The B•LOG

  Keeping Our Schools Equitably Diverse I know the 24 hour news cycle can be exhausting but if I have your attention for a moment I’d ask you to think all the way back to the 2020 presidential election. Many of us voted, and many of us watched as Biden was elected as the 46th President of the US. There, right there, lies a schism within our society that I fear only grows, a division that we are now only really beginning to deal with. That moment marked the beginning point of an effort that I hope isn’t only visible to a minority of people, that effort being the willingness to bring the battleground to our backyards, or… more specifically, our schools.  Shortly after the loss of Donald Trump in the 2020 election we saw a great many societal responses from across the spectrums of enjoyment and sadness, liberal and conservative, and so on. But just under that surface there was already an effort in full swing. A reddened scar from a year’s worth of government forced shutdowns, act...

Some of my first writings. Europe, 2004 Over the years this blog has been updated in a less than frequent manner. I can chalk this up to the trials and tribulations of trying to raise two same-aged children almost entirely on my own. Those who say "the struggle is real" haven't tried to raise twins while at the same time maintain their professional viability. That said, I wanted to update this blog with a list of published writings I've achieved over the years. It's not a complete list but one that will give an adequate look at the kind of work I do. Over the years I have been published in a variety of print and online publications. Here is a list of them. Visit Tillamook Coast: I am a contributing and consistent blogger for the Visit Tillamook Coast destination marketing organization. In addition to blog postings I have also helped shape their North Coast Food Trail program with up-to-date postings on area businesses that cater to the tourism indus...

  The Donald: The Rise of NASCAR America Well everyone, it’s official; Donald Trump has won the position of 45th President of these United States.  Wow… who saw that one coming?  Bet you wouldn’t imagine me saying so when I say; I did.   If any of you actually had a face to face conversation with me about this recent election you’d know one thing that maybe you couldn’t tell from my Facebook posts… I predicted Donald Trump winning.  Why?  It has everything to do with his energy, the zeal, the donald.   And, if you’re just reading this and don’t really know me that well I think it’s safe to say I am not a ready and willing supporter of the donald but I do have to appreciate the awe, splendor, candor, audacity and the certain level of genius he brought to the table.  Much the same kind of respect that goes to people like Mussolini, Hitler and the like, an acknowledgement that despite the horrendous nature of their handywork… it is ...

Let me impose something upon you. What will Tillamook look like in 2116?  A hundred years used to sound like a forever chunk of time to me, what separated the modern world from the old, but as I grow older every day I realize now that a century is but a small component in the great human experience.   In 2116 much of the usable pasture land will have been long reclaimed by a rising and everly acidic sea.  Salt marsh and estuary will take the place of field and pasture flooding centuries of local livelihood.  What industry still remains is but a shadow of itself but a hundred years prior.  Tillamook’s namesake, its precious dairy industry consolidated.  Market and societal forces push the need for dairy products from a federally subsidized necessity to cut-rate industry; only the wealthy survive.  Over time the smaller farms were bought out, crowded and pushed into oblivion.  The only survivors were the automators, the ones who held ba...

I'm not dead, I'm just holding a baby or two! This is not even a full day's worth. Indeed. If anyone ever diminishes the notion of a SAHD (that's Stay At Home Dad, ftw), or a SAHM (figure it out) in my presence I'll be quick to shoot them down and cover them with a few day's worth of diapers, wipes, genie liners packed to the brim, empty formula containers, used bottle liners, dirty onesies, dirty twosies, soiled blankets, hair-covered floor binkies... and so on and so forth.   And that's just a day or two's worth. I'm not joking.  These twins are eating, peeing, pooping, puking machines.  Is that a fresh shirt?  Hmm, not anymore.  Oh you feel wet, sorry 'bout that.  No, that's not curry on your lap, that would be plain ridiculous.  Yep, its pretty much like that. We've now switched to more bottles and better formula. I've tried to keep track of everything they take in and out but its a lot and it can be hard t...

Fire Behavior: The Spring Creek Incident Objects in the mirror are closer then they appear. It was getting on four in the afternoon and almost time to think about our return trip back to the compound after a day of forest patrol and campfire enforcement.  Doug had taken his time to instruct me in the proper usage of our belt weather kit, a relic from days without batteries but a reliable device. Doug was from another generation of fire hounds, he’d started his government career enlisted on a PT boat out of Laos and Vietnam and had “given them hell,” or so he recanted to me time and time again. Doug, a repetitive gnome from times past, deemed a plethora of knowledge to me in my first year on a wildland fire engine. I watched him as he dipped the business end of the thermometer into the water and began to spin the instrument on the string provided. It would end up giving us the wet and dry bulb temperatures within the area, with that we could figure out the relative humidit...

Sometimes things happen that cannot really be explained logically.  These things can take on many forms; Life, love, stress and struggle.  And sometimes true tragedy happens.  This last week has been no exception for me and my family. What you're about to read is an emotional expression of a first hand account of burying a friend. Yesterday morning I had to bury a family friend.  A family member really, one I had only recently come to know.  Its quite a thing to grab a shovel in your hand and know that what you're about to do signifies a great and true finality, an end to something.  Its symbolic both good and bad to sink the blade into the top soil, depress downward and pry up a mound of Earth, set aside and repeat process.  Its quite a thing.  You see, a pet is a family member in my eyes and even once removed, while living in proximity, a pet is still a family member all the same.  Yesterday I was to bury a family member.  Do you e...

A twinvasion indeed!  A word I made up by cleverly adjoining two words together; "Twin" and "Invasion."  A word I've come to describe the third great chapter in my life, this being my thirties.  Of course I'm already two years into this (and a half!) realm but I'm finding sometimes a period of acclimation is necessary.   A year ago had someone told me I was going to be the father of fraternal twins I would have spit my beer all over them.  Had they mentioned in addendum to that that I would become the defacto stepfather to another set of nine-year-old twins simultaneously I might have taken another swig and proceeded to exhale it all over the individual telling me this.  Had they mentioned that the set of twin black kittens I had recently acquired acted as the harbinger of all of this... well I might have simply stopped believing you.  I mean, how is that possible?   Its true, an invasion of sorts has taken place within the last year, ...

Cattail Flour: When I first heard one could actually eat cattail it was while browsing through a US Army survival manual I have that stands at roughly a bajillion pages thick. Regardless it goes over what kinds of unconventional plants a human may ingest in a number of different environmental types. I remember reading the section on Cattail and thinking that might be fun to do. Everyone, I give you the process to refine flour using a fine local plant; the Cattail. First I went out for collection, I’m sure there’s better ways to do it but my novice regard made it seem fairly straight forward, I found a place where Cattails are, pulled off the side of the road and voila I started pulling my first Cattail. On my first mission out I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for so I naturally grabbed the biggest healthiest looking one I could find. It stood well over my head at around eight to nine feet high. It had long frond leaves that hung down, a giant grass. I ...

Cioppino This was my first foray into the highly dubious world of Italian soups but I have to say, after the fact, it was simply the best recipe I've done thus far. Living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest allows one to enjoy the bounty by which they are surrounded by. By this I mean shellfish. Clams, mussels, oysters, crab. Its all here for the taking. And for Cioppino, its for lack of a better word, perfect. To Save a lot of time and typing I'm going to simply copy and paste the recipe from which I derived my version, take note that I did not have all the exact ingredients but I think thats okay when dealing with something like this. Cioppino Recipe Ingredients Seafood 3 pounds halibut, sea bass, or other firm white fish, cut into inch-long cubes 1 large (2 lb or more) cooked Dungeness crab (hard shell) or a cooked lobster 1 pound (or more) of large shrimp 2 pounds little neck clams, mussels, or oysters or all three Sauce 1/2 cup olive oil 1 1/2 cups ...