Tillicum

What is it about puddles and raindrops, blue rubber boots with green frog designs, and yellow rain jackets with hoods not up that beg for a leap-flying, pigtails-scattering, peals-of-laughter-the-air-splitting, water-and-mud-splattering (them and us and the camera lens) kersploosh that is so beautifully, and importantly, a part of childhood?

Stormy Daniels, whose birthday is today, is one reason. As I’m writing this, a father and his two daughters came down to go fishing at our lake-front public dock.

My dad, piloting solo, was heading south along the Puget Sound shoreline and had left the wheel of his pride and joy – the inboard plywood boat he’d built – to address a matter near the stern. Unseen ahead was a sandbar which, had dad attended to proper steersmanship, he would have avoided.

I-502 legalizing marijuana was not, never was, about requiring local jurisdictions to allow the sale of recreational marijuana.

When 17-year-old Chloe Kim won the gold medal for the U.S. in the women’s snowboard halfpipe, she said of her third run, “I wouldn’t be satisfied taking the gold and knowing that I hadn’t put down my best. That third run was for me — to put down the best run I could do.”

For lack of a better marker for the farthest Whiffle Ball hit during the soft-toss batting practice competition the other night, the red helmet was moved progressively back as the 11-and-12-year-olds strode to the plate, swung for the fences, and raised arms overhead, each successively claiming the distance record.

“Why is No One Talking about the Violence of Popular Entertainment after Parkland?” Douglas Murray headlines his piece in “National Review” this March 2. “A culture that encourages enjoyment of horrific violence alongside a sort of flippant approach to its consequences cannot be helping matters.”

If the Department of Ecology can hire teens at $11.50 per hour to pick up roadside litter throughout the state of Washington this summer, then is there a reason why the homeless can’t be hired to do the same? Especially since the trend in unsheltered homelessness shows a steady increase over the last five years?