In my inaugural column for this newspaper, I teased the time I snuck into a presidential event as “a story for another time.” As it was an Independence Day event, the time to tell that story has arrived.
It was 2005. I was married in May, and moved to Morgantown, W.Va., so my wife, Traci, could finish her degree at West Virginia University (WVU).
I didn’t have trouble finding work. I was already four years into my newspaper career, and I got my job in the city simply going in and asking if they needed help.

If there is something that sticks out in my memory from last year’s Memorial Day program, it was the following two things.
One, there was almost no one, outside of the families of military and military veterans themselves, that showed up at the Memorial Day program at the Montgomery American Legion.
Two, the one thing that was asked of people by the veteran presenting was that you take out time to thank veterans but also to show up and do something in remembrance of those veterans on a day such as Memorial Day.

MVEC remains grounded amidst industry changes
 
Jordan, Minn. – While the energy sector is facing many changes in the coming years, Minnesota Valley Electric Cooperative’s focus will always remain on putting members first and the unique needs of the co-op’s service area in 2024.

Taking public notices for schools out of newspapers would hurt public
A significant discussion is taking place at the state legislature in reaction to the recent announcement that eight community newspapers will close at the end of the month.
Under a proposal in the Senate Education Policy Omnibus bill (SF 3567), school districts would no longer be required to publish their proceedings in newspapers and could instead move them to their own websites.

The internet and social media won't fill the gap in civic awareness. Local government officials will go largely unchecked. 
"If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.” — President Thomas Jefferson on the dangers of an uninformed electorate.

I’ve seen plenty of pheasants cruising around Minnesota, as well as several bald eagles. Not so much for larger animals. Popular culture had me expecting more moose. I suppose they exist in Minnesota. I’ve never lived far enough north to witness them.

One of social media’s beautiful features is that it quickly reminds you of whatyou were doing a year ago.
My posts from last January feature disgruntled sel-fies of me standing in mydriveway with salt and a pitiful electric snowblower that I thought would be enough. It was not.
By the end of last winter, there was a solid two feet of snow in my yard. The ice walls that formed from shoveling my driveway were so formative, that I began reading George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series to seek a suitable comparison
in literature.

The importance of civic leadership cannot be underestimated in its importance, need, and overall community benefit. In a town the size of Montgomery, a very low amount of your time is often necessary for such an engagement too.
Civic leaders are people that help shape communities and influence the path that they are headed on. Organizations and cities are struggling to find enough individuals to fill all of those roles.

Many of you have likely heard of Festivus (for the rest of us), the popular holiday skit from the hit show Seinfeld. It includes the Airing of Grievances and the Feats of Strength. Actor Jerry Stiller in the role of Frank Costanza proclaims “Festivus Miracles” and starts out dinner with the famous line, “I got a lot of problems with you people. Now, you’re going to hear about it!” It also includes a Festivus Pole, a bare pole requiring no decoration.

A routine visit to see my grandmother on my dad’s side, where she was making us dinner, can never go well for someone after my dad tells me that she’s making a soup and I should at least pretend to like it.
I am not sure where the term came from exactly or who ever said it first, but it looked like and tasted like “Dishwater Soup.” If you can imagine a really dirty batch of dishwater that had been sitting for a while where the suds are gone, that is what it kind of looked like.

When you tell someone that you’ve never flown before, their first assumption is that you’re scared of flying. That has at least been my experience when I revealed this in my late 20s and persisted through my 30s.
Now, in my early 40s, I finally crossed that maiden flight off my bucket list.
Three years of living in Minnesota has kept us from visiting our families in West Virginia, but we had an opportunity to go for Thanksgiving and we decided to take it. Making the drive is a two-day excursion one way, making flying the only viable option in the short week.

I have a sibling who doesn’t eat anything with pork products in them. Strangely enough, you will find pork products in places sometimes you don’t always think of — one of them being store-bought gelatin.
This sent me on a hunt of how I could make my own gelatin and the results were surprisingly simpler, more flavorful and more nutritious than I realized. In fact, if you can somehow make anything into a liquid, you can make it into gelatin. It also sets firmer.

I took my father to see a show with U.S. Navy Glee Club Men’s and Women’s Chorus with the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall earlier this month. Preceding the show, we sat down in the lobby next to a couple, approximately in their seventies.

Between Halloween and the 2020 Presidential Election, my family moved from West Virginia to rural Minnesota. It was during the height of the pandemic and my wife had lost her job because of it. She found a new position in Appleton, Minn., and we decided to leave the Appalachian Mountains for the first time.
As a lifelong West Virginian, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Minnesota felt like such a foreign place. Cold, flat and in a different time zone from all our friends and family.

Living on a farm, we have some farm cats. Yes, feral cats that come and go as they please. Sometimes they eat and stay at the neighbors. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they like each other.
All of the cats seem to like each other in the winter time, but not always. I am guessing that is a deep-seated animal-hatred when it is -10˚ Fahrenheit out and a cat doesn’t want to cuddle with their fellow farm neighborhood cats.

My name is Mike Mallow, and I have joined the staff of the Montgomery Messenger and the LifeEnterprise as a part-time reporter.
I am a West Virginia native and a 22-year veteran of the newspaper industry. My career began in 2001 at my hometown newspaper, The Pendleton Times, in Franklin, W.Va. Even though the digital age was well underway, the newspaper was still assembled by pasting the elements to a large sheet with hot wax until 2005.