Thirteen years ago as an outdoor enthusiast and local paramedic, I discovered a quiet oasis of towering 60-100 year old cedar trees, towering maples, and ferns the size of Volkswagen Beetles and a quiet solitude between to growing cities of Maple Valley and Covington.
Enjoying our first Fourth of July at home in years, Trav and I spent the holiday having barbecue and street fireworks with our many friends and neighbors. It was a fantastic time in which I was asked lots of questions – which I may or may not have entirely gotten around to answering.
This past weekend was a holiday for most of us, but not for a lot of door-to-door salespeople. I didn’t think I needed more magazines, dubious cleaning supplies, or bug and rat control, but these folks apparently saw my deficiencies in this area and decided to make a personal visit to help me out.
So, I visited Pride Fest last Sunday at Seattle Center.
For those of you not familiar with it, Pride Fest is Seattle’s celebration of sexuality, in all its facets. It’s a festival about acceptance of our fellow humans – whether those humans are older folks in North Face jackets, or a guy with a mohawk in a tutu.
Given its subject matter, Pride Fest is a magnetic north pole for some folks, kryptonite for others.
Well, I still don’t have a job. Technically. Although it’s sadly true that I haven’t been hired for a full-time position, my freelance business is – finally, thankfully, wonderfully – becoming another story.
Well, Independence Day is this weekend, and you might expect to read a well-researched and carefully thought out treatise on freedom and liberty in this column. Nope, not here.
The Green River Valley is under threat of flooding by the diminished capacity of the Howard Hanson Dam. Lots of work still remains to put a permanent fix in place at the dam and shore up levees along both the Green and Snoqualmie rivers. Now, it has come to light that a new threat to the Green and Snoqualmie River Valleys has emerged – taxes.
After spending last week’s column encouraging us all to shop locally, I spent the weekend getting rid of the fruits of my own shopping. Most of it was household clutter, a lot of it was books, and it ended up taking five van loads to get rid of it all. If you are in need of some truly great stuff, get to the Goodwill before it’s all sold out.
Some time ago, I was asked by a friend with whom I share a mutual interest in the history of this great country of ours, to write something about it. Both of us are particularly drawn to the early history; centered around the years leading up to and following the American Revolution and the patriots who influenced the thinking and subsequent decisions that ultimately led to the formation of the greatest experiment of self government ever devised.
Lady Gaga is arguably the biggest star in the world and over the past year she’s been interviewed by almost every major news outlet and journali
Last time in this column: My cat, Algie, went back to the vet. Again. Some more. They gave him shots. He got a little better. Then he got a lot worse. He started lying around like he was going to die. So we spent all day saying goodbye. Then we took him to the vet for the final time. And we cried. A lot.
Get ready for another “Shop Local” campaign in your town. Hopefully this one will do better than they usually do.
I’m not knocking the abilities of the Chamber of Commerce folks who are putting this together. They have a lot of successful business people who are able to attract customers, but the track record for creating artificial desires in the minds of shoppers isn’t good.
For example, take the campaign from the 80’s that encouraged us to “look for the Made in the USA label”. Celebrities such as Barbara Mandrell did TV and print ads to drive the point home. It worked for a short while, but it never became a habit. Why? American factories just couldn’t compete with imports from China, and American consumers are simply too addicted to low prices to care.
This Sunday is Father’s Day and this year I am looking at it in a whole new way.
After my dad died in 1986, Father’s Day became a non-holiday, there was no reason to celebrate it.
In the quest for success, small business owners and middle-class families deserve a level playing field. Instead, they are penalized by a Washington State tax code that is stacked against them.
The business and occupation tax requires hundreds of thousands of small business owners, even if they don’t make a penny in profit, to pay tax on gross sales of their services and products. That makes no sense.
This weekend, a new crop of high-school students will be mounting the stage, mortarboards on heads and gowns over suits and dresses.
They’ll be walking across the stage to take their diplomas.
They’ll be walking across that stage as adults, ready to take their place in society.
The Class of 2010 will be walking at a watershed moment for this country.
Previously in this column, I described how Algie, our cat, developed a mysterious demon illness last year that culminated in a week-long, sleep-deprived Marathon of Grossness. Ending up in critical care, they ran very expensive tests. Which provided very few answers. (As in, none whatsoever.)
During the last November election, a lot of attention was given to ballfields, and how few of them Maple Valley has (just one). At last night’s council meeting, we got to see three options for finally building ballfields on the south side 22-acre site. Oh, it’s a grand plan, with a couple of fields for soccer and lacrosse, two softball fields, plus five (really?) tennis courts.
More than a decade after Tim Eyman qualified his first anti-public services initiative to the ballot, it appears that voters are finally going to get the chance to vote for tax reform instead of tax cuts.
A coalition of progressive public interest groups, led by William Gates Sr., is pushing ahead with an initiative that would create an income tax on high-earners. The initiative is built around two closely related and important ideas: Making our tax system fairer for middle and low income families while simultaneously strengthening our common wealth.
Last year, our cat, Algie, became very, very ill. I had a job, and was very, very busy. This year, Al got sick again. I didn’t have a job. And it was all very, very messy. This is what happened:
We’ve been reading about the new state income tax proposal (Initiative 1098) for about a month or so, and I don’t know that either side has made a compelling case so far.