Tag: local news

Mundaz Wandering Thoughts

Call it first world blues. Again.

The annual property taxes bill arrived in the mail.

Normally a mild-mannered but curmudgeonly individual since I was young, the tax bill brought out my dour side.

I vented to my wife. “Our real market value declined by nine thousand but the assessed value increased by two. The land increased in value but the structure’s value plopped by a few thousand. Yet, the tax has increased a few hundred dollars.”

Used to the annual rant, my wife nodded in feigned sympathy and fed me some new irritation fuel. “That’s so we can pay our city manager their ridiculous salary.”

Yes, we’re in an Ashlandia uproar over the city manager’s compensation. She doesn’t live in Ashland, and makes 226K a year after a 30K pay raise. Total compensation pushes her package close to 400K a year. She earns more than any other city manager in the area, yet there is a general impression among the hoi polloi that things in the city are going in the wrong flippin’ direction. Fer instance, while the city manager and other ‘managers’ were given raises, the city laid off maintenance and office people and cut back services. Like, WTF, over?

I pointed out to my wife, though, “The city manager’s pay doesn’t come out of this. This is the county’s tax bill.” I then read her the itemized list of bond issues we’re supporting in our $6200 tax bill (with discounts for paying it on time and in full in November). Most of it is for the Ashland School District. Yet, Ashland Schools needed a $890,000 donation to make ends meet.

This all does not computer. Our house was built in 2005. Three bedrooms, two baths. Almost 1900 square feet, it’s not large or fancy, all on just under a quarter acre of land.

On the other hand, I reminded myself. I have a decent house and life. I can afford to pay these taxes when it will strain others.

Ranting is in me, though. I’ll rant, let it go, pay it, and move on. Then, though the subject came up in NextDoor. Multiple people turned out to have the same opinion as me about the subject. Reading their comments validated my opinions and insights. Thus comforted, I slept well.

For the record, here’s more about the donation to the school district from last week. Cheers

Kelly Clarkson Is Amazed By $1 Million Anonymous Donor Who Saved Oregon School District

Ashland School District in Oregon was facing an $8 million deficit last year, until an anonymous donor stepped in with a nearly $1 million donation to save teachers’ jobs and student programs. Kelly meets superintendent Dr. Joseph Hattrick, executive director of the school district’s foundation Erica Thompson, as well as students Soren and Grace and teacher Paul, who share how the community came together to thank the donor. Watch till the end for another huge surprise for the Ashland School District from Scholastic and Kelly!

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Do You Want to Connect

Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?
View all responses

Life before the net. Do I remember those dark, soulless days? Oh, yeah. I remember those days, just as I recall life without the world wide web, life without cable and DVDs, life without CDs, eight-track and cassette tapes, life without microwaves, and life without cell phones and more than three networks. I remember life without remote controls, which my wife calls, the clicker.

Yes, I remember buying my first personal computer. I remember using the first one at home. Then I recall signing us up for Compuserve and Mindnet. I remember getting my first email address and having no one to email. That soon changed. Viagra offers quickly found my inbox. With it came an understanding of something non-meaty called ‘Spam’ and wealthy Nigerians in need of money.

Yes, I remember pre-net life. Primarily because our TV schedule was fixed according to the cable schedule. Cheers on Thursday, for example. But when the net came into its full flowering, I was able to find a huge variety of things to stream from around the world, watching them when I wanted, instead of waiting for their schedule. Long as I was willing to pay for it.

With the net, the days of going to the front door and looking for the daily newspaper disappeared. There was no need for all that inked paper to stack up and get put out for the trash. Now the news was right there online. I didn’t need to wait until 6 PM to check to see what was happening. Of course, information about what was happening locally soon began fading. We could no longer just pick up the paper and turn to the police log to see what the hell the sirens were all about the other day. No, that faded. Now, there are sometimes stories on Facebook or Nextdoor. Some others are struggling to bring the local news back to us. It’s a challenge. Many efforts arise and fall.

Freedom came with online ordering, too. I no longer needed to prowl through brick and mortar stores, making comparisons, trying to figure out what to buy. Boom, the net was heavy with choices. It was still onerous in the early days to compare things but then came Amazon… Suddenly, whoa. It was a desperate consumer’s dream.

Do you know what it was like to travel in pre-net days? Calling the airlines to get price checks, listening to them look up schedules for you, explaining options? Same with hotels. Expedia and the like made it easier…for a while. But wherever money and humans are involved with money transactions and information, others are there to scam us for their share of the pie.

Yes, I remember life before the net. It was simpler and harder, easier, and more problematic. That’s how it always is with progress. Each step unfolds with new and surprising insights, and the things we used to do begin to fade.

Just think: one day, people will be asking, do you remember life before AI?

And someone will reply, I remember the days before cars. And then we’ll all wonder, what was that like, and turn to AI for the answer.

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Thurzda’s Theme Music

Pop, pow, sunshine has laid out winter. Sprinter holds Ashlandia in its palm and leans hard toward spring. Blooms and blossoms and things are cropping up on trees as life feasts on the strong sunshine. Current temperature is 58 F and the weather ‘they’ say we’ll punch in over 68 F by the day’s completion. Cool beans.

Papi the ginger blade, aka Meep and Butter Butt, loves the sunshine but seems a little perplexed by its presence. Circumstances have promoted him to the only floof in the house, meaning he is also number one floof. He’s still adjusting to his duties but has taken to sleeping in every chair and surface he can find. It’s like he’s stating, “This is mine, and this is mine, and that’s mine, too.”

My wife and I were chatting this morning. She was indulging in her ritual doomscrolling and worrying that she’s in a news bubble. share the concern. Trying to ensure I’m not, I chased down online newspapers in Des Moines, Bismark, Santa Fe, and Tempe to peruse their samples. They mostly focused on local news stories. Only one mentioned PINO Trusk and DOGE. Most said little about politics in general. Interesting. They do seem like the sort of newspaper my wife is constantly bucking for in Ashlandia, a local site focused on local issues, just telling us what’s happening in the community, like why the firetrucks raced down the road with sirens screaming. We rarely get that sort of info these days, unless someone in the known takes to social media such as Reddit, Facebook, or NextDoor to tell what happened.

I have a 1981 R.E.M song, “Sitting Still”, rocking the morning mental music stream. I think The Neurons directed its playing because of the sense that we’re sitting still, waiting for the fall out from the Great Shitsorm of 2025 and the Great Undoing. I’m personally searching for validation of how I was taught the world works from A-Z, including the economy and features like supply and demand, inflation, and tariffs, and the Federal government and its systems of checks and balances. News about angry constituents at GOTP townhall meetings keep my interest piqued: many people are pissed off about what they’ve seen happening — or so it’s reported in my bubble. The GOTP response is to not hold meetings to hear what the people are saying. I’m sort of amused and intrigued whether this tactic can and will hold, especially if cuts to Medicaid are initiated. So I’m sitting still, waiting for results.

Fer instance, eggs. The price of eggs was a big deal in the 2024 elections. Now, The price of eggs is expected to skyrocket by more than 40% this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Meanwhile, the PINO Trusk cuts have reached home with several friends in Ashlandia. They were planning river trips. To use the rivers, passes are required. To limit the number of passes, a lottery system is used. The Federal government runs the lottery. With the PINO Trusk cuts, there is now no one to run the lottery.

Well, coffee has signed a treaty with me to provide energy. I’m going with it while coffee still exists and is affordable. Hope your day is strong in many good ways. Cheers

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Friday’s Theme Music

Mood: Fribulent (It’s Friday so my spirits are up but news is bringing me down.)

‘Tis Friday, April 19, 2024. Spring continues an upswing. 66 and sunny after a cloudy, chilly start to the day, 73 F is expected to present as the high. Tomorrow is expected to be close to the same.

It’s lovely, energizing weather. I get out there and feel the sun and it’s like a double espresso has been downed. Lot of outdoor work is finally getting done.

Our hausfloofs, Tucker and Papi, agree. They managed to get much done in the sunshine, bathing themselves and guarding my wife as she lounged in the sun reading and sucking up vitamin D in an epic display of multi-tasking.

Despite these warmer temperatures down in the valley, some scattered snow remains in the mountains around us. The local ski resort, Mt. Ashland, is closed for the season.

Some local news has me down. Cougars are regularly spotted in town. People post their sightings on a website made for that purpose so we can keep an animals safe and avoid the area.

But a cougar was sighted 250 feet from a local elementary school about half a mile from my house yesterday. It killed a friend’s cat. Then the authorities killed the cougar.

Such majestic, fascinating animals, I hate seeing them disposed like that. I understand the aspects for and against. Doesn’t make me happy.

In more WTF America news, an 81-year-old man shot and killed a 61-year-old Uber driver. He had concluded she was part of a scam. She wasn’t. Nor was she armed. Yet, this man, William Brock of Ohio, decided he needed to shoot and kill her.

This wasn’t a spur of the moment matter. Brock, the killer, had received threatening phone calls from a man. He had time to call 911 and receive police assistance when the Uber arrived. The victim, Loletha Hall, couldn’t call for help because the killer demanded her phone before killing her.

Two kickers for me. One, the killer claimed that she was trying to rob him on his property. Her dashcam video shows the truth. Two, this only now seems to be becoming national news. It had happened in March. Maybe I was just negligent following the news.

No doubt they’ll show all the extenuating issues. I’m sure it’ll be argued that Ms Hall was a victim of circumstance, and that William Brock was a confused old man stressed by circumstances brought on by the scam phone calls. He, they will say, feared for his life, and that of his family.

Still doesn’t explain why he didn’t call the police before killing an innocent, unarmed, uninvolved person in broad daylight. Especially as he says he figured it was a scam. If he figured it was a scam, why did he shot and kill Ms Hall?

He has been charged with felonious assault, kidnapping, and murder.

A third piece of news irked me today. U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican, MAGA supporter, was on Fox News complaining about the state of America’s infrastructure.

“It just strikes me that more and more, nothing really works in America anymore,” Hawley told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “I mean, our roads are falling apart, our bridges are falling down right in front of our eyes. Pieces of airplanes are falling out of the sky.”

Viewers and netizens point out that President Biden has been working on infrastructure plans and that Sen. Hawley “was one of 30 Republican senators who voted against a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill in 2021, which contained money for upgrades to highways, bridges, airports and other major projects.”

The GOP are using the same gaslighting tactics that the use on immigration and the border issues. They bemoan a lack of progress even as they vote against any efforts to improve the situations.

They are miserable, miserable, miserable, lying, unprincipled individuals. Sadly, too many people tune into facts and will sit there, nodding their wooden heads as Hawley speaks, agreeing with what he’s saying.

Well, that felt good. Enough of soaking up news and becoming mired in anger and depression. Not letting that stuff rule my life. Sometimes, it feels like a wave rising up to overtake me. I just got to keep beating it back. Writing, friends, and coffee help.

The Neurons are filling my morning mental music stream (Trademark fumbled) with “Border Song”. Written by Bernie Taupin, performed by Elton John, “Border Song” came out in 1970 in the U.S., and was the first song to chart in the U.S. for Elton. When I first heard the song, I always thought its title was Holy Moses.

The question of why this song is playing today has been asked of The Neurons. They have not responded.

Stay positive and strong, and Vote Blue in 2024. Coffee is flowing, my friends. Help yourselves. Here’s young Elton John. Cheers

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