Peninsular Thinking

Friday Afternoon Club: A post highlighting selected events and activities coming up this weekend.

I have just one question for you, “Bumbershoot or Blackberries?”

Oh, right, I know. There’s more to Labor Day than these two landmark events. What are your plans for this three-day weekend? Upload your pix and videos on the Kitsap Sun’s website.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

Ah, the first day of school: the smell of new pencils, the look of new clothes carefully chosen, the sound of eager voices, children ready to hit the books for another year.

But wait, one district was missing.

On Wednesday, as students in North Mason and all other Kitsap County schools returned to the classroom, students in South Kitsap School District continued with their summertime sloth and frivolity.

At least the kids in my neighborhood could be seen soaking up those precious last dabs of summer sunshine, getting in the last few games of basketball, a last bike ride. Some I know personally took the opportunity to sleep in until all hours, before the rude shock to their systems of having to make the bus in the cold, gray dawn.

I called Greg Roberts, assistant superintendent of personnel, to ask why South Kitsap schools resume Sept. 8, a week later than other districts.

“For years, South Kitsap has always started after Labor Day, so there’s a tradition on that,” Roberts said.

On the calendar, Labor Day cycles year by year farther into the month before jumping back to near the beginning, Roberts said. This year, the difference in start time between schools that start before Labor Day and after is more pronounced.

Families in South Kitsap have told district officials that they like having the extra time at the end of the summer, Roberts said. And really, if you think about it, the other districts will be just getting up a small head of steam, when wham, there’s a three-day weekend.

The decision has nothing to do with the South Kitsap Education Association, the teachers’ union, which recently ratified a new three-year contract with the district. Teachers have the right to bargain for starting before Labor Day, but it’s never come up in Roberts’ memory.

South Kitsap’s late start does not mean that students get fewer days of schooling, Roberts said. South Kitsap compresses its 180 student days over nine months so that the last day of school, June 15, is within a day or two of most other school districts in the area.

So, to all Kitsap and North Mason students and their families, enjoy this Labor Day, and as you bid adieu to summer, stay safe, have fun and make memories to carry you through the winter.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

The next time I’m in South Africa, I know who I’m going to party with: Baboons.

While driving to Silverdale yesterday I was listening to BBC World News. They had a report about baboons in Cape Town going after grapes ripening on the vines. After a good laugh, I knew the story was too good to pass up.

I went in search of the report today, but found an article from March in the Telegraph, a UK paper, that detailed the incidents. It appears the story might not be as current as I’d hoped, but hey it’s still entertaining. (And, if we start to see an increase in price for Cape Town area wines, we know who to blame — darn baboons!)

Apparently the baboons were ransacking the vineyards because the grapes were the best food source available after wildfires made it hard for them to forage. Also, the expansion of grape-growing areas into their habitat has impacted their ability to find food, according to reports.

But here’s the best part. The baboons aren’t eating just any grape. Nope. It seems they’ve developed quite a palate while living in the jungles of South Africa — they’re showing a penchant for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Yup, my kind of baboons.

The Telegraph article says in the Constantia region, La Petite Ferme was hit hard by the Chardonnay-loving primates. The winemakers usually produce 12 to 15 barrels of chardonnay a year, according to the article, but this season they were only able to squeeze out three.

It sounds like the baboons like the grapes because of the balance they offer of sugar and starch — the same reason why we love them. And, in the case of the Pinot Noir, the baboons seem to not only enjoy the grapes, but also the discarded skins that are left in piles by farmers harvesting the fruit. The skins start to ferment and the baboons not only get a meal, but also a nice buzz.

There were reports of some baboons passing out on the spot because they ate too much and were unable to return home.

While this is serious for the winemakers, and the people who live near the drunk baboons (they are wild animals after all and can get pretty violent), the story was too funny to pass up.

Read the full Telegraph story here.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

I was in Oregon over the weekend taking my daughter back to college, and we were at a little roadside restaurant that had biodegradable plastic cups made of corn. At least they said they were made of corn. The cup looked and felt for all the world like plastic.

Now Oregon takes its recycling seriously. I mean, they’ve got recycle bins for the recycle bins. Just kidding. But grocery stores and campgrounds do have elaborately defined containers for just about every sort of recyclable.

So when I asked the girls behind the counter at the Butteville Store — oldest continuously-operating business in Oregon — if they had a container for plastic cups made of corn, I was surprised to hear they didn’t. They had no idea if the cups will even degrade because they just throw them out with the trash.

We Henrys established a compost bin this summer, so I offered to take the cup with me. I was curious about how long the corn cup would take to disintegrate.

“Let us know how it works, would’ja?” the girls asked.

So now I’m on task to report back to Butteville as to whether the biodegradable plastic cup will be a boon to the environment or a dead bust.

With that I launch a new topic on this blog, “Living Lite.” I’m not trying to stomp on environmental reporter Chris Dunagan’s turf. But the corn cup thing got me thinking about our lives as consumers.

No, I don’t subscribe to the mentality purveyed in magazines with names like “Real Simplistic.” Articles and pictures therein seem to suggest that you — read women, who make up more of the consuming public than men — can do it all, have it all, be it all. All you’ve got to do it is buy enough containers to hold it all. And make tidy little dishes that look pretty enough for a magazine, but would they actually give you the energy to do everything you do in a day to make life look ever so simple? I think not.

No, what I’m talking about — and I hesitate to use the term, because it’s become such a catch phrase — is sustainability. I’m embarrassed to say at the height of the 1990s glut, the wrapping for my children’s Christmas presents took up way more space than the toys did. Every week, we’d amass a herd of plastic bags from the grocery store. I’d always forget to recycle them, and I swear they multiplied like rabbits in the kitchen closet.

I’m trying to do better, not only for the planet’s sake, but because I’ve found the main thing I lack is not stuff but time, and if consume less, my theory goes, I may have more time.

What does that have to do with watching a corn cup disintegrate? It’s part of my trying to achieve a balance in my life of doing, consuming and tossing, because they’re often related. I’m trying to live lightly, to do less, but make what I do count, to take and give just enough. I’m figuring it out in baby steps. One step will be to see how this cup behaves over time among the rotting vegetables

Stay tuned.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

Perhaps you read reporter Chris Dunagan’s article about Puget Sound Energy putting scratch ‘n sniff tabs in with customers’ gas bills so they know to be alert for a gas leak.

I thought the article presented a new opportunity for innovation in the Kitsap Sun newspaper and on the website – scratch and sniff news. Like many great thinkers, however, I was pronounced ahead of my time. To be honest it was more like, out of my head. But whatever, I still think the media is missing a whole dimension.

And of all the topics crying out for smell check, none beats the Kitsap County Fair and Stampede. I was at the fair on Wednesday doing research for an article in today’s Kitsap Sun. Folks, if I were a dog, my olfactory cells could play you a video of everything I saw and heard.

Imagine, opening the paper this morning and getting hit with the odor of manure. Nothing says “county fair” like the aroma of road apples. Or on the web, you could click an optional button to release the acrid smell of dust in the arena.

Over in the barns, you’d get the smell of cows. Why do milk cows smell sweeter than beef cows, I wonder? Llama breath, now there’s something you don’t want to miss, and chickens with their strangely salty, distinctive smell.

From the Van Zee building would swirl the sticky sweet smell of cotton candy, the heady aroma of barbecue and a hundred other smells, most of them involving the oniony, oily odor of hot trans fat.

Imagine getting all that in a pop-up ad. Surely our web gurus are up to the task. Not yet? Well, I can dream can’t I?

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

When I mentioned KIRO-Radio’s Dori Monson’s back-handed compliment to Bremerton from December, I failed to include something else he said that day. Monson told his audience, introducing whimsy of his own into his show, that if the fish statue appeared to be getting the upper hand on the fisherman statue, he would come over to Bremerton and bring family members. Here is the quote from Dec. 17:

“You know what, I would make a special trip to Bremerton if the fish was catching the fisherman just so I could delight in the whimsy. I’d take all my girls over there and we’d stand and ‘Oh ho ho look honey. Usually fishermen catch fish. Here in Bremerton the fish (wait for it) the fish is catching the fisherman.’ And then we would titter with glee with the whimsy.”

So what if it was said in jest. As a former college roommate once told me, “There is a lot of truth in humor.”

As readers of this site know, the fish is catching the fisherman now on those statues at Fourth Street and Pacific Avenue. So who willissue the invite to Mr. Monson to see if he will jump aboard a ferry with his daughters so he prove he is a man of his word?

Listen for yourself:

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

Rachel Pritchett writes:

Bloggers,

Members of the Outside Homeless Committee of the Kitsap Continuum of Care Coalition continue to work toward setting up a tent city, or two, by fall.

Members meeting Tuesday concentrated on prospective sites that still include land at Hillcrest Assembly, near McWilliams Road across Highway 303 from an unsanctioned homeless encampment where about 18 people live.

Other prospective sites might include a former helicopter landing-and-takeoff site off Sheridan Road once used and still owned by Harrison Medical Center. The group has not yet heard back from Harrison on whether it would be interested in cooperating on that site.

Still another possible site — and this would be for families as opposed to singles — might be somewhere in the Callow Avenue neighborhood somewhere near St. Vincent de Paul. Yes, there is undeveloped property there adequate for a tent city.

The Harrison and Callow sites are within the Bremerton city limits, however, and Mayor Patty Lent has said she believes less urbanized areas in Kitsap County would be better suited for a tent city, rather than more urbanized Bremerton.

Quickly falling out of favor is a site around the Kitsap County fairgrounds, which is in the county. Members believe it’s just too far from essential services.

Committee member Walt LeCouteur says the county continues to be infinitely more receptive to the controversial idea than cities led by Bremerton. The panel received word from a county representative Tuesday that it wouldn’t take longer than two days for the county to issue a permit, once a site is selected.

LeCouteur said the next challenge now will be for the panel to identify homeless persons to be leaders in the process, so they have ownership in the decisions and therefore much more likely to use a tent city, in theory. None showed up to the meeting Tuesday, but some have in the past.

The Coalition is a group of social-service agencies, and its Outside Homeless Committee meets again Sept. 7.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

A reputation can be a hard reality to overcome. What do you think of when I say “O.J. Simpson?” If you thought “Buffalo Bills,” “superb actor” or “Heisman Trophy,” you may want to reset your watch at least to 1995. One Bremerton community is intent on trying to overcome the city’s notoriety and may be pulling it off. If it is wildly successful it could help the entire city come off better, too.

To lay some context, in December, when KIRO-radio’s career talkatician Dori Monson was decrying the use of taxpayer money for public art in Bremerton in these economic times, he called the city a “cool, gritty city.” That’s one of those compliments that doesn’t really feel like one. Bremerton is like the blind date described as having such a super personality that you hardly notice the acne.

That grittiness, which people bring up even when they’re trying to be nice, is something that will likely take a long time for Bremerton to overcome. For one thing, parts of Bremerton still are gritty. In fact, gritty would be a compliment in some corners. The face lift that has gone on with the help of federal, state and county money has not erased every trace of the blight that accelerated when Orange Julius (I hear there were other stores, too) chose rural Silverdale over Kitsap’s urban center.

The second part, though, is that you don’t live down a tag unless you get someone to see you, and since Bremerton is a ferry ride away from many, including the one calling the city “gritty,” it’s a tough pitch.

I have it on good authority that recently a couple of Bainbridge Islanders never given to heaping praise on Bremerton were in town recently and were astounded at the change downtown. They heaped praise, to the point of saying the city had it over the island. It took a long time, though, for them to get here to see it.

There are, however, other parts of Bremerton. Nice parts, as it turns out. Even nicer when neighbors decide to know each other.

One of them was lumped in with the tag “West Bremerton.” Jaime Forsyth bought a home there in 2007. She wrote of her move:

“I bought my house during the revitalization excitement and just befor ethe economy crashed. I could see that my block had good ‘bones’ and was within walking distance to the ferry, but less than half seemed to take pride in their curb appeal. Further, no one seemed to know more than one or two other families on the street of sixteen homes.”

Forsyth helped get neighbors together to plant trees in 2008 using a city grant and in 2009 with the involvement of local churches neighbors got together again to work and used more donated labor from the city and materials from private companies to replace some concrete with rain gardens. By March 2010 neighbors named the location from the shipyard to 11th Street and from Charleston to Warren Avenue “Union Hill.”

The name comes because it’s on a kind of a hill and in reference to the former Union High School, now Kiwanis Park.

Neighbors got a nice write-up from the Bremerton Patriot in March. In April some of them showed up as a group at a city council meeting to argue in favor of Kiwanis Park improvements. In May they marched in the Armed Forces Day Parade. On Aug. 14 the neighborhood hosted a a story in which the point was made that crime is lower in neighborhoods where homeowners outnumber renters, not because homeowners are better people, but they tend to know their neighbors better. They notice, more, when something looks different at a neighbor’s home.

Well then, it seems to be working. The evidence would be in this section from our story about the block party:

In her eight years living on 10th Street, Jessica Falk can’t remember any time the neighborhood’s come together like this. As she helped children paint pet rocks Saturday afternoon, she said that it’s been a blessing.

“There’s a huge feeling of safety between us all,” Falk said.

There you go, then.

Read the rest of this entry »

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

Brynn Grimley writes:

I realize this is normally a Chris Henry post, but after I read her Friday Afternoon Club entry from this noon I realized there were a couple CK-related events that she didn’t know about, and thus didn’t include. Instead of posting them on her existing entry, I decided to offer up a dueling post.

The two-CK related events are both happening on Sunday.

The first is Petersen Day on the Farm. The event is for the community to teach people about farming in Silverdale, and give people a chance to walk around the 167-acre property. Suggested donations are $8 adult, $4 child (3 to 12), $24 family (4 or more). No dogs. Read the full story about the event. Read about the conservation effort for the farm here.

The second is the arrival of the steel beams from the Twin Towers to Silverdale. The truck toting the beams will be escorted into town by the Patriot Guard Riders, along with police and a number of other motorcycles. The beams will be brought to the Kitsap Mall parking lot, where they will remain for a ceremony and so that people have a chance to see them before they are placed in storage until a 9/11 memorial is built for the community. The beams are estimated to arrive in Silverdale around 6 p.m. To read the latest story about the beams journey across country, check out Josh Farley’s article.

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post 

Friday Afternoon Club: A heads-up on selected events and activities to do over the weekend.

A fun-packed weekend in Kitsap County will get off to an early start today (Friday) with Port Orchard’s monthly art walk and the start of Chief Seattle Days (a three-day festival now in its 100th year).

On Saturday, there’s just way too much to do it all, but good luck with that. On deck: South Kitsap School District‘s Back-to-School Celebration (featuring informational booths, food, games and free immunizations … now that sounds like a barrel of fun), the beloved Olalla Bluegrass Festival (that almost didn’t happen), and (only in the Northwest) a Slug Hunt in Kingston. Details below.

Friday
Monthly Art Walk in Port Orchard
Join artists and downtown merchants on the third Friday evening of each month, May through October for the Port Orchard Bay Street Merchant’s Association Art Walk. More than 20 artists set up their work inside and outside of businesses along Bay Street, some artists will actually be demonstrating their art. Many businesses serve food and beverages. Bring your family and friends and start off your Friday evenings once a month at the Downtown Art Walk.
Contact: Mallory Jackson mallory@custompictureframing.com
Place: Bay Street, Harrison, and Sidney (downtown Port Orchard)
Date: Friday, August 20, 2010
Time: 5 p.m.
Age Limit: All ages
Categories: Arts, Port Orchard, Family Entertainment

Friday – Sunday
Chief Seattle Days
Activities like a graveside ceremony for Chief Seattle, a baseball tournament, traditional canoe racing, a “Coastal Jam”, salmon bake and parade are held at various times during the three-day festival that begins Friday. A full schedule is a suquamish.org.
Parking is limited downtown. Parking and free shuttles from the Clearwater Casino Resort along Highway 305, and across the street, will run from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.

Saturday
SKSD Back to School Celebration
This free event will feature school supplies, hands-on games, art projects, school bus rides, and refreshments. There will also be performances by South Kitsap High School Band, Academy of Dance, Just for Kicks, The Gallery of Dance, SKHS Dance Team and Cheerleaders, Irish and Cultural Dancers.
The day will culminate in a kids’ parade. Booths from community organizations, businesses, and schools will line the South Kitsap High School track with kid-centered displays, demonstrations, and activities. All activities and performances are free. All students should be accompanied by an adult.
SKSD, in cooperation with the Kitsap County Health District, is also excited to offer free immunizations again this year.
Time: 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Where: South Kitsp High School Track

Saturday
Olalla Bluegrass Festival
Come and join us in Olalla to ‘kick the city off your shoes’ with a day of Music, great food, local crafts, kids entertainment and don’t forget to bring your best berry pie for our Berry Pie Contest. Our 19th ever Bluegrass Festival(we’re getting good at this!)will have you up and dancing before the day is done.
Time: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Place: Olalla Little League Field on Olalla Valley Road
Cost: $12 – $35
Age Limit: All ages

Saturday
Kingston Slug Hunt
Buy a slug hunting license for $1, pick up up a slug hunt map at the KIngston Farmer’s Market, then comb the town for slugs decorated by artists of the Front Street Gallery and guests. If you find it, it’s yours to keep. A silent auction will be at the Kingston Cove Yacht Club between 4 and 6:30 p.m.
The event is a fundraiser for an arts scholarship.
Time: begins at 9 a.m.
Where: KIngston

Share on Facebook

Tweet This Post