Capitol Hill Owl
Originally uploaded by Laurel Fan.

Sometimes things just happen — like this gorgeous owl that visited Seattle the other day. Sometimes you need to plan. Nothing replaces actually doing something better than having a list of things you could do. That’s why we love event calndars. We probably won’t do most of these wonderful things but there is the potential of it all to make us feel happy and fulfilled.

Here’s a round-up of calendars for our part of the Hill in semi-geographical order starting on 19th ave and ending on 15th. Range too small for you? Start your own damn blog!

Capitol Hill Seattle’s Neighborhood Event Calendar Round-Up
1) Capitol Hill Neighbors event calendar
Semi-random compendium of activities and entertainments. Check in here when your want to turn your day over to serendipity.

2) Monsoon events
Special dates at the graceful 19th Ave restaurant

3) Washington Ensemble Theater at The Little Theater

4) St. Joseph Parish events
Because gods are entertaining

5) 22 Doors music schedule

6) Hopvine music
Pub also has tunes; plus open mic on Wednesdays and trivia once a month though we can’t find any calendars that list these

7) Victrola
Promises a ‘new’ event calendar is coming soon. We advise checking out the board when you stop by for your buzz.

8) European Vine Selections of Washington
This little mystery — did you know it had a ‘real’ name? — at 522 15th has tastings on last Thursday of the month that our friends are going to be pissed that we wrote about because they are piggies and want to keep the events to themselves. Shame!

9) Sonic Boom Capitol Hill in-stores — My Space | Upcoming
A music schedule so rich, you need to links to track it. And even then you still won’t know who is playing when. Anybody have a better source for these rockstars?

10) Craigslist Seattle “capitol hill” events
When in doubt, CL it.

–j/k

Snip
Originally uploaded by yotababy.

Kitty Hawk is a fantastic hair salon in the neighborhood. You should go!

To start with the most important thing, I now have a very cool haircut (if I do say so myself) and Lo managed it in spite of my very unhelpful request. “I want it…shorter…and…more interesting.” Somehow she turned this into a cute hair style that I still can airdry. Magic! (I was only slightly panicked when I saw all that hair falling to the floor – shorter feels risky to us long-haired girls.)

KH has an open and interesting style. Lo stores all her hair cutting supplies in an old armoire with a huge mirror on the door. The armoire is perfectly suited to the job, and seems so improvised and fresh. Lo is so hip.

As a side benefit, Lo has an adorable Boston Terrier that will come make friends but isn’t too friendly. This little darling spent his whole life in hair salons, so he could probably offer up some good style advice if anyone ever asked him. Meeting him made me spend the evening searching for Boston Terriers on PetFinder, and as a general rule I can’t stand buggy-eyed dogs. He is such a sweetie!

Remember to bring cash or your checkbook – Kitty Hawk is cheap, but doesn’t take credit cards. She let me go home for cash without leaving anything, which feels so small town and trusting.

I’ve never felt all that loyal to a salon before – but I’m hooked!

–k

Can somebody with experience living with a back yard please advise? The neighbors are throwing toys into our back yard. We’ve never had a back yard before. Is this normal? We have no children.

Our hypotheses:

1. The neighbors are returning toys thown into their back yard by the children of the family we bought the house from.
2. The neighbor kids are throwing their toys into our back yard.
3. The neighbors are shy and give strange gifts.

Regardless of the cause, we’re stuck about what to do next since we never talk to any of the neighbors. Do we keep the various Hot Wheels and Star Wars dudes? Do we throw them back over the fence and risk escalating the toy throwing? Which fence do we throw them over?

Thanks in advance,
— j/k

Quick follow up to our post about the pending flame-out of the Capitol Hill Kidd Valley.

In-the-know reader Finish Tag comments:
“The kidd valley will be torn down and replaced with a big 4 stories of apartments of one story of retail kind o’ thing.”

I want to see one of these ‘mixed use’ projects where they put the living component on the ground floor and the retail up top just to screw with people.

–j

We really want to like 22 Doors. After all, it can be a little lonely on top of Capitol Hill. Down closer to Broadway, you have the full spectrum of drinking stops — from legit hip to fake hip, legit gay to fake gay, legit dive to fake dive, and so on…

But the choices slim at the top — 15th Ave does well in the legit end of the spectrum but doesn’t really cover a breadth of categories beyond dive (see ‘Canterbury), neighborhood brew pub (see ‘Hopvine’) and homemade meth (see ‘Walgreens’).

So it’s hard not to welcome another category to the mix even if it’s not as cool as it thinks it is.

And boy does 22 Doors think it’s cool. From furnishings made of ‘reclaimed’ material like old doors from the Camlin (get it? 22 doors) to $75 drinks on the specialty cocktail list, 22 Doors tries to pull of some fashionable stuff. While some of these things come off great — classy liquor list for example — others remind you you’re paying Belltown prices on 15th Ave. Simple case in point — a medium rare burger came out charred to the core with huge, unevenly cut tomato blocks (couldn’t call them slices or even wedges for that matter) smashed inside. It looked kind of like something we would make for ourselves. And we are decidedly un-cool and definitely not fashionable. Meanwhile, it came with excellent yuppie fries (meaning oddly cut, oddly spiced but yummy).

Like any good friend, we plan to embrace the parts we like about 22 Doors and avoid its bad habits. That means we’ve got a place to drink when we’re all dressed up but don’t want to leave the hood. It’s nice to have the ‘swank’ category filled in (See ’22 Doors).

22 Doors is located at 405 15th Ave E just a few steps from Victrola.

Seattle Weekly called 22 Doors “classy and relaxed” while the Seattle Times had mixed things to say including the ambiguous “22 Doors is a restaurant disguised as a cocktail lounge.” Meanwhile, this dude was more certain in his praise — “definitely worth trying” — but he did drink beer with pancakes so who knows?

–j/k

Cute little automated Amazon… they posted a nice review of BTK pesticide from a Capitol Hill resident.
— j

p.s. — in case they yank it, here’s a grab of the review.

Our neighborhood hullabaloo is reported by the Seattle PI this morning:

-snip-
Seattle PI: Capitol Hill area resists aerial moth spraying
The state Agriculture Department is proposing aerial spraying of a pesticide in order to deal with voracious European gypsy moths in an area of Seattle where Capitol Hill and the Central District meet.

About 100 acres would be sprayed this spring with a pesticide that contains a naturally occurring bacterium that’s lethal to the insects, the agency announced this week.
-un-snip-

The pesticide at the center of this has the unfortunate name BTK — and, not entirely surprisingly, it’s available for sale on Amazon.com. Amazon’s product description contains these nuggets:

* Safe, easy-to-use and effective control for caterpillars and other insects.
* May be used on shade trees, ornamentals and evergreens.
* BTK does not harm people, animals, birds or fish.
* Highly concentrated formula in a 100 mL bottle. Makes over 30 liters of spray solution.
* One bottle will treat 300 sq meters (3229 sq feet) or two to three large shade trees.

In its charming automated way, Amazon also encourages product ‘enthusiasts’ to submit a product manual or Be the first person to review this item.

We expect a general uptick in the sales trend. Curently, BTK has achieved an “Amazon.com Sales Rank” of #129,467 in Kitchen & Housewares building off yesterday’s rank of #130,114. Barring exogenous events, we’re predicting a rise to approximately #115,322. Buy, buy, buy!

In the meantime, take a moment to review the ‘product’ and let Amazon know how it worked for you.

–j

BTW, we like people to read this stuff. So, add the capitolhillseattle feed to whatever magic tool you use to keep track of your favorite blogs. We use Firefox, pictured below. You can click the orange thingy if you want to add the feed but you probably already know that if you use Firefox.

If you don’t use Firefox, check out our feed and other groovy reading options on Feedburner.

–j

To offer further evidence of our sophistication and refined tastes, we’ll follow our review of a restaurant we compared favorably to Chuck E. Cheese, with news about another local high-class eatery. The Capitol Hill Kidd Valley on 15th across from Safeway will soon be no more — sign in the window sez they’ve lost their lease. Not a terrible loss, to be sure, but we kind of liked having something simple and generally bad for your health in the hood. No word on what will replace the burger joint. We’d bet on corporate coffee (there’s only 2 SBUX within waddling distance of that corner) or mixed-use housing and retail space.

–j/k

With the millions of you blogging nerds sure to be swinging through thanks to today’s post on Metroblogging Seattle, what’s your favorite ‘recent comments’ hack? The code bit we borrowed appears to be malfunctioning.

–j