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For our family, Annunciation shooting was a tragic reality

“It’s unimaginable.” “I can’t even begin to understand what you must be feeling.” “I cannot imagine what you’ve gone through.” These are a few of the well-meaning sentiments we’ve heard since our world was shattered and our worst fears came true on Aug. 27. While well-meaning, they’re not quite right. You can imagine it. You can viscerally feel it. You just don’t want to. So today we’re sharing your story from that day. You were on a work call when your phone started repeatedly buzzing around 8:30 a.m. While you tried to focus on the call, ...

September shines a light: Awareness, recovery and hope

September is a month of reflection, awareness, and hope. It marks both National Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month and National Recovery Month—two observances that shine a light on struggles often carried in silence. Together, they remind us that mental health and recovery are deeply connected, that every life matters, and that healing is possible. This month calls us to break the stigma, extend support, and honor the courage of those who continue their journey toward wellness and recovery. The statistics are sobering. Suicide imposes profound and far-reaching consequences, ...

Adapting to disaster

You can hardly watch the news or read a newspaper without learning about yet another disaster. It almost seems normal that something terrible is happening to someone somewhere. People losing their lives, far-ranging damage, and consequent hardship are the fruit of disaster. The prolonged psychological impact of these experiences cannot be overstated. One of the things that gets us through a disastrous experience is called Resilience. Simply put, resilience is a person’s ability to adjust to, adapt to, and recover from, exposure to a difficult or even terrible situation. Another way ...

Making a board

I recently decided to expand my woodworking skill set by making a board. It turns out that this is much more difficult than it sounds. Yes, I could have simply gone to a lumberyard and purchased some wood. Or I could have wandered into a home improvement megastore where I likely would have gotten lost and forced live off the land by swilling sports drinks and chewing on leather tool belts. But buying a board would have been the easy, wimpy way of doing things. This might be due to my Norwegian heritage, but I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing the hard way. That’s why ...

Taking care of some creaky parts

“You gotta take care of stull.” Long ago, my father Sylvester told me that. That admonition still sits in the back of my mind. Dad was referring to taking care of the myriad machines involved with working the farm. Routine maintenance of everything from the gutter cleaner to the tillage tractor is required. It also means being ever vigilant, on guard for loose chains and squeaky bearings. Recently I’ve been taking care of stuff. Every few years, my 70-year-old Farmall 400 and 60-year-old IH 560 get a once over from the tractor doctors at Miller Sellner Implement. Both ...

Printing plant tour highlights modern technology

I had an interesting experience this week, one that showed how much the world has changed because of technology. I took part in an Adult Community Center tour of the Henle Printing plant at its new location in Marshall’s industrial park. Owner Charlie Stark and Production Manager Marc Klaith introduced the group to the set of machines that produce a massive amount of printed materials. They also gave a demonstration. They printed off 800 programs for the Marshall Tiger football season on a machine that automatically puts pages in order and staples them. Henle’s has only one ...