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• Wednesday, September 25, 2013
The Issaquah Press
THE ISSAQUAHPRESS
Section
B
COMMUNITY
Wednesday September 25, 2013
A BREED APART
BY CHRISTINA CORRALES-TOY
Justin Shaw displays his Weather Blog Twitter page, with more than 1,100 followers, on the laptop computer in his Issaquah home. BY PATTY HERMAN
BY SYMONE LITTLEFIELD
Duncan Mulholland (above), of Issaquah, leads the Clydesdale Ranger out of the Draft Horse Barn on Sept. 12 at the State Fair in Puyallup. Mulholland is a volunteer and spends his time harnessing, grooming and driving the hitch team of six Clydesdales (left) belonging to Alan and Shelly Manning, including Ranger.
Skyline duo earns top marks at national leadership conference By Neil Pierson npierson@ sammamishreview.com This summer, Rachel Catterall and Megan O’Brian achieved something none of their peers at Skyline High School can claim. The two seniors won gold-medal honors in July at the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America’s National Leadership Conference in Nashville. Thousands of students attended the event, but a relatively small percentage did as well as Catterall and O’Brian. Projects that qualify for nationals are scored with a rubric — a point-based system that looks at the quality of each component. The points are converted into a percentage, and students earn medals based on their scores. “The majority of people at nationals get silver medals, which is 80-90 percent,” Catterall said. “Over 90 is gold, and we got 95, I think.” Catterall and O’Brian spent the better part of the 2012-13 school year preparing the project that was eventually judged to be one of the best in the nation. They were part of the national No Kid Hun-
gry campaign, which seeks to end childhood hunger in the United States. The project was much more than research; it required hands-on activities. O’Brian and Catterall — who served as the president and vice president, respectively, of last year’s Skyline FCCLA chapter — had to raise money and awareness in their community. Last October, they held a Wear Orange Day that got a big chunk of the student body involved. Shortly thereafter, they held a two-week food drive that netted hundreds of items for the Issaquah Food & Clothing Bank. During the spring, the girls partnered with Popcorn Palace to sell treats at the school. They made a $500 profit, which went directly to No Kid Hungry. Their website, Skyline for No Kid Hungry, chronicles the steps they took. They estimate their efforts reached 95 percent of Skyline’s students. They also learned a lot in the process. The statistics they gathered were startling — 16 million American children live in homes without enough food, and 10.6 million don’t receive free or reduced-price lunches at
BY NEIL PIERSON
Rachel Catterall (left) and Megan O’Brian, Skyline High School seniors earned gold medals from July’s national conference of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America. school even though they’re eligible. “I learned a lot about childhood hunger itself,” Catterall said. “I didn’t really realize how big of an issue it is in America.” The girls were both involved in the school’s Teaching Academy as juniors, and their FCCLA project also relates to possible career prospects in teaching. O’Brian said there are obvious examples of how meals can positively influence a student’s academic performance, as well as their behavior and emotions at school. “It’s pretty incredible
OPENING THE ARCHIVES AN ONGOING LOOK AT MEMORABLE IMAGES FROM ISSAQUAH’S PAST
The Issaquah History Museums take requests regarding what people would like to see in the Digital Collection. Roughly quarterly, volunteers have a data-entry day and prep a bunch of records for upload. If there is a particular name, place or item you’d like to see more images of on the website, email Erica Maniez at erica. maniez@issaquahhistory.org. If you have a photo or subject you would like to see in this feature, email editor@isspress.com.
King Salmon greets children during the 1981 Salmon Days Parade on Front Street near the old Village Theatre. 2001.020.001
just what little changes can do,” she said. Skyline’s FCCLA chapter is recruiting new members this year, the girls said, and because they have a new adviser, they’re expecting some changes. They also know FCCLA will be working with Autism Speaks on outreach efforts in the coming year. “We’re planning on focusing on that a little more this year,” Catterall said. O’Brian said she is hoping to see more students join FCCLA and particiSee LEADERS, Page B3
Automatic landscapes By Jane Garrison My plants talk to me, and I always answer — sometimes in no uncertain terms. I was telling them the other day, “You guys have it made. You haven’t a clue what plants are dealing with in other parts of the country.” This summer and last winter have been really conducive to plant growth here. We had a warmer than usual winter, extra heat this summer with higher than normal humidity, and a longer than normal growing season. With a little extra water from the hose, it’s a jungle out there. Hot summer days started the first of June rather than July 5 this year, and as of this writing, the weather is continuing to delight. I don’t have a real lawn, but we had to mow our weeds continually throughout the summer. My newly planted natives in the woods
Tweeting up a storm Issaquah resident shares his passion for weather By Christina Corrales-Toy newcastle@isspress.com When rare thunderstorms pounded the area in early September, Issaquah resident Justin Shaw was not staring out the windows of his Talus home, marveling at the lightning strikes. He was staring at a computer screen, tracking the storms’ paths and experiencing the extreme weather virtually with the more than 1,100 followers of his Seattle-weather themed Twitter account. “It was almost more fun to be on Twitter talking about the storms than actually watching them,” he said. “It’s like this big party with all of these weather nerds uniting together.” A self-professed weather geek, and proud of it, Shaw created the Seattle Weather Blog, and its accompanying Twitter account, as an outlet for one of his greatest interests. It is just a hobby, though, since Shaw currently works in marketing for a downtown Seattle law firm. Whenever he has lunch or a break, he’s looking up weather statistics with the National Weather Service, or tracking a storm with online radars. He combs through the data, often looking for
Help set up Habitat garage sale Volunteers needed to help with Habitat for Humanity Benefit Garage Sale set-up Sept. 25 and 26, any time from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. All abilities are needed but especially volunteers that can lift 50 pounds or more to help load and
Master gardener’s corner With Jane Garrison
GET GARDENING Talk with master gardeners at plant clinics from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays at the Issaquah Farmers Market until October, and this month at Squak Mt. Greenhouses & Nursery.
are so inundated by growth I can’t even find them. To take advantage of all that grub, the deer are showing up in “herds,” a term usually reserved for elk. All that exuberance made me wonder if people ever get tired of it, if perhaps it is just too much. Do we fantasize about living or vacationing in places where plants struggle to stay alive, for example, in the desert, in the high
ON THE WEB Join Justin Shaw as he follows the Pacific Northwest’s extreme weather on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ KSeattleWeather or on his blog at www.seattleweatherblog.com. something interesting to say about today’s weather and how it relates to the past, like the time he noted that Seattle was on tap for the warmest Aug. 16 since the day in 1977 when Elvis Presley died. “There’s kind of this rush of excitement that I get when I’m doing it,” Shaw said. “I like finding a cool stat that no one really knows about yet.” During severe storms, Shaw’s Twitter followers share with him the weather they’re seeing in their respective areas. He’ll often tweet about the weather he sees from his Talus townhouse, which is always a bit more extreme than in other places, he said. “We definitely get a lot more rain because we’re kind of on top of a hill,” he said. “If it’s really hot in Seattle, it will be hotter up here. If it’s really cold there, it will be colder here.” As his Twitter account See WEATHER, Page B3 transport furniture donations. Also needed are trucks and drivers. Those interested in helping can email H4H@faithunited.org, go to habitatgaragesale.org or call Faith Church at 392-0123. The sale will be Sept. 27 and 28 at the church at 3924 Issaquah-Pine Lake Road S.E.
mountains, or perhaps the windswept sea coast? Some ecosystems keep their appearances pruned nice and neat, all shaven and shorn. Windswept rocky or sandy beaches at the coast are like that. Alpine meadows in the Olympics and at Mount Rainier fit that description. Eastern Washington seems that way. Maybe those landscapes make people think they are more in control of their environment without having to do so much work. Maybe that’s why retired people move to Arizona. I know several couples who moved to the eastern Rockies in Wyoming and Montana. My sister fantasizes about moving to Ocean Shores. Our old friends from Edmonds just moved to Wenatchee, where they have a swimming pool surrounded by a rock and gravel yard. It must seem like a tremendous load lifted when landscapes can prune and weed themselves automatically. On the other hand, I don’t think I want to See LANDSCAPES, Page B3
The Issaquah Press
Wednesday, September 25, 2013 •
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