It’s the Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, and the town does feel as if it has cleared out for the weekend. For me, this weekend is always a time to reflect on the relaxing days of summer just past — the afternoons stretched out in the hammock, the mornings on the back deck enjoying a cup of coffee and watching the birds, the evenings chatting with friends and watching the sunsets and — what’s that? I didn’t do any of that this summer? Damn it; another summer is shot.

Well, to make up for all of that, I’m writing these words on the back deck — and, huh, the sun has just gone behind a cloud. Bummer.

Happy retirement to former Benton County District Attorney John Haroldson, who stepped down this week after 34 years working in the criminal justice system, including 22 years in the Benton County’s DA’s office. Haroldson was among the most thoughtful public officials I ever covered — and remains just one of two public officials in my experience who always spoke in complete sentences. (The other was former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot.) I don’t expect Haroldson to keep a low profile for long in retirement.

This will be a particularly interesting election for the Corvallis City Council. Only five of the nine council incumbents filed for reelection, and it’s possible that when the dust settles after the Nov. 5 election, only one incumbent will still be serving — Ward 5’s Charlyn Ellis, who is unopposed. (Ellis, of course, also is the target of what appears to an increasingly futile effort to oust her from the council on grounds that she violated the city’s charter.) It’s also interesting that six of the candidates essentially are running as a slate — Beckett Hunt, Dylan De Honor, Ava Olson, Alison Bowden, Roy Rheuben and Karen-Jean Canan are aligned with a group called Sunrise Corvallis, the local chapter of a national climate advocacy group. Ella Hutcherson at the Gazette-Times had the rundown on the candidates.

A couple of additional thoughts on the City Council: I have long believed that two years is too short a term for city councilors. Two years is barely enough time to figure out where the restrooms are in City Hall, let alone the intricacies of the city budget. It’s possible for virtually the entire council to turn over every two years, and that hobbles the council’s ability to offer the proper level of oversight for city staffers. Power inevitably flows to the city staff. Switching to four-year terms would require a change to the city charter, but it might be time to take a look at that.

And as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, here’s the one question I would be sure to ask every candidate for the council this election: Has the Ellis charter-violation affair been a good use of the council’s time and taxpayers’ money? Why or why not? I guess that’s actually two questions, but you get the drift.

This just in: In a ruling that almost certainly eventually will be swatted away, the NCAA has blocked Oklahoma State University from slapping QR codes on the helmet of every player as part of a fundraising effort for the school’s name, image and likeness money pool. The ruling feels like an attempt to suggest that college football isn’t entirely about money, but everyone knows that isn’t true. Instead of helmets, Oklahoma State will plaster the QR code on every available surface at Boone Pickens Stadium. No word yet on QR tattoos.

Nicholas Kristof has a new column in The New York Times in which he urges liberals to refrain from the temptation to demean voters for Donald Trump. It’s not a humane reaction, writes Kristof, an Oregon liberal — nor is it particularly helpful. Just ask Hillary Clinton how it went with those “deplorables.”

But how about just laughing at Trump? That may prove to be just the ticket for Democrats. Minnesota Gov. (and now vice-presidential candidate) Tim Walz led the way by slapping Trump with the adjective “weird,” and other Democrats have followed suit, including Barack Obama’s bit about crowd size that just may become the enduring moment of the Democratic National Convention, although it wasn’t really about crowd size. This kind of mockery looks like it gets under Trump’s skin — but is it a solid strategy for victory in November? That was the topic of a recent episode of “Radio Atlantic,” one of the magazine’s podcasts. You can find it, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts — or you can read a transcript here.

Although the weather has given firefighters a break in what already has become a record-setting wildfire year in Oregon, nobody is even close to declaring fire season over, as Gov. Tina Kotek and wildfire experts reminded us this week.

But the wildfire seasons in the West, seemingly burning with increasing intensity each summer, raise big public-policy issues. Kylie Mohr, an outstanding Montana-based freelance journalist, has a new piece in The Atlantic in which she writes about a source of fuel for wildfires that we don’t think enough about: our houses, framed with wood and filled with synthetic couches and carpets that are primed to burn. We’re not doing enough to build fire-resilient neighborhoods, Mohr reports, and a third of Americans live in the rural-urban interface, where homes mingle with forests and other flammable vegetation. And thanks to a century of trying to extinguish every fire as soon as possible, there’s a lot of flammable vegetation.

(If you’re interested in this topic, I can recommend an excellent book: “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World,” by the Canadian-American journalist John Vaillant. The book, about the devastating 2016 fire in Fort McMurray, Canada, includes vivid passages about how entire neighborhoods go up in flame.

If you are the sort of movie fan who sometimes would almost rather watch a trailer than the actual movie (guilty as charged), you’ll enjoy this piece from the Times’ Esther Zuckerman, who’s worried that trailers have gotten worse — they reveal too much (the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap” created more controversy than the actual movie) or not enough to give you a feel for the movie. By that standard, the preview for 1979’s “Alien” still is considered one of the best ever: You know something really creepy and bad is going on, but never catch a glimpse of the pesky xenomorph itself.

And that’s it for this weekend. My fondest wish for you over the next couple of days is that you grab some hammock time. But remember the sunscreen. And hydrate; don’t forget to hydrate.