Opinions

We don’t charge for obituaries. Its been a long and arduous journey, but a line that I’ve held for 20 years and don’t intend to shift on any time soon.

I’ll admit it (kind of) I’m a bit of a hoarder. Not one of those that have the 4000 food containers falling out of their car, or the one that saves Pringles cans for that justright project that might come along, but I do like to keep things.

When I first started my college career, I was sure I wanted to be a music teacher. I loved playing, I love music, I loved everything about it.

I miss the days when things were just fun and you didn’t have to worry about other countries. We’d be much better off if we could go back to when it took a few weeks for news from around the world to reach us.

One of my favorite stolen sayings is that “close only counts in horsehoes and hand grenades.” I’m not a real particular person - I like to think I am, but at the end of the day I’m just as lazy as the next person. I throw my clothes on the floor at home, a foot from the washing machine.

One might think - yeah, grab some pictures, write a few paragraphs and then slap it all together and *poof* there’s a newspaper! Why and how can it be late sometimes!? Listen, I totally hear you, I wonder the same thing all the time. There was a time, not so long ago, that all my papers were between 10-16 pages each week.

It seems these days that things are going faster and faster - it probably is because I’m getting a bit older and I’m not quite as quick as I used to be. When I was younger, we had a pop machine right outside the swimming pool gate, and every 10-minute break, my friends and I would go buy an entire can of pop and attempt to drink it before the 10 minutes was up.

I have a love/hate relationship with the “looking back” editions of the News every year. We do it in quite a few of our publications, it’s become a very popular thing to do during the holiday weeks, especially when there’s no snow to get a picture of a plow or a snowman or something.

I really appreciate all the checking up and checking in that everyone has been doing. Until you’re sitting in a chair staring at the same part of the ceiling for a number of hours a day, you don’t really appreciate the contact that people can make that makes a huge difference.

There are times when one gets really busy that it’s always been a trick to just stop and take a breath and decide what the next move might be. At my age, that often times leads to a “mid-life crisis” where you begin to second guess yourself, or perhaps wish for something you wanted, but chose something different, or just flat out up-end your life and do something differently.