Opinion

Around a month ago, my daughters convinced me that the thing to do was to adopt a puppy from the Hawk Creek Animal Shelter. All of our pets have only ever been rescues, but we have never adopted an actual baby animal. Thus, I underestimated how much effort raising a puppy would entail.

Last week I wrote about my trip to Fort Drum, New York to watch my son’s military promotion ceremony. I mentioned that one full day was spent on the ceremony and everything involved with it, and my final day in Upstate New York was spent helping him learn how to shop like a real broke adult, and helping decorate and organize his home. The day in between all of that (trip days bookmarked by two long, terrible flight days), we spent going on an adventure that we decided needed to be an epic one.

A New Discovery University of Glasgow, Scotland. 1848.

I attended a presentation on Scams and Fraud given by the Director of Commerce for the state, Marty Flesichhacker. He shared that while it used to be older adults that were more likely to be targeted, these days it’s actually younger people who are scammed more frequently.

Uff da. I’m afraid that we’ve had the last of the NICE weather until spring.

Last week, I traveled to western Upstate New York to attend my son’s military promotion ceremony. With short notice, I was left with some pretty undesirable flights, but after an eight hour adventure of plane changes and layovers, I made it.

Dress for success The thing about fall is that it’s not winter. Winter is winter. Winter comes right after fall. Fall is, try to stay with me here, directly after summer. The season of fall is named after a guy who first noticed the temperature dropping and, for some reason, coincidentally, was always dropping stuff. And, in another pretty big coincidence, his name was Fall. So I mention fall as a distinct season to winter because some people confuse the two. But fall is nothing like winter. Sure, the temperature drops in both seasons but in fall it drops a lot less. A brisk fall evening might put you in the upper 30s. A more tepid effort is going land you in the vicinity of the 50s. And yet some people, I’m not going to name names but some people, you know who you are, pull out winter coats. The heavy winter coat is a powerful beast. When I went to college, I named my winter coat Old Yeller. In Vermont Old Yeller kept me warm for four good years. But if you pull out Old Yeller for fall then what are you going to do come winter? You know what you’re going to do? You’re going to be cold. Because winter is, try to keep up here, colder than fall.

It’s time to look skyward again and cast a heavenly gaze upon a well-known constella- tion, and a seasonal meteor shower. Hopefully our skies will not be shrouded in clouds as it was for the recent lunar eclipse.

jstolen-jacobson@cherryroad.com In the third grade, our class started a school newspaper. At the time, I was a student in Redwood Falls Elementary School, but I distinctly remember the first article I wrote, titled “Tom Terry and his one man band”.