Out and About Archive

You should probably get your calendars out and mark down the following local activities. Labor Day is Monday – Sept. 2 and since most of you won’t be “laboring” you might want to consider going to Juana’s for the Navarre Krewe of Jesters Annual Labor Day Rubber Duck Derby and Mullet Toss will be held Monday, Sept. 2, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Juana’s Pagodas (1451 Navarre Beach Causeway) on Navarre Beach. This event is fun for the whole family and is a fundraiser for the Krewe’s scholarship fund and Mardi Gras parade.

Thank you to everyone that called in, texted and emailed with your thanks for my column last week. I didn’t start out writing that column about that subject but apparently it was on my mind, so I just kept typing and typing. We have a motto around here and it goes something like this, “When in doubt, keep it out.” Well, I broke that motto last week – but maybe I should break my self-imposed rules more often. After the column was at the printer, I second guessed myself – a lot. I thought to myself – that it wasn’t “nice.” But then, I thought, “Well, that was being nice.” It could have been less “nice.” A lot less.

We have an article in this week’s issue about how much our county commissioners are being paid for part-time work – north of $70,000 a year. Some of our commissioners would say they are working full-time, but it isn’t a requirement to clock in, so we will just have to believe them, or not. There is at least one that I hope isn’t working full time – but probably is. His entire identity is based on being a county commissioner, and that is James Calkins. And, if county commissioners are elected for two terms, they receive retirement for serving eight years as an elected official. For instance, if James Calkins is re-elected, he has retirement pay of 3% of the average of his highest paid eight years in office. One dollar would be too much.

We had a very eventful week last week. Between the three newspapers, we won 45 awards from the Florida Media Conference. Thirty-six of the awards were from the Florida Press Association’s annual contest. We didn’t win best overall, but I’m fairly sure we came in second in two circulation categories. I’m going to find out.

Have you heard of the perfect storm? Well, we are being tested here as of the last two-three weeks. Our awesome bookkeeper for the past five years decided she would like a summer to stay home with her children, so she gave us plenty of notice to find a new bookkeeper. One we hired and waited two weeks for, emailed in the day before she was to start and said she took another position. Another person actually started training, and it was obvious in the first few days that she barely knew her way around a computer, much less QuickBooks, so we had to say no thank you. By that time, it was mid-July and rightfully so, our bookkeeper went home to be with her children. And, at the same time, our front desk admin gave her notice because she got a job with better benefits…i.e., a government job, and we hired someone to replace her and four days of   training later, the last four days of our former team member’s time with us — she emailed us late one night and said she decided to stay home and homeschool her child. So that left us without a bookkeeper or a front desk admin. I told Gail, our Publisher, that this means something awesome is about to happen. And then, I found a quote from a friend of mine who is also going through some trying times. She wrote, “Whenever something important falls apart, it’s because something bigger and better is on the horizon. And, with sudden change always comes the deepest opportunities for growth. Well, we are definitely growing through this. The good news is that we used to put out a job opening and get zero applicants. Now, they are coming in all day long – which is a job in itself – weeding through applications, interviewing, onboarding, etc. However, well worth it when you end up with awesome team members like we have now.

This is probably a subject I should have taken more time to hash out before I wrote an entire column about it, but here it is regardless.

Last week’s column was a re-run from 2019’s Independence Day paper. I didn’t receive any complaints, and I thought it was still interesting and I hoped you would too. It was, after all, verified history from more than 200 years ago so…it wasn’t stale. It is always good to reminder during Independence Day celebrations.  

Happy July 4!

We need to be reminded occasionally that freedom isn’t free, and we know that only too well in our military community. Most of the signers of the declarations signed their lives away with the stroke of a pen. I recently ran across this on singer Michael W. Smith’s website, and it is a message that we all need to hear, regardless of the time of year.

I’m visiting a prison later this week in Blountstown and I was required to submit information for a background check before I got permission to go inside.  Let that sink in.  I totally understand, but the irony wasn’t lost on me. I heard that the prison is training inmates on how to operate a piece of machinery that I’m interested in knowing more about. And, because there is always a story, there is a story. However, I don’t have permission for the story yet. They have vocational programs and when the inmates that are in the program are released, they leave with a vocational certificate. I’ll have to see if we have any subscribers there. We have quite a few in prison. One time a paper was sent back to us because inside that issue was a story about how someone got in trouble for breaking someone out of prison. The note we received back from the prison office was that the story was too descriptive and gave details on how to sneak certain items into prison. The person that didn’t receive their paper missed it, so we cut that story out of the paper and sent it back to the prison. It was very appreciated. We appreciate our subscribers that happen to be in prison. At least it helps the prison guards read newspapers – because apparently, they are reading them before they are passed on to their rightful owners. My mom used to go to a maximum-security prison for women in Orlando every Sunday evening to lead a Bible study when she was in her 80’s. She was always nervous that she would make a mistake and not be able to go back. There were very strict rules about what she could wear and bring with her. Pens were not allowed, or sharp pencils. I’ll follow her lead when I visit the prison.   

This week I’m writing about mosquito control because they are out of control. I was trying to talk to my new neighbors, who recently moved here from Alaska, around dusk last week and we were all swatting mosquitos and dancing around trying to get out of the mosquitoes’ way. They were relentless. My feet and ankles were on fire. I finally had to tell our new neighbors that I just couldn’t chat anymore because – I couldn’t. I high tailed it back into my house – while zig-zagging back and forth trying to throw the mosquitos off my tail. I have found a few trying to follow me in my house. I found out that in the few months that our new neighbors have been here, they have also found the mosquitos to be overly plentiful. They had already invested in some kind of mosquito magnet machine that kills mosquitoes.  I would have checked it out if I didn’t have to literally run away.