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…
Many of these 25 were great, balancing exposition, character introductions, the tone of the piece, and the basic conflict. Yet many more missed the mark. 
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. 
Anyone trying to make a go of it as a writer for more than 6 minutes will have heard the adage to write every single day. That’s what makes people writers, after all. They write. They don’t just talk about writing or literature, they do their best to make it happen, which means getting some kind of writing out there in some fashion, on a daily basis.
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.
Let me come out right at the start and say that I have worked for the government. The Federal Government, in fact, in the vast civil servant system. No question, it took some getting used to. First, there was the 2-day orientation, explaining the protocols, policies, and guidelines for working as a Federal employee, for working in this particular agency, and within that, for this specific team. I was fingerprinted and had a background check, because people with criminal records are generally not eligible for employment from Uncle Sam. So I’ll put that another way—rather than being the scourge of the American pool of workers, they must meet relatively elevated expectations. I’m not saying that American workers in the private sector suck; I’m saying that government workers also excel. Even the intake procedures for hiring them are designed with citizens’ interests in mind.
Trans/plant/portation 