Opinion

When you read this article, fall will be several days old. Where did summer go? Due to the unusual weather conditions, we have just wrapped up our Summer Roadside Litter Abatement drive.
The recycling center has gotten used to the new baler we got through a Kentucky Pride grant from the Division of Waste Management at Frankfort.
Our students have gotten settled in their classrooms for the next year of learning.
But we have so many activities coming up in October that we will not have time to sit down.

This week, we’re frustrated — with everyone and everything, it seems. So frustrated, in fact, that we’re not exactly sure with whom we’re most frustrated. But we’ll name a top three:

Use local assets to better community

I just wanted to respond to Ashley Scoby’s editorial in the Aug. 14 issue of the Magnet.
Ashley gave us invaluable insight into some of the problems with this county. Her editorial was not mean-spirited, but was a concise appraisal and we should pay attention.
In a few short months, she clearly saw the good and bad of Spencer County. She couldn’t have been more to the point and I admire her honesty. It is up to us to take it from there.

After nearly 18 months, one lawsuit and one plan declared unconstitutional, the House of Representatives and the Senate finally passed a redistricting plan this past week during a Special Session in Frankfort.
Given all the past history of redistricting stretching back to the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision to throw out the plan that passed in 2012, it was somewhat refreshing that we could come together and pass a plan that for the most part passed along bipartisan lines.

Back in the early days of human activity, the earth was covered with about 18 billion acres of forest lands with trees of various types. Today, that has shrunk to less than 11 billion acres.
Wood in general helped create civilization as we know it today. Even when building with brick, concrete and steel, a lot of wood is involved in each project. We have been exposed to using wood in so many different ways, we have lost the sense of its importance in our world today.

Our young ones again face the challenges of absorbing all the knowledge necessary to survive in our modern world.
For us old people, the challenge is finding the way to grab their attention. Today’s world is a very fast-paced, high-charged distracting environment. To make matters worse, new products are brought to market before you have learned to use the item it replaces. That tends to create a “throw-away” society.

A lot of things can happen in four years: a teenager completes high school, a young adult earns an engineering degree, a president serves a full term, the Olympics gear up for another go. But can Spencer County get light poles installed in that time frame?
Apparently not.
According to our very own archives, UPS donated several massive light poles to the county in September 2009. Those poles were unloaded at Ray Jewell Park and those poles lay in that same location four years later.

Many years ago, there was a television documentary that was broadcast called “This is Your Life.” The series first ran from the early 1950s to 1961 and it was revived for a couple of years in the early ‘70s, eventually fizzling out with a few shows in the early ‘80s. The essence of the show was that the host would surprise a guest and then he would take them on a stroll down memory lane in front of the audience.

Will Spencer County ever have a fireworks show to celebrate Independence Day? I thought the answer was finally a resounding “Yes!” last week when all signs pointed to a night of fun at the lake on July 6. But Mother Nature had other plans.
Inches and inches and feet of other plans.
Thursday through Saturday, Spencer County, along with many other nearby areas, received so much rain we could have started to build an ark.