Idaho Voices

Wind, according to KREM-2 meteorologist Tom Sherry, “can make a good day bad, and a bad day worse.” Once it starts blowing at more than about 10 mph, it starts to impact people. Who wants to see the contents of their neighbors’ recycling bins in their yard on garbage collection day because it was windy the previous night?

Filings from March 30-April 3. Chapter 7 (liquidation petitions)

Coeur d’Alene

The sixth annual Canine Caper 5K run/walk will be Saturday at 9:45 a.m. at the Boundary County Fairgrounds. Volunteers are needed for approximately three hours to help ensure the safety of people and their pets participating in the event.

Headlines about swine flu continue to dominate the nightly news and morning newspaper. As reports trickled in of probable cases in the Inland Northwest, the Coeur d’Alene School District said it was determined to keep families informed about the disease. The district recently sent home letters with students from the Panhandle Health District, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, and the U.S. Departments of Education and Agriculture.

In the world of text messaging, Twitter and Facebook, people often long for a taste of the simpler days. In Sandpoint from May 14 through 17 the clocks will be turned back 50 years as baby boomers, young professionals and schoolkids don poodle skirts, penny loafers and rolled-up jeans; men and boys will slick back their hair and the town will be transformed into a scene from the 1950s. Vintage cars will be the norm, as will the music of Elvis, Ricky Nelson, The Platters and Fats Domino. Sandpoint’s Lost in the ’50s weekend, now in its 24th year, draws people from faraway places and has become a favorite tradition for many.

Jeff Butcher started as a volunteer firefighter with the Mica-Kidd Island Fire Department when he was 18. Now, at 21, he’s a full-fledged firefighter with the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department. “I really didn’t know a lot about it, but I knew I was going to be a firefighter,” Butcher said.

“Wow, I haven’t seen you guys in a long time!” the waitress percolated as she handed us our menus and poured our coffee. We gave each other sideways glances and laughed nervously. Only moments earlier, before we’d even walked into the Flying J Travel Plaza Restaurant in Post Falls, we were discussing how it had been ages and ages since we’d last eaten there. “It’s been at least since I was a senior in high school, if not earlier,” I calculated aloud, “so that’s nearly 20 years.” “I think it was 1991 for me,” decided Q.

Before I talk about a bit of Bloomsday weather trivia, I wanted to invite readers to give me some feedback regarding wind forecasts. One of the pieces of the weather forecast that is usually near the bottom of the priority list, both in time spent forecasting and time spent presenting (on TV), is wind. Unless I see a feature on the weather charts that would bring potentially damaging winds, or even sustained periods of very strong winds to the area, I don’t give the wind forecast a lot of thought. I suspect that the average person who gets up, gets in his/her car to go to work, works all day indoors, and then comes home, finds his/her daily life impacted very little by the wind.

Today BLUES JAM – 4 p.m., Linger Longer Lounge, 6262 W. Maine St., Spirit Lake, 623-2311.

Girls 100 – 1, tie, Camille Reynolds (Lakeland) and Krista Perry (Lewiston) 12.4. 3, tie, Shaundra Scott (Post Falls) and Dominique Billingslea (Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy) 12.8. 5, tie, Ashley Burke (Lew), Hanna Johnson (Coeur d’Alene) and Melinda Van Dyk (Sandpoint) 13.0.

Several UIdaho alums at Huckleberries Online were surprised that their alma mater wasn’t included in the Playboy’s latest list of the nation’s Top 25 party schools. After all, Washington State was No. 16. And even my alma mater, Chico State University (Calif.) was there, slipping from a No. 2 ranking in 2002 to No. 20 this year. Some thought Hugh Hefner’s bawdy mag had suffered a lapse in judgment, until John Austin chimed in: “I remember when Playboy compiled their list in the mid-70s and failed to include the U of I. Many thought it was an honest oversight seeing as how the lower Idaho drinking age encouraged a flood of Wazzu students to cross the border. Anyway, when someone checked with an editor at Playboy, they said they couldn’t include the U of I on their list because they only recognized “amateur” party schools! Made sense to us after that.” That, or the Vandal partiers have suffered the same fate as the sports teams since UIdaho’s jump to Division IA. Hike nekkid?

BOISE - Gov. Butch Otter has signed into law SB 1141, the much-revised bill to raise hunting and fishing license and tag fees next year, but only for nonresidents of the state. The state Fish and Game Department, which receives no general tax funds and operates solely on license and tag fees, sought a much larger increase, but lawmakers shrank it.

Readers seem to eat up news about a new restaurant with more interest than other business news. So even though this place won’t open until maybe early June, here are the ingredients. Scratch, described as “a casual, fine-dining experience” in its Spokane location, will start its second location in downtown Coeur d’Alene. Remodeling is under way for Scratch in what was most recently Le Piastré in the northeast corner of Sherman Avenue at Fifth Street.

I don’t know about you all out there, but I’ve been pretty busy getting the garden cleaned up now that it’s warmed up. There were early weeds to pull, snow damaged shrubs and bushes to cut down, garden debris to shred and a few dozen plants to move before they came out of dormancy. I’m ready for a break. Some of our local gardening friends seemed to know that and have some really cool events planned for next week.

For 04-26-2009