Obama’s ‘fixes’ are boggling

My head is spinning from trying to keep up with what President Obama and his party are attempting to push through in Washington these days.

There is a daily dose of fixing this and fixing that, with mounds and mounds of more borrowed money and government intrusion.

To put the cost of health care reform into perspective I tried to take a trillion dollars and enter it into my calculator to find out how much that number is divided by 46 million?the estimated number of uninsured Americans?and I can?t put that many zeroes into it.

Pretty soon we?ll have to buy a new calculator that accounts for these huge numbers without fancy math.

Smart people can figure these numbers using the number 10 to the power of 10, 14 or whatever. I never did get the hang of this.

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I didn?t know what everything was called when I ordered the perfect meal like I did for Father?s Day. Banana peppers were not on the menu, as I mentioned last week in this column. It actually ate Pepperoncini.

These little devils are so good that I?ve already bought another jar of them and have been eating them like candy.

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We stopped by my sister?s house in Newton Saturday night and looked at all of the gardening going on in their yard.

One of the little boys they help take care of, Ian, who is about 3, was playing in the garden area. After a while he brought me a mulberry from their tree and I ate it. Pretty soon he brought another one and I saw that the stem was still on it.

I asked him if he ate the stems too, and the answer was affirmative. Then I said I didn?t eat them so he took the mulberry from my hand, bit off the stem and handed it back to me.

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The Hillsboro 125th weekend was good; we took in most of it except for the free swimming on Saturday night. (It was too cold. Ha!).

It was neat to see all of the past mayors; most who are no longer living had a descendant represent them Friday night.

On Sunday we heard from Anna Raymond, whose great-grandparents and grandparents were the former owners of the Adobe House, which is now called the Peter Paul Loewen House and is part of the Hillsboro Museums. She said her ancestors were not any better than anyone else in the community, it just so happens that it is their home that was preserved to represent our common heritage.

We also heard from William F. Schaeffler?s great-grandson, Keith Ebel, who put his heritage into perspective very eloquently at the opening of the new ?Joining the American Mosaic? exhibition. I would recommend everyone take the time to see it.

He remembers sitting in the driveway of his grandparents? home on North Madison in his Uncle Bob?s Chrysler listening to baseball on the radio.

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I may have written about this before, so if you can recall it you have a better memory than I. When I was about 10 years old we used to ride our bikes out to where the Peter Paul Loewen house was located southwest of town. It was on a half-mile road and had a nice little stream running behind it.

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That road also used to be where young couples used to go and park after dark. Do young people still do those things? I have no idea.

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