Now I know what some of you are thinking — you are thinking, Traicy, it was a quiet week, what on earth are you going to write about — and to that I say, the people who actually live here know that quiet weeks are the ones you have to watch the closest, because that is precisely when decisions get made that nobody told you were being made, and by the time you find out, there is already a sign posted and a date passed and someone is saying well you should have come to the meeting, which, as I have written before, they moved to Mondays, and I have never in my life met a person who is at their sharpest on a Monday, and I do not think that is an accident.
And speaking of watching things closely — I drove past the old Renner building on Tuesday, which, for those of you who moved here recently, used to be a perfectly good something-or-other, I want to say a shoe repair, or possibly a locksmith, and there was a man with a clipboard and one of those measuring wheels walking the perimeter, and I am not saying anything is wrong with that, I am just saying that a man with a clipboard and a measuring wheel is never there because things are staying the same — and while I had the window down I also noticed that the loading zone they put in where the parking used to be now has a cone sitting in it at an angle, which is doing absolutely nothing for anyone, and I said to myself, Traicy, this is exactly what you warned them about, and I did warn them, in print, which is more than most people can say — but I also want to note that I am not the type of person to say I told you so, I am simply the type of person who remembers that I did.
I will say this about quiet weeks — my grandmother, who lived in this county long before it was the kind of place people put on their license plate frames and talked about at dinner parties in Portland, she used to say that the quietest field is usually the one that just got plowed, and I thought she was being poetic but I am starting to think she was being literal — because you cannot have a cancelled hearing one week and a man with a measuring wheel the next and call it a coincidence, and I am not calling it a coincidence, I am calling it a sequence, which is a different thing, and if the April 13th meeting comes and goes without any update on that conditional use permit situation, I will have more to say about sequences, and I will have had time to organize my notes, which are extensive — and one more thing, I do not know who decided that the flower baskets on the main stretch should be petunias this year instead of the geraniums we have had for as long as I can remember, but somebody made that call and I would like to know in what meeting, because I have never once been asked, and I have opinions, and they are good ones.
That's all for this week. You know where to find me.