Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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Aug. 16, 2018 WAITSBURG—Present at last week’s meeting of the Waitsburg School Board were board chair Ross Hamann, vice-chair Marilyn Johnson, members Christy House and Russ Knopp, and newly-appointed member Lisa Morrow. The meeting opened with a presentation by the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Department on the possibility of the district hiring a school resource officer – a deputy who would spend most of his or her time in the district’s three classroom buildings. “Just being there for t...
WAITSBURG—Most Waitsburg High School alumni over the past couple of decades were required to take a class called “Life Management Skills” their junior year. The class met in the Home Ec lab, a long room in the middle of the building with a row of kitchen stations against the far wall. Students balanced mock checkbooks, put together hypothetical budgets, learned how to comparison-shop for groceries, and went over the ups and downs of using a credit card. Come test day, they were expected to be experts on everything from car insurance to IRAs,...
WAITSBURG – For years, summer in Waitsburg has been an excuse for residents of all ages to pump up their bike tires and two-wheel their way through the streets. But this year, Waitsburg’s youngest cycling enthusiasts are getting a little extra incentive to use pedal power: the Bicycle Rodeo is coming to town. The event, called Bikes on the Road, will be held August 16, from 9 to 11 a.m. It is sponsored by the Walla Walla County Traffic Safety Task Force Bikes on the Road will give kids of all...
WAITSBURG – At the Waitsburg School Board meeting on July 19, 2018, Chairman Ross Hamann, Vice-Chair Marilyn Johnson, and board members Russ Knopp and Christy House were all present. The Facility Supervisor’s report was enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies: Potentially thousands of bats have taken up residence in a disused chimney at the elementary school. While removing the creatures before the end of summer will likely be fatal to many of the juvenile bats, concerns about student safety have led officials from the Department of Fish and...
WAITSBURG -- Council Members KC Kuykendall, Terry Jacoy, Kevin House, Jim Romine, Kate Hockersmith and Mayor Marty Dunn were all present. The maintenance needs of the city’s fire-hydrant system were discussed. While no action was taken, it was noted that the water line would eventually need to be upsized and the hydrants replaced in order to ensure that engines don’t use up water faster than the hydrants can produce it. A payment order for work on the Main Street Bridge was approved una...
WAITSBURG -- "A-W-A-N-A! I'm gonna build my life God's way!" chanted the autotuned voices of children over Waitsburg Christian Church's loudspeakers. On July 17, a small crowd of community members listened in the pews, tapping their toes or following along with the lyrics on a projector screen. If Naomi Long gets her way, that song will blast through the church's sanctuary every Thursday night, and the crowd will be a lot bigger – and a lot younger. Long and her husband, David, are hoping to b...
WAITSBURG – After 20 years as a member of the Waitsburg School Board, Dr. Randy Pearson has stepped down, leaving a vacant seat which the district is trying to fill. The reason for his resignation? Pretty simple, he says: "I don't reside in the school district anymore, so I can't legally be on the board. Otherwise, I'd probably still be there." "It is bittersweet," he added. "We love Waitsburg, and we have a lot of friends here. I grew up here, and I raised all my kids here, and it's a bitterswe...
WAITSBURG-Last week, on a balmy Wednesday evening, area voters pressed through the propped-open doors of Waitsburg's Town Hall to meet the candidates running for four positions in local, state, and national government. The forum was sponsored by the Waitsburg Commercial Club. Nine candidates, grouped by the office they sought, were seated at folding tables along one wall as the audience settled into rows of folding chairs. Moderator Jim Davison explained the forum's format to the crowd over the...
WAITSBURG – While the Dayton city pool is closed for this summer, facilities in Waitsburg and Prescott are stepping up to meet the area’s demand for chlorinated summer fun. Both the Waitsburg pool (across Coppei Avenue from Preston Park, open Monday through Friday) and its Prescott counterpart (at 303 West 2nd Street, open every day) have begun operations for the season. The Waitsburg pool offers open swim periods from 1 to 5 in the afternoon and from 6 to 8 in the evening on the days it is open. Additionally, an adults-only lap swim time is...
WAITSBURG – It takes a lot to keep a schoolkid's attention on a sunny Friday, but Allison Bond managed that minor miracle last week at Waitsburg Elementary. In the school cafeteria, 150 five-inch saplings sat in boxes on the tiled floor as Bond showed them off to an awestruck crowd of students. They'd each get to take one home, she explained, and plant it in celebration of Arbor Day. Soon, the tiny trees would grow as tall as the one by the school's front door. They'd clean the air and p...
Hey there, everyone! I’m sorry I haven’t been updating you guys more frequently, but that’s mainly because nothing much has happened. Life is still pretty much the same – pointless craft projects, it-never-rains-but-it-pours dispensing of homework assignments, lame attempts at creative writing, and not enough sleep. I am currently in mourning for my 4.0 GPA (November 5, 2009 – December 29, 2015 – rest in peace, old buddy). I received a B in Continuing Hispanic Culture, a 300-level discussion-bas...
Hey there, everyone! Okay, so maybe that was a bit too peppy a start for the last regular edition of this column, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when the final book in a series gets all moody and broody just because the author’s sad it all has to come to an end. I’ve been thinking about how to write the piece you’re currently reading for ages. For a while, I contemplated printing my “lost first column”, which was about getting a column, but then I decided that I really needed a...
As the nurse at my last doctor’s appointment so delicately put it, my vision is down the toilet. I am, according to that infamous test with the rows of progressively smaller letters, 20/70 in my right eye and 20/40 in my left. Somehow, they manage to collaborate and produce overall vision of 20/30, which is still deep enough into the metaphorical plumbing to necessitate an appointment with an eye doctor and possibly a pair of glasses. I just got back from a trip to Long Beach. During the s...
As I am about to depart for college, I have been doing an extensive amount of research concerning what I need to bring with me, and I have found out that nobody on the internet knows anything about packing for college. But just to be safe, I’ll compare what I’ve already bought to this authoritative-looking list: •Alarm clock. Check – there’s an alarm function on my phone. •Bed linens/towels. Check and check, although I took the liberty of substituting bed flannels for the bed linens. •Ca...
I’m an avid Dear Abby reader, and I’ve always thought that I’d be good at writing something like that. The only problem seems to be that nobody wants my advice. So I’ve decided to write down everything that’s been on my mind this week, put it in a safe, unlock the safe as soon as time travel is possible, answer my own questions, and send them back to today. Here are the results of this experiment: Dear future self: I’m in the process of writing a novel. I’m almost to the exciting part, but I c...
I had glorious plans for this week which involved Bennington Lake and my little blue kayak, but due to the wildfire situation, Bennington Lake is closed to boaters lest they be unwittingly scooped up by water-carrying helicopters. But because I’m still in a lake-y state of mind, I think I’ll reminisce about the wonderful trip to Lake Pend Oreille I took a couple weeks ago. Five of us went – me, my mom, Chris, Chris’s friend Kyle, and my cousin Ariel. We traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho, in my grandp...
I am supposed to be folding the clothes right now. I’m also supposed to be running a few errands and getting ready to vacuum the carpet in my grandparents’ motorhome. I have done none of that yet. But wait – I have a good excuse! I haven’t done anything because I was doing my homework! I know what you’re thinking. “But Emma,” you are thinking, “It’s summer! You don’t have homework!” As a matter of fact, yes I do. Whitman College sent me a link to a personal and community safety course. I started...
Hey, everybody, guess what day it is! (Well, not today, necessarily. I think it might be this weekend, or it might have been last Monday, but it’s this week and this is a weekly newspaper, so just play along.) That’s right, it’s National Embrace Your Geekiness Day AND National French Fry Day! On the same day! It’s my favorite holiday for obvious reasons. Obvious Reason #1: I am a geek. Big time. Obvious Reason #2: I am a French fry connoisseur. I have an authoritative Top 10 list of the best fr...
Do you remember those commercials (I think they were for Charter) that listed an implausible sequence of events resulting from having ordinary cable TV? (Example: “When you have expensive cable bills, you feel helpless. When you feel helpless, you want to do something about it. When you want to do something about it, you take karate. When you take karate, you want to use it. When you want to use it, you become the Fist of Justice. When you become the Fist of Justice, you crash through a glass r...
I’ve always loved studying environmental science for two basic reasons. One is the large amount of impressive vocabulary you pick up and can use in everyday contexts– e.g., “That’s eutrophication for ya!” and, “I sense the formation of a positive feedback cycle here”. The second is how much of it applies to life and society in general. High school is an ecosystem, and it’s much easier to navigate when one thinks of it in terms of resource niches, apex predators, and keystone species, as opp...
There are pros and cons to computers. One pro, of course, is that you can work on multiple things at once. One con, however, is that you can work on multiple things at once. Take this seemingly simple dovetail: Working on signing up for college classes while trying to write a chapter for a “collaborative fiction project.” I started off by booting up the Internet and attempting to log into my course manager. While that was loading, I typed a few paragraphs, trying to flesh out my character withou...
I’m not sure that my subconscious knows that I’ve graduated yet. For the past two nights, I’ve had dreams about being late for school, which I still apparently need to attend. The night before that, I dreamed that my grades were lousy – not oh-heaven-help-us-it’s-an-A-minus lousy, but give-us-the-diploma-back lousy. According to the omniscient internet, dreaming about school “most often represents social concerns, insecurities or anxieties.” I have no idea what on earth that’s about. After al...
It’s June, everybody? Whoops, did I accidentally put a question mark there? Sorry. Let me try that again. It’s June, everybody! Much better, right? Although, come to think of it, maybe the question mark is appropriate, because as I write this the sky is choked with gray clouds and I still have doubts about being ready to graduate. Both of these were supposed to clear away by the end of May. It’s June, everybody? On second thought, my kitchen is encrusted with flour from the ten gazillion batches...
I am in the process of writing my co-valedictorian’s address. This process is not going as smoothly as I would have hoped. “Valedictorian” is taken from “Valedictory,” which is defined as “a farewell address.” In other words, academic stuff aside, the whole point of being a valedictorian is to deliver a speech at graduation. This fact is not helping. I know from experience that the opening line is the most crucial part of any speech. I won some very important elections at Girls’ State with biza...
As the end of my high-school career draws closer, people are asking me more and more frequently whether this column will continue once I leave for college. Unfortunately, the demanding coursework awaiting me as a freshman at Whitman will consume most of my free time, and so it will most likely be well-nigh impossible for this piece to continue in its current format. However, I have several ideas for utilizing this space in an entertaining manner well into the future, and I wanted to run them...
