December 23 is Root Day. Be sure to eat your healthy root vegetables!

This is a newspaper article from our local newspaper that I thought some might find funny. Though I'm sure much of it is in jest, it shows the kind of community that we are now a part of, much different than Portland. The author of this article is Brian Mitge of The Chronicle.


"Turns out catching a chicken is easier than knowing what to do with it.After a chase under copper pipes and behind washing machines, a Centralia police officer managed to remove a chicken from the laundry room of the Econo Lodge motel Monday.Unfortunately, because of a communications mix-up and the fact that the city’s animal control officer was on vacation, officer Gary Byrnes released the chicken back to the wilds of the motel parking lot — exactly where it had been wandering before motel workers chased it into the laundry room that morning.Econo Lodge manager Kim Cho said the motel staff had wanted to keep the bird safe until someone could take it to the county animal shelter.The chicken had shown up that morning in front of the motel lobby, just a few yards from busy traffic on Harrison Avenue.“We said, ‘Put it someplace safe until we get someone to take him,’ ” Cho said.Workers called the Lewis County Animal Shelter — which has adopted out chickens, turkeys, hamsters, even iguanas — where staff members told them to call the police. They did, asking officers to hurry so the chicken wouldn’t mess up the linens.The call from Central Dispatch that went out to officers, however, ended up as a simple (if unusual) request to remove a chicken from a laundry room.Byrnes drove straight to the scene and had a motel maid unlock the door for him. The bird took flight and refuge behind some pipes, but Byrnes managed to catch it in just under 10 minutes — although he got a small cut on his head in the process.He held the squalling bird by one leg as he took it to some tall red bushes behind the motel, near a chain link- fence separating the parking lot from Fuller’s Twin City Skate Park in Rotary Riverside Park.After being released, the bird walked west with a stately strut, apparently no worse for the wear. Byrnes also took the humorous situation in stride.“Protect and serve, and all that good stuff,” he said with a smile after releasing the bird.Cho said she wishes things would have gone differently. She’s still worried about the clucker, which, she said, seemed like a house chicken, not a wild one.“If I have a home, I would have just taken it,” she said. “We didn’t know they would let him free like that.”Centralia Police Sgt. Kurt Reichert said police couldn’t have taken the bird to safety even if they had known the manager had made that request.Officers wouldn’t put poultry in their patrol cars, and the animal control officer wasn’t available with his specially equipped vehicle.Reichert compared the situation to playing “telephone,” the childhood game of passed messages and compounded misunderstanding.“What I understood, the call was to remove the chicken from the laundry room, it was stuck in there or had wandered in there,” Reichert said.The question of where the bird came from is still unresolved, although the likely source is the the Country Cousin restaurant five blocks away.The down home-themed eatery has a coop of chickens maintained by Chehalis farmer Penny Mauel and her daughter, former Lewis County Dairy Princess Brandy Mauel.One of their birds escaped in September — probably the same one that wandered by the motel, Penny Mauel said.She said the birds they display at Country Cousin have distinctive speckles from their mixed lineage, the result of their family’s hen mixing with the neighbor’s stock.“My kid soon figured out why the chicken crosses the road,” Penny Mauel said. Her daughter supplied the long-sought answer: “There’s a rooster on the other side.”