Columns

The Delaware County Fair is always one of my favorite weeks of the year. This year, my daughter is 5½, and the “half” continues to be a really big deal for her. She tells me when she was 5 years old she could not do a lot of things, but now that she is 5½, she is a big girl and can do a lot more.

It’s now been more than seven months since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine. By now everyone in Ohio and around the country knows the devastation the company’s negligence has caused in that small, tight-knit community in Columbiana County.

Recall from last week Immanuel Kant’s proposal that the Milky Way is a spinning disk held in place by a harmonious equilibrium between the motion of its spin, which made it want to flatten and fly apart, and the mutual gravity of the stars and planets which made them want to fall into the center.

The Ohio Department of Health, in partnership with Ohio Breastfeeding Alliance, has launched the Ohio Breastfeeding Friendly Workplace Award Program to recognize Ohio businesses that offer lactation support to their employees.

Dreams. What are they? According to my Webster’s New World Dictionary, they are “A sequence of sensations, images, thoughts, etc. passing through a sleeping person’s mind.”

September 18 marks the beginning of National Fall Prevention Awareness Week. Not the season fall, but the common, costly, and preventable epidemic of falls among older adults. Each year, there are about 37 million documented older adult falls, and 3 million emergency department visits due to falls.

The high temperatures this past month has called for daily watering, fortunately with our own well water, in the big greenhouse, the smaller greenhouse, and the ADA-compliant accessible planter boxes and pots of red bud trees on the patio at Stratford Ecological Center on Liberty Road. The healthy red buds were donated during Earth Week and potted up to allow further development before planting on the edge of our woods this fall. The big greenhouse, and the beds in the Children’s Garden, and the Giving Garden, have produced a variety of vegetables for People in Need in Delaware all summer. The last week of August we sent 186 pounds, and that is a lot of tomatoes and squash!

“Justice isn’t subject to a mathematical formula.”

Recall from last time that the ancient Greeks organized the cosmos into a set of nested spheres centered on Earth.

Did you know that today, Sept. 13, is the annual celebration known as Roald Dahl Day? If he were alive today, the beloved (and controversial) children’s author would be celebrating his 107th birthday.