Summer Time, and the Livin’ is Easy

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant

The lyricist was clearly not familiar with having to do his own work in the summer, by the way. (Edwin DuBose Heyward, if you care to read about him.)

Summer is when everything needs to be fixed and weeded and watered and chopped down and all in the hot. Sarah mumbled something about sanding furniture this morning. I braved the hardware store and bought a new ceiling fan: the old one broke after forty years of dedicated service. Not the motor, either, the pot metal that had held the blades. It’s not the modern design where you can put a new blade on, but they all came off a central ring . . . anyway, it’s clearly time to play with electricity while standing on a ladder. (Not to worry, as long as the electricity is paint by numbers, I’m good to go. Although in this house, it often isn’t.)

Meanwhile, the weather is doing exactly as pictured above. which at least offers some relief from the heat.

Like houses, and gardens, and trees, did I mention the pruning? countries take a lot of maintenance. We see the local Roads and Bridges doing their bit right now, with orange cones everywhere, filling potholes, chip sealing, repaving . . . but a lot of the work goes on in places that are less in plain sight.

Do you have a state campaign finance sunshine law? My state does, and it’s enlightening to see who’s getting how many donations from where. Mr. “I’m just one of the people” Republican gets an awful lot of money from out of state unions, for example. Now would also be a good time to sign up for poll worker training for November, if you’ve got not much else to do that day.

There’s a growing push to change the county medical services here, mostly because the new non-government hospital has managed to irritate everyone in a variety of ways (sanitation. billing, eating all the independent medical practices) and make the old county hospital look good by comparison. That’s one to watch, and keep an eye on the commissioners. Who is watching your county commissioners? Your city council and mayor? Anyone?

We hear a lot more about the big government than we do about the local from the media, by design, I think, and not malicious: everyone is affected by the federal government, but state may only affect five-hundred thousand, and county might be down in the four digits. Can’t sell nearly as much news if you have a maximum market of eight thousand souls as you can if you have a maximum market of the entire country and half the world beyond. So we hear that the House passed this, that, and the other, the Senate is sitting on their hands, and the President signed another executive order on any news site, but we don’t hear the closer-to-home news unless we go digging.

So after you mow the lawn, while you’re sipping your lemonade or beer and cooling off, check in on what shenanigans your local government, the not-orange-cones division, is up to. Because I promise you, they’re up to something. They always are. And it might just be something good.

28 thoughts on “Summer Time, and the Livin’ is Easy”

  1. City council/commission meetings can be fascinating. When the pols start twitching, you’re probably close to a problem, known or otherwise. Locally, streets and sewers are major points of complaint, and watching, because those are areas known for graft. Park maintenance is a new, big one, since the city no longer does it in house. One thing I learned was that per capital, a local city has the highest ratio of pave to people in the US, because it sprawls so much. That explains in part why so much is spent on fixing roads – they have a lot of them, and they are old in spots.

    During 2020 some shenanigans happened in a local town because people couldn’t keep a close eye on the elected officials due to the lack of in-person meetings. Several officials got unelected in the next election.

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    1. One of our county commissioners got roasted at an outlying town-hall meeting earlier this year. Seems the people in the small towns would rather some of their tax money get used around them, and not solely for the big (20K population) city. They got a bit testy about it.

      This was a surprise to said commissioner. I don’t know if her losing re-election was a surprise; for the first time in years, she actually did a radio ad. (The market is too small for a TV station in the county; we get so-so coverage from west of the Cascades.) Next cycle, we have the other two who need the clue-by-four.

      I’m doing the projects that need to be done before winter, and both of us are trying to do fire-safe clearing. That fell way behind for a couple of years.

      Liked by 3 people

  3. Space X Starship test flight 13 in (cross your fingers) about a quarter hour. See their Web site for (now-live) video. (3rd try on this, WPDE.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Starship made it to orbit, booster faww down go boom. They tried to land it in the Gulf just off of Starbase and not all the engines refired, it hit the water hard. Good thing they didn’t try to catch it on the tower on that one.

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      1. Yeah but the pointy-bit ship soft landed in the Indian Ocean … and didn’t go boom! It was last seen on their stream floating serenely intact. The announcer said they’d been trying various tricks and twitches right at the end to try and get an intact soft splashdown, and they finally succeeded. BZ SpaceX.

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    1. “Whats on the telly, luc?”

      “Looks like a starship.”

      “… and now it is time for the Starship on your television set… to explode.”

      “How did he know that would happen?”

      8-)

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  5. My town elected one of those obnoxious HR ladies mayor and since then she’s been trying to eliminate everyone who might conceivably disagree with her. She tried to push through a game that would steal a couple million from rec and give it to her cronies. The town council meeting was epic. The highlight for me was number two son pronouncing them all “disgraceful” to general applause. They’ll try again, of course, and be sneakier about it because they are in fact disgraceful.

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  6. In these parts we’re grateful that it’s rained three inches in the last twenty-four hours or so.

    Y’all excuse me, please. I’m in search of (neat show) a “known good” piece of ethernet cable.

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  7. The coffee was excellent.

    John Bailey held the mug in both hands and regarded the lake with the expression of a man who has carefully constructed a situation and intends to enjoy it thoroughly before anyone points out its flaws.

    The porch was wide enough to be comfortable and not so large as to require a map. The morning light came across the water in a manner that John had privately described, in the third chapter of a novel nobody had yet read, as luminous and unhurried. He was pleased to discover that this description was accurate. In his experience, natural phenomena did not always cooperate with the adjectives assigned to them in manuscript.

    The lake was cooperating.

    The coffee was cooperating.

    The morning was, by every available measure, proceeding correctly.

    Mary appeared behind him with the pot.

    “You have that look,” she said.

    “I’m contemplating,” John said.

    “You’re planning something.”

    “I’m doing both. They’re compatible.”

    Liked by 1 person

  8. I’m very pleased with our current mayor; he’s the owner of a seed and feed store downtown, and is passionate about good upkeep of the town.

    So yeah, orange cones and closed streets everywhere right now, but the corner of the park across the street has a storm drain that works now, and that isn’t four feet deep (it’s high-centered countless cars and trucks over the years). The century-old sewer pipes are being replaced, they’re putting fiber optic cables all up our canyon roads (which will also be used to ping accidents up there, possibly saving critical moments of response time).

    Is it annoying to have to circle five blocks around where I need to go? Heck yes. Am I super glad that they’re fixing things? Also yeah!

    Local elections matter, and local politicking can make a real difference in quality of life, let me tell you.

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  9. Our “neighbor” is Eugene. Enough said. Mentioned before that they’ve tried to incorporate us multiple times. Prevented the area from incorporating ages ago when Eugene was actually “down the road aways”. It isn’t anymore. Someday, this will actually happen. When it does, our property taxes will almost triple. Just not today, Eugene!

    Also, the Eugene school district 4J wants to merge with the Eugene Bethel school district. Only the Bethel parents are saying, “Oh H* No!” Sixt”y years ago, when the Bethel area wanted their children to go into suburbia 4J, 4J said, “No. Hayseed.” Bethel school district was born. Bethel school district taxes are less than school taxes on the 4j property taxes. In addition, Bethel does more with less than 4j with more.

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  10. We had a couple of county commissioners lose in the primary. Suspected of corruption but no smoking gun because local media is useless.

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  13. San Jose’s mayor just ran a long shot run for Governor in the jungle primary here in the Formerly Golden State. It was well funded, but he was not The Party’s Chosen One, so he somehow fell short. He did contribute to diluting the Donk Party votes for the designated winning candidate, Becerra, such that second place actually went to a Republican, Steve Hilton, to the horror of the nomenklatura, and thus the election will be an actual choice between parties, so there’s that. I guess all the emergency fraud had to be redirected to keeping Pratt out of the race for LA Mayor.

    That does mean Hilton is getting ads done by the folks who were doing Spencer Pratt’s ads, like this one:

    .

    But locally since the primary our mayor has been back on his email list bragging about potholes and cleaning up the unhoused camps again, which was basically his platform when he was elected.

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    1. “Sign in to confirm you are not a bot”

      .. from their bot. Deadpan.

      Reap Rust Robbie. Bite your shiny metal….

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Wow, gurgle really has gone completely ultra super evil. It’s almost like that motto was fake all along…

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  14. Small town seems to run pretty well here. We have another story.

    Beloved went down to the restaurant to pick up yesterday’s money for deposit. (May also include dropping by the store to pick up things like chocolate milk). He’s now sitting and chatting occasionally with a city councilman and the reason is sad.

    Councilman has a collection of antique tractors and a car. Or he did. He and his wife were out in the antique car and were hit. She was killed. He was devastated. So beloved is making a point of sitting down with him and having a chat when he turns up for breakfast.

    We’ll see if the councillor runs for re-election when the time comes. It will probably be a good sign if he does.

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  15. Well, I hope you got your ceiling fan installed okay. Of course, it died right when it was needed most.

    If you lived closer to me, though, I would have tried to swap with you – I just finished replacing the toilet in the master bath. Tank cracked right down the side and flooded in the wee hours of the morning…

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  16. Why the frell were my posts removed? What on earth did I say/do/mis-gruntle now?

    LOL!

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