CATCHING UP

Well, it has, indeed, been a while. My beloved fall and winter seasons are now morphing into spring and that will swiftly give way to the heat and humidity of summer soon enough. To quickly update, the Christmas season went pretty well despite it being the first without my father. We, of course, thought a lot about him during that time - and still do think and talk alot about him still. I think it is therapy for us to reminisce about him. There will still be a small event as his memorial bench is placed at the cemetary in the next few months.

CHURCH - Things at Faith UMC, as usual, started out slow as January rolled along. It picked up, though, with some of our members participating in an event at our large sister church called "Festival of Choirs." As several of our members participated, several others of us attended the event and it was really awesome. We have now, just started preparations (albeit later than we want) for our Easter season presentation entitled "The Power of the Cross." We'll be presenting the bulk of this on Palm Sunday. It looks like we might have a pretty good presentation choir to carry this off, too. We had an exciting rehearsal this past week.

THE HOUSE - I have to say that, as far as the renovations of the past couple of years now, we're pretty much there. I don't know if you ever get all the way "there" with a house, but pretty much everything's in place. I'm still tweaking the decor and then the outside landscaping and such is next on the agenda - a lot to do outside.

WORK - Things at school where I work are really busy right now. We are in the midst of the dreaded FCAT testing right now and seem to have a lot of drama happening with many of the students. With the current financial and economic situation, we're all a little on edge to see what next school year is going to bring. So far, our school board has not been talking layoffs, but rather furloughs and salary reductions. I'd personally rather see the latter than to not have a job, so we'll see how things shake out in the coming months.

BUCS - I have to make some comments on the "new" Bucs football team. As we all know by now, Jon Gruden and company were all let go back in February and the new coach Raheem Morris and his colleagues have been about the business of completely cleaning house and starting over. There is the good and the bad with this, of course, and the season could really go either way. I'm one who doesn't like diving off into wholesale change, but prefer to change in phases. I think it works better that way. After so many years of the Bucs stinking and being the lowlife of the NFL, the Dungy and Gruden years established the team (along with the Glazers too, I guess) on an upper echelon footing - especially with Monte Kiffin and the "Tampa 2" defense that became so popular. Now, that is all changing quickly into whatever we see this fall. I guess you can't go on with the same things forever and ever and these kinds of changes are maybe healthy - but I fret that this major change in the consistency of things there may possibly lead to some down and unfulfilling years - possibly. I hope that not the case, and we'll just have to see.