A Washington Department of Transportation camera operator has caught the first few steps in the life of a baby deer born last week underneath the Jackson Ave traffic camera on Highway 16.

Photographs of the baby deer taking last Friday were mailed to Jenni Hogan, KIRO TV Traffic anchor, who posted them today on the station's Web site with a short story.

Usually the employees at WSDOT's command center watch hundreds of cameras every morning and look at brake lights and backups. Last week camera operator Rich Langlois had the pleasure of watching what he described as the Discovery Channel, right on his very own WSDOT camera.

According to KIRO TV, WSDOT employees have named the mother deer Pearl and the baby deer little Jackson.

Eastsiders have come to love the sound of tow trucks in the morning.

They have been working with Tacoma Police Department Officer Don Williams to rid the neighborhood of illegal and decaying cars in all the wrong places.

They’ve alerted Williams to blocks clogged with cars on the planting strips, cars with grass growing in their wheel wells, cars with expired tabs, cars on lawns, cars on sidewalks, cars parked facing the wrong way. Williams checks off the pertinent violation on a form. He leaves the form on the windshield with a notice that, if the owner doesn’t move the car by a certain date, the city will do it, and send a bill.

The first time Williams went out, people thought it was a bluff.
Then big trucks towed 30-plus cars away.

The next few times around, owners dealt with the problem themselves, and the tow trucks hauled off half a dozen vehicles.
Now Tow Day is going city-wide.

Jeanie Peterson of Hilltop Action Coalition is inviting volunteers in Sector One, which includes Hilltop and the downtown, to get the training to hit the sidewalks for the program. The police will offer free training sessions the weekend of Dec. 6 and 7.

“The first training class for the 6th will begin at noon at the Sector One Substation, South 16th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and other trainings will happen throughout the day,” she said.
Tow Day will come to Sector One in time for the holidays, then cycle through Sectors Two and Three, then back to Four.

A tip from a reader sent me off late Tuesday afternoon to Point Defiance Park’s Five Mile Drive in search of a kitty.

This was no ordinary feline but one apparently living with a family of raccoons, according to the caller. A gray kitten, she said. Very cute.

I didn’t think cats and raccoons got along. Such an anomaly of nature seemed worthy of investigation, a photograph at least. It had national news written all over it, as one newsroom wag said.

The caller even had a general location for the kitty: it often can be seen on Five Mile Drive between mile markers 1 and 2 around 5:30 p.m.

I first called Metro Parks and the Point Defiance Zoo to find out if they had reports of the gray kitten among the park’s large population of beggar raccoons. No reports, they said with a laugh. And while such a co-mingling seemed very rare to them, they supposed it possible.

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Want to be one of the first people to check out Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium's newest exhibit, Animal Avenue?

Time to get the brain crankin'.

The zoo is hosting a frog haiku contest. Winners will be selected in each age category (I'm going for "adult published writer," hoping that my coworkers won't read this and enter). Each winner can bring a guest for a behind-the-scenes tour of Animal Avenue. The runner-up gets two free tickets to the zoo or Northwest Trek.

The rules are here.

Here's my best shot. (OK, it was actually the first thing to sprang to mind.) You can clearly do better:

Kermit: A good frog?
No. Kermit is a great frog
He taught me to spell

Worker retraining enrollment at Tacoma Community College is up more than 20 percent from last year’s numbers. I decided to drop by the campus and talk to a few students about why they’re attending classes.

Glenda Smith-Stewart was a student at TCC in 1973 but left when he was presented with an opportunity to pursue her dream – to sing lead vocals for a seven-piece traveling band.

For the next eight years, she traveled the country seeing rhythm and blues and country music. She eventually returned to Tacoma and worked at a doctor’s office as a receptionist and referral coordinator – until last year, when she was laid off.

And now, at 54, she’s back at TCC to earn her associate degree in accounting.

“When I worked at the office, everything was structured,” she said Wednesday. “We just used specialized software. When I stopped working there, I needed to brush up on my technology. I felt like I was in the Dark Ages.”

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The economy is driving more people to campuses around the area. So what’s the situation at three local colleges?

All up.

UW Tacoma grew by about 350 students this year and will have about 3,000 people enrolled, its highest ever. Most students enter as juniors after transferring from community colleges, but UWT has a freshman class of more than 220 students.

At Pierce College, more than 11,351 students fill its Fort Steilacoom and Puyallup campuses as well as its other programs, like online learning. That’s up almost 1,400 from last year.

At Tacoma Community College, enrollment has reached 7,309 – an increase of 2.67 percent. But certain areas are seeing a boom, like worker retraining (up 20.87 percent) and adult basic education (up 22.45 percent for state-funded programs).

A National Geographic photographer is coming to Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium next weekend to tech kids photography.

Don't know if you're a Natty G fan like myself, but this would be a cool opportunity if you're 3-8 years old. Kids borrow a digital camera as Whidbey Island-based Kevin Horan teaches them how to shoot photos. The kids then practice on animals at the zoo.

Click below to read the press release and find ways to sign up.

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If you’re interested in the various United Way Day of Caring project sites around the region, here they are:

L’Arche Tahoma Hope
Project Address: 12303 36th Ave East, Tacoma
Project: landscaping
Start time: 9 a.m.
Volunteers: State Farm Insurance
Number of Volunteer: 20

Boys & Girls Club - Gonyea Branch
Project Address: 5136 North 26th Street, Tacoma
Project: fall clean up - landscaping, painting, organizing, window washing, etc.; painting
Start time: 9 a.m.
Volunteers: Russell, Weyerhaeuser & Target
Number of Volunteer: 35

Point Defiance Park – Rose Garden & Five-Mile Drive
Project Address: 5400 North Shirley, Tacoma
Project: flower bed/rose garden maintenance; trail clean-up
Start time: 9 a.m.
Volunteers: School of the Arts & Johnson, Stone & Pagano, P.S.
Number of Volunteer: 35

Girl Scouts - Pacific Peaks Council
Address: Camp St. Albans, E 251 Lake Devereaux Rd, Belfair
Project: splitting & hauling wood; building benches
Volunteers: Tacoma Public Utilities
Number of Volunteer: 28

Helping Hand House
Address: 20915 120th St, Bonney Lake, WA 98390
Project: Remove all tagged trees/plants in yard, clean gutters, prune bushes, mow grass, edge lawn, pull weeds
Volunteers: Bank of America
Number of Volunteers: 14

The public meeting about Chabad of Pierce County’s zoning application with Tacoma has been moved. It’s now at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in Room 708 in the Tacoma Municipal Building at 747 Market St.

The Orthodox Jewish group wishes to build a synagogue at 2146 N. Mildred St., but several of its neighbors have complained the proposed size of the building is too large.

At the meeting, the city will provide information about the proposal and listen to feedback from the public. This is not a formal public hearing, and no decision will be made at the meeting.

As part of my reporting on today's synagogue story, I read the dozens of letters that residents and others have written the city. Among the letters is one from Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor.

In it, Pastor doesn't just voice his support to the project. Dude gets downright biblical:

The prophet Jeremiah, during the Babylonian exile of the people of Israel, encouraged the people to "look after the peace and well-being of the city" because, in that way, they would find peace and well-being. Today, the City of Tacoma has an opportunity to look after the well-being of the Chabad community by helping them through the process of permitting a new synagogue. In doing so, the City would benefit the well-being of the entire community.

Deep.

One of Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium’s 10 meerkats has died.

Kingsley died last night or early this morning in the zoo’s health-care facility.

The meerkats arrived at Point Defiance from a facility in South Africa earlier this spring. Zookeepers don’t know Kingsley’s age, spokeswoman Sheelah Medved said.

“The loss of any animal here at the Zoo is always difficult,” deputy director John Houck said in a release.

Staff veterinarians will perform an autopsy, and results should be available in a few weeks.

Rabbi Zalman Heber looks at a garage and sees a synagogue.

His neighbors see a problem.

The proposed site for the new home of Chabad of Pierce County, an Orthodox Jewish organization, has sparked controversy in this quiet corner of Tacoma’s West End.

Proponents see the placement of the synagogue as vital to worship practices, but some neighbors worry about impact on traffic, views and property values.

The conflict has been slowly building since May, when an application for a conditional use permit was filed with a city. Since then, the West End Neighborhood Council executive board, acting on behalf of several neighbors concerned about the buildings’ dimensions, has written the city to express its opposition to parts of the synagogue’s variance application.

Heber, who moved to Tacoma in November 2003 to start a center that is part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, visited every house within 400 feet of the site at 2146 N. Mildred St. in late June to tell neighbors what he was planning.

“I showed them the whole project,” he said. “I showed them the height. I showed them the aesthetics, the looks. I said, ‘As a neighbor, I want to show you this.’ And not one – I want to be on record about this – not one opposed the project.”

But about six weeks later, several neighbors told him they were worried about the changes to the neighborhood a synagogue would bring. Some letters sent to the city – and forwarded to Heber – were critical of the project. And on Aug. 20, the executive board of the neighborhood council met and drafted a letter to the city opposing the proposed dimensions of the building.

To Heber, the negative feedback came as a shock.

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