New Shoes in the Rain

It's Saturday, friends, and I'm ever so glad to be in weekend mode.  Hope you'll get to enjoy some downtime, too. I just returned Thursday from a four day trip to the Cleveland, Ohio area for some training for my new job.  Met some interesting people, but what stuck with me the most in two trips into the middle of the city there was the extent of rundown or even abandoned commercial and residential structures. Boarded up, beaten down, depressing scenery, block after block of it. To be fair, Lexington has that, too, but the scale is so different in a city the size of Cleveland.  I found the same in the Detroit, Michigan area, at least in parts of it, during frequent travels there late last year and early this year.  But it's still something that takes me by surprise, and then leaves me somewhat depressed for those affected by it. I watched a documentary a while back that spent some of its running time addressing the water situation in Flint, Michigan.  I'm sure

Good morning, friends.  We're facing a major weather change here in central Kentucky, with heavy wind and later some severe storms, although it pales in comparison with the "bomb cyclone" that hit the Rockies yesterday!  We received a report from our daughter in the Denver suburbs of heavy snow and wind and cold, such that none of her gang even ventured out of the house! This week's revelations about the college entrance cheating scandal have been astounding in their creativity and downright meanness, and I have a few things to say on this subject. First, anyone who does not or did not already recognize that wealth offers certain people discernible advantages over those without it should come to this realization quickly.  Money and the advantages it offers pervade so many areas of our society, from where we live to what we drive to what we wear and how we're sometimes treated based on all of that. But this whole scenario, which involves a college admissions

Friends, it's late on the first Monday afternoon of March.  And it's 24 degrees.  And the temperature had to really struggle to reach that level today! It snowed here in Kentucky yesterday, as it did in a lot of other places.  My wife and I were returning from a hockey tournament in Oxford, Ohio yesterday afternoon and noticed that the further south we went, the worse the roads became.  And there were more cars off the road.  Our son was following with his family a few miles back and he reported that a car lost control in front of him, careened (his word) across all three lanes, and finally came to rest just off the shoulder--facing the wrong way! So, in other words, while the winter may almost be over, the operative word there is ALMOST! It's over for hockey, we know, as our grandson concluded his season well with the trip north and a couple of games yesterday morning.  The later of the two was an absolute blowout, which means that the entire team had a big time play