Cassie Marie

Farmers’ Market
The Walla Walla Valley Farmers’ Market always has lots of locally grown fruits and vegetables, as well as breads, cheeses, arts and crafts. Open most weekends, but closed during the winter months. Located at 4th and Main.

Bright’s
This candy shop is straight out of the movies and features fudge, ice cream, and other tasty goodies. Located at 11 E. Main Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues.

Walla Walla Parks, & esp. Pioneer Park
Take a walk to one of Walla Walla’s best, and largest (58 acres) parks. Be sure to visit the Pioneer Park Aviary, which is home to approximately 200 exotic birds. Directions: from Reid Campus Center, head south on Park St., turn left onto Alder, the park is on the right side, at Alder and Division.

Bike to Bennington Lake
Borrow a few of your friends’ bikes, and bike to Bennington Lake. Follow Boyer Ave. East until it veers left. Turn Right onto University Dr., following it until you hit the Mill Creek trail. A sign will show you when to turn off to the lake.

History and Cultural Attractions, esp. Black Door Gallery & Museum of Unnatural History
Created and run by artist Gerry Matthews, this wacky and subversive museum takes jabs at your expectations with zany, three-dimensional assemblage art. Located at 4 1/2 W. Main, upstairs. Admission is free.

Main Street
Take a walk down the 2001 winner of the “Great American Main Street” Award. Be sure to check out the Sweet Onion sculptures on display.

Corn Maze
Open Thursdays and Fridays from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., Saturdays from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m., and Sundays from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Directions: Head East on Isaacs until it becomes Mill Creek. Take a Right at 5 Mile Road, then follow signs. Admission is $6.00.

Frolf
Take your parents for a round on Whitman’s renowned Frisbee Golf course. If you don’t know the course, bring along a knowledgeable friend.

Ice Skating
For a change of pace, go ice skating at the local YWCA. Admission is $4.50, Skate rentals are $1.50. Open Friday 6-8 p.m., Saturday 2-4 and 7-9 p.m., and Sunday 2-4 p.m. Located at 211 E. Birch.

Carnegie Art Center
Located at 109 S. Palouse St. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Admission is Free.

Currently at Carnegie Art Center (at the date of this blog posting):

• Art of the Home September 30 through October 31, 2008
  Join CAC for a show of functional as well as beautiful artwork for the home. Featured work includes rugs, fine wood and metal furniture, lamps and lighting, floor cloths, paintings, wall hangings, soft furnishings, quilts and wall decor’. Featured Artists: Dana Boer, Lori Boer, David Emigh, Kirk Fortner, Doulas Gisi, Carol Hassen, Margaret Jaminson, Nancy Kessler, Donna Maiden, M’Lisse Moerk, Colleen Sargen, Sue Scott
• Holiday Art Market November 7 through December 20, 2008
  Carnegie Art Center hosts a wide array of gift items featuring the work of local and regional artists including small watercolors, oils, pastels and pen and ink drawings, jewelry, decorative wood items, ornaments, purses, cards sets, gourd art, felted items and fine toys. Opening reception, Friday, November 7, 5-7 pm Featured Wineries - Walla Walla Vinters, Tamarack Cellars and Saviah Cellars
• Spend holiday time in the Pottery Studio
  Thinking about that perfect gift? Plan to visit the Carnegie Art Center Pottery Painting Studio for holiday fun. For guaranteed Christmas delivery, please schedule before December 13.
  

Information Sources: Chamber of Commerce | City of Walla Walla | Whitman Pioneer | Wikipedia

I'm Cassie and I work for The Lane Real Estate Team (my Mom and Dad) as their virtual assistant. A rather nice arrangement, I might add. I work for them, and they pay my college tuition! Not bad! If you need a great real estate team, or property manager, consider Team Lane for all Southeast Washington real estate needs. :)

I have great tutorials on WordPress, Blogger, and other tutorials to recommend. We've used Lynda.com for over a year now and cannot say enough good things about the service. We pay $25.00 per month and have unlimited use of their tutorials. In addition to their great WordPress tutorial, their topics include tutorials on Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Office, digital photography, Web design, digital video, and many others. Lydia has over 32,500 tutorials covering over 500 topics, all for $25.00 per month!

The WordPress tutorials are 4.25 hours in length, while the Blogger tutorials are 3.5 hours in length:

I'm Cassie and I work for The Lane Real Estate Team (my Mom and Dad) as their virtual assistant. A rather nice arrangement, I might add. I work for them, and they pay my college tuition! Not bad! If you need a great real estate team, or property manager, consider Team Lane for all Southeast Washington real estate needs. :)

This morning I received notification that BlogRush is no more. R.I.P. Funny, I just signed up and thought it a good idea, but apparently, they've pulled the plug. You'll want to remove the code as who knows what will populate your site if the site is sold. Here's the email as it came from BlogRush this morning:

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users. Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money. In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice. There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,
John Reese

I'm Cassie and I work for The Lane Real Estate Team (my Mom and Dad) as their virtual assistant. A rather nice arrangement, I might add. I work for them, and they pay my college tuition! Not bad! If you need a great real estate team, or property manager, consider Team Lane for all Southeast Washington real estate needs. :)

An early Happy Halloween to ya! These two Halloween images below are free, but before you right-click your mouse and swipe them, let me tell ya where you can get them for free. Plus, we certainly do not want to get in trouble with this scary dude (already dressed for Halloween) over here, do we?

Essentially, here are the three resources we use for images:

• iStockPhoto ~ We use these folks when we want a relatively high quality image that is competitively priced. Plus, if you sign up before the end of the week, you can grab the two images posted below for free! You see, every week iStockPhoto offers a free image or two, so sign up today and start collecting those free images (and download your free Halloween pics). Normally, you can expect to pay $1.50 for a small image.
• Clipart.com ~ This is where we go for cheap stuff. The quality is acceptable, however, the price is right. For $159.00 per year, you can download as many images your heart desires. Clipart.com has more than 10,000,000 clip art images, photos, illustrations, animations, fonts and sounds!
• Lastly, public domain & free stuff* ~ Sometimes you'll spend too much times looking for the image you want on these sites, but when your budget is tight, then consider searching using these resources: 123rf | Creative Commons | Free Animations | Public Domain

*To the best of my knowledge (last time I checked) these are free, but here's the disclaimer, Check The Individual Site's Usage Policies First. Enough said on that! :o)

I'm Cassie and I work for The Lane Real Estate Team (my Mom and Dad) as their virtual assistant. A rather nice arrangement, I might add. I work for them, and they pay my college tuition! Not bad! If you need a great real estate team, or property manager, consider Team Lane for all Southeast Washington real estate needs. :)

Tonight I watched the half hour Barack Obama special and I thought the show was well done. I am certain the purchase of a half hour of prime time television, coupled with Hollywood quality production elements, bought a lot of votes. I was able to see through the rhetoric and see that Barack Obama told America what they wanted to hear, however, for the most part, I saw no real plan on how Barack would implement his agenda, nor where the money would come from to fund the plans. Our country has a national budget where 85% is spent on debt. We have limited resources left to draw from!

On the other hand, the media continues it's love affair with Obama. I opened up MSNBC to this page and found the page below. The "unbiased" reporting highlighted Obama's strengths while drawing attention to a criticism of McCain. In the reporting, I've noted two inconsistencies. Here are direct quotes and my accompanying comments (in bold):

• "Barack Obama took to the airwaves with a 30-minute ad that mocked John McCain for his self-described lack of economic prowess and his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate. NBC’s Lee Cowan reports." ~ Really? I do not remember anything said about McCain or Palin in the 30-minute special.
• "The Nation’s Chris Hayes talks about John McCain’s secret national security round table followed by public remarks in which he tried to employ fear as a campaign tactic." ~ I imagine siding with Obama wasn't enough. The media found it necessary to introduce some titillating negative publicity for the McCain campaign.

What say you about the 30 minute special? What say you about the media's coverage of the election thus far? Does the screenshot (below) of this news page look like unbiased reporting to you?

I'm Cassie and I work for The Lane Real Estate Team (my Mom and Dad) as their virtual assistant. A rather nice arrangement, I might add. I work for them, and they pay my college tuition! Not bad! If you need a great real estate team, or property manager, consider Team Lane for all Southeast Washington real estate needs. :)