Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 7. Sunrise is 7:17 and sunset is 4:21 for 9 hours 4 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1962, NASA launches Relay 1, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.
There is, or there should be, a calculated order to writing. Reasonable patience underlies that calculated order: not too soon, not too late. In the language of the law, some questions are not yet ripe. They may seem so, but they’re not yet so, if thoroughly considered.
This brings me to an anecdote, from around the time FREE WHITEWATER first began, in 2007. A resident emailed me back then, expressing a concern about this website. She observed that another website in town at that time was a revealing expression of its author’s personality: colorful, exuberant, a kind of heart-on-one’s-sleeve publication.
By contrast, she saw FREE WHITEWATER‘s design as cold, distant, and unrevealing of my personality.
I thought after considering her message: hasn’t she considered the possibility that cold and distant are expressions of my personality?
Her observation comes to mind now and again, even these many years later, and it always delights.
When and how to present is a discipline and requires discipline. There’s design but underneath design lies by design.
Before pen hits paper, and before fingers strike the keyboard, there’s much that’s simply observing, reading, listening, and considering. Empirical comes before, and shapes, the polemical. Not too soon; not too late. All of this is, or at least should be, by design.
December in Whitewater is almost always a fraught time1. It’s Hanukkah and Christmas, but it’s also, not uncommonly, a time of heightened political concern in this town.
These concerns matter, of course. They matter enough, truly, to hear the full discussion and argumentation about them.
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- Late March in Whitewater is typically another time like this. I take gear with me when I travel — phone, laptop, pens, pencils, notebook, reference books on Kindle — and there has never been a March vacation where they’ve not come in handy for one local controversy or another. Whitewater is always on my mind. ↩︎
Aerial video shows severe flooding in Washington state: