Oh, yeah. Another bunch of stores will fill that empty feeling I have inside. From The Olympian:

Some mall shoppers this week were pleased to learn that stores previously only found outside of Thurston County would be coming to Olympia.

Teri Lund of Olympia said she became familiar with Bed Bath & Beyond while a Western Washington University student in Bellingham. She said the store would be a positive addition to the west Olympia mall.

Sarah Nelson of Olympia said she hopes a TGI Friday's restaurant will open in The Promenade.

More important to Nelson, she said, would be if a Wal-Mart store opened in west Olympia.

"The other one in Lacey is so packed," she said.

Mark Curtis of Olympia said the new Borders bookstore drew his attention to the project, which he hadn't been paying much attention to before he heard the news.

A fan of blues, bluegrass and spiritual music, Curtis said he likes the music selections available in Borders.

"That would be a good addition," he said.

I only recently stopped. From HeraldNet:

OLYMPIA - A steadily growing number of Thurston County residents commute to jobs outside the county, which economic development experts say is partly due to a lack of good-paying local jobs.

Nearly 30 percent more people now commute to jobs outside the county than work for state government in Thurston County, and the number of outbound commuters is increasing steadily.

State government jobs have long stabilized the county's economy, cushioning it from economic downturns. But growth in state jobs has been relatively flat for several years.

I've heard commuting described as "committing suicide one day at a time."

Go over to Rob's blog (Ultraquiet No More) and click through to the submarine's blog:

Drop on by to the newest submarine website, Olympia717.com, the official website of the USS Olympia (SSN-717). The boat elected to try an online forum style, a "message board". There's a ship's store, forums, and other features coming online in the next month or so.

From The Olympian:

OLYMPIA -- On a small lot tucked in a dead-end street on the east side, residents come to grow tomatoes, squash and cabbage and talk gardening.

They gather for monthly work parties, take food home for dinner and donate the excess to the Thurston County Food Bank.

This garden may have to move, but the article includes a list of other opportunities to garden in Olympia.

In the spirit of "High Fidelity," here are my top five music discoveries of 2005:

1. Dogs Die in Hot Cars -- Please Describe Yourself
2. The Dresden Dolls -- The Dresden Dolls
   
3. Kaizers Orchestra -- Ompa Til Du Dor
4. Nellie McKay -- Get Away From Me
5. Postal Service -- Give up

Feel free to add your own top five list (not necessarily music):

Authorities throw out residents of homeless camp near Capitol Lake

The Olympian - Police evicted four residents of a small tent city along Deschutes Parkway on Friday morning. In the spirit of the holidays, they didn’t arrest them.

–Jesus is never going to return if we keep treating one another this way–

Evergreen's free-form curriculum did have some shortcomings in the pioneering years, but that's all part of being an experiment. In my own case, this was painfully evident in my brief foray into the world of cartoon animation.

There was a huge, old-fashioned animation stand buried deep in the maze of the Library building. I was able to sign up on the roster and use it nearly any time I wanted. In 1975 I had taken an internship with the regional educational television station in Tacoma. My aim was to produce a three minute piece. But there were two big problems.

The first little complication was the fact that I could find no one to really spend time and teach me how the animation stand worked. Believe me, I tried. My faculty sponsor really knew nothing about animation or cartooning, he was an anthropologist! The keeper of the stand basically threw open the door for me and said, "Have at it, kid." So I taught myself how to use the contraption. My short film was an animation of the song "Surrey With The Fringe On Top," set for an elementary school audience. To this day, I can't hear that song without thinking about this episode.

The second problem was that even though the television station wanted a three minute segment, they had, as I discovered only after I completed shooting, supplied me with less than two minutes of film. That meant that almost half of my labor was spent on what could be charitably called "conceptual art." But I still had time to be resourceful and complete not one but two finished short films by the end of the quarter. And I did it without using the animation stand.

Inspired by the innovative Canadian animator Norman McLaren, I ran some leader film through a projector. This discolored the white film enough for me to identify where the frames were located. Then I painstakingly drew, with a fine point India ink pen, on each frame. At 32 frames per second, it took awhile, but the result was sort of a shimmering effect that I really liked.

Click on Picture to Play

Quicktime Required (free download)
NORAD Santa tracker here.

A review from decorabilia:

The restaurant's hues are warm, burnt sienna and mustard, its decor sparing, unsurprising given its recency and its location in the downtown Ramada. The owner is friendly, welcoming patrons and taking the chance to visit when time allows. Prices are reasonable, averaging around $10 per entree, many including a choice of three sides and a cornbread pancake.

I declare the cornbread dressing to be the best side dish in Olympia. In fact, next time we dine at Southern Kitchen, I'm going to order a plateful and stuff myself with it, gravy and all.

From CBC British Columbia - U.S. ready to apologize for vigilante lynching:

Washington state is planning a statement of regret for a 121-year-old injustice -- the hanging of an aboriginal teen by an American lynch mob in the Fraser Valley.

Fourteen-year-old Louie Sam had been accused of murdering a Nooksack, Washington man, and was being held in custody by B.C. police.

About 120 American vigilantes rode north at Sumas Prairie in 1884, seized the teen and hanged him from a tree just north of the international boundary.

It's believed to be Canada's only lynching.

It turns out the kid was innocent. There is also an audio link to an interview with a professor who did the research on the event.