For simple fun there's nothing quite like digging a hole. Said no one ever. Digging for clams, however -- now there's a ticket to the fun parade! And for clam digging, nothing quite beats razor clams out on the Pacific coastline. Razor clams enjoy sandy beaches and inhabit tidal zones only revealed by the lowest tides, so razor clam digs are scheduled around the tide table. Last weekend had a trio of low tides out on the Washington coast, corresponding with an open seaso

The block comes together again, this time around a crushed car. Ours. Late in August an unusually strong storm blew through the Northwest -- the strongest in our recorded weather history, in fact. My son and I were in downtown Seattle, at the Penny Arcade Expo, when I got a call from a friend who had just stopped by our place. "Your upstairs windows are flapping around like crazy," he said. We have casement windows that swing open easily, and I could imagine them banging v

Every season or so a group of like-minded friends gathers together for a unique shared meal. We call ourselves the Foragers Dinner Club, and the meals feature ingredients foraged, grown, caught, or killed. We also like bartered, traded, or gifted foodstuffs, as these usually come with a great story attached. Every one of these meals has been unique and entirely pleasing, and this season's evening was no exception. Not only are these meals a treat to attend and consume, b

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

It wasn't hard to identify the house being warmed as I drove through the dark streets of a central Seattle neighborhood. It was a small house on the corner, illuminated brightly from within, with the whirling figures of dancers filling every window. I gingerly pressed open the front door until it encountered resistance in the form of a body inside, and slipped through the narrow opening. Inside the house was devoid of all furnishings. A group of musicians was standing pi