Kubota Garden

Kubota Garden is an old Japanese garden here in South Seattle. It's huge, it's free, it's in a bad neighborhood. It's supposedly haunted. Everything about it is unlikely.



From the garden's website:

In 1927 Fujitaro Kubota bought five acres of logged-off swampland in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle and began his garden. A 1907 emigrant from the Japanese Island of Shikoku, he established the Kubota Gardening Company in 1923. Fujitaro was a man with a dream. Entirely self-taught as a gardener, he wanted to display the beauty of the Northwest in a Japanese manner and was soon designing and installing gardens throughout the Seattle area.

Enough talk. Let's look.

Full Throttle Bottles Coming to Georgetown

This just in from Seattle Weekly's food blog, by way of The Paper Noose.

Georgetown will soon be home to Full Throttle Bottles, which the Weekly says will be a beer and wine shop in the old Georgetown racetrack stable on Airport Way. (I don't know which building that is.)

I like beer. I like wine. Especially French Sauvignon Blancs, hint hint, Full Throttle Bottles!

Offbeat Homes

In case any Offbeat Homes readers come to this blog after reading about it in Jennifer's super-nice post, I want to point you to some old posts you might be interested in. This blog is a badly tagged mish-mash of neighborhood items, photo essays about plants and drinks, and personal diatribes, and you might not otherwise find the good stuff.

(An aside to everyone else: I've been really busy with work lately and will continue to be busy through Christmas, so I haven't had much time/energy for fun stuff, like stalking local gardening celebrities or attending Hangar Cafe's grand opening party last night. I promise to return to my paparazzi party-crashing ways in January.)

Anyway, here's a list of some posts with lots of photos of offbeat homes and other cool spaces:

1. Dick and Jane's Spot in Ellensburg, Washington. A cool couple's crazy art yard.



2. Rich Art's Yard in Centralia, Washington. An even cooler dude's even crazier art yard.



3. Bridge Motel in Seattle, Washington. Some artists threw a party at a soon-to-be-demolished motel on the old interstate in Seattle.



4. The Brew House section of the old Rainier Cold Storage complex in Seattle, Washington. A beautiful turn-of-the-century brewery structure that will soon be renovated.



5. Little & Lewis's Garden Art Gallery on Bainbridge Island, Washington.



6. My artist friends' awesome house here in Seattle.



Thanks for visiting!

Great Stuff

Last night we stopped by the grand opening party at Great Stuff, an antique shop on Airport Way.



I'm pretty familiar with their inventory, which I used to admire at the Pacific Galleries Antique Mall in Sodo. With Great Stuff and Planet Oranj out of the Antique Mall, we'll have little reason to go there anymore. Though last time I was there, I got these cool X-ray viewers, which we put on the far wall of our living room, on the weird wood paneling, here.



I blew up some of the photos I took at the Rainier Cold Storage Building and am displaying those right now.



Anyway, back to the party. Lots of people showed up.



Including that cool guy who's tended bar at Calamity Jane's and Smarty Pants. I'd already been drinking, and I couldn't remember how I knew him, and he's very friendly, and I gave him a hug. Anyway, sir, I'm sorry for being so forward and hugging you without even knowing your name. You're always so nice that I feel like I know you!































We're hungry, so we head to Georgetown Liquor Company.



This way.





I wonder how many billions of dollars and hundreds of lives he'll take from us in the next 430 days. When he took office, he inherited a record budget surplus from Bill Clinton, and he quickly turned it into a record deficit. There's fiscal conservatism for you. Anyway. Just saying.