Miscellaneous ramblings on a short work week

Wow, what happened, I skip writing my editorial one week and let U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers have my spot and the next thing you know, not a single letter to the editor.

I can’t believe I scared everyone away a few weeks back when I asked people to try and only write on one subject every 30 days and to keep things short, concise and to the point. That’s never worked before. Maybe it’s because I’ve moved the Town Crier to page five to get in another color page, could be that’s unlucky – but who knew I didn’t until I did it?

It was a short week due to the holiday, not that I ever get the July 4th off, but it can be argued that it’s nicer to be up at Chesaw for the rodeo and at Deep Bay Park for fireworks then it is to be stuck in the office, especially when its gotten so hot out. It still seems like work by the end of the day though.

What a great job the volunteers do that get the rodeo off the ground each year and not enough can be said about the very small crew that plans and executes our beautiful fireworks display. I’m sure the rodeo club could always use more help and I know Dane Forrester could use a hand, particularly when it comes to seeking donations to pay for the pyrotechnics each year.

So, we kind of lost a day with the Fourth of July holiday, no big deal, except Monday’s deadline was thrown out of whack by that fire near Crumbacher that took out the fiber optic cable. It rendered our internet useless until late in the afternoon. That doesn’t sound so bad, just don’t surf the web, right? Unfortunately when the internet goes down, we can’t connect to our servers and when that happens we can’t even log on to our computers and our phones don’t work. So, for me it was off to my house to work on my old slow-mo desktop. At home I still had internet through DSL and could connect to my work email and even listen to my phone messages. However, all the articles, as well as the fireworks and rodeo pictures I downloaded before sneaking out early on Friday were locked in my work computer. Any other day of the week and it wouldn’t have been such a hassle, but not on Monday.

I promised myself I wouldn’t complain about the heat if we could just get rid of the rain. Climate Change or not, last summer and this one were certainly shortened by all the rain we’ve had. Hopefully the rain has gone away, at the very least long enough to get the rest of the cherries off the trees. Rain isn’t unusual, but my childhood memories of camping out in the backyard of our Oroville home have the rain, thunder and lightening mostly at night, leaving perfect, hot summer days.

This could be a case of selective memory as I remember listening to C-K-Double-O radio out of Osoyoos waiting for the temperature to hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit so we could stop thinning apples. Not, of course, because the orchardist was worried about us passing out or anything, he was worried about his little apples getting sunburned. I can’t remember what that is in celsius, but I could do the conversion in my head back then and when it was 90 and above it meant we could quit and go swimming in Lake Osoyoos or perhaps jump from the rope swing into the Okanogan River (as it was still called back then) at Henry Kniss Riverside Park (as it wasn’t called back then, and usually still isn’t today).

Enjoy the upcoming Tonasket Truck and Tractor Pull, Oroville Heritage Days and the Fly-in, the Can Am Hydro Races, the Wauconda Sock Hop and whatever else this summer has to offer like Music in the Park in Tonasket. Who says there’s nothing to do in north county, not me. Don’t forget that in August we will have the third annual Tumbleweed Film Festival, always a box-office blast. Although were not doing the Toast of Oroville Wine Festival because of a scheduling conflict this year, we hope to have the wine festival back next year though.

Enjoy the heat, it must be like 32 degrees Celsius out there.