There is a pretty solid chance that, in the history of Nebraska high school football, yours truly was the first player ever to take a book that was a part of Oprah’s Book Club to football camp. Odd, I know, but during the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, there was about a ten-day stretch when I was glued to a book by Ken Follette titled Pillars of the Earth.

The other day, I got a text from my uncle in California. He’d just watched a news report about the tumultuous March 18th town hall held by United States Representative Mike Flood, a Republican, in which shouts and boos dominated.

Late last Wednesday night, with the world still recovering from a late-season blizzard, I found myself bent over the tank of my toilet. I am not a plumber.

St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone, but as always, you probably saw buttons reading “Kiss me, I’m Irish” from all sorts of people, Irish or not.

Growing up in rural Nebraska, there is a skill that, throughout your life—farmers and ranchers master it much quicker than others— you have to learn. That is how to properly, and somewhat gracefully, climb over, through, or under barbed wire fences.

It’s tax season, and who doesn’t dislike filing their taxes? It takes time away from things like checking on the latest Husker football recruit or seeing what new fight we’re having with Canada. And it’s a messy, mathematic- heavy task, requiring a lot of wading through regulations.

I literally sprinted down main street in Elm Creek. It was August, it was hot, and that week’s edition of the Elm Creek Beacon-Observer was sitting on the dock at the post office.

It’s daylight savings time, so let’s turn back the clock… to four years ago, when the state was still contending with the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a silver lining of sorts to those awful days—a huge influx of federal funds to keep the economy going.

The old joke around the state capitol is that legislators get paid “$12,000 a year and all you can eat and drink.” That is a reference to all the free meals— and, okay, maybe a drink or two—dispensed at the almost daily events hosted by lobbying groups during legislative sessions. But in reality, it’s no laughing matter that state senators in Nebraska get paid so little for representing us.