Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Halloween hopefuls have been dreading this since March when memes began to surface on the internet message boards regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was determined: put the mask on now to save Halloween. Skeptics were present in the comment sections of SubReddit pages, insisting that there would be no Halloween without a safe and efficient vaccine. Well, here we are six months later. #QuarantineHalloween approaches as Walla Walla County rests in Phase 2 of Gov. Inslee's Safe Start Plan....
With eight grandsons and nine great-grandkids, Norma Jo Shay has more than earned the title of Great Grandma. For many years she's been the mandolin strumming frontwoman of the band Grandma & the Boys and is affectionately known in all the local bluegrass jams. Grandma Jo is a friend to many Waitsburgers. She shares old songs and fresh fish, the winningest combination. She's been a tournament toxophilite, a skilled hunter with bow and arrow, rifle, or fishing rod in her illustrious past. The...
WALLA WALLA-The 2020 ArtWalla grant season is open for applications until November 16. Arts Education Grants include the Arts Build Community (ABC) Grant for organizations creating arts programming for the community and the Dan Dunn Memorial Grant for individual artists of any discipline. "These introductory grants are perfect for young or emerging artists and budding organizations," said ArtWalla board member Natalie Lyons-Cohen. With the mission of enriching local artistic vitality and...
WORLD WIDE WEB—In the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, director Jeff Orlowski (Chasing Ice, and Chasing Coral) posits that the massive data mining force that is social media is creating more than a few problems. The case is presented by some of the very creators of the social mediascape as we know it today who personally attest to using human psychology to imbed addictive qualities right into the industry. In some instances, the idea of social media’s problematic nature is very con...
WALLA WALLA-Walla Walla native, Brandon Hallsted, wears many hats. By day he is an entrepreneur who owns Connor's Flooring and Design. As past president and current board member for ArtWalla, he's an effective leader. He has spent the last 22 years as a husband to his beloved wife, Mandy. And, this month, Hallsted dons the Combine Art Collective featured artist hat. Beginning his art years ago with sketches, pastels, and painting, Hallsted pursued technical skills that garnered him a bachelor's...
It isn’t surprising in the least that Adobe has chosen to forgo its annual Adobe MAX event in person and take the whole experience online. The novel coronavirus has made virtually everything...virtual to round out 2020. What’s exciting and surprising is the fact that they’ve made the entire event free for all. (A full conference pass was $1,295 in 2019, not including travel and hotel accommodations.) MAX is Adobe’s showcase of talent and technology, including keynote sessions, labs, musical perf...
Books are magical treasure troves of knowledge and art. Academics love books. It makes sense that places of study such as colleges and universities would house libraries of rare collections. The University of Washington's Bhutan book, for example, is a massive seven-foot by five-foot behemoth. This thing weighs 133 pounds and took an entire 24 hours to print. As a former Guinness Book of World's Records holder, Bhutan, at its mammoth scale, offers landscapes as big as windows and life-size...
Woke, Project Power, and Dora the Explorer: Lost City of Gold Woke [TVMA] Hulu Keef is an African-American cartoonist on the verge of mainstream success when an unexpected incident changes his life. The more Keef confronts his revelations, the more he puts his career’s success in jeopardy. Keef, the cartoonist, and his pen draw more than conclusions. Episodes are about a half-hour in length and meet at the intersection of social awareness and comedy. Dora the Explorer & the Lost City of Gold [PG...
WORLD WIDE WEB-By now, you might've seen a certain viral video floating around the web. Or perhaps not, it's a big internet world out there. The Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company posted a video to their Instagram feed of grilled sunflowers. By the end of this quick tutorial style video, the sunflower is taken in hand and eaten like corn on the cob. Sunflower seeds are a popular snack, sure, but this isn't that. The edible part is the head. It broke my brain a little. The video says to pick a...
WORLD WIDE WEB—It’s not nearly as fun as getting out the rod and heading down to the lake, returning hours later with a cooler full of fresh fish. It’s quite the opposite. Phishing is the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers. To appear legitimate, scammers will add counterfit logos to the top of their emails sent from similar-sounding, but not-q...
WALLA WALLA—I first learned of “Gross Out” in Seattle. My roommate Jeff, a produce guy to elite Seattle restaurant owners, had sous vide another delectable cut of meat. He was always in the kitchen, cooking up some chef-level deliciousness. I wondered aloud how he was getting these amazing meat deals in a city so expensive, and he described to me a magical place where perishable and nonperishable foods alike, alongside plants and some truly random housewares, were all for sale at reaso...
Local artists Wayne Chabre and Jeanne McMenemy create special show for the occasion WALLA WALLA-Combine art collective is celebrating its one-year anniversary with featured artists Wayne Chabre, sculptor, and Jeanne McMenemy, owner of Calligraphica. Though there will be no reception, a showing of the artist's work will be available for viewing beginning Thursday, September 3 at the gallery's regular business hours. Wayne Chabre, born in Walla Walla, graduated with a B.A. in Art from Gonzaga...
WALLA WALLA-Record Store Day (RSD) comes around just once a year. This past Saturday, August 29, Hot Poop celebrated the thirteenth annual event with a somewhat demure version of its usual festivities. Record store day is all about getting music lovers inside brick and mortar record stores, connecting listeners with the establishments that keep music and musicians alive. To participate, store owners sign contracts attesting that they will not sell any of the select RSD merchandise online for at...
Gardening is inherently humbling. Perhaps this is because a gardener is an architect and a janitor, literally in the dirt with earwigs and ants crawling alongside as one attempts to render a masterpiece. Anytime I invite someone into my garden, I lead with a disclaimer. "Mistakes have been made," I say, "good plants have died here." Most recently, we said goodbye to a tomato plant. It's fallen over three times now. The fruits that have come off it tend to have rotten spots and represent an...
WALLA WALLA-Have you ever considered the way location affects recreational activities and sports? Clearly, it stands to reason that living on a snowy mountain would invite more skiing and snowboarding than, say, outdoor beach volleyball, but there are some regional differences that are a bit more subtle. Being born and raised in Tennessee, I grew up learning about bluegrass (turf or lawn), which is a big deal when the grass is bluer on the other side of the fence (Kentucky), as well as...
STREAMING—Though it would make a great band name, Future Man and The Umbrella Academy are two different television series now at your streaming fingertips. The two shows tackle time travel and its ramifications in a way that is absorbing. Part of the richness in the quality of these shows is the fastidious attention to detail both in sets and costume design. Their characters are icing on the cake. Netflix’s Umbrella Academy follows a very peculiar event on one particular day in 1989 when 43 inf...
Not all shortcuts are created equal. One should probably be wary of, for instance, construction shortcuts. I’m no expert, but my guess is creating long-lasting, safe buildings is not the ideal time to start cutting corners. Technology shortcuts, however, can be lifesavers. One of the more generalized tech shortcuts might even fall under the term “life hacks” and applies to any device. For example, it’s a good idea to avoid saving files directly to a device’s hard drive. That way, you never rea...
Natsiree Puttavon isn't "put upon" by any means. Most who've met her during one of her gallery talks, might not ever imagine her mood as anything less than merry and light. As a docent who explains the finer details of fine art, her disposition is serene. Yet, bubbling under the surface is a bit of anguish and sorrow as Puttavon faces down the daily grief. If you're someone who has experienced loss, you know. And if you haven't, know that you will at some point, loss and grief are inevitable. Ha...
Harvesting carrots took longer than I expected as a first-time grower, even when it says "easy to pull" right on the seed packet! You pull up the root vegetable to find it inundated with dirt and, well, roots. Far from the clean, peeled, consistently shaped and sized carrots you see bagged and ready at the grocery store or produce market. It occurs to me now that all the carrots I've been buying have been glamorized. Even more plentiful than the orange (or purple or white) "meat" is the carrot...
Greetings from the garden! Salutations from the places 'twixt the thickets where the deep-rooted weeds grow. I've been busy. The store-bought tomato and pepper "starts" we sowed in May started up alright, and they took off. Though current harvest totals are low, jalapeno, anaheim, lunchbox, banana, and red bell peppers are swelling. There are a fair few baby peppers, yes, but there are even more flowers. More are coming. Pretty soon we'll be back in that special time when you've got to lock...
When I moved to Walla Walla just over two years ago, I knew little of wine. Family and friends assured me that would change. "Next thing you know, you'll have a cellar going," they said. Sure. At the time, I had an art major's experience with the everyday chardonnays and merlots that accompany gallery openings, most of which can be described as brassy and abrasive. Beyond that, I once tasted what I still consider to be the greatest wine ever, a 2000 Leonetti merlot aged fifteen years. Perfectly...
OUTSIDE-It's a tale as old as time: a spherical projectile thrust over a net and into the opposition's path is met and volleyed off at an angle. It's ping pong on a table, it's tennis (or pickleball, I guess) on a court, it's volleyball in the sand, it's Pong on a video game, but it is arguably best as badminton. Badminton takes a familiar concept and changes the pace of play with suspended animation achievable thanks to the aerodynamic quality of its shuttlecock, or birdie. Gameplay can be...
WAITSBURG-It happens often enough, scrolling through one's timeline to find a friend or acquaintance posting about their accounts having been hacked, but has it ever happened to you? Once in 2005 my eBay account was hacked into and subsequent attempts were made to use my sixteen-digit debit card combination at a few gas stations in Florida. Ah, but the joke was on the aspiring thieves. There was no money in that account. No nefarious gasoline expenditures for you! The fraudulent charges were...
IN THE WEEDS-Here it is, just after Mother's Day weekend, planting time. We Washingtonians are pretty much guaranteed a frost-free growth season from here on in. (Not so much for friends at higher elevations and/or in Colorado.) It seems as though the garden goes from an idea to a plan to behind schedule practically overnight. Those plants started indoors can finally spread their roots in the garden beds or pots previously prepared for them. Working with plant starts is incredibly satisfying bec...
THE DIRT-Gardening is a great way to mitigate that lingering hopelessness associated with these unpredictable, and socially distanced times we face. Here's a little patch of dirt you can control, when so much else is out of hand. And it's good exercise. Plus, food and flowers! Waitsburg resident, Susan Tarver, reached out to share some of her garden progress. Last year Tarver had great luck with frost tolerant beets and radishes, so she planted more just before the snow. Those little seeds...
