On a weekend in mid-September,  A group of Wallingford neighbors came together to repaint the street mural of ‘Bubbles the Turtle’. I recently walked by the intersection of North 41st and Interlaken Avenue North, one block west of Hamilton Middle School, and was struck by the size of this art piece, the bold colors of green, red, and blue, and the swirling shapes.

My first thought was that it had an almost psychedelic feel to it. No, I didn’t go into an alternate state of consciousness, but I was a little puzzled because I couldn’t quite make out the shape …

It was a dark and stormy night . . . 

Well actually it was just a stormy morning, back on June 3rd of this year, w hen we experienced wind gust up to 50 miles per hour, with Cliff Maas, on his weather blog calling it more like a November morning. Combined with wet soils, due to substantial rainfall at the time, numerous trees around the city came down. 

One tree that did not survive was a native Bigleaf Maple, on the corner of 44th and Burke Avenues, belonging to Wallingford residents Mary Pembroke Perlin and her husband David. Mary …

This last Saturday I attended the open house for the new Family Resource Center at Cedar Crossing Affordable Housing, one block north of the Roosevelt Light Rail Station. The resource center is run by Wallingford based FamilyWorks and was created to partially to increase services to families in need and to also give FamilyWorks space to expand the Wallingford Food Bank in the near future.

This new Family Resource Center initially opened in September of 2023, but this …

I noticed that the US Postal drop box on 40th and Sunnyside Ave North has been missing for the last couple of months. When I reached out to the Wallingford post office branch to find out what gives, Supervisor Madir Yussef informed me that the box in that location is being replaced, within a couple of weeks. He said others throughout the neighborhood would also be replaced, gradually, but was not able to give me a timetable.

The new mailboxes will have letter slits, instead of pull-down openings, making them more secure against thieves. The downside is that mail patrons …