Commentary

I love Valentine’s Day….I love hearts…I love expressing my love to others…..but it’s the kid-sized valentines with warm wishes and sentiments that I love the most!!! Back in grade school, each classmate would construct a special mailbox for their valentines. We would cover shoe boxes with red or pink construction paper and then paste lacy white hearts, cupids and such on the sides for decoration.

 

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When we were presented the state budget this past year, current funds were included as income when actually they were various anticipated funds that were coming from pending lawsuits that were expected to be settled or adjudicated.

 

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SNOW!!! Two times in five days...Sabine Parish was covered with snow. What a delight!! School was cancelled and all of the kids had fun romping in the snow, making snow ice cream, sledding and having snowball fights. Pictures clogged Facebook. Hunter Dubois made a super big snow angel…..Uncle Josh Jenkins pulled his kids, nieces and nephews behind the four-wheeler…85-year-old Dollie Barnhill got out and went sledding with her grandkids….Snowmen were built in all shapes and sizes…Some were foolish enough to get in the hot tub….others huddled around the fireplace….Pots of  soup steamed on the stovetops

 

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I just love things my grandchildren say or do. Of course, all grandmothers do. On a recent trip to Zachary to see Riley Kate and Braeden, I was treated to several cute quotes. Braeden got a new trundle bed, just like his sister’s. He wasn’t too keen on having this “big boy” bed, though, so when we arrived he quickly told us we could sleep in his room.

 

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Dear fellow citizens, We do not often enough, as members of a society who hire governmental officials to manage our state of the union, ask ourselves what is the state of ourselves. Few, including those who supported a “fundamental change”,

seem well pleased with what they were promised. It now seems it is turning out to be not what it was made out to be.

 

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It hardly seems possible that 50 years ago John, Paul, George and Ringo first stepped on American soil and set off an

explosion of British music with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” The four moptops sang, shook their heads and mesmerized

an entire general of teenaged girls, who expressed their love of the Fab Four with screams, fainting and love letters…and by

purchasing everything from magazines, to photo cards in bubble gum to shirts, records and even dolls!!

 

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In a recent report, Louisiana public school students ranked 49th in the nation in academic achievement. The grade is D minus, which is up from an F for the three previous years, Education Week magazine said in its annual “Quality Counts” report on the state of education nationwide.

 

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Dear Santa,

I really don’t want much this Christmas…just a few things that will make my life better. First of all, I’d like a new telephone  system for the house. Ours has become full of static and last week it began just hanging up in the middle of conversations. Besides that, I am always losing the phone because I forget to put it back in the charger. Having a new phone is a real necessity now, since I pulled it out of the washing machine after it had been washed, rinsed and spinned dry…don’t ask me how it got in there!!!

By Donna Smith Ammons.

A new game has been circling through Facebook over the past week or two. If you like someone’s list of “Things You Didn’t Know About Me”, they could assign you a number and then you had to participate. Needless to say, I have enjoyed reading and learning new things about my friends. But nobody has given me a number!!

By Lola Russell.

As I was pursuing my favorite pastime the other morning, one clue was “1959 hit recording by The Coasters.” It was a 9-letter word. I had the first letter, which was a P, and the last letter was a Y. After a lot of thought, I came up with a song that I barely remember called “Poison Ivy.” I guess they just coasted right on off the charts, as did a lot of other bands. This worked with the rest of the words, so I asked Dianne to look it up on her “smart phone” so I could remember the lyrics and she did. The first verse went, “She comes on like a rose, but everybody knows, she’ll get you in Dutch, you can look, but you better not touch. Poison ivy (repeated over and over).”