Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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By the time you read this, I’ll be back in South Bend, Indiana. The temperature will be in the seventies. So will the humidity. I will be fanning myself with my new lease agreement and yearning for the three-digit temperatures of home, which at least had the courtesy to be a dry heat. My apartment things will come out of storage, smelling like the inside of a plastic bag. I’ll shake them out and dust them off and put them in their old places. I’ll buy a couple of air fresheners, so the entire ap...
As the summer of 2020 winds down, a generation of students casts wary eyes upon the dawn of a new school year. With it will come many familiar bugaboos—homework, early mornings, regular bedtimes —as well as any number of new challenges related to the present pandemic. More specifically, for many students from the sixth grade on up, at least some of the new school year will take place online. (And when I say “sixth grade on up,” I mean all the way on up – Whitman is moving wholly online th...
Fair warning: I’m not going to be very funny this week. I’ll try, as appropriate, to give you a giggle or two, but there’re certain things you can’t and shouldn’t make a joke out of. I’m really sorry, but I can’t think of anything else to write – I’m having a hard time thinking of anything else, period. (Believe me, if I could, I would.) A relative is sick. It might be COVID. I’ll go ahead and answer some of your questions right now: Circumstances are such that I’m not worried about my own...
So, you folks remember that writing contest thing at the law school I entered a couple months ago? Against all odds, I did well enough that I’ve got a new writing gig—Staff Editor at the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation. Don’t be too impressed. First of all, when I say against all odds, I mean against all odds. Really. I cried for about an hour straight after I turned in my finished product, finally calming myself down with the thought that my essay was bad enough to add some much-needed comic...
So, you might ask, what have I been doing these past four weeks besides trying and failing to turn a two-day trip to South Bend into an unauthorized Indiana Jones sequel? Nothing earth-shattering, I’m afraid. Some crochet, a few tentative excursions into town, an eye appointment, a decent amount of creative writing, and a lot of reading (mainly court filings). I started a remote job a couple weeks ago and am having way too much fun with it, but I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to tell you a...
Any adventurer will, at one point or another in their career, find themselves turning to philosophy. On some precarious mountain peak or vast barren plane or beat-up dorm mattress, the great mysteries of the human experience beset such people like roving predators. “Why,” fretted our own intrepid adventurer, “did the airline reschedule our flight to last for fifteen hours, including two four-hour layovers? And that with an hour’s drive after we land! One would have thought that the scarcit...
Had the Curse of the Lost Security Deposit not loomed in the temporal distance, our intrepid adventurer might well have ceased her quest for the Lost Treasure of Apartment 1B rather than brave the belly of the Ford Fusion. Marked as sacred by the Ground Transportation Gods, it was taboo to cause it any injury. But the Fusion shared no such concern for the welfare of its riders, and the labyrinthine streets of South Bend, Indiana, were no willing ally to our adventurer and her mother. "Turn the...
(We last left our intrepid adventurer and her mother in the plague-stricken wastes of SeaTac International Airport, where nobody could be bothered to wear a mask despite being crammed like sardines into the concourse-and-a-half that was actually open. However, given that mask policy has become a hot-button political issue, our intrepid adventurer will use her lightning-quick reflexes to avoid this topic until later in this serial, where she will be stuck in consecutive four-hour layovers and...
I am convinced that about half the stuff on the Internet these days is lists of things to do in quarantine. Fifteen recipes to try, twenty home-repair projects you can do in a day, the one hundred and thirty plants you absolutely need to squeeze into your yard while you have the free time to plant them. I'm sure you've read at least a couple. As a journalist, I will let you in on a secret about these lists: they are found at the very bottom of the idea barrel. Sure, there are some...
Slightly less than a year ago, a past version of me was asleep in my bedroom. A blue graduation gown was hanging in the shower in the hope that the wrinkles would disappear before I had to wear it in public. A matching cap, having been passed between a dozen or so relatives kind enough to feign admiration for the crocheted decorations on the top, perched atop an arm of the living-room sofa. There was cake in the fridge. Chocolate. Well, I'd tried to do chocolate, but I put too much coffee in...
Finals are over. I'm done. I'd say I'm "finally" done, but that just feels like a bad pun even though I didn't intend it as one and-ugh. Forget it. Finals are over. If you can't tell from that car crash of an opening paragraph, I'm still a bit burnt out from last week's academic shenanigans. To be sure, my mental acuity is improving-I can more or less carry on a conversation now and I've stopped drooling on my shirt-but it's going to take me a bit to get back to normal. And with my luck, by the...
Don't do crimes! At the time of this writing, I've finished one three-hour nightmare of a final and have three more such finals in my future. By the time you read this, I'll be done with three and have one left to finish. (And if anybody needs me for anything over the weekend, ask someone else. I'll be asleep.) Seeing as it's getting so close to crunch time, I figured this week's unsolicited advice would do double-duty as a review session. That's right, folks: it's time for some unsolicited...
Your new hobby-writing! Finals are very nearly upon me, and I find it increasingly hard to talk or think about anything else. But given that you folks have enough stress in your lives at the moment, I figured I'd expand last week's unsolicited-gardening-advice column into a three-part series of unsolicited-advice pieces for those looking to try something new during quarantine. Did anybody ask for it? No. That's the whole point. This week's topic is writing. I think it's fair to say that most of...
Last week's Times ran a couple articles about gardening. As offering unsolicited advice is one of my favorite pastimes-and as I'm sure you're not interested in another week's worth of secondhand finals stress-I figured I'd share a couple horticultural tips of my own. (As for my qualifications, I do have some green stuff coming up in this year's garden, and barely half of it's weeds!) Yes, seeds are cheaper than plants. Yes, there's usually more variety in the seed-packet display than there is...
I've been home for just over a month now-and I mean that quite literally. Our family picked a "designated extrovert" to do all the errands fairly early on, and those of you who know me know that my extrovert qualifications come up short. So with the exception of one trip to get coffee back when Ten Ton could still offer sit-down service, my house is the only building I've been in since I got back from Seattle. I'm still adjusting-not so much to being stuck at home as to being home in the first...
My household is extremely lucky in that it hasn’t felt much of an economic impact from this whole mess. My mom is teleworking overtime, my brother’s job at a ski shop wasn’t going to be netting him very many hours in April under the best of circumstances, and I’m still an unemployed bum. But I know that many workers—indeed, industries—haven’t been as fortunate. To my readers who have taken an economic hit from COVID-19, know that you are in my thoughts and prayers, and please don’t hesitate to g...
Some wannabe philosopher on the internet – the quarantine seems to be bringing them out of the woodwork in droves – recently commented that all this isolation is forcing people to face their true selves and some folks aren’t handling the introduction very well. I’d beg to differ. In the nearly three weeks I’ve spent hunkered down, the only thing I’ve learned about myself is that my bangs don’t fluff up overnight if I brush them out before bed. Granted, I was a fairly solitary person before...
You're stuck with me for a bit longer, I'm afraid – as of last Wednesday, in-person classes at Notre Dame Law School are cancelled for the rest of the school year. I should probably finish unpacking my suitcase. My mom's birthday was on Sunday. Not being able to leave the house to buy her an expensive present, even on the spurious assumption that I could afford an expensive present in the first place, I did the next best thing and made her a cake shaped like an expensive present. One batch of f...
It didn't take me very long to pack. I hadn't brought that many clothes – a few tops, four pairs of pants, and my prized slate-gray skirtsuit – and I'd more or less been living out of my suitcase anyway. I'd been in Waitsburg for five days catching up with my family and going over my class notes, not really enough time to justify moving anything into my closet. Normally, I wouldn't have gone home at all. Plane tickets from South Bend, Indiana, to Pasco aren't cheap. Perhaps more crucially, I l...
Present at last week’s meeting of the Waitsburg City Council were members Terry Jacoy, Kevin House, Jim Romine, and Kate Hockersmith, along with Mayor Marty Dunn. Basin Disposal, Inc., which contracts with the city to provide garbage pickup services, will be increasing its rates starting Jan. 19. Once the city’s administrative costs – which cover the state’s refuse tax, among other things – are factored in, the typical monthly garbage bill will rise to $21.75. Sheriff John Turner provided the co...
Oct. 17, 2018 Present at last week’s meeting of the Waitsburg City Council were Mayor Marty Dunn and Council members K.C. Kuykendall, Terry Jacoy, Kevin House and Kate Hockersmith – as well as student representative Leena Baker, who has returned to the Council for another year of service. The meeting began with a presentation by a representative of the Walla Walla County Department of Community Health concerning a recently released report on the department’s spending in areas related to affor...
WAITSBURG—Present at last week’s meeting of the Waitsburg School Board were Chairman Ross Hamann and members Christy House and Lisa Morrow. Member Russ Knopp, while not onsite, attended remotely with help from a video-chat app. The Board heard presentations from two Waitsburg High School FFA officers who discussed their chapter’s success at the local fairs. Thirteen members earned a total of over $20,000 from their projects this year, as well as earning the highest showmanship accolades at bo...
WALLA WALLA-"We are decorating Sunday," said the post on the Waitsburg FFA's Facebook page. "Please meet [at] 10 a.m. Bring extra supplies such as zip ties, wire, or side cutters if you have them." The accompanying picture showed pink letters on a black background: "I CAN'T KEEP CALM IT'S FAIR WEEK." The reference was to the upcoming 152nd Walla Walla Fair and Frontier Days. On paper, the event lasts a bit less than a week, kicking off this Wednesday and ending on Sunday. But as far as...
WAITSBURG—The Waitsburg School Board has decided to postpone its decision on whether to keep a life-skills class as a graduation requirement until the community has had more time to offer input. Nancy Bickelhaupt, who has taught the Life Management Skills course at Waitsburg High School since its inception, was in attendance at last Thursday’s board meeting. She spoke passionately in favor of keeping the requirement. She noted that the course was made mandatory after it had been offered for only a year, and that the decision had been sup...
WAITSBURG-After serving for nine years, Waitsburg School Board member Marilyn Johnson has handed in her resignation. While Johnson and new board member Lisa Morrow exchanged a few jokes about Johnson resigning as soon as Morrow was hired, correlation doesn't equal causation in this case, as Johnson had been planning to retire for some time. "I'd like to thank you for your service to the district for the past nine years," said chairman Ross Hamann. "It's been a real pleasure having you on the...
