The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

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 Mo...

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 sce...

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...

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 k...

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,...

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 K...

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 e...

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 ca...

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 place...

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...

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:...

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...

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 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 ca...

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 consi...

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...

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, tha...

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...

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 t...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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 p...

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."...