Greetings from City Hall –

I hope that everybody had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year with optimism and plans to improve over the one we are leaving behind. I am writing this on 27 December, because Donna and I will be visiting the twins in Tacoma and jamming with Doctor Way Yin in Bellingham over the next week. Diane says the bills will go out on time. I don’t know what it would take to get on Diane’s short list, but I don’t want to find out. If you did not have a chance to watch Town and Country Players’ Christmas Play, it was a fun event. The old American Legion building was very accommodating to the players and the audience. About 300 people in all saw the play and everyone I have talked to enjoys our capability of having a place where we can have this local bunch of thespians do their thing – paying homage to Thespis, who invented acting in Icaria, which is present-day Dionysos in Greece which is also the origin of the name, “Dennis” and … let’s see, where was I? Anyway, this came right on the heels of the American Legion Auxiliary’s Bazaar, which was also a great success. In fact, the ladies did so well they contributed to the cost of running the place for events like this. There are ways to offset the costs of keeping the old building open and also to make it more operationally habitable as a performance center and pleasant for our other users.

Community Meetings – the Greenway and Other Stuff

This other community treasure will be the subject of a work session which will precede our January City Council meeting at 6:00 PM on 25 January at the American Legion Building to discuss the future of the Greenway. Nick Kaiser, the spokesman for the family that owns the property, will be at the session as will Dave Talbot, former director of Oregon State Parks and Recreation, and who has a home on Dufur Avenue. Along with City Hall, they have been working on the future of the park, including some updates and modifications. We will be entertaining ideas for these subjects at the meeting and would like to see as many people as can make it to listen to some of the things that are happening in the park. The community work session is becoming a regular feature of the City Council meeting and will probably continue, depending on what issues we need to work on, throughout the non-busy season. Sometime this spring I would like to talk about holiday decorations for the streetlights. That would give us a chance to do some fund raising and select what we would like to see on the street lights in the way. Don’t forget that we have a plug-in on every post. Once May gets here, we all get busy. By October we will probably have more to talk about – or talk about old stuff again.

Wireless Internet

It is almost ready for prime time. We are working on an agreement with the owner of the property where the old television translator station sat and have established a few locations to break in the system. It is working in town, Tygh Valley, Wamic and on Juniper Flat, which is upgrading from dial-up. We are up-grading from the single-gerbil version of DSL provided by CenturyLink to people within 18,000 feet of their office on Dufur Avenue. That is not a circle; that is the length of the telephone line from there to your house and in general, may not reach the edge of the city limits. The DSL speed that CenturyLink advertises is maxed at about 1.5 mps (megabits-of-information per second), but in actuality is much less due to the material that the “final mile” of our phone lines are made of – at best, copper. At our home, that speed is approximately .4 mps, and sometimes I can multi-task by bringing up a browser on my computer and making a sandwich at the same time. The wireless system will bring that speed up to 1.5 mps as a start and will be expandable to 3.0 mps. My dual tasking will drop to taking a bite out of the sandwich while waiting for the browser. Clint Johnson, the entrepreneurial owner/operator of Johnson Network is a former student of Lynn Ewing’s in The Dalles. He has worked with The Dalles Dam, the Education Service District in The Dalles, Providence Hospital in Hood River and is currently working at Google. He has a fairly talented crew working with him and is highly regarded in the field locally and in the Portland area. His talent is looking ahead to see what he can do next with a system so we can expect to be part of the leading edge of an area-wide wireless system. When we get the contract settled and begin to install the systems in individual homes and businesses, it may be a while before he gets to all of us. He will be busier than a one-armed paper hanger which will give us the opportunity to exercise a very important virtue – patience. Stay tuned.

That’s it. It’s been a quiet month. The only thing currently heating up is the Iowa Caucus. I always wondered what a caucus really was and to my disappointment, it is usually a closed meeting where a political party develops policy or selects candidates for office. I knew that a “Caucus Race” was what the Dodo in Wonderland proposed as an “energetic remedy” for drying off Alice and a bunch of weird characters dreamed up by a mathematician on drugs. And I thought that was just silly. And Alice had better opponents – a Dodo, an Eaglet, a Mouse, a Duck, and a Lory, which is a parrot. And everybody won because when it was over everybody was dry. But this one is even sillier. The winner doesn’t necessarily win anything, except for the historical certainty to lose the New Hampshire primary election. We will have our Oregon primary on 15 May. By that time the die will be pretty much cast, to steal a phrase from Caesar, concerning who the November opponents will be. That is the bad news. The good news is that we don’t have the requirement to be silly with the entire country watching.’

Happy New Year!!!

Cheers,

Denny