“The sun’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun.” Annie, an orphan, sang these words in the 1982 movie by the same name – Annie. She sang them while she was living in an orphanage with a monster of a head mistress – Miss Hannigan. What prompted her sunny attitude was the belief that she had been left at the orphanage by mistake. It’s a great movie about a little girl with a positive attitude and how deeply ingrained her belief is that better days are ahead. Many of us have been quarantined for quite a number of days and some of those days have been cloudy and rainy…

Most of us have heard the old adage that goes something like this: Figures can’t lie, but liars can figure. I guess that this is supposed to encourage us to be discerning when we hear and/or read about various statistics. On one hand, the statistics we are looking at may be totally factual. On the other hand, somebody may be trying to twist or “interpret” them because they have an agenda. Some statistics are, indeed, “just the facts.” Things like physical distances, population numbers, and a host of other things are just what they are. There doesn’t need to be any interpretation, explanation, analysis, etc. However, when it comes to other matters, the…

What in the world would George Jones and Warren Buffett have in common? A country singer who some called “Possum” and a wealthy investor looked upon by many as “The Oracle of Omaha” probably appear to be from two very different worlds, but one of the singer’s old songs and recent news about the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway actually do have something in common. In 1985, Jones recorded “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes?” The song basically raises the question about where the next generation of country music stars will come from. On February 22nd of this year, Mr. Buffett’s annual letter to the investors of Berkshire Hathaway addressed his age and the…

That’s what it was. It seemingly came from nowhere. There had been no mention of TORCON ratings, and no frenzied weather people had been on the air for hours. People were sleeping peacefully in their beds when it hit. Of course I am talking about the tornado that hit my beloved town just a couple of weeks ago. People I know personally were impacted either through home damage or losing loved ones. Those of us who live on the other side of town are both grateful and, at the same time, feel almost guilty for the fact that we had no loss. Through all of this, my main prayer has…

I remember so clearly my parents, when they were older, loving to have a bird feeder outside of their window in the winter. Watching the birds feed seemed to fill much of their time, and my dad would even name the birds (even though I’m sure he didn’t know one cardinal from another). What goes around comes around I suppose, and with the return of the cold weather a couple of weeks ago, Jim and I have enjoyed watching the birds on our bird feeder. We can see them from our sunroom and from our home office. At this point in life, we don’t have quite as much time to…