Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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I’m not a violent person. I’m a flighter, not a fighter. I don’t like to be intimately involved in the slaying of anything, even vermin in our home. I’ll escort spiders and moths to the door. I tell them to find somewhere else to play. However, I did liquidate a stump near our front door a couple of summers ago that housed a wasps’ nest. When wasps sting a couple of times, you tend to lose your convictions. So I’m mystified by a tendency my brain has, and I wonder how common this tendency is...
"Summer, summer, summer, It's like a merry-go-round - Magic." -The Cars Summer is the season we residents west of the Cascades have earned. Winter is the slog. Summer is the song. The sun shines and we are better. In summer, we take the crooked path to where we're going. It's the season of youth, the season that makes us forget we'll die someday. Summer begs us to leave the house and pretend we can sing and dance well. Work might wait, but the sun can't, not on this side of the mountains....
I spent the summer of my 19th year working outside the northern Washington town of Republic on a cattle and alfalfa ranch along the Sanpoil River, a river that drains into the Columbia. It was there that the ranch owner, Stephen Konz, told me one sunny day to build a ladder, with rungs 12 inches apart. When I finished the ladder, a couple of the rungs were 12 inches apart, but other rungs were more and less than 12 inches apart. Rung uniformity matters in ladders, as it turns out. Mr. Konz was...
Kangaroo Court and Star Court would be good road names in a housing development. Here are other possibilities: Hula Loop, Hard Road, Rue Avenue, Lame Lane, Broken Dreams Boulevard, No Way, Miss Place and Osama Bin Terrace. A picture isn’t worth 1,000 words if all you do is repeat the word “the” 1,000 times. When you go to your first rodeo, take a moment to appreciate that this is your first rodeo. The good thing about eating asparagus is that when you go the bathroom afterward, you might be re...
Every couple of months, I go to the Bloodworks Northwest office in Olympia to get a vein tapped. I enjoy these visits. I get to check the “no” box to the extensive list of circumstances that can befall humans, including “Have you ever received a dura mater (or brain covering) graft?” and “Have you ever had a positive test for babesia?” Before the blood flows, you get a little medical check — an employee tests your blood pressure and the iron level in your blood, and feels your pulse to ensu...
I worked for a state representative at the Capitol in Olympia for three months during the 1988 legislative session. I sat at a desk, behind a plastic rectangle that displayed my name. I smiled when strangers came to the desk, and when those strangers left, I’d say, “Nice to meet you.” I drank coffee from my coffee cup. I wrote and typed letters, answered the phone, made copies, kept my desk orderly, minded the representative’s daily schedule and directed visitors to the bathroom. I did not lik...
If you could have four dead people of historical importance to dinner, who would you invite? The rules are they wouldn’t be dead at dinner, you can’t invite Hitler (who wants to hear “Hitler’s here!”) and they would leave by 9 so you’d have time to clean and get to bed at a proper hour. Let’s imagine our guests are William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Franz Kafka and Socrates … Joan of Arc arrives at the house first, followed by Shakespeare and Kafka, who came in an Uber. Both appear to have...
I got an email a couple of weeks ago from a Journal reader inviting me to join some people who play pingpong Wednesday nights at Little Skookum Hall Community Club. This is one of the fringe benefits of being a newspaper columnist. I went, and for one of the few times during this plague, I recognized that the activity I was engaged in, which required being indoors sharing air with maskless and hard-breathing people, was worth increasing the risk of contracting COVID-19. We’ve all had to make d...
No matter how attuned you are to the news these days, you can always find a story or two each week that stretches your sense of what’s possible in this world. Feast on these three stories: Story No. 1 The reclusive and heretofore-unknown oldest daughter of TV mom Kris Jenner and deceased super-lawyer Robert Kardashian surfaced last week living and working in the tiny Idaho Panhandle town of Sandpoint. Ethel Kardashian Jones, sister to Kourtney, Kim, Khloe and Robert Kardashian, gave an e...
When people remark about how amazing our modern technology is — sometimes after discovering something else their cellphones can do — I wonder what time in human history they’re comparing “modern” to. Is modern technology more amazing than inventions of the 1920s: television, the altimeter and liquid-fueled rockets? How about the Renaissance when the printing press, eyeglasses and the musket emerged? What about the Han Dynasty in China when paper and the blast furnace were created? How about the...
Several years ago, I often played racquetball with a fellow who would attack himself. When this fellow would make a bad shot, he’d yell something like “Nate, you idiot!” or “You’re stupid!” He’d dive for shots and run into the walls and work up a powerful fever all while criticizing his misplays. He was a good racquetball player, and he was a smart and talented person. As far as what was obvious to me, he had plenty to like about himself, but he had this voice inside that needed to berate himsel...
Was it Bruce Jenner or Caitlyn Jenner who won the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics? You can’t really be a lifelong resident of a place until you die there. Here’s a trait of some recently retired workers: They take the long route to rooms in their homes because it buys them some time before they have to figure out what to do next. It might be better to have pretension than hypertension. When did the phrase a “results-oriented person” become a workplace cliche? We overhear and we oversee...
Way back in the 20th century, those of us in Mrs. Jannsen’s 12th-grade English class at Mead High School in Spokane County had to read the novel “Fathers and Sons.” Ivan Turgenev, a Russian, wrote it, and it was published in 1862, so imagine our excitement. The book’s main character was a young man named Yevgeny Bazarov — a name I had to retrieve from the internet — but what has stuck with me is that Bazarov was a nihilist, a philosophical outlook rooted in its Latin base “nihil,” wh...
What do you remember of the news from the last week of February and the first day of March 2020? If you’re normal, not much. So let’s leave 2022 for a moment and refresh our memories. Let’s fall back into early 2020 and remember the way we were: Monday, Feb. 24, 2020: “Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, ‘Actually, let me start again.’ So it’s striking whe...
When you’re cleaning the fridge and you can’t identify a substance, toss it. If anyone complains, say you ate it. Never comment on a woman’s pregnancy unless you have indisputable confirmation that the woman is genuinely and thoroughly pregnant. Be sincere when you say “please” and “thank you,” even if you don’t mean it. Take your shoes off and put them near the door when you enter your home. You won’t have to vacuum as much. Read novels occasionally. Until you turn off your computer, assume any...
My brain summons images of people when I read or hear particular words. Maybe this happens to you too. The word “accommodate” conjures a millisecond image of Dan Shaw, former city editor for the Bellingham Herald, while he taught a journalism class I was in at Western Washington University. He taught us how to remember how to spell accommodate: “Two C’s, two M’s.” The word “primer,” in reference to a short piece of explanatory writing, summons Bettz Pitcher, a long-gone Olympian copy editor who...
The Olympics opening ceremony starts Friday at 3:30 a.m. That’s the middle of the night for most of us, including me. Still, I’m getting up to watch this one so I can see members of a particular team walk into Beijing’s Olympic stadium. I was once a sports-spectating fan. I had favorite college and pro teams. I had a favorite AAA baseball team, the Spokane Indians; a favorite boxer, Muhammad Ali; a favorite play-by-play announcer, Kevin “Achtung Baby!” Calabro of the SuperSonics; and a favorite...
Figurative language confounds children. The first time I heard “Put some elbow grease into it,” I imagined it came in a can, like 3-In-One oil. I checked the cupboard. We were out. In the playground of metaphor, few pieces of work are as bewildering as a religious work, and the religious work I’m most familiar with is the Bible, due to a lifetime of Sunday school at Presbyterian churches in Spokane. Here are some biblical stories, some questions and some apparently valuable lessons not learn...
Once upon a time, two aardvarks named Donny and Danny lived and hunted in the scrubland of their native territory. They were the best of friends, sharing their food and happiness equally. Sometimes they argued about whether ants or termites were tastier, but they always were kind to each other when they disagreed. While wandering through the scrub one evening, our main characters had become especially hungry because they couldn’t find insects to eat. Their stomachs growled as they trolled for fo...
This is the second time I’ve written the headline “The night of breaking trees” for a newspaper. The first was for a story in The Olympian about an ice storm that hit in the final week of 1996. It worked then, and after talking to Lake Kokanee-area residents Charles and Frieda Osborne last week, it works for this story in this edition of this newspaper. Sometimes 25-year-old headlines don’t age. The ill-effects of last week’s storm were multiple and freakish: Trees toppled across U.S. Highway 1...
Imagine this: You’re expecting a lot of people for dinner. They show up around 5 p.m. and assemble beneath the covering over your front porch before entering your place. Now, imagine discovering that several of them are testing positive for COVID-19 and that you’ll need to separate the ill from the well before accepting all of them into your place. I witnessed such a scene Sunday. In the late afternoon Sunday, while the sky was issuing an ice-cold rain that felt like nature was being unn...
The difference between breakfast and brunch is you can order alcohol at brunch and not be considered an alcoholic. But if you order alcohol at breakfast, people will talk. We need more people who are into governance, not politics. It’s similar to being spiritual, not religious. Here’s something wonderful: unexpected sunshine. The one thought you don’t want to forget when you’re in the middle of setting rat traps is that you’re in the middle of setting rat traps. I bet some kids who are consi...
This is a story about a gift my father gave me when I was about 5 years old. This story is as true as any memory summoned from a long-past Christmas. I’m child No. 4 in a four-child family, and when we were wee our family was the type that put Christmas presents under a Christmas tree. We lived in northwest Spokane in a house atop a steep hill where the distant field lights of Joe Albi Stadium could be seen from our living room window. When the stadium lights illuminated the night, the scene w...
Cooking doesn’t have to be a burden. It can be fun! Fun! Fun! Fun! You can never be too unmotivated or too unskilled to learn to prepare zesty and tasty meals that satisfy palates of all ages, including that grumbling Gus in your family. Me, I’m Mr. Ten Thumbs in the kitchen, but I was recently given a cookbook, “Cooking for People,” that has inspired me. The recipes in the book are easy to follow, even for the cooking challenged. Here’s a sampling of some of the recipes: Stuffed Brioche:...
Downtown Shelton resident Miguel Gutierrez unveiled his candidacy for City Council on May 17 by posting the following announcement on his campaign website (vote4miguel.org): "Dear friends. What will you do with the time we have left? I decided to be a helper instead of an internet troll. I am proud to announce that as long as there is breath in my lungs, I will dream the American Dream and fight the good fight. "I am proud to announce that I am a candidate for the office of City Council for the...
