Tips for Driving in the Rain

For the first-time visitor to the Pacific Northwest, it’s common to worry about driving in the rain. It’s perfectly natural to worry, as there are always large numbers of accidents every year where rain plays a factor. The most hardened locals, however, will insist that this has everything to do with the driver. They don’t have experience, and make the wrong prediction at the wrong moment. While Tacoma has its share of road hazards, it’s also one of the nicer cities for learning the ins and outs of driving in the rain .

For one thing, there is a friendliness here that is particular to the area. Drivers don’t need weld racing wheels to compete with other drivers for the right of way. In fact, it’s one of the things that people notice right away, that the local drivers might be a little too polite. To test this, try pulling up to a 4-way stop with two or more other cars at the same time. Chances are pretty good that no one will move for a bit, as the drivers all take turns to acknowledge each other and let the others go first.

On the other end of the spectrum, where the politeness might be terribly pleasant, there’s nothing more maddening than a snow storm here. Those who have grown up with the peculiarities of winter driving might know the secret here. It doesn’t snow often, but it does come around almost annually, but since it is so occasional, it tends to throw the city into a standstill. Instead of driving on snow days, consider taking the personal days, stay inside, or enjoy the fluffy stuff. Even if you might happen to have extensive snow driving experience, it’s so rare that the roads are better left avoided altogether.

The usual precautions apply for inclement weather otherwise. Some of it is common sense, and some of it is through experience. Anyone who has tried to cross a road where there is moving water will remember wishing they had mickey thompson tires as they start careening into parts unknown. The short rule is, if it looks dangerous, don’t do it. Go slow and let the car tell you what the road feels like, instead of insisting on driving the usual speed. Take time to brake. Be as visible as possible, let the other drivers know your intentions, and whenever things look particularly hazardous, pull over and wait it out. One of the great benefits of living in a friendly place is that waiting can often become one of the most pleasant moments of a week.

Is it time to use Advertising for your Company?

Advertising is a way of promoting a business, product or service. If you are just starting out or you’ve been in business for years, it is always necessary to have some form of advertising. Companies will spend millions of dollars every year to introduce consumers to new products and services. Advertising provides exposure for the products or services they are offering. More people will buy a product from a company they know, rather than one that is not as familiar. Advertising helps create favorite name brands and preferences. There are several methods of advertising, and some businesses use all approaches, while others may use only one.

“So how do I know which one to use”?

Naturally it will all depend on what you are advertising. Below is a list of different forms of advertising that may be helpful:

• Newspapers and Magazines – Placing an ad in your local papers or even magazines will help get your name out there to a general audience.
• Billboard – Renting a sign will get recognition in a big way.
• Television – Run a commercial giving details as to what it is you have available and exactly who you are and what sets you a part from everyone else.
• Radio – Another commercial to reach out to a diverse group of people.
• Internet – With more people online the internet will definitely be a great form of advertisement for you. It will allow for a wide variety of people and other companies to take notice to who you are and what you have.
• Word of mouth – Amazingly enough more people are inclined to follow along with what friends and family are doing. So if someone hears a friend say that your company is one they use, then they will more willing to check it out.

Last but not least if you are too overwhelmed with the idea of advertising you should hire a professional. An advertising agency would be more than willing to assist you in whatever it is you are aspiring for and regardless of what type of company you may have.

The Growing Concern of Rape on Campus

Fall is just around the corner and college students will soon be returning to campus. This is an especially exciting time for incoming freshman newly free from the restrictions of living under their parent’s roofs. While the newfound freedom can be liberating, it can also be dangerous. Despite the best attempts at security, college campuses are crawling with hidden dangers. One of the most prevalent dangers that college students and their parents need to be aware of is the potential for rape on campus.

While it is not always talked about, rape is a serious issue on college campuses. In fact, a rape occurs on a college campus somewhere in the United States every 21 hours, according to Crisis Connections Inc. While it is not a pleasant thing to think about, parents and students need to realize and accept this fact and decide what to do to make sure it does not happen to them. Perhaps an even scarier fact, the same group reports that college women are at their most vulnerable for rape during their freshman and sophomore years.

Unfortunately, it seems that college and alcohol seem to go hand-in-hand. Despite being under the legal drinking age, many teens will experiment with alcohol for the first time in college. Parents need to be aware of this fact. Parents do not have to condone drinking, but instead of living in denial, they should be sure that their teen knows how to drink responsibly. It could save the teen from being a victim, or save their life. When it comes to rape, Crisis Connections Inc. reports that 90% of all campus rapes occur when one or both parties are under the influence of alcohol. A teen who is experimenting with alcohol for the first time is even more at risk of being a victim of rape because they do not know their limits.

Parents teach their kids the buddy system at an early age, and it is a good system to remember. Walking in groups and keeping tabs on each other is one of the best ways to stay safe and avoid becoming a rape victim. However it is important to really know your friends. Rapists do not have to be strangers. In fact, it is rare that a victim is raped by someone that she does not know. Turning Point Services claims that an acquaintance, friend, or boyfriend of the victim commits more than 80% of rapes.

The most important thing a parent and student can do to prevent rape is to be aware and to talk about it. Parents need to ensure that their student knows that there is a risk and that it is real. Rape happens, and it does not discriminate. Most importantly, be sure that the student knows that they are responsible for protecting themselves from being the next victim of this crime.

Olivia Jones is a contributing health, fitness and relationship writer. As you can imagine, she writes on a variety of topics ranging from more light hearted content like fashion and Botox to more serious topics like sexual assault on campuses.

Tacoma Star Hit by U Boat

The Tacoma Star was a British steam merchant ship owned by Blue Star of London.  It was attacked by a U Boat (U-109) (Heinrich Bleichrodt) on 1 February 1942 on route from Buenos Aires – Liverpool.   The ship sank with 5107 tons of cargo.  There were 87 people on board and no survivors.  Prior to that on 4 May, 1941, the Tacoma Star sank in dock at Liverpool as result of an air raid, but was salvaged and repaired.

At 03.30 hours on 1 Feb, 1942, U-109 fired a spread of three torpedoes at the unescorted Tacoma Star (Master Robert George Whitehead) and hit her with two torpedoes and caused the ship to sink by the bow after four minutes about 500 miles east of Hampton Roads, Virginia. The U-boat was just about to meet U-130 (Kals) for refueling when the ship was spotted at 16.20 hours on 31 January and Bleichrodt began chasing the zigzagging ship. A distress signal from her was received and USS Roe (DD 418) sent to search for survivors but found no trace of the ship. The Germans reported that the crew abanoned ship in five lifeboats but reported a wrong position in the radio message.

More information on the Tacoma Star

Cultural Tacoma

The Museum of Glass  boasts an iconic structure standing near the Thea Foss Waterway; the steel cone of the hot shop is one of the most recognizable structures in the city.

Tacoma Art Museum was founded in 1935 and reopened in 2003 in a new building on Pacific Avenue in Tacoma – now one of three organizations forming the “museum district” (others are Museum of Glass and Washington State History Museum). It is considered a model for mid-sized regional museums.

The Broadway Center for the Performing Arts is the home to three theaters, two of which are on the National Historic Register. Performing within the three theaters are several performing arts organizations, including the Tacoma Opera, Tacoma Symphony Orchestra, Northwest Sinfionetta, Tacoma City Ballet, Tacoma Concert Band, Tacoma Philharmonic, Tacoma Youth Symphony, Theatre Northwest, and Puget Sound Revels, one of ten Revels organizations nationwide.  Tacoma’s Pantages Theater, a remnant of the vaudeville circuit founded by Alexander Pantages.

Shakespeare in the Parking Lot celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2009. Their motto is “taking the fear out of Shakespeare”.  They offer both educational opportunities and inspired theater in and around Tacoma.

Tacoma hosts part of the annual four-part Daffodil Parade, which takes place every April in Tacoma, Puyallup, Sumner, and Orting.

The Tacoma farmers’ market runs every Thursday, from May through September, in the Theatre District.

Fort Nisqually is a prominent local attraction featuring historical reenactments.

Tacoma History

Tacoma was inhabited for thousands of years by American Indians, predominantly the Puyallup people, who lived in settlements on the delta of the Puyallup River and called the area Squa-szucks. It was visited by European and American explorers, including George Vancouver and Charles Wilkes, who named many of the coastal landmarks.

In 1852 a Swede named Nicolas Delin constructed a sawmill powered by water on a creek near the head of Commencement Bay, but the small settlement that grew up around it was abandoned during the Indian War of 1855-1856. In 1864, pioneer and postmaster Job Carr, a Civil War veteran and land speculator who hoped to profit from the selection of Commencement Bay as the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, built a cabin (a replica of Job Carr’s cabin, which also served as Tacoma’s first post office, was erected in “Old Town” in 2000 near the original site), and later sold most of his claim to developer Morton McCarver (1807–1875), who named his project Tacoma City. The name derived from the indigenous name for the mountain.

Tacoma was incorporated on November 12, 1875. Its hopes to be the “City of Destiny” were stimulated by selection in 1873 as the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, thanks to lobbying by McCarver, future mayor John Wilson Sprague, and others. The transcontinental link was effected in 1887, but the railroad built its depot on “New Tacoma”, two miles (3 km) south of the Carr-McCarver development. The two communities grew together and joined. The population grew from 1,098 in 1880 to 36,006 in 1890. Rudyard Kipling visited Tacoma in 1889 and said it was “literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest”.
George Francis Train was a resident for a few years in the late 1800s. In 1890, he staged a global circumnavigation starting and ending in Tacoma to promote the city. A plaque in downtown Tacoma marks the start/finish line.

In November 1885 white citizens led by then-mayor Jacob Weisbach expelled several hundred Chinese residents peaceably living in the city. As described by the account prepared by the Chinese Reconciliation Project, on the morning of November 3, 1885, “several hundred men, led by the mayor and other city officials, evicted the Chinese from their homes, corralled them at 7th Street and Pacific Avenue, marched them to the railway station at Lakeview and forced them aboard the morning train to Portland, Oregon. The next day two Chinese settlements were burned to the ground.”

The discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1898 led Tacoma’s prominence in the region to be eclipsed by the booming development of Seattle.

During a 30-day power shortage in the winter of 1929/1930, Tacoma was provided with electricity from the engines of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington.

In 1939 Tacoma received national attention when George Weyerhaeuser, nine-year-old son of prominent lumber industry executive J.P. Weyerhaeuser, was kidnapped while walking home from school. FBI agents from Portland handled the case, in which payment of a ransom of $200,000 secured release of the victim. Four persons were apprehended and convicted. The last to be released was paroled from McNeil Island in 1963; George Weyerhaeuser went on to become chairman of the Board of the Weyerhaeuser Company.

In 1951, an investigation by a state legislative committee revealed widespread corruption in Tacoma’s government, which had been organized commission-style since 1910. Voters approved a mayor/city-manager system in 1952.

Tacoma featured prominently in the garage rock sound of the mid-1960s with bands including The Wailers and The Sonics. The surf rock band The Ventures were also from Tacoma.

Tacoma experienced a long decline through the mid-20th century. Harold Moss, later the city’s mayor, characterized late 1970s Tacoma as looking “bombed out” like “downtown Beirut” (a reference to the Lebanese Civil War that occurred at that time.) Steve Miller wrote a song that mentioned Tacoma in a chorus as well. “Streets were abandoned, storefronts were abandoned… City Hall was the headstone and Union Station the footstone” on the grave of downtown.

This picture began to change somewhere around 1990. Among the projects associated with the downtown renaissance were the federal courthouse in the former Union Station (1991); the Washington State History Museum (1996), echoing the architecture of Union Station; the adaptation of a group of century-old brick warehouses into the University of Washington Tacoma campus; the numerous privately financed renovation projects near that UW-Tacoma campus; the Museum of Glass (2002); the Tacoma Art Museum (2003); and the region’s first light-rail line (2003).

The first local referendums in the U.S. on computerized voting occurred in Tacoma in 1982 and 1987. On both occasions, voters rejected 3-1 the computer voting systems that local officials sought to purchase. The campaigns, organized by Eleanora Ballasiotes, a conservative Republican, focused on the vulnerabilities of computers to fraud.

In 1998, Tacoma installed a high-speed fiber optic network throughout the community. The municipally owned power company wired the city.

Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood struggled with crime in the 1980s and early 1990s.  The problems have declined in recent years as neighborhoods have enacted community policing and other policies.  Bill Baarsma (Mayor from 2002-2009) is a member of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition,  a bi-partisan group with a stated goal of “making the public safer by getting illegal guns off the streets.” The coalition is co-chaired by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In 2004, Tacoma was ranked among the top 30 Most Livable Communities in 2004, in an annual survey conducted by the Partners for Livable Communities.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Tacoma has taken steps to revitalize itself and its image, especially downtown.

The University of Washington established a branch campus in Tacoma in 1990. The same year, Union Station (Tacoma) was restored. The Museum of Glass opened in downtown Tacoma in 2002, showing glass art from the region and around the world. It includes a glassblowing studio.

Tacoma’s downtown Cultural District is the site of the Washington State History Museum (1996) and the Tacoma Art Museum (2003). America’s Car Museum is currently breaking ground in Tacoma. The glass and steel Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center opened in November 2004.

Downtown Tacoma has a thriving Theatre District, anchored by the 89-year-old Pantages Theater. The Broadway Center for the Performing Arts manages the Pantages, the Rialto Theater, and the Theatre on the Square. Other attractions include the Grand Cinema and the Temple Theatre.

The area around the Theatre District is the center of Tacoma’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender culture. Three of the city’s gay bars are here as well as the Rainbow Center.

About Tacoma, Washington

Tacoma is a mid-sized urban port city in and the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States.  The city is on Washington’s Puget Sound, 32 miles (51 km) southwest of Seattle, 31 miles (50 km) northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and 58 miles (93 km) northwest of Mount Rainier National Park. The population was 193,556, according to the 2000 census, while the Census Bureau estimated its population at 199,637 in 2009.   Tacoma is the second-largest city in the Puget Sound area and the third largest in the state. Japanese automaker Toyota has a truck named after the city.

Tacoma adopted its name after the nearby Mount Rainier, originally called Mount Tacoma or Mount Tahoma. It is known as the “City of Destiny” because the area was chosen to be the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the late 1800s. The decision of the railroad was influenced by Tacoma’s neighboring Commencement Bay. By connecting the bay with the railroad Tacoma’s motto became “When rails meet sails.” Today Commencement Bay serves the Port of Tacoma, a center of international trade on the Pacific Coast.

Like most central cities, Tacoma suffered a prolonged decline in the mid-20th century as a result of suburbanization and divestment. Recently the city has been undergoing a renaissance, investing in the downtown core to establish the University of Washington, Tacoma; Tacoma Link, the first modern electric light rail service in the state; various art and history museums; and a restored inlet, the Thea Foss Waterway.

With a long history of blue-collar labor politics — from the railroad workers of the 1800s, to the longshoremen of the 20th century, to the Labor Ready workers of today — Tacoma has long been known for its rough, gritty image.  Tacoma is also known for the smell caused by the Pulp mill, and the smell is called by non-locals the “Tacoma Aroma.”

Tacoma-Pierce County has been named one of the most livable areas in the country.  Tacoma was also recently listed as the 19th most walkable city in the country.  In contrast, the city is also ranked as the most stressed-out city in the country in a 2004 survey.  In 2006, women’s magazine Self named Tacoma the “Most Sexually Healthy City” in the United States.