My friend Jim picked me up for lunch at 11:30 am. We drove to the North Proctor area in Tacoma. We parked directly across the street in what appeared to be the only available parking spot. This was well before noon on a Friday morning in January. We walked across the street and entered the […]
Breaking Away – Life Free of Cable
We kept talking about it . . . a friend kept suggesting it . . . we kept paying out good money every month for old movies and PBS. Finally, for Christmas our daughter gave my wife a Kindle and paid for a year’s subscription to Amazon Prime. At the same time, our daughter-in-law gave […]
Foldscopes: Every Picture Tells a Story
This is the third article featuring Richard Dorsett’s trip to Asia to distribute Foldscopes, the fully functional microscope, which users construct by origami principles. The Rotary Club of Tacoma #8 funded the Foldscopes for adventurer and hiking and biking enthusiast Richard Dorsett: Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which […]
Beef Stroganoff? Prime Rib Gravy!
In my article about Ponders Corner (https://thesubtimes.com/2017/12/06/ponders-corner/) I mentioned buying a can of Beef Stroganoff from a small grocery store a couple hundred yards away from my parents’ motel when I was a teenager. All I had to do was boil up some noodles and open the can and add a little butter in a […]
En Garde – Fencing for Fun, Exercise and Knowledge
In the seventh grade at Hudtloff Junior High School I signed up for an evening course in fencing. I had always loved stories of The Three Musketeers, pirates and duels of honor. I thought fencing would be fun. No one told me that it was a lot of work. All you need to start with […]
A Family’s Defining Moment
Sometimes a moment can go on for hours and on rare occurrences that’s not quite enough. My parents owned La Casa Motel (Spanish for home) in Ponders Corner. We lived there and we worked there. In a moment of teenage angst I once told my mother, “We don’t have a home. We have a motel.” […]
25th Anniversary of the Asarco Smokestack Demolition
“The ASARCO plant site had nearly 100 years of history, beginning as the Ryan Smelter, a lead-refining company built by investor Dennis Ryan in 1888. Two years later it became the Tacoma Smelting and Refining Company, under the ownership of William Rust (1850-1928) who began modernizing and expanding the facility. Rust sold the plant for […]
Foldscopes: Going Up The Country – Luang Prabang
This is the second article featuring Richard Dorsett’s trip to Asia to distribute Foldscopes, the fully functional microscope, which users construct by origami principles. The Rotary Club of Tacoma #8 funded the Foldscopes for adventurer and hiking and biking enthusiast Richard Dorsett: When your bus ride of barely two hundred miles will take more than […]
Fold and Unfold, Foldscopes Go to Laos
A heavy rain seemed to come down my first night in Vientiane. Sounded just like the needs-to-be-repaired dripping gutter outside my window in Tacoma. About midnight, big thunder hit. I was deep in dreamland. There are no windows in my hostel room, the sound of rainfall was created by the whirring fan, and the thunder […]