New Shoes in the Rain

It's Monday.  A good bit has happened since our last visit..... Saturday brought us the March for our Lives in some 800 locations throughout the U.S. and around the world.  About 1,000 people marched here in Lexington, and, of course, the largest gathering was estimated to be 800,000 in Washington, D.C.  Ironic that both President Trump and members of Congress were not in town when this occurred. I watched some of the coverage and many of the speeches, but was most taken by Emma Gonzalez and her speech.  If you're not familiar with her by name, Emma is the young woman who wears a buzz cut and has become one of the primary faces of the movement she and her classmates from Parkland began.  Emma's speech was deliberately punctuated by a period of silence to ensure that the entire length of her appearance was equal to the amount of time that the shooter roamed the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day.  To see that girl standing b...

Good Tuesday morning.  Here we are, just a couple of days from the calendar indicating that it's springtime, and my home area is under a winter weather advisory! I suppose this would explain why my wife, who loves being outside, is adamant about not planting anything until Mother's Day, which she considers the absolute first safe point to plant anything new.  She's been proven right more times than I can remember, too. So there are a lot of names in the news right now, not all of them for the right or best reasons, but many of them are people from whom we need to hear things, recollections of things that have already happened, plans of what they plan to do next, and so forth.  I doubt this is anything close to a complete list with respect to the news of the day, either. THE NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT SELECTION COMMITTEE:  These folks have really done something I didn't see coming--they've created an upset-filled free-for-all with this year's vers...

Good morning to you, from foggy central Kentucky.  We had a quick reminder that spring has not yet arrived here Sunday night, as we awoke to around five inches of snow here in our home area. Before leaving for some work in the field, I shoveled our driveway, weighing out whether or not I should.  A friend confided upon hearing my dilemma that I should have opted for what meant less work, but I persisted.  Turns out I could have left it exactly as it was and it would have melted, as the driveways of our neighbors were untouched. Oh, well, I needed the exercise. This is always an unpredictable time of year in our area.  I have probably mentioned before our plans to take the family to Florida on spring break, which one year was the first week of April.  We woke up to find that we had received four inches of snow, totally unpredicted.  That made for an interesting trip south. I have to say that I'm more than a little pleased with myself in that I recent...

Friends, things are happening in a few places.... Congratulations first to the teachers in our neighboring state of West Virginia.  This state has long been known as one of the lowest spenders on education of its children (48th in the Union at last report) and their teachers finally reached a breaking point, striking for nine days until finally the state legislature voted to give all teachers (and many state workers) a 5% pay increase. The only catch is that a member of the legislature acknowledged that the money will come from general cuts in Medicaid and other services.  So they're robbing Peter to pay Paul, it seems. Regardless, the teachers uniformly stated that they knew when they became teachers that they'd chosen the wrong profession in which to become wealthy, but this was about creating stability for students, so that teachers could afford to stay in their positions.  That's a noble thought.  I sincerely hope it works out. That would likely never hap...