And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that I have become sort of addicted to watching the presidential press briefings, and have come to the conclusion that Sarah Huckabee Sanders not only earns her government check as spokesperson, but should also get hazardous duty pay.

She faces a press corps that is almost unanimously hostile toward the president and his administration, but lately toward Sarah herself. And she is frequently confronted with things on which the president has ricocheted two or three times while forming a position.

Today’s conference was a short one, because Sarah wanted to clear time for the First Lady, who was going to talk about cyber bullying. I watched a few minutes of her talk, and then went to set out the two trash carts for next morning’s pickup.

And, once again, an impression came to mind unbidden. I have refrained from stating it previously, but will do so today. First, I want to make it clear it is most definitely not a political statement. And secondly, I am a little bit ashamed of it.

When I came back in, the First Lady was just finished, and the president was speaking.

The First Lady has light brown hair, and was wearing an outfit that almost matched her hair color.

Outside sat the two receptacles, one larger than the other, and with a bright yellow lid. The other smaller, and of muted color.
Sigh.

We complain about weather, and here in northeast Iowa with some reason. We have a tendency to think of the state of Hawaii as paradise. But every so often Pele disproves that, and a volcanic eruption claims more acres of the big island of Hawaii, as is happening now. It isn’t only the lava flow, but there are numerous earthquake tremors. And while our snow will go away eventually, the cooling lava is there for the future.

There is another way in which we are luckier than some others. We have in Waukon two grocery supermarkets, while some smaller communities have lost their last such store, and some major portions of large cities are described as “food deserts” because of lack of a grocery store for many blocks. So I found it hard to complain much when both stores in Waukon at about the same time decided to move things from in store locations I had learned to somewhere else entirely. Both are members of chains, so I doubt the decisions were made locally.

I don’t hunt deer so do not recognize deer tracks. But I wrote here a couple weeks ago that I suspected one set of tracks in new snow were those of a large deer and a small deer. Suspicions confirmed. When the last snow melted, on my lawn there was the lower bone of a small deer’s front leg. The bone was not sawed off, but chewed. Victim of what?