-First day of the new season of the West Seattle Farmers’ Market. I won’t make it there this week but if you see this before 2 pm, there’s still time for you to check it out!

-The Water Taxi hits the bay tomorrow. The official celebration’s not till next Sunday, but the WSB clan can’t wait to climb on board for the Maritime Festival next Saturday (which includes great freebie secrets that few people seem to catch on to, including free harbor cruises and free admission to the underattended Odyssey Maritime Museum).

-This one is West Seattle-related only because every Starbucks in the country, WS and elsewhere, has been promoting it: Akeelah and the Bee is actually a very good movie. Wonderful cast. No matter how cold-hearted and cynical you are, it will grab you. (Local aside, looks like our regional spelling bee was just a month ago. The champ came from the Eastside. I can’t find any evidence we’ve ever had one from our side of the pond.)

Some days back, WSB visitor Kathleen enlightened us as to the fate of the woman I remembered as “the bird lady of Beach Drive.” Now I’ve finally figured out what happened to a woman I could correspondingly call “the travel lady of California Avenue” — She runs a business called Cruises by Kay, which until a few years ago was housed in a house on the east side of Cali Ave, just south of the Morgan Junction biz district. Then she moved to a smaller house on the other side of Cali Ave; the previous house went down, condos went up. Now the house that used to bear her signs is also targeted for the wrecking ball (backhoe), and the building permit site says townhouses are going up. Rooting around a Web site for her agency, I found an address that suggests she moved to Bremerton. I hear that’s a hot neighborhood for real-estate gentrification too …

Looks like the folks behind Seattle Music Fest at Alki are going to try again this year. (If you’d forgotten, last year’s effort resulted in a last-minute cancellation.)

I’m not deeply into live music, so all I can say is, just don’t ever try mixing the music festival with the Fourth of July again … that happened at least once in the late ’90s, and I remember being at the beach and trying to reconcile the splendor of the fireworks with the grungy dirge of the 10 pm stage act … yii.

… so are the days of our West Seattle Lives?

Don’t know if “Days of Our Lives” is even around or, if it is, whether it still starts with something like that. Inspiration is this blog entry by somebody who seems to be mulling the creation of a soap set in West Seattle.

In my neighborhood, it wouldn’t be sex and other sassiness, it would be people slugging it out over hedge-trimming and obnoxious pets …

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 …

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.

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.”

OK, if you can get past NEXT weekend, looks like TWO big events are happening here on the West Side the last weekend of the month: one has earned the nickname “Geek Slumber Party“; the other, just sounds like a big fun excuse to wander around the Junction (maybe a couple of the new businesses will be open in time)!

I’m a big fan of the smoking ban but I have to agree with West Seattle Blogger Spouse, it just seems wrong somehow for smokers to even have to take it outside at divey little joints like Chuck ‘n’ Sally’s. Quite the little clot of puffers standing outside there a bit earlier tonight, perhaps getting ready to tank up for the Big Basketball Game …

I thought the Monorail Board wasn’t supposed to decide the fate of the tab tax till they opened the bids and told us all how much $ they would reap from the real-estate sendoff. Guess not.

Also … for those of us envious of waterfront-property owners … here’s something to dunk your envy in today.

It’s nice to have this tiny nook on the Web to ramble about memories as well as what’s happening now. That said — our jaunt to Alki yesterday reminded me that I still don’t know the fate of The Bird Lady of Beach Drive. She lived in a white bungalow across from the open waterfront at Emma Schmitz Viewpoint, an older lady with wild long salt-and-pepper hair and glasses. Many mornings, you’d see her out on the grassy streetside waterfront bank across from her house, throwing food at seagulls and ranting loudly at the world as her hair danced in the breeze like a kite. More than once, I saw her at West Seattle Thriftway, continuing her semi-high-volume muttering while shopping.

In the past few years, I hadn’t seen her, but her old mini-station-wagon-type car was still parked next to her house, so I suspected she was still in there somewhere.

Then some months back — the “FOR SALE” sign went up, and the station wagon was nowhere in sight. Yesterday, in fact, as we passed the cottage, an open house was under way, and that reminded me I still didn’t know the fate of The Bird Lady of Beach Drive — dead? living with a caretaker? institutionalized? Certainly a memorable WS character, and those are in shorter supply these days.

The March issue of the Alki News Beacon is out … and our dear pals are revealing rough times. Good gosh, in a world where we can spend billions on bombs, we should be able to scrape up a few bucks for a good grass-roots community group & its newsletter.

I was going to suggest — have you guys tried brainstorming with Megawatt? Then I went to the MW home page & got an idea … how about a big rummage sale to raise $ for your group? I don’t live on that side of town any more but I promise I’d donate!

Had no idea that Fire Station 37 on 35th SW is a historic landmark.

But it says so right here, on a page I looked up after receiving a flyer making its way around this side of WS. According to the flyer, the city is going to sell off Historic Station 37 and build a new one a couple blocks to the south, on land that’s currently home to a house and a substation (apparently NOT historic).

Found a bit more about Current Station 37’s allegedly historic nature here. So will West Seattle’s Log House Museum be joined by a Fire House Museum?

–Two more Signs of Spring over the weekend: The first wave of dandelion invasion, followed by the first door-hanger flyer from the Unmarked Truck Gardener Services. Yeah, I know, my yard will never make it into the pages of Pacific Northwest magazine. But at least it’s organic. (Death to dandelions — but never by chemicals — only mano-a-mano combat.)

–Still working on the Ben & Jerry’s “investigation.” Didn’t get back to the Junction to try to read the posted permit in daylight; did search the city permit database, nothing new there; maybe it’s a different type of permit.

–If you’re wondering why TV news crews are in the Admiral Junction tonight, here’s the story.

–Found out a bit more about the Ben & Jerry’s mystery in the (Alaska) Junction. Went to the Ballard B & J’s, whose owners also ran the WS B & J’s. We asked the guy behind the counter what’s up with the WS location; he told us “It’s been sold. Might stay a Ben & Jerry’s, might not, don’t know.” Then we stopped by the Junction to take a look for ourselves. You can see inside from the south side windows, which are only partly papered. Tearing it up like that wouldn’t make sense if it’s going to stay a B and J’s. There’s a permit posted by the front door but the light was too dim for us to read it (gotta go back in daylight tomorrow). Our money’s on another food franchise replacing it – Starbucks or Quizno’s.

A bit of a rant this morning:

One of our favorite takeout places has a wide selection of brochures and other marketing paraphenalia on its counter. Not sure why, but if they can spare the space, more power to ’em. One pile of brochures is from a nearby public school, intended to entice more families to enroll (not a bad strategy considering this school may face the ax otherwise). All I can say is that if I were looking for a place to teach some child of mine how to write with something resembling clarity, this wouldn’t be it. Half the brochure is taken up by mission-statement mumbo-jumbo such as “XX School is a child-centered learning center utilizing global strategies to encourage strategic child-centric learning amid a diverse community of centered learners.” Longer, actually; sorry I didn’t pick up the actual brochure and tote it home — I was a little woozy from both the convoluted language and hunger.

Discussing this with West Seattle Blogger Spouse brought memories from WSBS of a mission statement once proposed by a church that WSBS attends from time to time. As with many church mission statements these days, it included the phrase “faith-based community.” (Faith-“based”? Doesn’t “faith” just say it all? Or is it an open door toward branching into, perhaps, “faith and cuisine”? “Faith and gardening”? “Faith and bingo,” maybe.)
Please, world, I beg you, let’s just call a church a church and a school a school. Mission-statement-ese is rampant enough out in the business world; some spaces can be kept safe.

West Seattle’s most famous music man has a new album coming out — for the first time in a long time.

Check this city-drawn West Seattle neighborhood map I bumped into.

I don’t live where I thought I lived.

And where’s Delridge?