As we move away from snow and ice, what’s on tap for this week’s weather? Check our local weather coverage.
In case you missed them, here are some of the top stories of the weekend:
It’s a little after 8 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 7, as Jaime Somosot steers a small bus out of the C-Tran yard toward a neighborhood of low-slung houses in Vancouver.
For the last 18 years, Somosot has been driving for C-Van, the paratransit service provided by C-Tran. While C-Tran buses travel fixed routes through the county, C-Van buses provide door-to-door rides in specific areas for those too disabled to access C-Tran’s regular buses.
Today, Somosot is planning to pick up about two pages worth of passengers. Each one will pay between $1.80 and $3.85 in cash fares, depending on where they’re going, but their contribution meets just a fraction of the $44.06 cost for each one-way ride, compared with the $5.99 cost per ride on a fixed-route bus.
“I hear it all the time: Without the mailman and us, they wouldn’t get the mail or groceries,” Somosot said, while en route to his first pickup of the day. “A lot of these people don’t have anybody. They’d be stuck.”
Somosot’s day is planned in advance to be as efficient as possible. His passengers made their reservations two days ahead of time. A GPS program plots the most direct path to each stop, but he can reroute if there’s an unforeseen problem.
Paratransit is a small share of C-Tran’s customer base, but it is responsible for a disproportionately large share of the agency’s expenses — and the region’s changing demographics threaten to exacerbate the situation.
HA-19 was one of five mini-submarines assigned to sneak into Pearl Harbor and fire torpedoes during the attack. Only one mini-sub made it inside the harbor, where it was spotted and sunk.
Read the full story: Washougal man has piece of Japanese mini-sub
Vancouver’s number of hotel rooms will grow 35 percent between now and 2020. One hotel was completed in January and seven more are on the horizon. All said, 957 rooms will bolster the city’s current total of 2,738.
That’s good news for a lot of people. Local officials hope to see more travelers stay in the area. Nearby restaurants, cafes and bars might expect more tabs picked up by out-of-towners.
“I think it’s big news for the community as a whole,” said Jacob Schmidt, a spokesman for local tourism organization Visit Vancouver USA. “You’ve got competition between old properties and new properties. Consumers can have more choices and more selection. Obviously, to some extent, new supply can generate some of the demand, but not always.”
That is the question. Between the proposed Hotel Indigo, The AC by Marriott, and a hotel addition to the Ilani Casino Resort, which Visit Vancouver includes in its projections, there is little doubt hotel developers are planning big investments. But will there be enough demand?
Read the full story: Will more hotels bring more tourists to Clark County?
It doesn’t get much humbler than the humble napkin, whose job is to absorb your sloppy mess and vanish.
But local painter, illustrator and graphic designer Patrick Flynn has exalted the paper rag into a proper canvas for his masterpieces. Or, anyway, for one creative dad’s daily message of lunchtime love.
“It’s just a little, tangible way of making my kids feel special,” Flynn said.
It’s a little more than that. For as long as they’ve been packing lunches into brown bags, parents have been tucking in sweet notes and Valentines too — but most parents don’t splurge on fine-quality paper napkins and spend as long as a couple of hours in the middle of the night decorating them with cartoon characters, superheroes, family pets and other amusements.
It’s just what a kid slogging through school needs in the middle of the day: a loving, laughing pick-me-up from home.
Now you can sample his kids’ delight. A wildly successful Kickstarter campaign has led to the creation of a new picture book called “Lunch Napkin Art” — and Flynn, 50, is pondering the irony that doodles on napkins have become his signature creative achievement.
And that’s OK, he said. Being a “serious artist” can mean a whole lot of staring at canvases, “trying to birth grand, profound, heavy things,” he said. “This is something you don’t have to think about. You just do it.”
Read the full story: Local artist doles out a little love at lunchtime
