She is as spoiled as any cat could be... especially considering my parents weren't "pet people". Sassy changed that. She has the living room covered in toys, boxes & bags; her own personal playground, she drinks out of my stepmom's water glass, the list goes on... she definitely was put on this earth to be found and taken in by my parents. It's probably the best thing that could have happened to them.
Cliff Mitchell’s daughter found out about the veteran broadcaster’s retirement the same way everyone else did: on the air. She said she thought he might call it quits six years ago when he celebrated 50 years on the air at KASM-AM in Albany. He talked about retiring but never did anything until this week.
“When we heard it on the air Monday, it was kind of a surprise with the rest of the world,” Karen Mitchell-Schleicher said.
Wednesday was bittersweet for Mitchell’s listeners and friends. The man who has graced the airwaves from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. for 56 years at the Albany station has left the air. The North Dakota native spent his entire career at KASM, a station that hit the air two years before Mitchell arrived.
“I thought he would be there forever,” said Paul Stacke, who worked with Mitchell at KASM in 1955 and 1956 and retired from Regent Broadcasting in St. Cloud.
“Cliff has made KASM what it is today. He is such an icon,” said Diane Haskamp, a saleswoman and afternoon radio co-host who has worked at the station for 10 years. “Usually, you say KASM, they say ‘is that old guy still on?’”Today, the answer to that question is no. Not that Cliff Mitchell, who turns 81 in March, will be easily forgotten. His name is on just about every plaque that covers the walls at the small studio just off Interstate Highway 94 in Albany.
Mitchell was installed in the National Association of Farm Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Minnesota Broadcast Hall of Fame in 2002. Stearns County commissioners declared April 12, 2002, Cliff Mitchell Day.
Mitchell’s smooth voice has been coming out of radios in homes, cars and tractors for almost six decades. His daily program “Unbearable” took its final call Wednesday from a woman who said she had been listening to Mitchell and hearing her mother talk about him since she was 4.
“What Cliff would say is God’s word. If he said it, people would believe it,” Haskamp said.Jesse Job, who has owned Charlie’s Cafe in Freeport for almost two years, said the restaurant has been advertising on Mitchell’s show for decades. He said people value Mitchell’s opinion.
“A lot of people in the area listen to Cliff,” Job said. “When I talk to people about the weather, they say ‘Cliff said it will snow at 1 o’clock.’ A lot of people take what he has to say pretty highly.”
That was that... thats what we got because it's what Cliff said.
What's your cookie jar look like?
Bah Humbug to Alaska!ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A giant snowman named Snowzilla has mysteriously appeared again this year — despite the city's cease-and-desist order.
Someone again built the giant snowman in Billy Powers' front yard in an east Anchorage neighborhood. Snowzilla reappeared before dawn Tuesday.
Powers is not taking credit. When questioned Tuesday afternoon, he insisted Snowzilla just somehow happened, again.
For the last three years, Snowzilla — to the delight of some and the chagrin of others — has been a very large feature in Powers' yard. In 2005, Snowzilla rose 16 feet. He had a corncob pipe and a carrot nose and two eyes made out of beer bottles........
......"I have tried to jump through every goofy hoop they have sent to me. I have never been confrontational and it goes on and on and on and it is so goofy," he said. "Some of it is unfounded, some is just outrageous."The city said it did not expect to take any further action until after Christmas.
Experts who are looking at why allergies appear to be on the rise have come up with a number of theories - for example that we have all become too clean.
Clean water, antibiotics and vaccines have eliminated many of the most toxic challenges which the immune system is designed to fight such as parasites, viruses and infections, so the immune system finds something else to battle such as eggs, wheat or some other innocuous food.
It has also been suggested that children born by Caesarean section, which have risen 40 percent in the last decade, could be at higher risk for allergies, perhaps because their bodies are never exposed to the healthy bacteria in their mothers' birth canals.
But much of this is no more than speculation and while scientists may have a basic understanding of how allergies occur, the complex immune system remains in many respects a puzzle.
Novel approaches are being tried with some success where the offending ingredients are introduced in tiny amounts to see if they can treat, cure or even prevent food allergies from developing in the first place.
The hope is to ultimately come up with a peanut-allergy vaccine.
There are pages upon pages with the same theory - from scientists and doctors. It makes fricken sense. I look at too many parents these days who wash their kids toys, don't let them eat candy out of the dirt and have them wash their hands so many times a day they have rough skin. I don't have anything against hand washing or washing things in general, but lay off a little bit! Those germs are HELPING, not harming.
Demon #2 was a pacifier addict until she was 2 1/2. I couldn't count how many times it dropped on the ground, in the dirt and she picked it up and stuck it in her mouth. And if it was that dirty, I cleaned it off with my own spit and dried it off with my shirt.
The thing that pissed me off the most is that instead of telling these parents to chill the hell out, they are working on yet another vaccine to stick into kids? I laughed at my doctor when he asked if I wanted the demons to get the chicken pox vaccine. Oh, they got it eventually... the natural one. The one that they got from a friend, the one that made them itch and scratch and look like a connect the dot book. Thats the one I gave them. And when they get a cold or the flu? They lay their butts on the couch and let it ride out. I've heard so often "are you taking them to the doctor". Heck with that. I don't want their bodies to be so pumped full of antibiotics that they can't fight off a pimple.
I can say that I'm lucky that I haven't had any serious illnesses with the demons, outside of their hypothyroidism & the occasional psoriasis outbreak, but I don't think it's luck. I think we've made that happen by buying a bottle of NyQuil instead of dropping a co-pay for some antibiotic. We don't have anit-bactrial soap in the house, we wash our hands when we have to, we eat off of each others plates and the dogs kiss us on the lips. We're all healthy, get sick rarely and we sit back and shake our heads at these over-protective, germ fighting, paranoid parents who think that if their child breaths the same air that another child breaths it's going to kill them. And we all stick our fingers in the peanut butter jar.
Yep, we are a peanut butter addicted house. And my kids have been eating peanut butter since before they were walking.
Lighten up, thats all I say. Let your kids get dirty, keep them out of the doctors office (do you know how many fricken sicknesses are in that waiting room?) and let your kids get sick - and get over it - by themselves. I haven't encountered a cold that chicken noodle soup didn't cure.
... and thats my rant for the day.
