Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley
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I’m getting to be a “short-timer” – At least that’s what my grandmother says. That means, were I to use both my hands and my toes, I could count the school days I have left. That number’s 19 as of Monday – Nineteen days of high school remain! Nineteen mornings of dragging myself out of bed With the fog of sleep still in my brain. Eighteen hurried cold-cereal breakfasts And one student parking-lot brunch Eighteen ‘leventh-hour dashes to reach school on time – ‘Cuz on the last day, what’s the rus...
As graduation draws near, the term “future” gets bandied about more and more, and I increasingly find myself wondering what life will hold for me a couple decades down the road. The following scenario, while highly improbable, is ideal: Emma is a high-powered attorney and bestselling author who lives in a nice-but-still-easily-cleanable home in the suburbs of a larger city. She owns three corgis – Scout, Mimi, and Benedict – and is married to a gentle man with a sparkling intellect and a Natio...
Roughly a week from now, your mailbox will start to fill up with graduation announcements from the high-school seniors in your life, which means that as you read this, some senior somewhere is busy licking envelopes and hunting down addresses. Depending on how much parental input is offered during the guest list formulation process, preparing invitations for mailing can be fairly time-consuming. The following is a list of tips that I wrote up for my little brother on this topic. I’ve seen his r...
It’s human nature to want to leave a legacy of some sort after spending any extended period of time in a given place. For example, after bidding adieu to my beloved Knowledge Bowl in March, I did so knowing that my team and I were responsible for two new additions to the state rules – the one about the audience keeping well away from the teams (aka the Onion Breath Amendment of 2014), and the one that says that if the question asks for a last name, a first name is offered, and the first name is...
It’s eight o’clock in the morning. The commons area is all but empty, but no wonder – it’s the first day of school after spring break, and nobody is exactly rushing back. The floors are clean, almost impossibly so. They will be their usual rubber-scuffed and mud-splattered selves in 20 minutes, but for now they shine in the April sun. There is a pile of cloth crumpled on a table near the far end of the room. Somebody notices – a staffer, perhaps, or a student struck by its incongruity with its...
I was recently informed that I am something called a “co-valedictorian.” This confuses me on multiple levels. Take the word itself. That’s seven syllables, my friends. SEVEN. It’s like one of those Knowledge Bowl questions where they give you a complicated Latin word and you’re supposed to decipher it based on your knowledge of smaller Latin words. So here goes nothing: Co = Company. Valid = Authentic and useable, as with a coupon or passport. Ick = An interjection expressing disgust Tori = A...
Every now and then, this column will feature instructions for an activity I find interesting. Right now, I’m particularly interested in counted cross stitch, which is a simple, relaxing form of embroidery that results in a satisfying thunk noise as the stitch tightens against the taut fabric. So I thought I’d include some instructions on how to get started on your own sampler. But then I remembered that there is more than one way to have fun with cross-stitch. For example, you might be a cat...
Happy Daylight Saving Time, everybody! Okay, fine, so maybe “Happy” should be in quotes. Or perhaps eliminated altogether. Daylight Saving Time, everybody! Yessiree, it’s that time of year when we cash in our sleep, our sanity, and our statistical probability of avoiding a car accident for 180 extra hours of pure, gushing sunlight per annum. I understand that there is currently a bill in the state legislature concerning dropping the concept of daylight saving altogether. I expect it to pass...
Now that the Waitsburg Knowledge Bowl team knows that it’s state-bound, we’ve started planning like crazy for our trip to Seattle. We have an official t-shirt design mocked up, we’re picking places to visit for when we go into town, the hotel rooms are reserved, and the only question is whether to have dinner at The Crab Pot or Pike Street Fish Fry. In the meantime, we’ve been practicing up on our trivia. The Times writes a nice article every year about the local Knowledge Bowl teams, and the...
And now, presenting some valuable insight into the human psyche: The Nine Steps of the Grieving Process! Step One: Denial. “Wait. So let me hear that again. An elite prep school who edged us out by a few points last year is coming to compete with us at Knowledge Bowl Regionals because they are the only team of their size in their area. And they’re not bringing their berth with them? And at the same time, one of our two berths is getting taken away? So only one team out of four gets to go to Sta...
The quadrant of my brain responsible for generating column inspiration has decided to take a vacation over this three-day weekend, so I'm forced to resort to Emergency Writing Idea Plan 64B: pretending that all of you are high schoolers and then offering advice on a topic relevant to this group. (Just go with it.) One of the "fun" things about one's senior year is gathering letters of recommendation from teachers. This is easier at Waitsburg than at larger schools because most of the teachers...
I really do hate to use this column for promotional purposes, but I’d like to take this opportunity to put in a plug for an upcoming event. If you’ve read my column for a while, you know that I don’t do this for most “upcoming events.” But the following upcoming event is special. It helps to support local music. And to keep an important piece of American folk culture alive. And to teach adorable little kids how to play banjos twice their size. And to give cranky, rebellious teenagers the ability...
I got a bit of a bonus on my last case. For a minute, I fantasized about relocating to a part of town where one didn’t have to look both ways before stepping onto the sidewalk, then about hiring an assistant to help out with my workload. Then I realized that what I’d thought were two zeroes was actually the sorriest excuse for an eight I’ve ever laid eyes on. From now on, I’m not accepting doctors as new clients. Perhaps I should’ve hired an archaeologist to figure out whether there’s a...
“So, Mom,” I said. “Yeah?” “So here we are. We’re strolling down the street in Leavenworth, in America, looking at German buildings. We’re eating gelato, the Italian equivalent of ice cream. I’m carrying the set of Russian dolls that I just bought, plus a hair clip and some candles from an Asian boutique. You’ve got a sack of stuff from a fair-trade shop that carries products from Africa and South America, and you’re thinking about whether to let Chris buy that sword from the Australian impo...
Inspiration for this column is a bit like wind power. When the wind blows, you get power. When the wind blows too hard, you can’t use all the power. And when the wind isn’t blowing, you’re in a considerable pickle, as there’s no way to save the surplus power from the days the wind blows too hard. On relatively uneventful weeks (like this one), you’re sometimes reduced to blowing really, really hard in the general direction of your metaphorical wind turbines, and possibly enlisting a few frien...
Every once in a while some adult in my family will tell a hilarious joke about my being able to pay my way through college. I laugh. They look confused. And I find out that it wasn’t supposed to be a joke in the first place. As far as I can tell, paying one’s own way through college is all but impossible nowadays. Depending on which way you lean politically, this is either the inevitable result of Socialist-style financial aid distribution or a conspiracy of the wealthy establishment to rem...
It’s been one of those days. After wasting two cups of good pecans on a batch of gritty pralines, I discovered that one of my college applications is missing some components – in other words, that it is still bound and determined to kill me with a stress-induced apoplexy. It’s days like these, remarkably, when I make the most progress on my recreational writing projects. Anyone who has ever had more than two undertakings go sour within forty-five minutes of each other can appreciate the appea...
I sat in the living room thumbing through a seed catalog. I contemplated ripping out the order form and sending for a few choice varieties of tomato when I remembered that I would be heading off for college right before they were in season. The floor was littered with shreds of wrapping paper. A brother and a couple assorted cousins were sprawled on the floor and furniture. A paused frame from the credits of a Christmas movie flickered on a TV screen. It was getting warm, and I was getting...
WAITSBURG - Waitsburg High School's Homecoming kicked off this week, and the student body is already getting into the spirit. On Monday, nearly the entire school was decked out in faux mustaches for the "Mustache Monday" dress-up event. At an assembly featuring a best-mustache contest and a relay race, ASB officers entertained the students with corny jokes from Laffy-Taffy wrappers, then threw the candies to the crowd. But Monday was a mere warm-up compared to the other fun, offbeat activities p... Full story
WAITSBURG -- ASB officers chose an unusual way to welcome fellow students to the new school year. At a morning assembly on the first day of classes, the song "Be True to Your School" blasted over the auditorium's loudspeakers. ASB President Owen Lanning busted moves in a vintage letterman's jacket, and the vice-president, secretary, and treasurer performed a synchronized backup routine with pom-poms. The students in the audience laughed, perhaps caught off guard by the occasionally silly moves t... Full story
WAITSBURG - "There were men from sixty different countries. They were all in business suits, and I'm just walking around in my boots, and I'm like, 'I don't belong here.'" In some ways, Waitsburg High School senior Mikala DeRuwe had a good reason to feel out of context. She, WHS graduate Kimmie Hamann, and WHS FFA advisor Nicole Abel were about to give a presentation before global leaders in the agriculture industry. The venue would be the sumptuous Grand Ballroom at San Francisco's Westin St....
WAITSBURG - To the average person, the spinning wheel is an obscure relic, relegated to glass-fronted museum cabinets and renditions of "Sleeping Beauty". To Waitsburg native Ronda Bell, however, it's much more than that. Bell has been spinning wool for nearly 18 years now. "Until you do it, you don't understand," she said as she described the "peaceful feeling" of pressing a spinning wheels treadle and listening to the mechanism make a gentle thunk noise as the wooden wheel rotates. Her first...
WAITSBURG - Picture a tent city of 10,000 inhabitants. People from all walks of life set up camp en masse, eating and showering in hastily erected temporary facilities, crowding into huge evening concerts that shake the ground long into the night. This isn't Woodstock. This is the Creation Festival. And eight young members of Waitsburg's Christian Youth Group were there. The event, which took place at the Benton County Fairgrounds in Kennewick, began July 30 and ended August 2. "Creation... Full story
There's a part of me that finds a certain measure of comfort in consistency. It enjoys falling back into the same familiar patterns, doing the same things in the same way I've always done them. That part of me hasn't had a very good week. Case in point - this column. I'm typing it on a Windows 7 computer running Windows 8 software while some fancy internet modem blinks up a storm on the shelf next to me. Just a week ago today, Word and the computer it ran on were the XP version, and the dial-up...
PRESCOTT - "Being out of balance - everyone has their own version of what that is," Melissa Lee told the group that gathered last week at Prescott's Lions Hall. "But they're usually uncomfortable." Lee, owner of Walla Walla based Melissa Lee Acupuncture, gave a presentation and workshop on "The Science of Acupuncture and Eastern Medicine" in Prescott last Monday night. The free event began with a brief presentation on acupuncture, its history, and its benefits. Acupuncture, Lee said, was...
