Meridian's police chief has one rule about phones at bedtime, there's a benefit for Finley downtown today, and the advisory finally ran out

The heat advisory expired at 9 last night and nobody renewed it, which is the closest thing to a gift this valley has handed out in two weeks. Today runs near 97 with patchy smoke after noon, and the week keeps stepping down from there — 96, 95, 92, 90 by Thursday.

Today's issue: a Meridian family whose neighbors have spent the summer refusing to let them do this alone, and a benefit for them downtown this afternoon. Also, Meridian's police chief has exactly one rule he wants every parent to hear before Wednesday, an arrest out of a Meridian parking lot that explains why he's saying it, and a Sunday afternoon of card games on Fairview. Let's get into it.

🧠 Trivia: When the Meridian Idaho Temple opened its doors to the general public for a three-week open house in the fall of 2017, roughly how many people walked through it? (Answer at the bottom.)

Better week than last one. We've got two things today, one Thursday, two next Saturday, and one worth putting in your phone now for the 22nd. Everything here is physically in Meridian and none of it has run in a recent issue.

Today, Sunday Aug 9

Thursday, Aug 13

Saturday, Aug 15

Saturday, Aug 22

And the one that isn't optional: West Ada's first day is Wednesday, Aug 12. Three more sleeps.

☀️ Today: sunny and hot, high near 97, patchy smoke after noon. That's the National Weather Service point forecast for Meridian. CBS2's Boise number for today is 96, so for once the two are basically holding hands — call it upper 90s and don't be surprised by 97. Tonight bottoms out around 61.

No heat advisory today. The one that had been running since Thursday afternoon expired at 9 p.m. last night and was not renewed. First morning since Wednesday that there isn't one on the books, which is worth about thirty seconds of appreciation before you remember it's still 97.

Air quality is the part that didn't improve. An Air Quality Alert is still listed on the NWS hazards for Meridian, and smoke is written into today's forecast — patchy after noon, thickest overnight and early morning. If you've got lungs that complain, do the outdoor thing early and keep it short.

The week ahead: Monday 96, Tuesday 95, Wednesday 92, Thursday 90. A real, unbroken slide. By the first bell on Wednesday it's merely hot instead of dangerous, and that's the best sentence we've gotten to write in a while.

Fine print for the honest: the NWS data feed we pull was last refreshed Thursday, so today's numbers were checked against CBS2's same-day Boise forecast before they went in here. They agreed within a degree.

Finley Domy is five. In June, after a routine dentist appointment, his parents Alex and Dallas noticed one side of his face was drooping and chalked it up to the numbing. A few days later he was throwing up and losing his balance. The pediatrician came back into the room and said, "we found something." It's an inoperable brain tumor.

He's been on radiation five times a day for six weeks, plus specialized medication. A few weeks in, the doctors told the Domys he was responding better than expected. "He's doing way better than he should be," Alex said. "That's a really good sign that he's strong and he can fight this thing."

What's happened since is the part that's ours. Businesses across the valley have been running fundraisers. Robert Hernandez, who owns Keystone Barbershop and has known Dallas since they were kids, cut hair for 24 hours without stopping — his own brother was diagnosed with the same tumor in 1998. "So it really hits home for me," he said. He's handing the money to the family at a benefit at the Frontier Club today. Dallas's response to all of it: "There's no words we'll ever be able to say thank you with."

The GoFundMe is here if you can't make it downtown.

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Wednesday, in a Meridian Walmart parking lot, a man in a car struck up a conversation with two teenage girls. According to Meridian Police, the girls then noticed his pants were pulled down and he was masturbating in the driver's seat, and he asked them repeatedly if they wanted to touch it before driving off.

Here's the part worth telling your kids about: one of the girls recorded part of it and photographed the license plate. On Thursday, police ran that plate through an Automatic License Plate Reader, confirmed the car had been in the area at the time, went to a home in Kuna, and matched the man's description and an arm tattoo to the video. In an interview, police say he confirmed much of what the girls had described.

Dylan Myers, 31, of Kuna, has been booked into the Ada County Jail on a felony child enticement charge. Police say more charges are expected. The teenagers did the single most useful thing anyone can do in that situation, and it took detectives about a day.

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Meridian Police Chief Tracy Basterrechea went on the record Friday night about online grooming, timed for exactly this week — kids about to go back to phones, laptops and school-issue devices for eight hours a day. "It's a huge issue," he said, "and it's one of those things where parents need to know what their kids are doing."

The part he keeps coming back to is that it isn't only social media. "There are people who get on the online gaming systems, and they start grooming kids through those gaming systems." The Idaho Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force flags Snapchat, Discord, Roblox, TikTok and WhatsApp specifically, plus "vault apps" — the ones that hide photos or messages behind a password or a fake calculator icon.

The department's own guide is unglamorous and free: keep computers in open rooms, check privacy settings, talk about the risk of meeting someone you only know online. But the chief's actual headline is one sentence. "Number one is that smartphone doesn't go into their bedroom with them at night." That's it. That's the rule.

If you or someone you know has been affected, the chief points to Faces of Hope, the Idaho ICAC Task Force, and the NCMEC CyberTipline.

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More than 200,000 people.

The Meridian Idaho Temple held its public open house from October 21 to November 11, 2017 — three weeks, open to anyone, no membership required — and north of 200,000 people took the tour. It was dedicated on November 19, 2017, making it Idaho's fifth temple after Idaho Falls (1945), Boise (1984), and Rexburg and Twin Falls (both 2008), and the 158th in the world.

For scale: Meridian's own population at the time was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000. The open house drew roughly twice the city, which tells you the line was not coming from here. The building runs 67,331 square feet on 15.73 acres out on Linder, and the interior marble was quarried in Egypt, Italy and Spain — a fairly long supply chain for a building on the northwest edge of town.