The Christmas season in La Grande is a special time.The new downtown decorations, combined with the many businesses that have festive windows, make for a wonderful local shopping experience.

Our local businesses are our strength and, by “keeping it local,” we are all helping our community.

I would like to highlight some of the fantastic efforts by citizens and organizations during 2011.

After the long weekend at St. Paul, it was great to have a week to recover. Brinda, our chaperone, had talked to us beforehand about the possibility of going to Elgin two nights: the Mark Nichols Memorial Bull Riding Night and the Sunday Performance.

Are wind turbines the symbols of salvation for cash-starved rural counties, or disfiguring cancers on the landscape? Baby steps to wean an economy off fossil fuels, or menaces to public health and property values? It may depend on who you ask.

BOISE — A reoccurring theme has emerged during this annual training period on the vast, high-desert Orchard Training Area and it is a simple sentiment: Let’s get going.

Over and over again while I’ve drifted from one company to another in the 3rd Battalion, I keep hearing the same refrain: Let’s just get going.

The sentiment is not delivered with negative overtones. No one appears frustrated. Instead there is a workmanlike sense of responsibility evident in the words, a kind of blue-collar motif stamped with a calm realization that the sooner the battalion gets to Iraq the sooner it can go home.

As a member of the La Grande City Council, there were certain aspects of the 2010-2011 budget that I felt could raise some legitimate questions.  Consequently, when I saw the caption for your editorial of July 29, my first thought was, “Fair enough, let’s see what they have to say.” Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that the content of the editorial didn’t address any of those potential issues, but took the council to task for not “...insist(ing) that cutbacks be made and shared by city staff...”

If you missed your chance at the Eastern Oregon Livestock Show to put quality meat in your freezer, here is the last opportunity for the year.

We are gearing up for the Union County Fair this week and once again the youth of our community get the opportunity to bring their 4-H and FFA market animals to a show, have them judged and then sell at the auction on Saturday. We have 110 market animals coming to fair including goats, hogs, lambs, steers and rabbits.