This love story is missing something. It has all the high points, from boy-meets-girl to boy-and-girl-date. It’s got all the flirting, all the blushing, all the hand-holding, giggling, and gentle words of love, too. All the meaningful looks are there, in spades. What it’s missing, though, is the awkwardness and uncertainty that usually precede all of those other things.

So, how did they get past that point, and on to the good parts?

George Summers and Betty McNeely look at each other before answering, and Betty’s cheeks begin to color. They both laugh. They can’t explain it.

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The face of Snoqualmie Valley School District’s compliance with state anti-bullying requirements is not Nancy Meeks, and she’d be first to say so.

Instead, Meeks said the school district really addresses harassment, intimidation and bullying issues at the level of each individual school. “The real work is not with me, it’s with the buildings,” she said. Although she is officially the school compliance officer for the state-mandated policy 3207, she said “it’s the principals and the counselors in the buildings who play the biggest role.”

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What Heidi Dehart does, she does because of other people.

People are what motivates the Mount Si High School senior to volunteer for various Key Club activities, and to coordinate the club’s big garage sale fundraiser each summer.

“The part that I really enjoy…is watching people who were looking for something and just being really overjoyed that they found it,” she explained, “or just being so happy that other people are willing to help them.”

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What made Afghanistan memorable for North Bend’s Andrew Conway, serving there as an intelligence analyst for NATO, were the mountains and the friendly people.

What he most vividly remembers about Iraq, where he was stationed from last April to November, are the heat, dust and a breakdown one night in Baghdad.

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Monday morning was the first day back for Carnation City Hall staffers, who found their offices just as they left them the previous Wednesday, warm and powered up. They knew power had been out for part of the week because the phone system needed a tweak, but snow and ice kept the office closed the rest of the week, so they didn’t know exactly when the power failed, or when it was restored.

The same was not true in neighboring Fall City, where homes and businesses Monday morning were still running on generators, and still talking about when the power would be back on. Many were gathered in the few Main Street businesses that offered light, heat and water.

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Recycling is easy, for most people in the area. Those blue bins for depositing plastic, glass, paper, and metal are part of the landscape, anywhere you’d find a trash can, and every commercial trash hauler in the county will pick up recycling right off your curb, if you ask them to. For the rest of the people, recycling is not exactly hard—those who don’t get curbside collection can still haul their recyclables to a collection site—but it is about to get harder.

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