This Saturday is Seattle Tilth’s annual Chicken Coop and Urban Farm Tour:

This is your chance to visit folks who are keeping chickens and creating “urban farms” in the Seattle area. Glean great ideas from creative neighbors who are incorporating animals and unique gardens into their home landscapes. Visit the event page for the full scoop.

In this self-guided tour, you will see simple chicken coops built in one afternoon and elaborate finely-crafted coops that took weeks of planning and building. See what accommodations are needed for keeping miniature goats, ducks, mason bees, honey bees and bunnies. Take a look …

Too late for for this weekend’s sunny Sunday, Seattle’s wading pools, including Wallingford Park’s, open this coming Wednesday, June 29th. It’s a three-day-a-week pool (Wednesday through Friday) noon – 7 pm.

But, Seattle being Seattle (and not, say, Phoenix), it doesn’t always make sense to fill the pools:

We will plan to open the wading pools on sunny days when the temperature is forecast to be 70 degrees or higher. On most days we will fill them half full, which is a 50% water savings…..but on the busiest days they will be filled to the top!

Parks uses the average …

Diane Gordon writes that the Wallingford Family Parade on July 9th is seeking volunteers to make it happen:

Wallingford Family Parade on July 9th ! We need YOU!

Volunteers Needed! We need your help to put up signs before the parade and help on parade day. If you can help, please email [email protected]. High School students will earn community service credit!

Be in the parade! Calling all kids and parents! Register on the day of the parade, come to the muster site at N 45th and Interlake and sign up by 10:30! Watch the parade! Parade starts at 11:00 and …

Lincoln High is getting a $19M update. An earlier version of this story mentioned that that part of this would involve changing the parking lot into a playfield (which would have a pretty big impact on the surrounding neighborhood), but I got a few notes that this was in error. Rachel wrote:

I just wanted to correct some of the information you posted about the proposed athletic field at Lincoln High School.  I was on the design committee as a community participant, and the plan to is to keep the north lot as a parking lot when the school is …

Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe, the anti-vaccination film directed by the discredited anti-vaccine activist Andrew Wakefield, will be showing all this week at the Guild 45th in Wallingford.

Wakefield made headlines back in 1998 when he published a paper in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet demonstrating a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. In 2010, the article was retracted by the Lancet in the light of evidence that Wakefield had fabricated data for his article and that he had “financial conflicts of interest” associated with his claims. His medical license was revoked in the UK, but Wakefield …

Just saw this pop up on the Wallingford / Fremont Community Facebook page:

I just received a text from that there is an armed person near Wallingford Park. Anyone know anything about this?

and this response:

We were just there for our last day of school gathering. People started shouting about an armed person on the field, so I grabbed my kids and left. Lichton Springs was having a field day. I didn’t see anything, so I can’t confirm. We left quickly.

Several parents confirmed that Hamilton Middle School, which adjoins Wallingford Park is in “shelter in place” at the …

Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess and Mayor Murray have proposed a new law that would fundamentally change the way Airbnb operates in Seattle, rolling back the conversions of long-term units to Airbnb short-term rentals, and perhaps driving a cold stake through the heart of the Seattle Airbnb market.

I’ve been in this game for a while now: back in 2012, we decided to take the mother-in-law apartment we had built out in our Wallingford basement and convert it from a $900 / month studio apartment to an Airbnb short-term rental. When we started, we were unsure what to charge, and …