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New Year’s Intentions

This is the month for making resolutions. A resolution is a firm decision to do something. I don’t want to write about whether or not resolutions are effective in making change. I want to encourage you rather to think about what kind of person you want to be. With that in mind, I use the word intention rather than resolution. An example of a resolution is “I want to run a marathon in 2025”. An example of an intention is “I want to be a runner.” An intention is a planned purpose. When the intention is acted on, it becomes identity. If you start running, you are a runner. If you ...

Snow days affect the children

I am sure many people question as to why they close schools on snow or extreme cold days.. There are many pros and cons on closing schools but many things to consider. First many of us live in the cities waking up to plowed cleaned off streets which is a blessing thanks to all those hard workers that work all night while we are enjoy our nice warm beds. However we must consider all the students that live on back roads in the country with non-paved and gravel roads which is almost impossible to clear. For sure there are assigned people who are supposed to check the various areas and ...

Winter floods must have been miserable

Flooding in Marietta is nothing new, Marietta has been going under water from time to time as long as people have lived here. When those from the Ohio Company first selected the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers as the place to build a new city it would have seemed they would have had to be aware that from time-to-time the whole town would be covered by several feet of churning brown muck that would certainly make everyone wish they had located on higher ground. They had gotten advice from Thomas Hutchins, geographer of the United States, that the river banks in the area ...

Wm H. Styer, Prescription Druggist

Mariettan Ross Thomas showed me an old apothecary bottle and said, “See what you can find out about it.” The quart-size glass bottle has a cork and a label: “Wm H. Styer, Prescription Druggist, 240 Front Street, Marietta, Ohio.” Collecting old bottles is popular. There is a ...

MOV Climate Corner: Dollars and (common) sense

With the 2024 elections behind us and a second Trump administration preparing to take control in a few short weeks, I find it to be a time of reflection on the last four years. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Despite the rhetoric around America’s political realities and what the future may hold, we must also look back at the consequential policy of the Biden administration and the indelible impact it had on clean energy and climate. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act set a new standard for prioritizing clean energy and climate issues, putting hundreds of billions of dollars toward ...

Smart phones have slowly taken over our lives

Why can’t people stay off their phones? I’m a bit concerned that as a species we are losing our ability to communicate with people F2F. That’s “face to face” for those of you who haven’t let cell phones take over your life. Statistics show that nearly everyone has a cell phone now, and most of those phones are smart phones. To call them phones is really a bit of a misnomer. Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Inc. summed it up best when he introduced the iPhone in 2007. “So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a ...