Janet's Blog

We don't often stop to think about the light that brightens our days. We take it for granted, expecting it as our right. After all, the sun comes up each morning and gives light even on the cloudiest of days. The moon shines clearly from many nighttime skies, and the stars twinkle brightly even when the moon is absent. And on those dark, cloudy nights, we still have street lights and headlights outside, and plenty of electric lights in our homes and businesses.  I woke up suddenly around 3:00 a.m. yesterday. The stillness was startling; even with the wind rattling the windows, I was aware of the complete absence of normal inside, background murmurings. The darkness was all-encompassing--no night lights glowing, no street lights casting their faint light through our shaded windows. When I picked up my phone to check the time, it lit up immediately, providing the comforting light we've all come to expect. That's when I realized that we were in the midst of a power outage. I r...

I was reading an article the other day about a mom in England who let her young daughter ride her horse to school one morning. The mom rode along, too, on her own horse, and led her daughter's pony home afterwards. The main issue with this was the fact that the school children all gathered around the pony, just outside the school gates, to pet the horses. When one entitled eight-year-old insisted that she wanted to ride the other girl's pony, the horses' owner let her know that it wouldn't be safe for her to do that, since she had no helmet or prior experience. Upon hearing that response, the girl's equally entitled mother pitched a fit, insisting that her daughter be allowed to ride and, when that failed, she complained to the school authorities that horses should not be ridden to school unless everyone (especially her darling daughter) was also allowed to ride. I guess that riding horses to school has become a novelty. I've ridden horses since before I could w...

Here I sit, watching the snow fall steadily down, outside the kitchen window. The blizzard hasn't really started yet, but the freezing rain, followed by this snow, has arrived, just as numerous meteorologists have predicted, so I expect the winds to crank up to hurricane force within a couple of hours, as forecasted.  After a relatively dry winter, here in the Nebraska Panhandle, we have already had about sixteen inches of heavy, wet, snow in March. This year, March has come in like a lion. You've probably heard the old adage, "in like a lion, out like a lamb," referring to the month of March, which is supposed to start out with winter's full fury, and end with the promise of spring. I think it really worked that way, most years, when I was a little girl living in northeastern Nebraska. When we moved down to Fairbury, though, March sometimes started off with spring-like weather right away. When Bill and I  relocated to northern Michigan, we were surprised...