Pierce County’s Department of Community Services released the results of its 2009 Homeless Survey today.

The results show that on Jan. 29 and 30, 2,083 men, women and children identified themselves as being without permanent housing.

The total is up 19 percent over last year’s survey. That means an added 336 people, most of whom are living in transitional housing.

The number of families also is up by 111, or 43 percent, over 2008. Included in those families are 113 children, a rise of 21 percent.
The survey is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. By H.U.D.’s definition, people who sleep outside or in shelters or live in emergency or transitional housing are counted among the homeless.

The people who fan out through the county with brief questionnaires are the first to say that this survey is just a snapshot. They are missing families who are bunking with relatives, or living in recreational vehicles, cars and tents and trying not to be noticed. They are missing

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The orchard is just past the Roy, up a hill, past a graveyard and behind a group of five new homes sitting on a cul-de-sac.

For 10 young professionals from Seattle, it was the perfect place to spend a Saturday.

“The weather is great, I’m with friends and, most of all, we’re helping people,” said Thomas Buford, a 29-year-old attorney for the Department of Justice.

The group spent much of the day among the 3-year-old apple and prune trees. They donned canvas bibs with giant pockets, filled them with dozens of apples and transported them to cardboard boxes. The fruit is destined for the Emergency Food Network, which will distribute them this week to area charities.

“I want to make a positive impact. That’s why I’m here,” said 28-year-old Greg Chiarella, part of the group from a nonprofit called Seattle Works that helps link men and women in their 20s and 30s with various charity efforts. The group meets one Saturday each month for a different task; previous assignments include sorting donations at Goodwill and cleaning a homeless shelter.

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A bald eagle which has been at Northwest Trek Wildlife Park since 1976 died Thursday, the park announced.

Park zoologists believe the bird was 35 years old. A bald eagle can live up to 40 years in the wild and longer in captivity, according to the American Eagle Foundation.

The eagle first arrived at Northwest Trek with a gunshot injury. He recovered at the Eatonville-area park but couldn’t be released into the wild because of the injuries.
A necropsy to determine cause of death hasn’t been completed.

He was the park’s oldest animal. That title now belongs to one of the two male golden eagles, who was born in 1974.

The utility workers arrived on Harleys, in pickup trucks and in cars. They cracked jokes with each other as they cleared dead trees from a campsite.

And after a day volunteering as part of the United Way’s Day of Caring, the trails at the Camp St. Albans outside Belfair are safer for the hundreds of Girl Scouts who use the camp each year.

“We’re out here to help,” supervisor Al Lehtimaki said, “but we also have a pretty good time.”

More than 1,100 Day of Caring volunteers from Pierce County – including almost 500 from the Tacoma School of the Arts – were expected to participate at different sites around the region Friday. Other jobs included landscaping, painting buildings and helping serve meals at a food bank.

The Tacoma Public Utilities workers visit the 414-acre Camp St. Albans between Belfair and Allyn each year. Previous projects included building bleachers around a firepit and creating trails through the woods to get to the site.

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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

Sure, cities around the state are hosting American heroes today. But only one, Port Orchard, can boast the honor of hosting the only Mongolian in space.

Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa -- or, for my legions of Mongolian speakers, Жүгдэрдэмидийн Гүррагчаа -- will be at Orchard Heights Elementary School this evening. According to his Wikipedia page, Gürragchaa is an aerospace engineer, a major general in the Mongolian Air Force and the defense minister from 2000-04. He was selected through the Intercosmos program and spent almost eight days in orbit in 1978. In 1981, he received the Hero of the Soviet Union award.

And Wikipedia (sorry for not having better sources, but my Russian is rusty) also has this interesting bit of trivia:

After Mongolia removed the Communist-era ban on clan names in 1997, and unable to identify his original clan heritage, Gürragchaa chose the clan name Sansar - Mongolian for "cosmos."

Neat.

Allen van Houck’s shift at The Boeing Co.’s Renton plant ended promptly at midnight Saturday morning. One minute later, he and 27,000 other union Machinists went on strike.

And the 52-year-old team lead inspector from Renton isn’t sure when he’ll return to work.

“I was saddened. It really bothered me walking out like that,” he said. “The mood on the floor wasn’t happy with Boeing’s offer. I hope the executives don’t say this was a surprise. How could they not know?”

“Look, we don’t want to strike. We’d all rather be working.”

The strike follows the collapse of last-minute negotiations between the company and union representatives in Orlando, Fla. It halts all commercial airline production at the Renton and Everett assembly plants as well as parts production in Auburn and Frederickson.

The union rejected Boeing's latest contract offer Wednesday, but leaders agreed to hold off on striking by 48 hours while both sides met with a mediator. Talks were unsuccessful, and at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, workers throughout the Puget Sound region, Portland and Wichita, Kan., began picketing.

About 20 union members and supporters held signs near the gate of the aerospace corporation’s largely empty Renton plant by mid-morning. Drivers – including a few in Boeing security cars – honked horns as they drove by. Picketers said the response from the community has been largely positive.

“It’s encouraging. Absolutely, it is,” said Renton’s Linda Herrmann, who works as a sealer. She and others said Boeing’s latest contract offer was rife with problems, and the most worrisome for many picketers were the outsourcing of jobs, retirement benefits and raising the minimum pay.

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Tom and René Skaggs moved to a 10-acre farm in Eatonville for weekends like this: Bright sunshine. Fresh air. A day of polo with his friends.

“You can’t really ask for more, can you?” Tom asked Saturday.

Skaggs, wearing white pants, a striped shirt and boots, wrapped the legs of his horses as he prepared to umpire the first match of the Piper Classic 2008 polo tournament in Roy – one of three competitions the Tacoma Polo Club hosts this season.

Polo has become a weekend staple for the Skaggs.

René was a collegiate polo player at Texas A&M University. When she and Tom looked for places to move after graduation in 1995, their decision hinged on whether a polo club was within a reasonable difference. They chose Eatonville.

“I played for the first time when we moved out here,” he said. “Now it’s in my system.”

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Photographer Russ Carmack and I were out at the Yakima Training Center last weekend, and Russ came back with some fantastic photos. A few of them required some pretty nifty techniques.

We were riding along in a Humvee during training with the .50-caliber machine guns. The original plan to open up the back of the vehicle and let us stand behind the gunner was quashed by the safety guru on site (and for good reason, in retrospect). Still, that didn’t stop Russ, who used a remote control, a tripod and some duct tape to get these shots:

Click below to find out how he got them:

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Spc. Antonio Shepard returned from a deployment with the Virginia National Guard two months ago, spending his year in the Middle East as a gunner on convoys running supplies from Kuwait into Iraq.

Time for a long, relaxing break, right? Nope. Shepard is heading back.

The 23-year-old Atlanta native transferred last month to the Washington National Guard and joined the 1st Brigade, 161st Infantry Regiment.

“I just want to knock another deployment out before I finish school,” he said. “I won’t be going any more after this, so I can focus on classes instead of thinking about deploying again.”

Shepard is one of about 35 “interstate transfer” soldiers, brigade commander Col. Ronald Kapral said. Many of these Guardsmen transferred because they want to deploy, but their Guard unit might not be scheduled to for year

“We’ve had people drive here from Georgia and Tennessee just to fight with the 81st,” Kapral said.

Spc. Raymond Hearne had served with the Washington National Guard before accepting a job offer and moving to Coos Bay, Ore., last year. He kept in contact with his colleagues and transferred when he heard his old unit was deploying.

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