I’m a moderately reclusive shopper who is also a little independent.  My quirks manifest themselves in various ways.  For example, I tend to avoid crowds, although I will go into large stores, hermetically sealed in my own psychological bubble unless I’m in a familiar place. 

In one of my first columns about two and a half years ago, I wrote about my efforts to improve my drinking habits by drinking the Aquacal brand of strawberry flavored water as opposed to Coca-Cola.  Having become quite addicted to the soft drink over the course of my lifetime, I remember telling you that I was uncertain as to how long this change would last.  While I cannot recall exactly how long I was able to hold out, I regret telling you that I have completely fallen off the wagon. 

The Food and Drug Administration said this week it’s OK to go around eating cloned meat and milk. That’s what all the television stations, newspapers and Web sites were saying Wednesday.

When you’re walking back to the car, trying for all the world to look like you don’t really want all that much whatever item that has you out and about in your car, is when you begin the negotiations. So saith my father-in-law.

Some of the names were shocking. Others were anything but. We all knew about, or suspected, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi. But how many of us had any idea about players like Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Jerry Hairston?

On frustrating days, toting objects from one place to another, receiving and sending armloads of paper that will get pitched out, or standing on the college hilltop to watch massive tons of tractor-trailer cargo booming by in either direction—logs this way, planks that; goods this way, garbage that way—I sometimes conclude that the life of man could be reduced to the function of transporting molecules from here to there.

Just after I’d finished my pre-Christmas columns on “happiness,” Eknath Easwaran’s newsletter arrived from Blue Mountain.
Now here was a man who understood happiness, in his long and fruitful life. From his early years teaching English in California universities, he was fascinated by the human search for happiness that pervaded all the world’s literature, the great religious texts—and the American culture around him.

School Board member Dayton Owens got what he wanted. 

I’m fairly certain Black Friday is why the terrorists and the French hate us. I can’t say for sure, since I don’t know any terrorists or French people on a first-name basis. But I doubt I miss my guess by far.

Tickets are still available for the U.S. Air Force Heritage of America Band Concert on Friday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m. at the Wytheville Meeting Center. There is limited seating for the free event sponsored by the Wytheville Enterprise.