Happy Birthday, Freeattle! My Year in Free: 27 Free Events, and 52 Free Events Ahead

Image via Flickr user Theresa Thompson(Psst: if you are looking for the regular Monday This Week in Freeattle post, it's right before this one.)

Do you ever have one of those words you run around using incorrectly for your entire life and then one day look it up and are retroactively embarrassed for all those previous errors? This is especially embarrassing when you often get on a grammar high horse.

For me, this word is scrappy. Apparently scrappy's official definitions all exclusively focus on the pugnacious, the aggressive.

Oh. See, I'd always used it to also mean being defiantly resourceful. I thought of it as a quintessentially American trait, a sort of energetic, slightly rebellious, cunning creativity. "I might not have everything I need to make it easy, and I'm not quite sure I can pull this off, but you're not going to stop me from trying."

And now to learn that it doesn't really mean that to people at all! Even in Urban Dictionary, where words can take on a completely new life…the definition that came closest to my idea of it got 11 thumbs down.

This might seem like it has little to do with the point of this post, which is to celebrate the one year birthday of this site. But this concept is crucial to the creation of this site, so I felt it worth a digression.

It was from that kind of my-definition-of-scrappy energy that this site was created. Sure, it was about what I say in the About page: I was seeing a lot of events when researching for Fresh-Picked and wanted a home for them.

But to be perfectly honest, the little defiant piece was that I was feeling a sense of both exhaustion and rebellion at the…pricey nature of what I was feeling got a lot of attention in the Seattle food scene. I mean, it's just human nature, when you are a have-not or have-less, you can't help but feel a little resentment at the haves and the ease with which they run around and enjoy themselves (even if your rational side knows that resentment is a total waste of time and also usually not very fair.).

That's where my-definition-of-scrappiness came in. I could sit around feeling frustrated about what I couldn't do or I could make as much fun as possible out of what I had available to me.

I wanted to do the latter, and I wanted to try to share what I found so that other folks in a similar boat could also find some more fun and life-improving stuff too.  And this site was born, first as a slightly inelegant creation cobbled together on Wordpress and Blogspot, and now happily hitching on a ride on the sturdy infrastructure of Fresh-Picked Seattle. Sort of like one of those birds that rides around all day on the back of a hippo.

And with the work I did on the site, I was, in fact, able to find and do more than enough to keep me plenty busy while sticking to my budget.  

In the past year, this is what kind of stuff I was able to do for free.  There was lots of nature, food, culture and education...

1. Beach bird walk
2. Native plants walk
3. Mushroom walk
4. Arboretum walk
5. Various local personal birding expeditions at spots like the Union Bay Natural Area, Magnuson Park, and others.
6. Talk on crows from Crow Planet author Lyanda Haupt at Seattle Audubon talk at REI
7. Nature photography lecture at REI
8. Short, beautiful jaunts through the South Seattle Community College and Highline Botanical Gardens
9. Passover foods tasting
10. Free wine tastings at Esquin (but there are loads of places to get some freeno)
11. Canning class through Seattle Free School
12. Cheese making class Seattle Free School
13. Indian cooking class
14. Somali cooking class
15. Russian cooking class
16. Volunteering at Dog Mountain Farm dinner, got to try some of Josh Henderson's food
17. Herb gardening class
18. Caffe Vita's Public Brewing Class (next one is May 15! Recommend signing up if you love coffee!)
19. Italian for travelers language class at Rick Steves
20. Ethiopian culture night at the Northwest African American Museum
21. Polish, Latvian and Turkish cultural festivals
22. Japanese woodblock exhibit at Seattle Asian Art Museum
23. World folk art exhibit at WA State History Museum
24. A couple lectures about genome sciences
25. Lecture about NOAH and sustainable fisheries
26. Class to learn about the free magazine and newspaper resources we have available to us through the SPL
27. Talk on the latest developments on lung cancer (something that has recently affected my family although everything's looking okay now, thank goodness!)

And all this was without even really trying that hard, just from seeing them when adding to the calendar.

Now, for Freeattle's 2nd year, I am more ambitious! I'm aiming to try to do at least one free thing a week for this next year. Already on the agenda is a lecture about backpacking, a wildflower walk, a Spanish cuisine cooking demo, coffee and tea events, a nature walk about swallows, a class on starting a business and some food-related volunteering.

Some weeks, though, it might just be about getting out to do some birding at the lake or a walk around a park, especially with the lovely summer months ahead. The main point it to continue to fully enjoy this town and all it so generously offers to us for free.

If you ever go to an event you found here on Freeattle and want to tell me about it, I'd love to hear it! If you have a blog, I'll link to the story there, or you can tell it to me and I'll post it here. Or you can become a FaceBook fan and post the story there.

Comments

[Tri]

Belated Happy Birthday, Freattle. I just wanted to say Thank You Thank You Thank You for conceiving Freattle. I would not be exaggerating to say that that of all the sites I follow (and I follow a lot), yours has been the most consistently useful in my regular life. I subscribe to your Google Calendar, so planning my weekend's entertainments with my young daughter is an easy matter of copying events over to my personal calendar or to my Possibilities calendar. There is SO MUCH going on in this city that is free or cheap, and your web site helps me find it! Happy Birthday and here's to many more!

[Leslie Seaton]

Thank you so much, Tri, for taking the time to provide such a nice comment! I am so happy that the site has been useful to you and your family, knowing that totally makes my day/week. (Also, I love your idea of a "Possibilities" calendar. I tend to overschedule out of enthusiasm, maybe I need to add this to my own personal calendar as an interim step between seeing something and committing!)