Labor Day weekend is often a real beaut here in the PNW, and for the last few years Gabe and Dave have taken full advantage by having their birthday celebrations that weekend in Woodland Park, a lovely bit of acreage adjacent to the always popular Green Lake in north Seattle. Woodland Park contains a number of covered picknicking facilities, and a couple of remnants from the civic and community minded past: a lawn bowling green and a huge lane of covered horseshoe pits. Th

Over the weekend I got to play music for a monthly square dance at a nearby cafe. It's a good example of a community social dance, which is a rare thing for most communities these days (we're lucky in the Seattle area to have lots of social dance opportunities). It's hard to recommend social dancing enough. It provides for lots of interaction with people in your community, lots of face time and safe social touching, and lots of movement to music, all of which are little s

On Tuesday nights in the North Seattle neighborhood of Wedgwood the backroom of the Wedgwood Alehouse is taken over by an Old Time jam. Instrument cases pile up under the pool tables, chairs and stools are brought into tight concentric rings, a melody will be offered up from a fiddle somewhere in the corner, and then the room is off and running. If you know the tune, you play it. If you don't, you learn it as you go. In between tunes, drinks are drunk, gab happens, and th