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At 20 days into recovery from knee replacement, I've started working again. I had to. I was becoming addicted. <BR><BR>No, not to the drugs given for pain. It was the drug of television. I was starting my day with BBC's Cash in the Attic, wandering through Court TV's Poirot mysteries and capping it all off with the Ellen DeGeneres Show by 5 p.m. Blowing the whole day away in sloth.<BR><BR>The explanation for this sudden-onset addiction might be that I grew up in a household where television as a source of in-home entertainment arrived later than in most homes. <BR><BR>Much as people today wait to add a personal computer into their lives, people way back when waited to see if the flash of the television industry was worthwhile or a flash in the pan of progress.

Ouch<BR><BR>Schwack!<BR><BR>It was math class, the last class of the day. Ms. Weber had left us briefly to take a phone call. Neither Tim nor I were likely to waste a chance for a little mischief, so my best friend had just buried a spit wad in the side of Jeff's neck. <BR><BR>Jeff wheeled around toward Tim, but now it was my shot. I was the biggest kid in the class, with lungs to match. The plastic straw came up. My own spit wad had spent the last minute being chewed and tightened and condensed to the approximate size and hardness of a large BB. I inserted it into the straw with my tongue. As I took aim, Tim raised his weapon for the next shot.<BR><BR>Jeff, a Chippewa just down from the reservation, was short in stature and even shorter in temper. In short, he was the perfect target for two larger seventh-graders who still had lessons to learn about cruelty and its rewards. <BR><BR>SCHWACK!!

Forgiveness<BR><BR>O.C. and Tommy vaulted over the fence and into the yard. The two boys ran toward the house, then slowed to a walk when they saw me working in the garage. Tommy said, "Gotta go," mounted his bike and was gone in a moment. O.C. disappeared into the house just as quickly. <BR><BR>A moment later a man my age also came over the same fence, out of breath. He'd climbed the steep embankment from the busy city street below. "Somebody threw a rock through my windshield!" he gasped. "Have you seen any kids come through here?" In the next instant a mail truck came wheeling around the corner. Its windshield was broken. The driver was upset. "A rock hit my windshield and I KNOW it came from up this way - coulda killed me! Have you seen any kids up here?"<BR><BR>I had a pretty good idea of what might have happened, and I wasn't happy. "Look, I'm glad you two are okay," I said.

Part 13<BR><BR>Murph gave me the rules for his camp. He said at retreat the women came in and at reveille they left. Next, he said people were going to ask for help at times and we could help them, but we couldn't accept money if offered. We could accept booze which would be put on the mess table at supper time. At my first supper, there were seven bottles of various kinds of liquor on the table. An interesting camp, with the extras, but I didn't partake of either one. Of course, some readers will think "oh, sure." A lot of the guys had double cots, with large mosquito nets covering them, to accommodate their 'friend'.<BR><BR>I went about my daily tasks, usually with a grader. One day, while passing through town, a man came out of a nice house and stopped me. His house was of a more conventional style and set back from the road. Farther back, he had a garage, but the ground was muddy for the whole distance.

Warmer <BR><BR>The first steam powered cotton mills began producing cloth in Lancashire, England in the 1840s. Thus began the first large-scale burning of fossil fuels on this Earth; the Industrial Revolution. It took two million years for man to discover how to extract and burn the organic crud which nature had managed to bury during the previous 58 million years. And now, we wasted no time. The factories quickly grew, and they demanded more fuel. <BR><BR>The smoke and soot from these first coal-fired plants was horrible, of course. But it was a big world with less than a billion people. Burning a few thousand tons of coal each year didn't really matter. The Earth slumbered as the factories grew still larger and as gasoline engines replaced steam. <BR><BR>Henry Ford's Model T cars began rolling off the first assembly line in 1913. Soon thousands of humans were driving instead of walking or riding.

I've set two New Year's resolutions for myself. The first one was to start eating better. That was over by 6 p.m. on New Year's Day as I had a piece of pumpkin pie and some fudge for dinner. Although, there may still be some time to redeem myself on that one.<BR><BR>The other one is to become more organized. I'm the type of person who will set something aside and forget about it. So my goal for 2007 is to not do that.<BR><BR>The first thing I'm trying is called a household notebook. It's an idea I found online and so far it is working pretty well.<BR><BR>I use a three ring binder and tabbed dividers with pockets to separate the binder into different categories. <BR><BR>The first category is phone information, complete with everything from emergency numbers to work phone numbers to our favorite carry-out restaurants.

My departure from Ely that first year at the cabin was less than dignified. I stepped on a roofing nail. Off I went to see a nice young doctor at Shipman Hospital who patched me up and suggested I stick around and look for a job locally.<BR><BR>Instead I hopped in my dad's truck and headed back to my job in Illinois.<BR><BR>That winter dad drove to Ely with a used pontoon boat and parked it at Tina Rozman's place down the lake for launching in the summer.<BR><BR>On our next summer vacation, dad and I decided to cross Cedar Lake in the pontoon boat, carrying the Seliga canoe on board. Our destination was the small lake which ran parallel to Cedar - Picketts Lake. Dad planned to portage the canoe over the short trail so I leapt off the pontoon boat onto a rock to tie up.

Monday night's high school girls basketball game between Tower-Soudan and Orr was much more than your typical early-season contest.<BR><BR>Instead, it may have marked the start of a new era in regional athletics and certainly served as a celebration of the completion of a marvelous project on the Bois Forte Reservation.<BR><BR>The Golden Eagles and Lady Braves squared off in the inaugural high school basketball game at the Vermilion Wellness Center, a state-of-the-art $3.5 million facility that includes a regulation-sized gymnasium, weight room, fitness center and more.<BR><BR>Located about a mile down the road from Fortune Bay Resort and Casino, the facility has all the makings of a potential hub for the entire Lake Vermilion community.<BR><BR>That's one of the hopes of Bois Forte leaders, many of whom were part of the packed house that took in Monday's game - won by the Golden Eagles 45-44.<BR><BR>"The

I've been teasing Chick Beel about writing a history of Cedar Lake which is off the Cloquet Line. His memory tends to be far better than mine. The folks who bought our family's cabin on Cedar Lake have been after me too to do this.<BR><BR>There is something special about a lake cabin. Before you have one you are not aware of how intensely you will come to feel about it. After it's sold you'll forever rue the day you decided that having two places to keep up was one too many.<BR><BR>The family's intention was not to build a place on Cedar Lake. We owned lakeshore on Brown's Lake and that is where mom and dad were headed one spring day, over the bumps of the railroad ties. Dad had bought the Brown's Lake property on the advice of my sister who wanted to start a children's camp there. The year was 1958.<BR><BR>The old railroad bed crossed a swampy creek bed where the beavers sought to make a lake.

When you take on the role of caregiver either consciously or by a matter of attrition it will involve role changes. What type of role changes and how you handle these role changes can have a big impact on you and the person receiving care. <BR><BR>Who you are caring for also affects your response to your changing roles. <BR><BR>There can be many role changes that occur when caring for a parent. <BR><BR>¨ Reminder for appointments or meds<BR><BR>¨ Shopping<BR><BR>¨ Paying the bills<BR><BR>¨ Driving <BR><BR>¨ Cleaning and laundry<BR><BR>¨ Personal cares<BR><BR>Changes in your role when caring for a spouse can be more subtle, but no less significant.<BR><BR>Some of the emotional issues as an adult child caring for a parent will be different than those of one spouse caring for another. One of the most common feelings is anger.