I have been cooking in the kitchen for more than 50 years.

When I was a child my mother always was a big influence on me learning how to cook.

To this day I am so glad she instilled this in me as a youth.

When she passed away I took on more cooking responsibilities in our family and as you can see by my extended waistline, my cooking is quite good.

Now as a seasoned, veteran cooker, I thought I have seen everything in the kitchen. Until Thursday morning I got the shock of my life.

Video games can be many things: entertainment, escape, therapy and more. A history lesson may not be near the top of the list, but I’ve recently learned it in a game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (KCD2).
I invested in the game for an immersive, open-world experience. I had heard good things about the story, which received rave reviews overall. Plus, the setting, reminded me a lot of the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia.

This weekend was my first stop in Minneapolis. I had been around the fringes of the cities a few times, but this was my first time smack in the center.
    As far as traffic goes, I would rank it better than Pittsburgh and Indianapolis.

The content of public words and actions combined with a person’s/organization’s overall words and actions in private matters in the political realm, whose words and actions affect the lives of every person within that country.

Two of the things I dreaded most when we moved to Minnesota was the prospect of more snow and the potential for tornadoes.
Snow was no stranger to West Virginia. We received plenty of it in some years. But I am not a fan. Trace amounts are plenty for me. I do enjoy those evenings when the snow is falling and the sound mutes out all other things. It’s just that those evenings are also the ones where you have some place you need to go.
Tornadoes, or the threat of tornadoes, are a new experience altogether.

Taking public notices for schools out of newspapers would hurt public
A significant discussion is taking place at the state legislature in reaction to the recent announcement that eight community newspapers will close at the end of the month.
Under a proposal in the Senate Education Policy Omnibus bill (SF 3567), school districts would no longer be required to publish their proceedings in newspapers and could instead move them to their own websites.

As another trip around the calendar ended this week, it is time to once again recollect about times gone by.
Bingo has become a pretty big thing these days, especially the prize bingos which are held in our communities monthly.
A friend of mine came across this interesting bingo game which should only be played by Gen Xers.
There are 25 spots on the card and every card lists something which you may have or have not done in your early years.

One of social media’s beautiful features is that it quickly reminds you of whatyou were doing a year ago.
My posts from last January feature disgruntled sel-fies of me standing in mydriveway with salt and a pitiful electric snowblower that I thought would be enough. It was not.
By the end of last winter, there was a solid two feet of snow in my yard. The ice walls that formed from shoveling my driveway were so formative, that I began reading George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series to seek a suitable comparison
in literature.

Every time it gets extremely cold, and I mean every time, I forget to bring liquids in from my car.
My son Jayson looked at me Sunday as he got into the car and sternly said,” Will you ever learn?”
Well, apparently I will not.
During Christmas Eve my wife received a number of bottles of wine as a present.
They were all placed in a box and were loaded into my vehicle for our return trip from Le Center to Waterville.
It was late so we just grabbed the food we had in the vehicle and left other items for the next day. Or the next day. Or the next day…

I am so thankful I don’t have to drive more than a couple of blocks to work every day after a Thursday morning trip to Mankato.
I have come to the conclusion the older I get the more I don’t really like to drive.
Night driving is becoming increasingly difficult. This was part of what made my Thursday early morning trip that much more frustrating.
I left the house at 6:30ish, which is 30 minutes or more behind my wife, who makes a trip to Mankato every day.
I know there are others who travel much farther and I don’t envy you at all.

When you tell someone that you’ve never flown before, their first assumption is that you’re scared of flying. That has at least been my experience when I revealed this in my late 20s and persisted through my 30s.
Now, in my early 40s, I finally crossed that maiden flight off my bucket list.
Three years of living in Minnesota has kept us from visiting our families in West Virginia, but we had an opportunity to go for Thanksgiving and we decided to take it. Making the drive is a two-day excursion one way, making flying the only viable option in the short week.

I have a sibling who doesn’t eat anything with pork products in them. Strangely enough, you will find pork products in places sometimes you don’t always think of — one of them being store-bought gelatin.
This sent me on a hunt of how I could make my own gelatin and the results were surprisingly simpler, more flavorful and more nutritious than I realized. In fact, if you can somehow make anything into a liquid, you can make it into gelatin. It also sets firmer.

I took my father to see a show with U.S. Navy Glee Club Men’s and Women’s Chorus with the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall earlier this month. Preceding the show, we sat down in the lobby next to a couple, approximately in their seventies.

Between Halloween and the 2020 Presidential Election, my family moved from West Virginia to rural Minnesota. It was during the height of the pandemic and my wife had lost her job because of it. She found a new position in Appleton, and we decided to leave the Appalachian Mountains for the first time.
As a lifelong West Virginian, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Minnesota felt like such a foreign place. Cold, flat, and in a different time zone from all our friends and family.

I get hundreds of e-mails a day.
The majority of them go right into the trash can.
I don’t think I am unlike others in business, but some of the things I have been sent lately are completely absurd and have absolutely nothing to do with the newspaper business.
Unfortunately, some things I actually do need end up in my spam folder so I spend time going through twice as many worthless e-mails than I should have to because of that.
I am sure others get the same type of stuff. I rant about this every couple of years. So let’s compare…

I walked by a long-time friend of mine Sunday afternoon and he asked me if I had always had a beard.
I said yes, for many, many years, only this version of my beard has a different color to it….gray.
I guess he didn’t recognize the new, older, more gray Jay.
I am becoming relegated to the fact that sooner or later my head of hair will turn from dark brown to gray.
It was approximately 10 years ago when my then 13-year-old son Jayson and wife Jayne decided they were going to make me aware of the impending gray hair scenario.