Reality and fiction sometimes seem to overlay each other in strange ways. When Lakewood-based author Susanne Bacon started writing Telling Truths, her third Puget Sound romance based on the fictitious small-town of Wycliff, she envisaged what might happen if an oil refinery were built in a quaint Victorian tourist destination. “All the more coincidental it […]
To Know
Letter: Another day (month), another unmet rental inspection deadline
As of this writing, January 6 was yesterday, “but” in the hit single lyrics of Chad and Jeremy (1963) “that was yesterday and yesterday’s gone.” And with the passing of another day, another deadline promised by the City of Lakewood’s legal department has gone unmet as well.
2016 – The Year in… Woo…
We no more than curbed ebola, then Zika came on a tourist visa. Jolly Old England voted to Brexit, then took the walk of shame the next day. Boy… we would never do something THAT stupid.
Letter: Three questions to ask a prospective landlord (in Lakewood and elsewhere) before signing an apartment lease
“Most people tend to rush signing a lease,” warned Nancy Simmons Starrs in the December 28, 2016 “Washington Post.” Indeed, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” likewise warned Alexander Pope in a poem about tenant/landlord relationships gone bad (or maybe 1711 was pre-rental inspection days).
Letter: New Year’s resolution – never ‘whatever’
Whatever is the most annoying word of the year just ending? Yes. It’s both a question and a statement to which ‘whatever’ is the answer.
[Picture] Ow! Dental
…seen around town…
Letter: Three predictions for 2017
Marijuana sales will sprout – like the weed that it is – in Lakewood, the city joining La La Land – not the movie but its neighbors – in transitioning from holdout (bans) to handout (bucks). “Principles,” after all, opined the Tacoma News Tribune Editorial Board, “don’t keep the lights on.” And sprigs, that is […]
Lions Clubs test student sight and hearing
During 2016, members of the Lakewood First Lions Club and the Dupont Lions Club volunteered more than 760 hours to test 7,130 elementary and middle school students in 19 Clover Park and Steilacoom schools for sight and hearing issues at the request of school nurses.
Letter: Rental Inspection Paradox
When I won the Great Cross Sound Race in 1990, a competitor’s double rowing shell was named ‘Paradocs’, appropriately enough given the pair were both doctors. Lakewood’s Rental Housing Safety Program (RHSP), paradoxically, plans to achieve after the fact – entailing a great deal of complexity in the process – what it could have done […]