December 2018

By Peggy Sturdivant

I don’t usually venture out on the Friday after Thanksgiving. But this year I wanted to be out of the house. I wanted to walk with a friend. I wanted to be in downtown Ballard. I wanted to stop being sad.

We’d returned home late on Thanksgiving night from a meal with friends on Bainbridge. Once again I’d toted a cherry pie in a perfectly sized basket, along with the dough for yeast rolls rising in a bag outfitted with a heating pad. After plugging in the bag to a power outlet on the ferry from Edmonds there was only one crewmember truly alarmed; another knelt with me to sniff as I unzipped a corner. “If Thanksgiving could have a smell I would want it to be that one,” she said.

by Scott Anthony

It’s that time again where, amidst the scurry and hustle of holiday preparations and celebrations, people around the world begin to think about the coming new year and how they might do things a little differently. Those little efforts that signify a fresh start: slowing down the pace, quitting smoking or losing weight, showing compassion towards others. We feel fairly good about the concepts, swelling with the potential we hold for ourselves.

But of all these goals, objectives and small dreams that we post on the fridge or load into our PDAs, how many of them do we truly accomplish? How many of the wishes are hits and how many are misses?

By way of example, I made a list of wonderful things that I planned to do, including the results:

Lose Ten Pounds: I dropped the weight in the first 8 weeks, but I gained it back over the following months, so this was a miss.

By Jean Godden

The late architect Ibsen Nelsen once said that the Alaskan Way Viaduct was "the worst mistake Seattle ever made." Some would argue otherwise, but Nelsen likely was more right than he knew.

Seattle's "worst mistake," two miles of aging, double-decker cement roadway, will close down forever on Jan. 11, 2019. Soon after closure, crab-like claws will begin the work of tearing down the roadway, munching the old dingy concrete into reusable cement. Working long days, crews will obliterate the structure that, for the past 65 years has separated Seattle from its deep-water harbor.