Happy Labor Day! I hope you’re enjoying your well-earned holiday, maybe grilling up some steaks in the backyard, hitting the golf course, getting your boat out on Phillips Reservoir, paddling your SUP on Magone Lake, dropping a line in the North Fork or getting in one last campout with the family before the weather cools off. If anyone’s looking for me, I can likely be found on a trail in the Strawberries.

If you’ve decided to spend the day indoors with a good book, we may be able to help you with that. Our office coordinator, Alix Hand, has cleaned up an old magazine rack we weren’t using and repurposed it as a Little Free Library. You’ll find it right outside our front door, next to the newspaper rack. It’s bright red and chipper and filled with good reads, from mysteries and romances to historical novels, with a handful of Westerns, sci-fi and fantasy yarns thrown into the mix. So stop by and pick up a book or two. You can bring the books back when you’re done — or, better yet, replace them with one or two from your own shelf that you’ve already read. The idea is just to keep passing them around, one book lover to another.

In case you missed last week’s paper, we had stories on the first day of school, the sale of a burned-out building in downtown John Day, the continued infighting on the town’s city council, a local teen’s passion for shed hunting and a Grant County woman who’s been an Avon lady for half a century.

This week’s paper will feature stories on a local company that makes high-tech outdoor clothing (already live on our website), a challenging trek on the Blue Mountains Trail, the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases and an early-season volleyball tournament at Prairie City High School.

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If you haven’t done so already, take a moment to register your subscription for digital access to the Blue Mountain Eagle. Call 800-781-3214 to talk to one of our customer service staff, who will be happy to walk you through the process. It’s easy, takes just a few moments to get set up and allows you to take advantage of our e-edition, app and website delivery along with your print subscription.

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As always, if you have comments or questions about the Eagle, or want to pass along a story idea, send me an email at this address: editor@bmeagle.com.

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Finally, if you’d like to help support our independent local journalism, please consider subscribing to the newspaper. And if you’re already a subscriber, please accept our heartfelt thanks — we can’t do this work without you!

— Bennett Hall, Editor