-route transfers, twists and turns.
Sad sight
We didn’t realize till tonight that the Lincoln Park pipeline project has torn up Cove Park just north of the Fauntleroy ferry dock. The little park has been a favorite stop of ours during spring and summer walks — a nice place to sit on one of the driftwood logs for ferry-watching and Olympics-admiring. Tonight, once the weather cleared, we went down to Cove Park for the first time in months — and were absolutely shocked — the driveway down to the park from Fauntleroy is stripped of its artsy inlaid glass border; the driftwood logs are mostly gone; the beach is a staging area for the pipe work, complete with humongous backhoe; and a joint on the above-ground temporary pipe is venting sewer gas right at the entrance to the beach (no wonder the first house north of the parklet is vacant and posted “for rent”). We understand this project was necessary but that doesn’t make the loss of the little park any less heartbreaking. With that and the loss of the southernmost Lincoln Park parking lot (also a staging area for equipment, gravel, etc.), we don’t think we’re going to be spending much time on this end of the WS waterfront until the work is done in a few months. We find it hard to believe this won’t affect Colman Pool access, at least for the first few weeks, but the city brochure doesn’t reflect any impacts …
But what about the flag?
Managed to miss this while I was on blogging semi-hiatus the past two weeks. Funny, I was just telling a visitor the story behind the building’s massive flag. So will that stay or will that go? I always wondered what kept that guy in WS this long anyway, considering the oxymoronic nature of the term “West Seattle Republican.”
Pop …
… went the Bubble Lounge Cafe, on California a bit north of Morgan Junction. Just noticed it’s gone out of business. Stopped there a time or two, and never saw much of a crowd. A bit of an odd location, too, and being closed on Sundays couldn’t have helped (we would have patronized them a few more times if not for that scheduling quirk). However, hats off to them for trying; entrepreneurialism is never easy.
EBB expansion
Seems Elliott Bay Brewing Co. is expanding to a second (albeit secret) location (Puget Sound Biz Journal report via MSNBC). I think I mentioned here a while back that we re-tried them a while back and their burgers definitely passed muster, and then some.
Strange sign
We’ve gone past the Cat’s Eye Cafe’ a few times recently to see if it showed any signs of reopening, three months after the crash that closed it. No signs of anything … till we went by last night; the cafe’s marquee along Fauntleroy Way has a hand-lettered sign stuck on its south side, NATIVE PLANT SALE. Hard to tell in the dark but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s associated with the cafe — the patch of ground between its parking lot and the sidewalk used to bloom profusely in spring and summer with wonderful plants including lupines. Is this “everything must go,” or just a desperate attempt to raise a few more $? We’ll keep an eye out …
Also a note, our updates here for the next few weeks won’t be quite as frequent as they’ve been. Big project at work is about to eat every waking hour and restrict personal Web access. But it’s got a definite end date, so we’ll ramp back up afterward.
Your 4 favorite WS restaurants
If you were to pick ’em, would they be the same 4 as in this Times roundup (scroll down)?
I think West 5 belongs in that list, at the very least. But maybe that’s only because I’ve never been to Ovio. Peered at the menu a few times — will have to try it sometime — but it sounds a little too fused for me to bring West Seattle Blogger Spouse, who is a meat-n-potatoes type of person (and no, the meat can’t be “adolescent hamster raised on pinenut feed” nor can the potatoes be “spring purple fingerling speckled sardine-infused russets”).
Did she/he or didn’t she/he?
Banner season continue to pick up on the pedestrian overpass that graces the first leg of the Fauntleroy bridge approach. One banner that’s been up for days now reads “MORGAN, WILL YOU GO OUT WITH ME?” One problem, it’s almost impossible to read unless you squint hard when you’re practically directly under the bridgelet. So I wonder if Morgan has gotten the message yet, and if so, what her/his reply was … Advice: HUGE BLACK LETTERING. Like that “22’s About to B. Wilde” one I still haven’t figured out.
West Seattle’s most spectacular spring flowers
They’re just about to bloom at the Fauntleroy Creek overlook (across the street and up the staircase from the ferry dock).
They’re not big splashy flowers like tulips or daffodils. They’re small and relatively rare. They’re on a spiny plant called Darwin’s barberry, and they are the color of a tequila sunrise. No photos do them justice but here’s one anyway. They usually bloom at the start of April — that’s when we saw them for the first time, on a bush at Shore Acres State Park in Oregon, more than 15 years ago — and discovering them on a hedge at the salmon overlook here was more joy than we could stand. Just wondrous.
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