January 2008

The 2008 session of the Washington Legislature will convene on Monday, Jan. 14.

This year's session is limited to 60 days, and will adjourn sine die on March 13.

The Highline area is represented in Olympia by lawmakers from the 11th, 33rd and 34th legislative districts. All are Democrats. They are:

District 11, which includes Tukwila and Renton-Sen. Margarita Prentice, Rep. Zach Hudgins and Rep. Bob Hasegawa.

District 33, which includes Des Moines, Normandy Park and SeaTac-Sen. Karen Keiser, Rep. Shay Schual-Berke and Rep.

Rep. Sharon Nelson, D - Maury Island, has been appointed to the House Local Government Committee and the Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee.

In addition, Nelson will serve on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government and Audit Review.

The Burien City Council is seeking volunteers to assist staff in updating its shoreline master program.

Selected volunteers will serve on a special advisory committee providing valuable input and guidance during the shoreline master program update process.

The advisory committee will represent various geographic areas and a broad range of community interests in Burien's shorelines.

It will meet monthly throughout the update process that is anticipated to start in February and conclude in mid-2010.

Application forms can be found on the city's Web site

Burien

January 1-The owner of a 25-foot sailboat, who reportedly was an inexperienced sailor, was rescued from his vessel after it beached against the bulkhead at Three Tree Point.

The U.S. Coast Guard was alerted, and King County Sheriff's deputies then responded.

Meet Carlos Santos

I met him at the supermarket this week when I spotted the huge bandage on his left hand and asked him what happened.

He told me he was working on his car with the hood open and the engine running. He had installed some new radiator hoses and was checking to see if they leaked.

Pow, he caught his left hand in the fan blade with a careless move. In a flash the whirring blade caught him on the palm and wrist and ripped it apart.

Politicians fascinate because they constitute such a paradox; they are an elite that accomplishes mediocrity for the public good.

George Will

Syndicated columnist

Anyone who drives past Burien's Town Square site knows the traffic lanes at Southwest 152nd Street and Fourth Avenue Southwest weren't designed by the brightest of engineering minds.

Motorists often are backed up at green lights because there are no dedicated left-turn lanes.

I am writing to let you know I oppose a second Anthony's restaurant at our marina. In fact, for ecological impact reasons, I discourage any major construction at the marina (other than repairs to existing structures, or infrastructural upgrades).

Every winter I am amazed at what Mother Nature does to the Beach Park, and for the past couple of years I have been looking at the water-damaged hillside where a condominium building might someday slide down onto the marina parking lot.

We are writing in reference to a plan, outlined in the "Over the Fence" column of 19 December 2007, to move another Anthony's to the waterfront.

Does another "high-end" restaurant really seem like a need for the Marina, or would something more affordable and "family friendly" make sense?

'Fred Claus' is fun to watch

Director: David Dobkin

Rated PG

(Two Stars)

By Bruce Bulloch

The best movies are an ethereal alchemy of talent and skill, while the worst are a perfect storm of bad choices. But those films that find themselves in the undistinguished middle are sometimes not so much consistently mediocre as incomplete. They fire brilliantly on a couple of pistons, just not all of them.

Carrots don't grow bullet shaped

By Annette Herrick

"Today we give away our capacity to do things with our hands and our bodies that make us feel human."

This quote came from a recent review about a movie that was showing here in Seattle, "How to Cook Your Life," about a Zen priest and chef, Edward Brown. He was concerned with our disconnection from the physical world, and said,

"In cooking, hands get to be hands, to do something."

This became ever more clear to me on the day of our first snow in 2007.