Current News You Can Use

The old Rays on North 7th Street is perfect for this project I am Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener, and I have a dream: a no-frills hostel. Grants Pass will soon have a place for intoxicated people to sleep off their intoxication, thanks to Chief Landis and company.  A Medford non-profit is proposing to start a juvenile shelter here like they have in Medford.  Grace Roots, a Medically Assisted Treatment Center (MAT-C) for opiate addiction, is in the works, thanks largely to Nancy Yonally and the people she has gathered to help her.  We already have the Gospel Rescue Mission with its showers, meals and residential rehab, and Faith House, a shelter for battered women and their children.  The Salvation Army soup kitchen is another long-established feature in Grants Pass. Now we need a cheap place to shower and sleep for people who are not intoxicated, not juvenile, not seeking help for addictions, not battered, or for whom there is no room in other shelters....

Three-hour parking on 5th next to First Call Resolution Once again, Dale Matthews brings us useful news on the Bill Meyer Show on KMED.com.  We learned that, at the City Council’s January 11th workshop, the City of Grants Pass presented a plan to hand off downtown parking enforcement to a private company.  The main difference between this and our present parking code enforcement is that, if you are ticketed and want to contest the ticket, you have to pay the fine first and then appeal the verdict of the parking attendant.  You will be guilty until proven innocent in the name of “efficiency.” The company will collect its contract payment from parking violators and pay any collections over that to the City, on a monthly basis.  While the company says that cities never pay for enforcement, there is no guarantee that they will pay anything to the city. It turns out that separation of powers has long since taken a walk, not surprising in a city where the Mana...

This is a proposal for a no-frills hostel for those who just need a safe place to sleep and clean up: For perhaps $5 per person per night, the Center will provide: • A cot in a room full of cots: a dim, fairly quiet place to sleep, on a moment’s notice with no questions asked, and no searches; ·         Dog cages; • Ear plugs and eye masks available for purchase, as some light is necessary for security and people do snore; • A constant watch by camera and attendant on the belongings they carry in with them and store under their cots, and cameras elsewhere in common rooms for security; • Restrooms; • Separate shower facilities; • Coin-operated laundry machines to wash clothing and bedding and help fund the shelter; • A reading and dining room for food that people bring in, with a used book exchange and information on local services and employment listings. Rules: • Quiet. Do not bother the sleepers. • No exhib...

The same mask that stops colds and flu in the winter can help you breathe easier when forest fires are filling our air with smoke.  Your breath moistens the inside of the mask; smoke particles get caught up in the moist cloth, greatly reducing the amount you take into your lungs.  A bandanna cold mask has more cloth to catch the smoke than a dust mask or medical mask, and more room inside it to breathe easily.           You can breathe easier in your yard by using misters to clear the smoke by taking it to the ground, where it becomes good fertilizer.  The snakelike standing plastic misters with twin emitters that you can usually buy at the Grange Coop or Diamond Building Supply work very well for this, as they produce a very fine mist.  They also can be moved around, as they are made to be used on a hose.  (The hose should be heavy duty 5/8” or cheap ½” to take the pressure.)  Individual mist emitters tha...

“A woman is a woman and a man ain’t nothin’ but a male...” ~Louis Prima, Jump, Jive and Wail Honorable Public Servants,           “Male” and “female” are properly adjectives, modifiers of nouns, not nouns themselves.  “Male” and “female,” when used as nouns to refer to people, are dehumanizing.  Any animal and some plants are male or female. We have perfectly good words for male and female humans that convey not only humanity, but age range as well: man; woman; boy; girl.  The jazz tune from which the above quote was taken was written in the mid-fifties.  There is a long history of the words “male” and “female” being used to disrespect the people being referred to.  White, English-speaking men have a long called men and women of other races and cultures “males” and “females” and sometimes even the women of their own families.   I first noticed the dehumanizing aspect of such words in the ‘80s, when...

Kombucha brewing.  The scoby is so thick because I have not made more since I stopped drinking it. An afterword to " Make Kombucha Tea ," August 2014. After drinking too much of Kombucha daily for perhaps 8 years or 9 years, I've figured out that it was causing side effects.  I was told in the beginning that one should drink just a small glass first thing in the morning, before eating anything.  I like it so much that I just drank a pint all day long, putting it over ice first, and then diluting it more with water as the day goes on, so as not to ingest too much sugar.  I like the way a little sugar and acid make water less dry on the throat. For a long time I had constant soreness in the muscles in my arms, a common side effect of statins, which are used to lower cholesterol.  I have never bought into the anti-cholesterol fad, any more than the anti-fat fad.  A few days ago, I got to thinking about red rice yeast, which is rice fermented in a f...

A flat-topped 5-pound honey bottle; the fat one mentioned was thrown away.  The other day, I went looking for a honey dispenser with a pointy cap, because the 1 lb flat-topped squirt bottle I had been using was always sticky.  Honey would collect on the flat top and drip down the side when it was used.  It was a fat-top bottle, made to be able to set it upside down for easy dispensing, but that only made it easy for the honey to leak out and make a pool in the cabinet. I was looking through the honey selection at Fred Meyer and all the containers had the same type of flat top, some with a fatter top for setting the bottle upside down, others with a smaller top of the same design.  I noticed that the Agave Nectar bottles used by Madhava (Madhavasweeteners.com) had a pointed cap that opened to a short cone-shaped dispenser with a sloping cap that looked unlikely for honey to pool on.  I bought it, used it up, and now it is my honey dispenser. I call on ...