There’s a tiny white building on 15th Avenue NW in Ballard where every weekend you’ll see a line of people, all smiles, pushing their way inside the vintage lunchbox- and kitsch-swathed tiny dining room of Lunchbox Laboratory, home to some of the best burgers in Seattle. They’re truly gourmet. Restaurant-owner Scott Simpson ditched his gourmet digs to use his culinary training and homestyle inclinations to create high-end comfort food that spares no expense.
It’s right across the street from the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. Inside and out it’s a café that finds a perfect balance of sleepy and hip, busy and leisurely, with its baby blue interior fit with finished plywood cabinetry and rail station-style benches lining the back wall, complete with power strips every ten feet. Show posters cover the wall by the front door.
The mood at Neptune Coffee is pleasant and very workable: as I write this an enormous Mastiff named Oscar who came in with a young woman is making friends with a couple who are scratching his head asking, “Will you come home with us?” This is my kind of place.
Driving by Seattle’s Town Hall a few minutes before the start of the debates between King County Executive candidates, I saw all the dramatics of a Seattle green event. There was the plastic bag guy and others in costume with flyers and imperatives to share. Men and women wearing posterboard with hastily-scrawled eco-messages front and back. Green issues today are reaching an interesting point–they are slipping from the fringes and coming to rest comfortably in the mainstream. Twenty years ago Earth Day was about all you could get for a mainstream environmental consciousness. Today politicians are finding it’s an easy and almost somewhat non-partisan way to earn votes from either side.
About a third of the waste that goes into the local landfill is made up of paper or plastic. Every year people moving or cleaning out the garage discard used books, CDs and DVDs that eventually find their way into the trash. I’ve recently started as a Public Relations volunteer with Eco Encore, a Seattle-based non-profit that since 2002 has sold unwanted media online, keeping more paper and plastic out of landfills, and donated the proceeds to local environmental non-profits like Futurewise and the Washington Trails Association.
It’s a small non-profit, and its only paid staff in their SODO offices are the operations manager and assistant, both of which are on part-time. The organization thrives on its board and its volunteers, which means more money goes to the Eco Encore recipients rather than a receptionist and mail clerk and slick, high-powered PR guy.
For the past couple weeks I’ve taken to the streets with my new digital SLR, trying to figure out a good way to do street photography. I’ve always been interested in photography, and I’ve always documented in words the people and world around me. Street photography seems like a perfect fit. But, of course there is some awkwardness to get over.
I found a video of Garry Winogrand and realize that the awkwardness never goes away when people see the camera and what matters is how you deal with it. Take a look at what he does:
One weekend last fall I had planned to shop at the downtown REI for some hiking boots, eager to catch the tail end of weather good enough to put the mountains on the other side of I-90 to good use. Espresso Vivace was right across the street and I needed a fix. I got my latte—they don’t do drip—walked outside and took a sip and stopped right outside the door. I looked at the cup. I was already in Seattle three years by then and this was the best latte I’d ever had in my life.
I used to smirk at the barista championships I’d see reported on television. They all used espresso and milk to make the same lattes and cappuccinos. I could not imagine any of them, simply by virtue of some magic-imbued twenty-something espresso guru, could be wildly different from the cups I picked up at Starbucks on my way to work every morning. Turns out it can, and the difference is immediate.
It’s when the cherryblossoms bloom all over town. Through Ballard you can walk block after block and find tulips of all colors and shapes, daffodils in every shade of yellow and white. My potted jasmine has new shoots and leaves, tiny flower buds filling themselves in day by day. The stems from my poppy seedlings are spreading, and collect dew at their tips before dawn. The maples in the yard are sprouting buds for a new season of leaves. And just today the swifts have returned, streaking across the blue sky for their tiny prey.
Spring in Seattle is a thawing for all of us—this winter was especially cold in many ways. Today the sky is cloudless, the sun is shining, and the entire city is alive.
In its 2007 opening weekend, Seattle’s waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park was packed. Crowds of families and couples and singles, young and old in-between, came from all over Washington and beyond to see the unveiling of the city’s newest exhibition of public art. I’d intermittently watched the place get built as I drove past, was intrigued immediately by the sculpture “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” (on loan from Paul Allen, it turns out). I watched crews pour concrete, plant landscaping, and thought about what an undertaking it was to simply build the place, and it wasn’t going to be cheap even without the sculptures themselves.
All told, the park cost $85 million, and today anybody can walk through from sunrise to sunset for free. The only real costs are coffee and pastries at the coffee bar inside PACCAR Pavilion, and the optional donations at the corner for gifts and literature. While researching for a series of stories around Seattle outdoor arts, I started to wonder about the Sculpture Park, about this enormous undertaking of outdoor art installation, and specifically how could a regular guy like me—a guy who walks through the park as often as he can and really appreciates it—could thank those responsible personally, how I could shake a hand or two and share genuine words of appreciation.
Every day I’m up by seven. I start my day at home and leave the house as soon as I’m ready, head straight to my café.
I don’t own it, but it’s mine. It’s ours, really, belonging to me and others who end up here like I do. I could stay at home. We all, I’m sure, could stay at home. We could go to the library, to the park. We could go to the Laundromat, to the airport, anywhere, really. But why here?
There’s a tiny white building on 15th Avenue NW in Ballard where every weekend you’ll see a line of people, all smiles, pushing their way inside the vintage lunchbox- and kitsch-swathed tiny dining room of Lunchbox Laboratory, home to some of the best burgers in Seattle. They’re truly gourmet. Restaurant-owner Scott Simpson ditched his gourmet digs to use his culinary training and homestyle inclinations to create high-end comfort food that spares no expense.
It’s right across the street from the 
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Every day I’m up by seven. I start my day at home and leave the house as soon as I’m ready, head straight to