Columns

Winding through the hills of Harrison County earlier this month, I turned onto a road and immediately eased up on the gas pedal as a colorful painted quilt block on a barnside caught my eye.

I think we all know by now my opinion on back-to-school clothing. Namely, that the only thing missing from most back-to-school fashion collections for even the youngest children is a dimly lit stage and a pole.

"One thing for sure," I declared, "I'm not renting one of these again." "Well, unless we can find one that's adjustable.

You just never know when you'll have a brush with greatness, or in my case, great fear. As near as I remember, I was cleaning a high shelf in the bathroom when there was a flash of movement, a flutter, and my momentary thought "oh, why is there a big leaf up here?" before the "leaf" became coherent enough to make a beeline (bat line?) for my hair.

(As told by Josie Steeb) I felt great picking up my repaired Escort at the garage and even better knowing that I had paid for the repairs myself.

According to my internal calendar, fall is about four months down the road yet. In reality, the fall harvest season is fast approaching.

Do you know where your thousands - and on a national scale, hundreds of millions - of federally-mandated, non-refundable checkoff dollars go? It's a question Bobby King, policy director of Minnesota's Land Stewardship Project, asked when he viewed advertisements that attacked "anti-livestock activist groups" in the state on Minneapolis' powerhouse WCCO television station earlier this year.

While reading through Good Poems for Hard Times, a collection of poetry selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, I ran across a writing by Erica Funkhouser that could have been written by one of us.

Regarding the subject of etiquette, I once read that rules for social behavior don't exist to control people, but rather to make everyone feel comfortable.

I posted the Web site Braingle on my online home page because, like the site says, you exercise your body to say physically fit, so why not exercise your brain to stay mentally fit? It suggests using the Phonetic mnemonic system as one exercise to boost memory.