By Ashley Lodato
Forget your Netflix — a video you won’t want to miss is Liberty Bell High School junior Claire Waichler’s award-winning The Road to Truckee documentary-style film. Claire’s submission into the 2015 XC Ski Junior Nationals Film Festival won first place and features fellow junior ski racers, some pretty awesome speed and technique, and a pineapple, the last of which was apparently a requirement for all entries. You can view The Road to Truckee, as well as quite a few of Claire’s other lively films, on YouTube by putting her name in the search bar.
Like many others, I’ve been trying to be all Zen about the fruit fly situation, but I am not above resorting to a little first-world problem complaining now and then. I got some insight into the problem today, however: it’s the apple dumping. You know, the millions of pounds of apples that are being dumped by the truckload onto the Pateros hillsides. As if Pateros didn’t have enough problems already, post-fire!
Apparently a bumper crop of apples last fall coupled with labor disputes that prevented the fruit from being shipped resulted in apples that are now unsellable, and there seems to be no other solution but to {what}?
I’m sure it’s more complicated than my tiny brain can comprehend, but still, does it not seem like there’s something terribly wrong with a system and a country that allow tons of perfectly good fruit to rot on the ground?
(Unrelated but still worth a raised eyebrow was the KING 5-TV film clip I saw about the apple dumping, which I’m pretty sure featured a close-up of Dalmation toadflax while the reporter talked about Pateros’ beautiful wildflowers. I hope she was thoughtful enough to take a nice big bouquet home with her.)
One of the many things I love about raising kids in the Methow is that they don’t have to specialize at a young age, the way it seems like kids are increasingly forced to in bigger cities. Take third-grader Pearl MacArthur, for example. On Sunday, Pearl performed in the Pipestone kids’ recital, playing a classical guitar piece. Her teacher, Terry Hunt, pointed out that today Pearl was dressed in her Sunday best playing guitar, while yesterday she was barrel racing at the rodeo. Is that not a great message to send to our little people? There are many avenues in life, kids, try out as many of them as you can.
