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I think it has something to do with my dad being the shipping clerk at the Duncan Yo-Yo factory, and then operating wood lathes for the companies that followed after the yo-yo craze ended and the Duncans left town. Or maybe it was the stories my mother told of her second-generation...

I’m thinking, I’m thinking too much about age these days but what the heck. Every time I have to search for reading glasses to read a label and find them perched on my head, pick a place to sit based on the difficulty of getting back on my feet once I sit down and treat TUMS like...

I was watching a television show where they were talking about the rapidly improving technology in the world and how it makes things obsolete quite quickly. One of the examples they used was the way music is brought into people's lives. For example, music was first reproduced on records;...

I've just about recovered from our vacation. We returned last month from a nearly two-week trip to Germany, Austria and Sweden, but as my wife will tell you, traveling with me is hard work. I'm not as bad as my college professor cousin who turns vacations into literary field trips,...

August around our house this year was all about marriage -- our daughter's brand new one and our own at a whopping 42 years. We were too exhausted from her celebration to do much ourselves but then it has kind of been that way for the past 30 years or so. The last big thing we did...

They say time goes quickly when you're having fun. Well, I don't know if it's always fun, but working at a newspaper sure seems to make time fly. That came to mind this week when I was paging through our archives, looking at newspapers from the summer of 1993 -- 20 years ago. Many...

I’ve never been much of a “cabin guy.” I know many people who live for the weekend to go up to northern Wisconsin and spend the weekend at a cabin on a lake. Last weekend I got a taste of what is good about that “northern lake cabin.” I’ve always pictured a cabin owner...

Don’t try. I am about to see my youngest daughter (by 15 minutes) get married. Katie and her “womb buddy,” as she likes to call her twin brother Cory, both chose to make 2013 the year to tie the knot. And after adjusting to the idea that I am no longer the most important...

The subject of this column has changed three times since I started it. Last Thursday night as I tried to gain much needed sleep, visions of brightly colored frozen fruits and vegetables danced in my head. With each, a bit more sadness crept into my sleepy consciousness.

Administrative news and views from Hudson School Superintendent Mary Bowen Eggebraaten

It's clearer to me now. As a youth, I sometimes wondered how I ended up in such an intensely Christian home. Most of my people came from Sweden in the 1880s. My wife and I will be traveling there in a few weeks, at the end of a visit to Germany. That's how this journey of discovery...

Apparently a lot of us, especially our young people. I have covered a lot of stories in our community over the past 23 years as a reporter with the Star-Observer but I never thought I would be writing about heroin and the devastation it brings.

I had thought the day when I found myself in a cloud, I would be dead, resting in peace somewhere. Instead here I am working in one every day -- just wishing I was. It happened a couple of months back. The Star-Observer is being created in "the cloud," or at least I think it is....

You never know what might come across your path. On a recent trip to visit family and friends these are some of the statements that were made: "The Koch Brothers are evil. They are Nazis."; "Our government is two hundred years old.