The Northwest Clarinet Choir presents a FREE concert on Saturday May 2nd at 7:30 PM at Woodland Park Methodist Church, 78th & Greenwood, Seattle. They're a 12 piece orchestra consisting solely of clarinets (ranging from the tiny to the huge): their sounds blend wonderfully together and are often likened to a multi-person organ!

From their website (where you can hear samples of their music):

currently rehearses and performs at the Woodland Park United Methodist Church.  Four of the founding members still play with the group, which has grown to twelve musicians.

The NWCC is one of only a few community-based clarinet choirs in the United States.  Members pay dues to defray the expenses of rehearsal and performance venues, music purchases, etc., and to make our concerts free to all.

NWCC has players of all ages and backgrounds, students, doctors, teachers, retirees, etc., so if you think you’d like to join us, please go to the Contact Us page and follow the directions.

Most of our concerts are...

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The Seattle school board, faced with explosive enrollment growth in the North and Northeast clusters and a brutal season of austerity, decided to pull the plug on AS#1 in order to free its building (Decatur) up to house a new K-5. Under the plan, AS#1 students would join Thornton Creek (the school formerly known as AEII) in creating a new K-8 at the Jane Addams site that currently houses Summit K-12, which is getting shipped to the other end of the city -- Rainier Beach.

Got all that?

This appears to be the end of "alternative schooling" in the North End, depending on the final complexion of the Thornton Creek/AS#1 merger. Interestingly, the Thornton Creek students will have much further to go than the AS#1 students with the move, making you wonder if the AS#1 parents will ultimately win control over how the new Jane Addams school functions.

The North and Northwest clusters will have no changes, it appears. Some space will open up at Northgate and Olympic Hills, which are majority underrepresented population schools...

I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago informing me that Amazon Fresh was finally expanding into 98103. This now means that you can get Amazon to deliver your groceries to you if you're in North College Park (aka Licton Springs) and Greenwood.

So far, I've been happy with the service. Prices are close to QFC prices, though selection can be a little limited. The produce quality is very good. Ordering meat takes some getting used to, though -- I got 24oz of chicken breasts without any indication of how many breasts that would be. (For the record, two.) You can have them drop your groceries on your doorstep before 6am, which is nice. And they do a very good job of keeping cool things cool and cold things cold, with ice packs and dry ice in the cold bins.

The biggest drawback right now is that you must be an Amazon Prime member to get Amazon Fresh, which means you're spending $79/year on that service. We spend a lot at Amazon already, so we probably should have joined sooner, but it's clear they want frequent spenders...

It's getting increasingly certain that Seattle Schools, confronted with a large shortfall and a rapidly souring economy, is facing with another round of school closures.

The latest discussion seems to be focused on either closing or merging Summit K-12 and AS #1 in order to clear space for more students in the Northeast cluster. There's active resistance to closing Summit K-12 (as you'd expect from a school with a supercharged PTA), and one could probably expect the same resistance from AS #1 parents.

Meanwhile, the overcrowding problems continue. Rumor has it when Seattle Schools closed a number of north end schools in 2006 their demographic projections didn't factor in a baby boomlet that happened around the same time, resulting in the overcrowding we're seeing in the north Seattle school clusters.

The city, in its quest to make Seattle a little more bike friendly, restriped North College Way (the road in front of NSCC) and Meridian (what it's called north of 100th) this month.

Southbound they've eliminated one travel lane and replaced it with a bike lane and a dedicated bike lane.

Northbound they've also eliminated a travel lane but only replaced it with a bike lane south of 103rd, though parallel parking remains from 103rd to Northgate.

It's a nice start, but the lack of bike lanes on 92nd or any further north on Meridian suggests this is just low-hanging fruit for the city. It'd be nice to extend the bike lanes west on 92nd to Wallingford and down Wallingford to Green Lake -- and then further up Meridian into Haller Lake.

As someone who grew up in Oklahoma, I do loves me some chicken fried steak. Problem is, of course, that chicken fried steak isn't something that comes natively around Seattle. Not a whole lot of Texans migrate up this way, much less attempt to cook chicken fried steak.

Last night, for instance, I tried making CFS at home, but I quickly discovered a big problem with the cube steak I bought at the Holman Road QFC: They cubed good cuts of meat. And the problem with good cuts of meat is they don't have connective tissue, and it's that connective tissue that keeps the steak from disintegrating when you pick it up with a fork. Like what happened to me last night. Awesome job, QFC.

So I've been on a quest to find a decent chicken fried steak in this town. Earlier this year, on another blog, the great music writer with awesome sauce Hannah Levin told me her pick for best CFS in town -- Patty's Eggnest, which is ironically located in the same shopping center as the above mentioned QFC. (For you old timers, it's where the...

When Europeans first started to cobble together maps of the world at they understood it, there were a lot of places they didn't understand, gaps in their cartological knowledge.

Their solution to these gaps was to just draw a sea serpent in that spot and add the words HIC SUNT DRAGONES -- here be dragons.

When Seattle made its final push to cobble itself together as a city after WWII, they annexed a wide swath of land north of the city limits at the time -- 85th Street. But while places like Lake City, Haller Lake, Maple Leaf, Northgate, and Broadview were folded in Seattle, they never entered the lexicon the way places like Ballard, Georgetown, Madison Park, or Columbia City did.

Seattle has treated the north as something akin to its own tract house suburb, even though you'd be hard pressed to find suburban life up north. In a sense, it has been as if this end of the city map has been marked "Here Be Dragons."

When Seattle's blogging community grew and spread out to start what we now call the neighborhood blogging...