WEDNESDAY, OCT. 9 2013 >>>

1. No one knows for sure when the first Paleolithic cave-dweller stuck a mammoth tail in crushed-up berries and began painting stick figures on the wall of his rocky abode, but you can bet the market value of the neighboring caves instantly went up. Want to inject a little life into your urban blight? Bring in a bunch of artists. The Olympia Artspace Alliance wants to develop affordable new spaces to live, work, create, rehearse, perform or conduct business in downtown Olympia. Teamed with Artspace Projects, Inc. it has designed a market survey that will inform it about Olympians' specific studio and housing needs. OAA invites the public to a market survey launch party at 5 p.m. at the Washington Center.  Drop by for food, drink and information.

2. Holly Senn work is one of those rare creatures whose work is equally conceptual and visual. Her sculptures - usually small works made from pages out of old and discarded books and displayed on sculpture stands - and her room-size installations - generally made from the same materials, are all about ideas generated from the materials and their implications, meaning the pages of books and the trees they are made from and ideas surrounding the act of reading and the environment in which those trees grow. But there is much more to her work than the idea. Her work is also visually stunning. Senn's new exhibit, "Scavenged," showcases a body of new work: forms inspired by specimens from the collection of some 1,300 bird nests at Puget Sound's Slater Museum of Natural History. A reception for Senn, as well as Randy Bolton's "Have A Terrific Great Nice OK Day and Other Prints" is from 5-7 p.m. at Kittredge Gallery on the University of Puget Sound campus.

3. It may be grayer than Bea Arthur's pixie cut outside, but not so inside King's Books at 6:30 p.m.  The Stadium District bookstore draws a crowd during the Scrabble Rabble sessions, where folks compete with similar skill level players and pounce with triple word scores.  The Weekly Volcano doesn't know about you but we always enjoyed hanging onto the "Q," where it hangs there on our rack like some ultimate weapon of destruction, waiting for that all-enabling "U" tile to unleash its point-mongering wrath upon our opponents.  Anyway, if your job sucks or you have a strange rash, join the Scrabble Rabble and those problems will, if only for a few hours, ease back into the recesses of your mind.

4. New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber has 170 million books in print; the newest, Rose Harbor in Bloom, will be front and center at 7 p.m. when Macomber visits the Tacoma Public Library Main Branch. The book is the sequel to The Inn at Rose Harbor, which was set in the Pacific Northwest town of Cedar Cove and follows the story of Jo Marie Rose, a young widow who purchases a local bed-and-breakfast as a way to cope with the death of her husband. In Rose Harbor in Bloom, Macomber returns to Cedar Cove, specifically Rose Harbor Inn, the bed and breakfast Jo Marie purchased, and focuses on the guests' stories. If you'd like to meet one of America's favorite storytellers, then head to downtown Tacoma tonight.

5.Hailing from Chicago but circling the planet in ever-widening orbits, CAVE are known for playing with rolling funk minimalism. The band's new album, Threace, finds them inhabiting their cut-up aesthetic with tremendous ease and fewer reference points than before. Catch them at 8 p.m. with Arrington De Dionyso and Judson Claiborne at Northern in Olympia.

LINK: Wednesday, Oct. 9 arts and entertainment events in the greater Tacoma and Olympia area