Readers of this page of your favorite weekly newspaper might wonder what happened to the 800 or so words in the upper left corner with the editor’s photo.
(At least one did. She emailed me asking.)
The fun answer would be that I was on an exotic trip warmer than here, but were that the case I certainly would have mentioned my scheduled absence.
The current-events answer would be that I was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which supposedly was in Platteville though I was not), but that is not a believable tall tale.
Unfortunately for everyone around me, I had another surgery (actually two) in keeping with the admonition in Mark 9:45 (look it up). Once I start showing up in public again what happened will be very obvious.
The rest of The Journal’s staff kept your favorite weekly newspaper going during the editor’s unplanned absence, and for that they deserve my thanks and my apologies for dramatically increasing their workloads without warning.
I spent three weeks in two hospitals. Other than possibly in the sleep lab hospitals are terrible places to sleep, whether or not your system is screwed up by various drugs you’ve been prescribed. (Also, one does not go to hospitals for fine dining, especially if said dining is restricted.)
On the other hand, I got to watch almost all the bowl games, the college football playoffs and the NFL playoffs, including the particularly pleasing losses of Ohio State and Alabama. Beyond that, my access to TV, to which our house is not connected, generally reminded me yet again of why our TV is not connected to satellite or streaming services.
I also got to do more than my share of doom-scrolling of Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) because I couldn’t concentrate on reading the books or doing the puzzles people provided me. That includes Sturm und Drang over the Packers’ getting beat in the NFL playoffs and the Packers’ deciding to retain coach Matt LaFleur despite the fact he hasn’t won enough games (according to self-styled football experts and/or spoiled fans and/or people who really need to get a life).
For some reason I asked nearly everyone who came through my door where they were from. Health care in Madison is like the United Nations. The list of countries from which came two hospitals’ staffers included the Bahamas, Gambia, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Togo, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates via Somalia. That was an interesting discovery in this era of automatic suspicion of immigrants.
I will probably have more to write about this in future weeks now that I am out of hospitals and convalescing in a handicap-accessible location. But now that I am down to a handful of prescriptions, none of which probably are mind-altering, two thoughts come to mind:
• Before the Jan. 13 Platteville Common Council meeting I would have assumed that the council would have approved the petition of 35 homeowners to have their properties added to the city’s Residential Low Occupancy district, since the city had approved previous requests and even rejected an attempt to remove R-LO from a house due to what certainly could be called a “neighborhood veto.”
If you have read page 1, you know that my assumption was incorrect. Readers of this space know that I have some problems with R-LO, but until now the council seemed more willing to grant neighbors’ wishes (for instance, the aborted Western Avenue annexation) than considering whether R-LO, or in this case expanding R-LO, is really a good idea.
Director of Community Development Joe Carroll had a valid point in comparing R-LO’s original intent with the attempt to spread R-LO all the way up to the Westview neighborhood. (R-LO actually can be designated anywhere in R-1- or R-2-zoned areas.) Even though due to the previous imbalance between UW–Platteville enrollment and UWP dorm capacity students live in most parts of Platteville, there are a lot of For Rent signs all year that you would never have seen a decade or so ago.
• The future of Sts. Andrew–Thomas School (see page 1) might seem like a repeat of the closing of St. Mary School in Platteville, but that’s not entirely true. The latter was the result of conflicts between St. Mary’s members and St. Mary’s priests over how the church was being run. (That’s the short explanation.) The former is more about low and uncertain enrollment and shrinking reserve funds.
One thing I hope fans of Sts. Andrew–Thomas School realize is that the future of their school is really up to them. In every Christian religion the clergy comes and goes (in terms of decreasing length these days), but the school is the responsibility of parents and church members. Their support, financially and in attracting new students, will determine whether the school survives or not.
