Well, it’s been a year since the Lake County Press found its way to mailboxes across our area and I’m happy to say that the paper’s footprint has grown. Establishing a presence in communities across the county is a never- ending effort, especially in this day of challenges to newspapering and journalism.
We just hosted some friends for dinner. A family of seven, with children who ran and skied beside our daughters for eight years. That’s a lot of team dinners and conversations in the bleachers! It was a bittersweet meal, as they are moving to Indiana. The insecure employment situation for the father, an engineer at Northshore Mining in Silver Bay, made the move an obvious choice and financial necessity for his family.
Words matter. The labels we use for ourselves and others matter.
‘Tis a new year. A fresh start. A great time to break up the rural/urban rift, one of the starkest divides in our country if you go by voting records. Lisa Pruitt, a native of rural Kansas who now lives and works at a California University, gave a cogent speech to the Westminster Town Hall on this topic. Mostly she was taking to task her liberal peers and associates for all the ways they intentionally or unintentionally disparage rural Americans. She discusses the urban criticism of government aid to rural communities, the implication that rural Americans have an “undue influence” on elections because of the electoral college, and urban “subsidies” to rural communities.
Talk of raising the nation’s debt ceiling has stirred me into fiscal action. Congress just can’t find enough things to fight over but I can put a stop to it, and I did.
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Among the many issues raised about the development concept for Lighthouse Point presented to the planning commission on January 3rd was the aesthetics of the proposed 28 townhouses themselves. Someone at the public hearing compared them to the “Minecraft houses” on London Road in Duluth, those inert looking boxes that are gradually obliterating several previously wooded city blocks. They were used as an example of what we do NOT
One thing I really miss about living on a sailboat is the eating together. Most landlubbers would not guess that living on water is conducive to sharing meals, but in our experience it is so. It had something to do with the fact that liveaboards, though relative strangers, rely heavily on one another, have simple but similar daily schedules, and are on the move, which means constantly looking for new friends. When we moved off our boat and into Two Harbors in 2008, I had to restrain myself from pausing at the window of other cars in a parking lot with a friendly greeting. “Hey! Where are you headed? Come for a potluck tonight?” All those people we were running across at the gas stations and grocery stores but failing to become acquainted with!
The developers acknowledged having made changes not reflected in the proposal presented. Commission members had seen neither the original draft plan nor any revisions before arriving at the meeting that night. Yet they felt compelled to vote on it then and there, despite a suggestion by the commission chair that it be “revised, corrected and resubmitted”, because, “as this sits now, it is not acceptable.” The ARDC city planner Justin Otsea agreed, “Right, we all recognize that.” Days later, the commission chair stated on Two Harbors Community Radio, “The contractors were not quite prepared to face the planning commission.” Yet, the commission voted, unanimously.
“Just try to be nice to people,” my grandmother always said. “You can’t change who they are or why they are. All you can do is try to be nice to people.” My grandmother was a spiritual woman who believed in the ways of Jesus and knew how to get rid of warts by rubbing them with a piece of bacon under a full moon and then having a third party hide the bacon under a rock.