Opinion

The components of this week’s column will be alliterative in nature. Sights, sounds and sayings will be featured.

Seems like we can’t get through an entire Major League Baseball season without having some kerfuffle break out regarding the “Unwritten Rules of Baseball”. The latest involved the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres. Former St. Louis Cardinal skipper Mike Shildt is getting some fill-in work at third base coach for San Diego while their every day assistant coach recovers from surgery. Shildt is an old school baseball man. Therefore he is a keeper of the sport’s unwritten rules. In the heat of competition, after the Giants violated one of these unwritten rules by gratuitously stealing a base with a 10-1 lead, Shildt went off about the Giants being disrespectful competitors and their flaunting of baseball tradition. If Shildt thought the Giant’s refusing to let off the gas during a 13-2 route was such a grave error, I wonder then what he and other baseball traditionalists would have to say about a minor league baseball team known as the Savannah Bananas. The Bananas are a collegiate summer baseball team based in Savannah, Georgia. They compete in the wood-bat Coastal Plain League; alongside other local teams like the Macon Bacon, the Tri-City Chili Peppers and the Spartanburg Spartanburgers to name just a few. To describe a Savannah Banana game as traditional baseball would probably cause Mike Shildt’s entire head to rotate off his body and explode.

The Easter Bunny hopped out as quickly as he hopped in. It was a mighty chilly Easter, but that didn’t stop Linda Bowlin, Preacher Pat, and me from spending our Saturday evening doing our yearly tradition: Decorating the flowering cross in front of the Methodist Church on Thomasville.

Left myself a note stuck to a file that said “11am”. The “11” somehow got marked on to where it said “Ham”. Took me 30 minutes to figure out why I was leaving notes about ham. Although it does sound like me...

What is up with the weather lately? Where is Spring? I think we can all safely say that we dodged a major catastrophic event Friday night. While the wind and unbelievable hail did much damage- there wasn’t a large tornado ripping through neighborhoods. After church of Friday evening, I had gone out to eat with my mom and some friends to celebrate her birthday. About halfway through our meal, I started getting text from friends around the state and county stating they were praying for me and to be careful. I thought, “Ummm thank you but…” and then the weather alert came across everyone’s phone.

Today we are going to do a deeper dive on a comment from one of our previous columns. It is the idea of mastering a skill. You may have heard the saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. This claim is fairly abstract, but I bet you can agree that it is at least close to being true. Think about it, if you work your 40 hour per week job for just under five years, you will have mastered the task. Funny enough, you can earn a master’s degree in college in a little over five years so it would seem to ring true in higher education as well. However, I am not talking about college or higher education. We are talking about real world application. If you apply yourself to serious study and practice, should it take you about 10,000 hours to master anything?

Yesterday I went to Jonesboro, to do lunch with Monica, which is our usual thing to do, each week. Only we usually do Wednesdays, Brie joined us for a while, and we three had so much fun. Then, her schedule not only got changed, but Wednesday classes changed to being online. Park and walk the short block from Monica’s office to Main Street, there are so many restaurants to choose from. The ice Box, Skinny J’s, The Parsonage, or one of the others such as The Chef’s In. Yesterday, as we were walking her back to work, I asked her what the view from her office window was like. An hour or so later, she sent me a picture, her view is very nice. Indeed, anyone could get used to looking out from three stories up, there is a lot to look at. I went to bed last night at 7. Right after I cooked our dinner, an old-timey dinner for sure. Had some meals like this growing up in western Oklahoma. Red declared there wasn’t anything wrong with it and that it was good. For the first time in over two years, I went and got a pedicure. My feet were beginning to look like some Chupacabra. There seem to be so many new nail salons, I had never gone to this one but on the advice of a friend and she said from her granddaughter, I went to ISPA, it was very clean, friendly, and extremely professional. It was the best pedicure I have ever experienced! So soothing and relaxing and all the lotions and potions and hot towels and stone rub too! The girl was so nice and careful of my feet, due to Diabetes. I asked her what her name was and what country she was from, which is Vietnam. I told her my son just spent three weeks in the Philippines and he loved it. The two countries are almost directly across from each other, The China Sea separates them, by about 910 miles. Went to bed at 7 last night and then was up at 12:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep. Took some Vitamin D3 and went to the tiny back room with a cup of tea, thinking to write till I got sleepy. But sleep never did come and then got up at five and cooked breakfast.

Many towns are built on topographic features–mountains, rivers, bays, etc. Pocahontas is on a river, that’s the main reason the town was created here. But we have another outstanding feature here that dominates the town.