It’s now been a full week since I got to watch Washington State sports history play out on a national stage. With my wife, son and daughter by my side, we watched the Seattle Seahawks easily outmatch the Denver Broncos to win the franchise’s first ever Lombardi trophy. Although I didn’t have a chance to watch a single pre-, regular- or post-season game (since we canceled cable all those years
Everybody thought I was joking when I said I was taking a business trip from Olympia to Vancouver to Yakima to Spokane to Wenatchee to Everett to Bellevue to Tacoma and back to Olympia in two days. The itinerary I had laid out with Google Maps said it was a cinch and I’m the guy who enjoys driving around this beautiful state we call home. Well, I proved to everyone
Today I saw a request for name suggestions for Washington State’s newest additions to the ferry fleet. I’ve got a dozen or so ideas that I’ll be submitting, and you can too by following the directions outlined in the news release below. Now before you start submitting things like S.S. Minnow, Ship of Fools or Taxpayer’s Folly, keep in mind that the Washington State Transportation Commission has certain requirements – such
Isaac Ingalls Stevens was the first governor of the newly-formed Washington Territory in 1853. I’ve been reading more about the significance of his life since I began diving into library books about Washington state history. In a previous post I wrote about how I visited the cemetery where our first territorial lieutenant governor, Charles Mason, is buried. He served as the acting governor of Washington Territory while Isaac Stevens was
Being cooped up in the house for days on end is enough to drive anyone mad, and throwing a four-year-old in the cage can sometimes seem just plain cruel. So needless to say, I had to get my poor wife and son out of the house before we all ended up in the newspaper the next day. Despite the intermittent weather on Saturday, we decided to visit Tumwater Historical Park
Last week, I began planning the first full episode of the Washington, Our Home, video series and I decided the creation and exploration of the Willamette Meridian would be a good first start. To begin with, as I asked in a previous blog post, I had to learn why in the world someone in the mid-1800’s would decide that a straight line north and south from Portland, Oregon, was even necessary.
Last weekend, we took a trip into Kitsap County to see my Uncle Verne, who lives at the Department of Veterans Affairs veterans home in Retsil, outside Port Orchard. The facility was built in 1910 on a 31- acre bluff overlooking Puget Sound. According to the website, “Today the Veterans Home is a state-of-the-art, non-institutional facility providing a ‘Resident Centered Care’ concept that focuses resources around the individual resident. All primary services for a resident
My alarm went off at 4:30 in the morning, and my first thought was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Even though I had gone to bed relatively early the night before, I still didn’t get much sleep since it was the night before my first real hunting trip. Fortunately, the excitement of the coming day was also enough to roust me out of bed at that ungodly hour and
It was last Sunday night when I realized that I wanted to shave my beard. I’d been sporting it for nearly a year, since my foot surgery back in November 2010, and it had become my “look.” But I was getting tired of it, and because I had decided it was time to start working out daily and lose weight, part of my inspiration would be to lose the beard
I recently had the fortune to be taken on a personal tour of the Weyerhauser logging areas north of Brady, WA. I’ve been more and more interested in hunting as of late, and a coworker of mine – an avid hunter since he was a teenager – was kind enough to take me on a scouting trip to the area where he hunts every year. Being completely unfamiliar with anything