Under Construction, part VII: Woodland Park Before, During and After

Dear Diary,

As the title of this part implies, Woodland Park, a gigantic park in southern mid-North Seattle, has three projects listed at the two websites on which this page is based:  One done in 2025; one visibly still going; and one not yet started.

Citywide Athletics Building Restoration

You may remember, dear Diary, that thanks to a fire, the restrooms in the park's southeast corner closed.

Well, in 2025, the building got fixed.  I couldn't find any sign in the Internet Archive that the project was ever listed as upcoming - if I'd been paying attention in 2025, I'd have called this a "cowboy" project.  But on the chance that it's reasonable to think of the building as new, I took a postcard shot:

Replacing the turf on Field 1

Synthetic turf wears out, so it needs replacement every so often, as I remarked in part II of this page.

Now, Woodland Park, being so big, has basically five parts.  1) It has the city's main zoo, which dominates the park's western half, and which charges admission, one reason I've never visited.  2) South of the zoo is a big rose garden, and although roses don't excite me all that much, this garden is actually a pretty neat place, and does not charge admission.  3) In the park's northwestern corner, Woodland Park poses as an ordinary neighbourhood park, with one water fountain which I haven't visited yet this year.

The larger eastern half of the park is divided by use and by a strong gradient into the lower, eastern half, and the upper, western half.  The name "Lower Woodland Park" applies to both of these halves, because the zoo is even higher up.

4) The west has several picnic shelters, and my description of how homeless campers used these shelters in the height of the pandemic has, strangely, become one of your most popular pages, dear Diary.  This 4th part of Woodland Park also has reasonable woods to get lost in.

But all three of these projects are in Woodland Park's third claim to fame, besides the zoo and rose garden, which is 5) its unusual aggregation of athletic playfields in its lowest, easternmost, part.  Each of these fields is numbered, and the southernmost, Field 1, has been specifically blest by the Seattle Mariners, and so Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation keeps Field 1 locked up, the way a housekeeper might lock up the best china after a U.S. president had eaten from it.  Which makes it really hard for a visitor, usually arriving late in the day, and ignorant about synthetic turf, to tell when a project is going on.  I mean, Field 1 is always fenced off anyway.

But I finally decided that this photo demonstrates that the work isn't done, so this is a "during" account:

Installing turf in the infield of Field 4

Because Field 1 is so special, Woodland Park has to have a different, regular baseball diamond, for everyday use.  And because it's hypertrophic Woodland Park, it actually has four of these, Fields 3 through 6, in an arrangement formally named "Cloverleaf".  Now, I haven't investigated the other three - bad journalist, no cookie - but Field 4's infield is sand, for which the baseball technical term appears to be "grass".  So they're replacing that infield with turf, replacing "grass" without actually tearing up any plant life, so that players can use it during the many months of rain Seattle gets.

Well, two days ago I was there, and it's still all sand.  Just as I showed you, dear Diary, in part II of this page.

Neither of my photos of the construction signs shows a contractor's name.  Perhaps it's the same contractor for both jobs, and Field 4 will start when Field 1 is done.  Or maybe it seemed more reasonable to close Field 1 for a summer when it gets less use anyway, but Field 4, well, I haven't yet found it empty.  The project page hasn't been updated since March.  We'll see, I guess, dear Diary.

It's going to take me one more day to plan the baseline hikes, so there probably won't be any new parts to this page for a few days.  But tomorrow I hope to tell you, dear Diary, about a book about hiking I recently read, and about who owns the streets of Seattle.  Until then, stay happy, dear Diary. 

Under Construction, part VI: Meridian Playground Before

Dear Diary,

I've visited Meridian Playground a bunch of times, recently, waiting for the fences to go up.  I know, now, why they haven't.  But first some context.

Meridian Playground is a fairly big park between N 47th St, Meridian Ave N, the Good Shepherd Center, and N 50th St.  Unlike the past several projects I've written about, I have no real complaints with regard to this one, although this is the main project that led me to say Access is a magic word to park project managers.

"This project aims to make site improvements to the play area ...  The project also improves accessibility to the play area and restrooms.

"Most components of the play area were constructed in the early 1980s, and revised in 2002, and some equipment was replaced ... in 2011."

In other words, this is some seriously tired playground equipment, older than most of the kids' parents, and on my first visit July 23rd, it looked tired, too.

It was easy to tell which was the equipment new in 2011, too:

What I couldn't figure out, though, was how the project was going to make the playground more accessible.  See all those curbs in the foreground of this photo?  There are curbs aplenty in this place, and walls, and even stairs:

The thing that was going to serve Access was a new path between the Good Shepherd Center parking lots and the area where the playground and restrooms are.  So on July 30th, I went planning to blaze a trail through the woods, and was completely gobsmacked to discover that this path already exists.  Not least because that meant I need never have damaged my carts on the crude pavement of the N Bagley St entrance.

But here's the thing:  Most Access projects described at the parks website emphasise that standards change, and what was good enough in the 1990s isn't good enough today.  Well, but actually, I'm pretty sure that path wasn't wide enough for the 1990s either.  If you go from the park side, it's plenty wide, right up until about where the park/center boundary must be, and then it narrows drastically.  Sure, my cart would fit, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a wheelchair that would.

So even if, as it sounds like at the project page and in its linked documents (4 page PDF), they leave all those walls, curbs and stairs where they are, there's still a solid win for real access in making the restrooms wheelchair accessible.  And they're also planning to remodel the restrooms to make them work better for people with that kind of disability too.

Still ...  The Good Shepherd Center has north and south parking lots.  There are, of course, no stairs at their entrances.  But the Center warns pedestrians not to use those entrances - and of course, there are stairs at the middle path.  Three shallow steps, as if to say "No" just to be difficult.

So yes, I still think Access is a magic word for Parks project managers.

Anyway, none of that is why the project is behind schedule.  It's behind schedule because of a stupendously successful marketing campaign.

"Picnic in the Park".  Who knew?

It turns out that the Wallingford Farmers Market, held in Meridian Playground, is the closest to my house, somewhat nearer than the U-District one.  The fact that I hadn't known this, dear Diary, tells you all you need to know about how much attention I pay to farmers markets, which I could never afford in my first years in Seattle.

So there I was, on August 19th, and so were hundreds of other people, including a purely amazing number of children.  I think the average age in that park was probably not much over 20.  And that tired old playground equipment was in glory.

So I predicted then, and the project page already said before July ended, a start date of November for this project, after the market shuts down for the winter.  I don't envy the construction workers.

Well, dear Diary, I'd hoped to tell you the much more boring story of construction in Woodland Park tonight as well, but I'd better go back to real property reports instead.  Until tomorrow, then, dear Diary. 

 

 

A Foolish Mortal on Real Property Reports

Dear Diary,

I've been plugging away at my sources, compiling lists to turn into maps for my baseline hikes.  So I've been getting increasingly frustrated about the parks omitted from recent real property reports.

So frustrated that, to my considerable regret, I actually wrote an e-mail to the Real Estate Services people who compile those reports.  As an object lesson in advanced foot-in-mouth techniques, the e-mail follows, adding in [brackets] park names, plus footnotes identifying my errors.

Hello

I'm the writer of "My Seattle Parks Diary".  For information about Seattle's parks, the real property reports your office produces are a major source.  I'm extremely grateful for them.  Thank you!

However, I've long been troubled by the slimming of the report in 2021, which as far as I can now tell has not been reversed, by omitting whole categories of city real estate that weren't and apparently aren't owned, or that were collapsed into other city property.

In a post on May 3, 2021, I listed PMAs omitted:

4156 [Ingraham High School Playfield], 4167 [Cedar Park], 4442 [Laurelhurst Recreation Center] - agreements with schools

4477 [Waldo Woods] - other agreement with outsiders (and I have no idea why 4615 [Maple Springs Natural Area], also made out of easements, is still listed [A])

4450 [Bitter Lake Reservoir Open Space Park] - agreement with another city agency

3903 [Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp], 3975 [NE 60th St Park], 4010 [14th Ave NW Boat Ramp], 4011 [Fremont Canal Park], 4083 [Waterway 19], 4161 [NW 60th St Viewpoint], 4452 [Northlake Park], 4464 [Haller Lake Community Street End], 4598 [Wallingford Steps], [4599 Troll's Knoll Park ,] [B] 4619 [Gemenskap Park] - rolled into the great asset never reported, the streets [C].  In the case of 4083 this is almost certainly incorrect; the waterways are normally state property, and Waterway 19 is at the end of no street.

I understand that none of these was or is necessarily a lease (though I'd bet 4083 actually is), but leases are the easiest category to address.  Surely your office must keep track of them, and could produce a leased property report, say.  I'm currently reviving my blog after several years as a full-time student, and not knowing beans about the city's leases, after all this time, adds to my work.

Was there a good, specific reason for excluding leased property [D]?   Were the city's landlords getting harassed, say?  Or was it out of some sense that the real property report was too broad, and somehow ought to report only what the city owns, and (despite the omission of the streets [C again, dug a little deeper]) add up to a reliable total?

Thank you for your attention.

Whoosh.

A - They replied the next day, and that night, I found actual city property in Maple Springs Natural Area, in the King County Parcel Viewer, just as the real property reports say.  Oops.

B - Yes, I left one out of the e-mail.

C - I'd always assumed the city owned the streets.  Turns out this is not normally true, and I'll have more to say about this soon.  The only thing I got right about this was calling the streets a city asset.  They're easements, and so they are in fact assets, but that doesn't mean Seattle owns them.

D - The reply was kind of a work of art.  In the guise of dunderheaded obstinacy, refusing to understand my question, it casually mentioned the one clue I actually needed to see much, much more clearly.

Seattle City Council Resolution 31837 of 2018 is the fourth in a chain of resolutions concerning procedures for the disposition of city real estate, following 29799 in 1998, 30862 in 2006, and 31770 in 2017.  Unlike any of those, 31837 goes into detail about an annual report listing property owned in "fee simple", to be compiled by Real Estate Services.

The 2013 real property report, the oldest I've found, cites 29799 and 30862.  And it says "While the bulk of City property is owned in fee simple, the City also leases or obtains easement interests when appropriate.  Agreements with other public agencies provide another type of property right, e.g., the Seattle School District and Department of Parks and Recreation have agreements which provide for mutual use of certain parks and playgrounds."

What 31837 did was mandate that this report list only fee simple ownership.  Because, you see, dear Diary, the only purpose listing city real estate could possibly have is using surplus real estate for affordable housing, and leases, easements (including the streets) and agreements - none of those help with that.

Gotta love virtue signalling.

But anyway, what I'm left with is that for two years after Real Estate Services got its marching orders, it ignored them.  And if it hadn't done so, my hikes and your pages would've been much more boring.  So I'm immensely grateful to whichever bureaucratic maverick enabled me to start writing you with full information, before the burden of virtue signalling started preventing that. 

And does anyone else want Seattle to release information about its leases?

Under Construction, part V: Northgate Park before

Dear Diary,

The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation has twenty-six community centers, ten of which are in North Seattle.  Most of those are in parks with the same name:  Ballard Community Center in Ballard Playground, Laurelhurst CC in Laurelhurst Playfield, Loyal Heights CC in Loyal Heights Playfield, and Ravenna-Eckstein CC in Ravenna-Eckstein Park.  Some are drowned in much bigger parks, such as Green Lake or Magnuson.

This can create problems of attribution.  My solution is pretty simple.  All  community centers known to me are single buildings.  So parts of those buildings belong to the community centers; things that aren't parts of those buildings don't.  At Loyal Heights, for example, the restrooms are in the community center building, but with doors that open outside; one of the water fountains is attached to the building, so it's the community center's; the others, free-standing, are the playfield's.

Most of the time, Parks doesn't complain about this system.  But someone is trying to erase Northgate Park in favour of Northgate Community Center, and they're choosing weird ways to do it.  The list of water fountains I downloaded doesn't attribute the attached water fountain to Loyal Heights CC, or any other fountains to any CCs - except that it calls Northgate Park's free-standing water fountain, which is at least twenty feet from the building, Northgate CC's. What's more, the park's official Web page no longer includes the symbol that indicates a water fountain.

And more to this page's point, they're doing the same thing with the park's playground.

Now, to be fair, Northgate Community Center has two doorways, and has intelligently used them to run the child care stuff that all the community centers are still doing out of one door, and the rest of the stuff community centers normally do out of the other.  Better still, the child care doorway faces the playground.  And, in fact, the only people I saw using the playground on three brief visits were coming out of the community center, not separately visiting the park or spilling out of the adjacent Northgate branch Library.

So if Northgate CC weren't already trying to steal a water fountain, I'd probably be OK with them taking credit for this playground.  But they overreached.

Which, I think, is why Northgate Park is a surprise. It isn't in the article that initially prompted this page, and it isn't in the list I used to add some parks to the article's list.  I only came across it visiting the park for my baseline.  My best guess is that whoever at Northgate CC is so grabby of Northgate Park's stuff doesn't want their project rubbing shoulders with other ordinary parks' projects.

Anyway, though, going forward, I'll be looking for other cowboy project signs while I look for water fountains.

As to the schedule that sign swears by, well, I'll have more to say about timing in the next two parts of this page.  But on the premise that the Northgate Park playground may go away soon, here's a photo:

Good night, dear Diary.
  

Under Construction, part IV: Hubbard Homestead After

Dear Diary,

I'm sorry it's been so long.  I did warn you I had very busy weeks ahead, but also, enough delay meant I had to go back to some places.  For example, the work on Hubbard Homestead's basketball court was expected to be finished in late July, so although I found a fence still there August 4th, it was no big deal - except that I'd only photographed it through that fence.

 

So I went back yesterday, and I'm very glad I did, for reasons we'll get to in another page.  But anyway, replacing the fading half-court I denigrated five years ago with a fresh full court was a Good Deed for the Seattle Kraken, who work near there, to do.

But that wasn't even the main focus of the work.  As that five year old page narrated, the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation tried to move an old playground from Victory Creek Park to this one, only to be shocked by the amazing discovery that old playgrounds are - yes, I know you'll find this hard to believe, dear Diary - but, yes, old playgrounds are old.  Imagine that.  So, having already promised a new playground to Victory Creek Park, which, being adjacent to a QFC, really needs one, Parks also promised a new playground to Hubbard Homestead, and the project page, which is still up, suggests that the Kraken's money is why this project is done and Victory Creek's isn't even on the list yet.

So here's some photos of the new playground, which I regret to say is not remotely too swarmed with kids for me to photograph.  There was one little boy when I took the first photo August 4th, and nobody at all yesterday.

Tomorrow, a surprise.  Until then, dear Diary.

 

Building a Baseline, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

While we can do lots of fun things together, including the current page "Under Construction", your core topic is public restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and outdoor water fountains, public or private.

As I told you two years ago, I categorise the hikes in which I document that core topic:  "everything", "water fountain" or "restroom".  Something I didn't mention two years ago is that in the hikes of January 2021, which were restroom hikes, I tried to take "postcard shots", photos making these mostly pretty pedestrian buildings look as good as I could.  This hasn't been much of an issue since then, because I haven't had occasion to introduce any new restrooms to you, dear Diary.  However, in "Under Construction" and in this page, that will finally change.  So postcard shots will come back.

The hikes I started in July are intended to be everything hikes.  This part of this page has four remaining topics:

1. Why bother?
2. What's everything? (sources of information)
3. What will I do? (photographic practice)
4. What will I write? (organisation of this page)

Why bother?

Your friend and mine, Anna Patrick, formerly of The Seattle Times's Project Homeless, asked me in summer 2023 why I'd continued writing you, dear Diary, after getting housed in March 2021.  The easy part of the answer was that I hadn't then even finished writing up the January 2021 hikes, and then there was the second Durkan Drought that year, by which I mean then-mayor Jenny Durkan's decision to misread CDC guidance on public water fountains to justify leaving park water fountains turned off.

The hard part is, why after that?  I mean, dear Diary, you were obviously born of a pandemic that's now been over for years.  Why continue you?

Because if park restrooms and water fountains ever matter again, it'll be easier to pay attention to them if you, and the tools I've accumulated to write you, are still around.

There are three obvious contexts in which those things could matter.

• The Big One.
• Another pandemic.
• A scandal.

I'm pretty sure most park plumbing is not earthquake-safe.  I don't actually think, dear Diary, you'll be able to help much after the Big One.

I don't much like to think about scandals, but it's less likely that one will happen involving park restrooms in North Seattle if you exist.  You've already been part of the pressure on Seattle's leaders to address the scandalous lack of public restrooms downtown.

But the main reason to keep you going, dear Diary, is that another pandemic could come.  It's true that this country went about a century without any, so this would seem to be a long shot.  But the more certain politicians try to criminalise the practice of public health, the more chance there is for the next pandemic to come a great deal sooner, and when it does, it will probably come in the five months of the year when about half of Seattle's park restrooms are closed.

Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation has a plan to make its restrooms winter-safe, but it sure doesn't talk much about that plan.  What I found in January 2021 was that Parks claimed to be doing things differently because of the pandemic, and in some important ways those claims were true.  But they'd opened no additional restrooms, and diseases like cholera briefly returned to Seattle.  That plan is important, and you, dear Diary, and I, can help cover it.

What's everything?

Why do an everything hike?

Because I don't have a reliable list of water fountains.

Your frenemy Rachel Schulkin is now, according to LinkedIn, an Executive Operations Manager for the city; according to PubliCola, she oversees "parks, libraries, Seattle Center, and the waterfront".

So I wrote to Christina Hirsch, the remaining "media contact" for Parks.  I heard back from a general public questions address.  Fine.  I have to prove myself again. I can do that.

They sent me to two GIS/data analytics pages.

The one for restrooms is pretty good, and I've found it reliable so far.  My main concern with it is that I couldn't find a way to download the dataset.

The one for water fountains, however, while easily downloaded, is disturbingly familiar.  It not only resembles the list I got in 2020, it could be that list.  It also claims all water fountains in North Seattle are working, and although an awful lot really are, that claim turns out not to be true in detail.

So, about existence, there are false negatives (Soundview Playfield now has multiple water fountains) and false positives (Licton Springs Park now has no water fountain).  And, yes, it lists Baker Park on Crown Hill, which, the last time I went there, I was told has never had a water fountain.

There are no false negatives about function, because the map doesn't admit any fountains aren't working.  Well, I've actually been impressed at the fountains I've found operating, the parks department does deserve to brag, but there are exceptions.

So if I have to go to Baker Park, why not go to all of them?

Concretely, as I mentioned in your first page, dear Diary, parks are pretty fun.  The weeks coming up are all that's left of the summer I was supposed to have no classes; why not spend them visiting parks?

Many of the parks in North Seattle don't especially welcome visitors.  Most, but not all, such parks are called "Natural Area"s.  I've long used a heuristic to deal with this:  if a water fountain (let alone restroom) can't be found, if no trail leads to it, it probably doesn't exist at all, and certainly doesn't matter. So all I have to do in the Natural Areas and their ilk is follow all the trails.  In reality, I don't expect to find a water fountain in any of these parks.

Anyway, to get back to the question up above, "what's everything?"

I plan to rely on my past lists, plus four sources of information.

The one I've used the longest, going back to May 2020, is the parks department website.  This has individual pages for many parks, most but not all of which are linked to in the official list of all parks.  These pages have symbols for parks with restrooms and water fountains, and these symbols are usually reliable.  No new North Seattle parks were in the official list in July.

Almost as long, back to June 2020, I've used the City of Seattle's real property reports.  These are reports from the city's Real Estate Services office to the chair of the City Council's Finance committee.  The link currently only gets the 2025 and 2026 reports, but at the Internet Archive, the chain goes back to 2013.  The 2013 report begins with explanatory text that suggests to me that it may have been a new thing then, or at least that any previous versions had been forgotten.  These real property reports have two parts, a text introduction, and a spreadsheet.  As now downloadable, all except 2014 and 2018 actually have the intro; all except 2023 and 2026 actually have the spreadsheet, but the 2022 spreadsheet has changes that make its listings hard to correlate with the rest.  The spreadsheet usually lists department, Property Management Area (PMA) number, name, location or address, classification (Fully Utilized, Excess, etc.), current use, and land area; it usually has more columns than that, but what they are varies.  Between 30% and 40% of each spreadsheet is the parks department.

The third source of information, on which I've relied since May 2021 , is OpenStreetMap.  OpenStreetMap is an invaluable resource for many purposes, of course, but specifically for our purposes, dear Diary, it's often just Too Much, and that has probably contributed to my failures to finish my grander projects since getting housed.

Which is why I'm very glad to report the last major source, which has been familiar to me since I started working as a tax preparer in 2007, but which I've barely used for you, dear Diary, before.  The current version of the King County Parcel Viewer offers a map drawn by property lines, and identifies each "parcel"'s owner.  As a result, if what OpenStreetMap presents as green space is really a bunch of private back yards, I can find that out from the parcel viewer.  (The parcel viewer also colours parks green, but only if they're owned by an official parks agency, so, for example, the parks of Seattle Public Utilities aren't coloured.). Each pop-up in the map for a parcel links to assessor's reports, which often include a photo, and tax reports, which go back about 30 years.

What will I do?

Hiking for you, dear Diary, essentially consists of visiting geographical features, in this and most cases parks, and photographing things of interest, usually, in parks, restroom doorways, and water fountains, the former open or held open, the latter in action dispensing water, if all is well.

In Seattle, park restrooms are usually promised to be open 7 am to 7 pm; in reality, because a limited number of staff unlock and lock the doors, the times vary considerably (please refer your readers, dear Diary, to the series "My Book of Hours" in August 2020), but I try to time my visits between 8 am and 6 pm.

In summer, the restrooms are supposed to stay open later, until 9 pm; that was the point of that series, to find out whether the parks department was doing that during the pandemic.  (It wasn't.  So that was something they did differently because of the pandemic, shortening park restroom hours.)  Near as I can tell, now the pandemic is over, 9 pm closings are back. 

Soon after getting housed, I learnt that Blogspot renames the photos I upload, which each of the phones with which I've taken these photos titles with date and time.  So starting with the May 2021 hikes, I made a point of including a daily newspaper in each restroom door shot and in each water fountain action shot.  And also of uploading the photos to my Google Drive the same day.  Theoretically I was also supposed to upload to Google Drive a close-up of the front page, to help in identifying the newspaper in the photos, but I was never very good about that.

Anyway, it turns out that if someone downloads a photo, Blogspot gives it its original name back.  By that time, also, I only uploaded occasional door and fountain shots to Blogspot, and at Google Drive they weren't renamed.  And, to be blunt, I can't afford daily newspapers right now.  So in most photos for these hikes, there's no newspaper.

So that's a change.  Another, probably more important, change is that I'm no longer photographing the doorways of women's restrooms.  That was always socially problematic, and now that the pandemic is over, I just can't see an upside.  I'm trying to at least notice whether the women's rooms are open, but in a recent hike of Green Lake Park, I failed to do that with two out of five restroom pairs.  Back then, I imagined finding a woman to accompany me; now, I see how unlikely that is, but in the event that someone wants equal treatment, she'd have access to a good list, linked above.  (It does, however, omit the composting toilet at Picardo Farm.)

Things that haven't changed:  I try not to photograph people.  I also try not to photograph homes, particularly tents.

So this is as good a place as any to mention what I've been seeing with regard to homeless people.  I've long complained about what the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has done with the federally required point-in-time count.  However, what I've been seeing is that a majority of the parks I've visited have isolated tents, a few have people sleeping rough, a few have obviously inhabited RVs, and a considerable minority have these:

The KCRHA asserts that homelessness has sharply increased around here over the past four years, and however much I doubt their methods, I'm fairly confident, now, that they're right about that.  What I haven't seen yet is the kind of sprawling encampments that were present during the pandemic.

I've long felt uncomfortable with how freely I wrote about such things at the time.  I re-read some of those pages today, and seriously doubt that I actually did wrong, made any homeless people known to those who did them ill.  For example, almost every park encampment I wrote about was in a park with a restroom, which a staffer visited twice daily, and the I-5 encampments, and others remaining, had "sanican"s, which were visited less than daily. The I-5 ones had also already become a political issue.  So this isn't an apology, but is an announcement of another change.  I intend to notice homeless people much less this time.

Which brings us to this part's last main topic:

What will I write?

I recently suggested to you, dear Diary, an ultimate fate of holding a bunch of park-specific pages.  I'm pretty sure most parts of "Under Construction" will be park-specific.

Much though I'd like to make that my norm already, though, it's too much.  I'm increasingly leaning toward being fairer to the downtown parks, and North Seattle alone has over a hundred.  I can't justify adding one or two hundred pages every time I do an everything hike, even though those aren't that common.

So, for example, I currently have a lot of crow to eat concerning Beaver Pond Natural Area.  That'll get its own page.  But the rest of that day's hike near Northgate will be a single part of this page.

My current class isn't over, and won't be until August 26th.  I worked very hard last week to make time for you today, dear Diary, and can't predict when we'll meet again, but surely not later than August 27th.  Until then, happy days and happy nights. 

A possible destination

Dear Diary,

Re-reading some of your oldest pages recently has reminded me that, once upon a time, I envisioned you ending soon.  Obviously, that didn't happen, as I became more and more outraged at the ways that water was being used as a weapon against homeless people.

I expect to write in you fairly soon about why I'm carrying on, with that fight long over.  But it is reasonable to have some sort of goal.  On December 14, 2020, The Seattle Times was kind enough to publish something I wrote, that said, in part, this:

For years I've thought about what I value partly by planning, but never actually building, a website about my interests.  Now, the parks of North Seattle ... are demanding vast spaces in that website. 

I've been having a lot of technological problems lately, and it's getting less plausible that I'll really beat them all, as I continue to age.  Maybe my dream website will never happen.  So perhaps your destiny, dear Diary, is to hold many dozen park-specific pages.  Please think about that, dear Diary, and please welcome any comments your readers care to make.