Author: Butch Lawson

It was a fenced-in high school ball field. The gate swung open and I went in, closing the gate behind me and the dog. From the pitcher’s mound, I gave the fence lines a quick inspection without seeing any dog-size breaks or open gates, then I unsnapped the lead from Mac’s collar.

My world has gotten a whole lot noisier. Some routine happenings are downright deafening and lots of things that were silent are no longer.

The roads are wonderfully quiet with winter traffic now. Some days I can walk to the post office and back, at noon, without having a single vehicle drive by.

We get calls all the time from low-life scammers who have just enough of our information to start a conversation, but not enough to separate us from our common sense. I closed down an email address when it started delivering 50-plus scam emails a day.

I was speaking to a service advisor at a well-known local car dealership regarding an annoying problem with my truck. Different from problems that are not annoying, such as those of routine maintenance and repair of wear parts, this one had shown up a week before as a glitch in the “Driver Information Center.”