Glitteratzi
It’s hard to land in Las Vegas without at least a few preconceived notions about the people here—degenerate gamblers, greedy casino owners, exhausted showgirls and the like—images conjured up from so many Hollywood flicks, tell-all books, and mafioso lore. I’m sure Sin City lives down to its seedy reputation on a regular basis, but there is another side to the place that doesn’t get much attention, probably because it’s not as dramatic.
There are actually a lot of hard-working people here. Read More…
Where once we were used to a monthly routine of trying to conceive, which came with its own arc of emotions, we’ve had regular prenatal visits with the good doctor here in Walla Walla. The good news is, she’s more than competent, a fixture in the city for newborn delivery, and there are no more fingers crossed visits in which we plunk down a lot of money and spend down our reserves of hope that we get knocked up. As folks know, we are happy to have a fetus in formation.
Last year, 
It’s springtime in the Wallas, and the lawn care has resumed in earnest. If winter is a time of hibernation, a lack of produce in the local grocery stores, and complaints about utility bills, then springtime, not summer, is its opposite. People can’t wait to burst outside, and daffodils thrust themselves through the crust of the ground. Echos of children bounce off of the houses up and down the street, so it sounds, from our living room, like there are hundreds of kids playing hide-and-seek in the afternoon sun. 
It won’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me that I am a fan of public libraries, or at least, it shouldn’t. I nurtured a morbid fascination with maritime disasters at the Princeton public library when I went to grade school in the town, and although the East Windsor, NJ library paled in comparison by almost any measure, but most notably with regard to architecture, selection of books, and proximity to PJ’s Pancake House (I’ll always love you, PJ’s!), I still spent a lot of time there after school. I’d bike over and fret once I’d selected a couple of tomes that I’d left my bag at home, so it was a careful pedal back home, balancing the books on the handlebars. Any library beat my primary school’s library, really, which was limited to a tiny room on the top floor of the school, the books crammed in so tightly that one considered doing hand exercises in one’s spare time so as to improve one’s finger strength for wrestling them off the shelves. 
Walla Walla, as far as electoral politics go, is conservative. In the last Presidential election, the county went 58 percent for McCain. Culturally, it’s also a right-leaning place, as I’ve written about in this blog before—the handing out of scripture at the Christmas parade, the strong Seventh Day Adventist presence, the many evangelical people who go door-to-door selling their church’s services—it can feel intimidating to a bleeding heart liberal, especially when the conservative presence is coupled with angry sentiment. It’s a bad economy that doesn’t feel any better to people even as the latest unemployment numbers show a one percent improvement. I understand this anger; I’m frustrated too.
First it was lettuce in place of any food I’d made with aromatics like garlic, onion, or ginger. Then there was Susanne’s sudden yearning for glass after glass of ice-cold milk. Not milkshakes. Not vanilla ice cream. Milk. And she’s not a milk drinker by any means. This is a woman who leaves behind whatever didn’t get soaked up by the bowl of cereal, who eschewed the stuff from cows to the stuff from soybeans. I shudder at the very idea of drinking a glass of soy milk unless it’s over-laced with chocolate.
One of my favorite statistics about Washington, DC, is the number of lawyers working in the city: 50,000. That’s one lawyer for every 10 residents. Do these people directly benefit those residents? No, not really. Perhaps some of them do, or must, just by the laws of chance and probability. But certainly, many of those J.D.-carrying folks are members of an elite squad known as the lobbyists. They represent everyone from chemical producers to apple farmers to county-level employees. They’re not concerned about the people in the city so much they are getting into the city. And that is exactly where the residents made their stand. 
Trans/plant/portation 