Visiting our next door neighbors after the Snoqualmie parade…

Awesome: I just found a well-maintained trail that goes directly from my work to within a few blocks of my house…

Not so awesome: It appears to be already occupied:

(if you still can’t tell, that’s a 150-200lb black bear…)

The government has made gestures of paying up to 90% of our costs to raise our house for flood protection.. Do we consider it for resale value? This is down the street from us:

Live Blogging:

At the new Woodman Lodge in Snoqualmie. It appears they are trying for Aspen chic… Not sure it’s really working….

Aftermath:

That term is very apropos.  This wasn’t a meal, this was a Disaster. More to follow after I finish eating my microwave dinner.

Done with my horrible microwave dinner.  Still, it was better than what we got from the Woodman Lodge.

First, we noticed there was no actual parking lot.  I guess you could park at the train museum and walk over though.  Many people were parking in the residential neighborhood behind the restaurant and walking.

We entered to find a rustic/chic lodge style restaurant featuring two levels with a large bar and player piano downstairs.  On a whim, we chose upstairs.  We were rewarded with views of the dilapidated houses that are within feet of the building.

We were seated in the middle of a large open room with stuffed game animals hanging on the walls and jammed into every corner.  I counted at least 10 waiters shoehorned into the corner of the room completely blocking every single patron that was attempting to go to (and return from) the washroom strangely located directly behind their station.

The menu was printed on the paper placemats, and a winelist was nowhere to be found.  We ordered an appetizer that was described as grilled artichoke served with sauce.  We also ordered the Buffalo burgers - the main reason we decided to go.

The waitress showed up 15 minutes later to say the restaurant was all out of buffalo burgers and would we like regular beef.  We grudgingly accepted.  About 10 minutes later our appetizer arrived.  It was half of an anemic artichoke (nowhere on the menu did it say half), so poorly cooked that most of the leaf was rubbery leaving only the very tips soft enough to even scrape off and eat.

And then the wait began.  We waited.  And waited. Little things started to catch our attention.  The waitress brought out condiments in small china bowls - a nice touch.  Except the mustard was plain generic Frenches.  How hard would it of been to get a textured stone ground mustard to go nicely with that 40 dollar dinner entree?  The plain yellow mustard already had a hard dry cap on it from sitting around what we guessed for was most of the day.

Finally, our waitress stopped by to say our order was coming up shortly.  But then we waited some more.  We flagged her down and asked her about the order.  Her reply was, “It went so smoothly last night.”  We waited again, even longer.

Sarah started noticing people who showed up after us getting their orders, including burgers.  I finally asked our waitress to please find out when our order will be ready.  I saw her go down the back stairs to what I assumed was the kitchen.  She popped up five minutes later but appeared to hide in the hallway that led to the washrooms.  I walked up to her and asked her what she found out.  She replied that she couldn’t get the cooks attention.

Well, she had my full attention.  I informed her we were leaving and asked for the check for the artichoke.  She at least offered to let the house handle the appetizer and apologized.  I gave her a quick thank you and Sarah and I left.

We were expecting so much more.  Especially after Sarah bumped into a waitress in training a couple weeks back that told us the owner had flown in a professional trainer from California to train the staff.  In the end the staff came off as very well dressed, if not overdressed, but their performance was extremely amateur and unpracticed.  The menu was very light, with outrageous prices for generic non-standout steakhouse items.  Although the interior was trying for something like Northwest chic, and the gorgeous bar certainly did help, the upstairs with the over abundance of stuffed animals approached a near parody of itself.

We may give the Lodge a try again in a couple months, but it’s definitely at the bottom of our list for places to eat in the area.

Riley’s absence starkly stands out against the somberness of the house now. His presence was considered normal. Now removed, it’s painfully missing. His uniqueness lit up the room and filled it with a vibrancy and warmth that’s now forever lost. This new silence builds into deafening waves of pain that choke my heart and overflow my eyes.

This is Riley. I got Riley just over three years ago when he was about midway between puppyhood and dogdom - a secondhand dog, so to speak. His original name was just too awful to be kept. I remember riding home with him on my lap, Steven and I trying to come up with a suitable name for this little bundle of fun and energy. When I hit upon Riley, it stuck. It just fit. Like it had always been his name and it just took a little thinking on our parts to figure it out.

That’s how Riley came to be a part of our family. He came to live with me in a little studio apartment where we went through the ups and downs of training, chewing, cuddling, vet visits, bonding with his pal Earnest, and when we added Ludwig to the mix, bonding with him. His first friend was a cat named Sophie, from whom he picked up using his paws to groom his face and stalking while playing.

In 2006 we bought our first home. One of the big items on our want list while searching was a fenced yard for the dogs. Someplace they could run and play and just be dogs. Riley-dog loved to run and acted more like a greyhound when outside than he did a lapdog. So the house we bought in semi-rural Snoqualmie was a perfect fit. There was even a dog door already installed. The dogs spent many happy hours in the backyard. I would find all three of them back there sunning themselves on summer afternoons.

It was an adjustment at first for Riley. I think he felt a little overwhelmed at first and spent a few months expressing his resentment by growling at Steven. But he came to enjoy having “the pack” all together.

On Wednesday when I came home from work, I realized after a few moments that Riley hadn’t come out to greet me. After a few moments of calling his name, we escalated into full search-mode. Steven’s the one who found him on the other side of our fence lying in the neighbors’ yard. The neighbors’ dogs had managed to rip part of a fence board away and had pulled Riley through it. We think he died nearly instantly, probably a broken neck from being pulled through the fence. A 6 lb chihuahua is like nothing to a couple of 80 lb dogs. The probable speed of his death is very little comfort.

We knew of the neighbors’ dogs aggressive tendencies. We knew our little guys delighted in egging them on from the other side of the fence. We had already repaired parts of that section of fence and had added a thick plastic garden barrier at the bottom to keep any dog from digging under the fence. We installed a sonic anti-bark system that sounded everytime a dog barked in its vicinity. But we had hard rain that week and we had switched it off to keep it from sounding every 30 seconds.

We let Ludwig and Earnest see Riley’s body. It wouldn’t be fair to them to just have a member of their pack simply disappear. We wanted them to understand that he’s gone. They both took a lot of coaxing to even come outside to the back porch - as if they knew something terrible waited for them. But I felt it was necessary.

Riley was such a large and happy part of our lives these last three plus years, that it just doesn’t seem possible that he’s gone. I see Earnest and Ludwig come running to greet us at the door and I can’t help thinking to myself “There should be three of them.” I get Earnest and Ludwig treats and I no longer feel Riley bouncing off the back of my legs. I sit to watch TV for a little distraction and it kills me that my lap is empty where Riley would curl up. I hear Ludwig up at night wandering the house and know that he’s looking for his friend.

This weekend we build a second fence in the back yard. Our dogs will no longer have access to that part of the fence that borders that neighbors’ yard. I can’t bring myself to consider pressing charges. Why would I want to destroy two families? And if they destroyed the dogs, do three more deaths really make up for one, no matter how precious that life was?

For now we’ll grieve. And remember Riley for the joyful friend he was. And keep the rest of our family as safe and happy as we possibly can.

Like rotund Midwestern breeders dropping little ones by the dozen, we can’t seem to stay away from additions to our little family…

Luckily, this one (as yet unnamed) was only thirty dollars during a special adoption event.

The dogs seem to think we brought home a new squeaky toy for them to play with, but Riley already received a sharp-clawed smack that made him yelp. I imagine they are all going to learn pretty fast..

In other news, we finally paid off the contractor for the basement repair work. We have scheduled an appointment with him this Wednesday to begin the in-house work. We also received our 1000-dollar flooring delivery, but have been too lazy as of yet to install it…

Sarah: I was actually going to post about the kitty FKA Porsche, but Desperate Housewives sort of got in the way. (You know how it is.)

I really think that with a little time, she’ll fit in just fine. I just don’t know how long poor Riley can hold out - he’s so excited about the “Kitty-Cat” he can hardly sit still.

I usually keep this blog pretty bland politically as we have family members from various walks of life that have very different viewpoints from our own. Not to mention that arguing politics on blogs has become so passe that even midwest houswives on livejournal are doing it…

Anyway, I came across this and found it interesting that I never heard it before…

Published on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

 

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why?

It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.

“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 – a year to the day before he was murdered – King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm)

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”

You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”

King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life.

Jeff Cohen http://jeffcohen.org/ is the author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” Norman Solomon www.normansolomon.com is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” now out in paperback.

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Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/04/304/

We actually wanted the one from last year called “Loren” with seat cushion fabric we loved, but that’s now web-only with one THOUSAND dollar shipping. This looks very nice on our deck with zero shipping and the fabric on the cushions is passable. They talked me into a no annual fee Redcard at the same time and I scored 50 bucks off the set. Also bought some loverly patio string lights for what the classy people call ambiance…

I realized about a month ago I have quite a few cleaning jobs for a pressure sprayer. The side of the house, the deck, the driveway and sidewalks, maybe even the wood railings before a repaint. Most importantly though, the roof. We have a really bad moss problem in the Northwest and our roof is starting to look more green than black. If you are tool inclined, you might be thinking that pressure washing is a no-no on roofs. That’s usually regarding very high pressure systems. I’ll have this one on wide spray low-pressure for the roof. And most importantly, I’ll be using the magic formula below.

The secret ingredient. Roof Reviver. Non-chlorine based moss killer and stain remover. You just spray it on with the free pump, let it sit a few days, and hit it with the pressure sprayer. All the cool kids are using it…

Even though that third button on the left makes reference to a bookshelf, this is one of our real bookshelves. There is another one just like it on the other side of the room. The button just tracks what books we are reading and have read - But you probably knew that, right?

Anyway, just picture the floor in rich, dark wood, and the walls in a soft garden green.. This room just might end up looking pretty damn good… Earnest thinks so…