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I woke up this morning to read in the paper that there was a shooting at my brother’s work. I immediately called him, since the vague article suggested there was an employee fatality. He answered, pretty shook up. They sent all the employees home after the shooting at 7:30am. While he wasn’t in the building at the time, he was walking up to it, and heard the gunshots and watched people burst out of the building in panic. He’s OK, but one of his bosses died. The shooter, also an employee, was killed in a firefight with a police officer down the road. There’s a lot of messed up details and he’s pretty upset that someone could go off the rails like that on a pretty good boss. It sounds like there were a lot of witnesses. I hope counseling is provided for all employees who need it. It’s a small community, and it is likely that both people were well known by most of the town.  I hope they support each other with dealing with this unexpected violence.

UPDATE: My brother is still pretty shook up. Many co-workers have quit, making his job more stressful, and he had to remove graffiti left by the shooter. All the employees are supporting each other, though. He may still decide to quit (he had lots of valid reasons before this happened), which he has my full support on.

My gift to you for the holidays is to introduce you to the next hip band: The Igloos. The Igloos, who usually reside north of the Arctic Circle, come down to our less snowy mountains fairly often to play music of their life among the walrii, polar bears, and ice. I highly recommend you check them out. This picture does not do them justice – but with songs like, “The Lemmings, They Cannot Control Themselves” how can you go wrong? They were on KRFC’s live music program today, Live @ Lunch – and harassed the host quite a bit. Can’t say I blame them. He seemed to not understand many things about the land of the Eskimos.

See that? That is the new Big Project. Despite whatever we did or did not learn from running a fire performance LLC, we decided to take on the larger project of organizing a group of people who want “project space”, and making that space possible. What you see to the left is the original bare bones set-up. While it looks a lot more like a workshop this week, it still has a long way to go: we have to balance our budget, we have to get rid of five pallets of cardboard, five exterior doors (old tenants love to leave behind junk), build a loft, and solve issues about what is expected of everyone so there is a strong culture of respect. Luckily, so far we have a truly excellent group of people. I was starting to give up on this city having people who are this high quality, but I’m glad to be proven wrong. Now if only we could find a taker for all those doors…in the meantime, I’ll try to post updates as the space comes together. The Big Project will hopefully allow me to brew root beer for incorporation into the multi-tap kegerator, do tie-dye without risking other people’s floors, and Sam and me to build our other Big Project: a paper incinerator that is also an art piece that is also easy to use and transport, that also meets particulate matter standards, etc. Hmm.

We’ve gotten very little snow here so far this season. Which is a shame, because the most notable thing about the weather has been the howling, gusty winds. Snow is much better than wind – and certainly better for tourist dollars, which the state could definitely use.