It has been a whole year since I moved. Leaving my Marysville home of 49 years, I moved 4.2 miles southeasterly into a Lake Stevens zip code in a move toward full retirement and curtailed landscape labor. At one time or another, two real estate agents had been involved, each presenting homes that offered different benefits.
We were short on fruit and veggies so I went shopping at one of my favorite windows on the world, WINCO. It’s a place where no race or ethnic group is a majority so we shoppers were a happy mix of minorities.
It seems that when some processes get started there’s no stopping them. It’s not that they‘re unstoppable. Rather, we don’t muster up the gumption to pull their plugs. Crab traps for instance: not crab-rings or the fold-up kind, but rigid traps that lure crabs in to the bait but don’t let them out again.
Seeds of Socialism are being sowed in every pre-school and kindergarten in Snohomish County. You find them reflected in children’s progress reports as, “Has learned to share toys.” Kids who carry that attitude through life might even fall for radical ideas like sharing a medical system. Lucky for conservatives that not every child goes to kindergarten.
As your moms and dads know all too well, each generation thinks up ways to break loose and invents styles and behaviors to artfully annoy parents. I know because I’ve been there and done that. And then you try the hyper-private thing. A parent asks, “Where are you going?”
Turn south off Highway 528 at the Nazarene Church. Drive south toward Soper Hill. Tune your car radio to any AM station and what do you hear? Static! Whole symphonies of static.
An odd thing happened in Iowa — or rather, it didn’t happen. You’d think that intellectual triumphs like space exploration and gene splicing would show that we’ve become better thinkers but just the opposite has taken place. If the Iowa primary reflected the nation’s quality of thinking, our mental processes definitely need some work.
The trains are coming! The trains are coming!
Marysville’s issue with increasing rail traffic is here to stay in spite of all the ink that’s been spilled over BNSF’s high-handed intention to slice Marysville in half with a chain saw of coal cars. From a local perspective it just isn’t fair but from the BNSF perspective, our perspective doesn’t count for much. BNSF has the law on its side.
A new charge showed up on my bank statement. I hadn’t done anything differently, I deposit money, write a few checks. So what had changed that warranted a $4.95 charge? Actually, nothing had changed except for the bank deciding that some small service would no longer be free. Okay, that’s fair, but only if one uses that service. I don’t.
Anyone looking closely saw actual tears forming in Governor Gregoire’s eyes when she announced a menu of cuts equal to our state’s budget shortfall. Anyone who criticizes that lady’s priorities ought to be sentenced to the cruel and inhuman punishment of taking over her job.
Unless you’ve been there, it’s impossible to come close to envisioning anything about Turkey. Any child’s first contact with Turkey is the edible fowl of the same name. Call someone a turkey and he’s labeled as dumb or unknowing. Turkey-ness means stupidly comic. Gobble-gobble.
Judging from recent voting patterns, clever propaganda blitzes convince people to believe just about anything. Poor people have been convinced it’s in their interests to award tax breaks to the super-rich. Workers with no pension plans are conned into voting against Social Security. What a strange world.
Before every election, strips of land like the one between the BNSF tracks and Old Highway 99 are thoroughly decorated with signs. It’s a mess that must cause members of Marysville’s Arts Commission to tear their hair. Either Marysville’s City Code is a little murky on the posting of political signs or the city hasn’t found it practical to enforce or strengthen it. Whatever, the result amounts to a civic eyesore.
