Please don’t break into our car or post spam comments on our blog. We’re on vacation — see you in a few weeks!

–j/k

Suddenly, we have a bunch of new neighbors down the street — the parking lot at St. Joe’s is now home to Seattle’s Tent City. While we were a bit surprised to see the rows of tents appear out of nowhere, we’re cool with it. Not sure we’d be down with the blue tarp action on a permanent basis but hosting for a few weeks is probably good for everybody’s karma.

Here is a calendar of social events involving St. Joe’s and Tent City. Tonight is their ice cream social which sounds like a good excuse to check things out and get involved if you have time.

Here’s what Seattle’s archdiocese has to say about Tent City and the people involved. For more on tent city projects around the country, check out this Seattle Weekly article.

We do have to say that St. Joe’s didn’t exactly put the word out that this was happening. Of course, they seem to have good reason not to make a deal given the NIMBY action of the past. You can see some of the responses St. Joe’s was up against in this letter to parishioners from 2003. Nice to think Tent City’s appearance on this part of Capitol Hill has settled into a peaceful groove.

–j

We first stumbled upon Bre Pettis when he left a comment on Capitol Hill Seattle. He’ll never make that mistake again! We’ve been following his geeky cool I Make Things blog ever since though we don’t really have time to build robots because we can’t even pull the 3-foot dandelions out of our yard. Bre was a Hill resident when he left a note saying ‘hey’ so we’ll assume he still is even though we found him filling in for the much-buzzed about Amanda Congdon over on the nearly-equally much-buzzed about Rocketboom. We’re betting you’ll see Bre on at least TLC in a year if not the Discovery Channel.

Meanwhile, Seattle Bon Vivant — this city’s best example of an indie foodie blog — has gone radio silent, its connoisseurship frozen in place, the site post-less since early May. We haven’t pinged Viv — as her fans call her — so we’ll do it blog style. Viv, where are you? Seattle needs a chow tip or two. And you better scramble if you’re going to beat that Bre dude to having your own cable show.

–j/k

NY Times decided to run this piece on the ‘Sherlock’ of the Kyle Huff murder investigation in Sunday’s edition but, wow, what a disappointing article. You can sense a hacked down version of what was probably a longer, lamer article.

We are usually suckers for whatever the NYT wants to make the story — but this Dr. Fox fella blows it so bad that not even the Times can makes a cool theme stick. You can’t take a scientific approach to understanding crime and then base your argument on some note found in a dumpster. That’s cheating! The NYT gives it a rip making some kind of claim about the value of involving academics in the worries of the world but the sad little article just limps to its end.

The whole thing gives us very little hope we’ll learn anything when Sherlock’s report is released next week.

–j

With all of the Savage swipes at Jamie Pedersen from the Slog crew, we’d like to see Jamie go with it jujitsu-style and embrace the nastiness. So we designed this bitchin’ t-shirt for his campaign. We doubt we’ll see Jamie sporting it any time soon but the various pride parades are coming up so who knows. Maybe I will wear one in my race up in Alaska if nobody decides to bid.

(thanks to Shirt-O-Mat for its nifty online shirt designing tool)

–j

On CHS, we try to keep things focused. It’s easy to drift to topics that have nothing to do with why readers follow a site. So it’s rare for us to mix in a personal post that has nothing to do with Capitol Hill. This focus also keeps us mainly behind the curtain, so to speak. This post, however, is an exception to the rule — we’ll step off the Hill and out from behind the curtain for a moment — for a good cause.

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SPONSOR THESE LEGS
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This 4th of July — like we do every 4th — K & I are heading up to Seward AK for the Mt. Marathon race. We’re two of the lucky 600 people who get to race up — and then down — the mountain this year. You can see what this kind of athletic event does to a normal human body in this pretty-much-disgusting picture of my legs. K has been doing this crazy race forever but last year I got dragged into it. This year, I’m hoping to leverage my suffering to help a couple of lucky charities.

So, I’m putting myself up for bid over at eBay. The winning bidder gets to slap their corporate/blog/street gang logo on a shirt/hat/poncho that I will wear to the top of Mt. Marathon and, hopefully, if I survive, back to the finish line in beautiful downtown Seward.

But that’s not all! I’ll pledge all the bidding cash (minus eBay’s cut) to charity — 50% to mine, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, 50% to yours. It’s a win-win-win-hope-I-don’t-break-a-leg situation.

More details over on the eBay side of things. I have no idea if I’ll find any takers but seems like a waste of leg skin not to check it out.

Now back to your regularly scheduled blog.

–j

In the Capitol Hill trivia department, Tully’s got a fresh coat of paint this week. It went from drab brown and greyish to a chirpy yellow and white. No complaints here, we like fresh paint. According to the various color symbolism websites out there, brown means conservative and stable while yellow means energy and creativity. Seems like a fitting summertime transition. Although apparently in Cherokee culture, brown was a positive color and yellow meant trouble and strife. I’m pretty sure the Tully’s folks haven’t read that much into their paint choice, but it is nice to get something a little brighter on the corner of 19th and Aloha. In our old neighborhood, Minnie’s is still sporting a crazy paint job of 6 months ago – clashing magenta and pink. Wowzers.

Note to St. Joes: it must be a bummer to keep the church white, but you might want to follow Tully’s lead. We’re starting to see a few dingy spots.

–K

It’s nice to inspire art — or, at least, inspire an art magazine. We noticed a new referral or three coming in from a new source rivetmagazine.org. Apparently, we inspired Rivet to post a shout out to a few Seattle-focused blogs. Nice to be noted — that’s definitely the spirit we were looking for. Rivet’s blog lives at http://www.rivetmagazine.org/riveted/ It would awesome to have a voice in Seattle devoted to promoting great art but with a more positive vibe than some of the more established blog playas. Maybe Rivet is part of the answer.

–j

Birdfeeder Totem
Originally uploaded by Rogue Peanut.

We don’t know Capitol-Hill-Seattle-linker and VT-SEA driver Rogue Peanut, but we appreciate her Flickr photographs of Capitol Hill’s nooks and crannies. Picture included here is not the latest condo project on the Hill. Instead, you’re looking at Stevens Elementary’s cute little birdhouses. Thanks Peanut.

–j

The restaurant business must be the crappiest business ever. Seattle PI says Fork has closed its doors. We never made it there. A good reminder to not wait around too long to try interesting new places and to frequently patronize restaurants you want to see stick around.

–j