Zoning. It’s one of those words— and concepts — that’s been cussed, spat upon and kicked unkindly to the curb for decades in the mountains. “Don’t anyone tell me what I can do with my own land, by God.”

When I was in high school, I was on the basketball team. We weren’t very good, but we loved the game and even during the offseason you would find us on any given Saturday afternoon playing pick-up basketball just for the fun of it for hours and hours until our moms started showing up to take us home for dinner. While we waited on the last of the mothers to arrive, we’d play “horse” or have free-throw shooting contests. 

Last night was one of those nights. That means today I’m running on caffeine instead of sleep. Normal bedtime, three or four hours of hard slumber, then wide awake, a stampede of thoughts, worries, ideas and plans racing around my head. Sometimes, like on this night, I give in to the insomnia and just roll over on my back and wait for the stream-of-consciousness parade to come to an end and hopefully get some more shut-eye. 

In what feels like a previous life, I was a mom blogger. After the birth of my youngest son, now age 10, I created a blog called Zealous Mom. This was during the early years of blogging when it was all about content and connecting with others in the blogging community as opposed to pushing out posts on social media and seeing how many likes and views it could get. 

For decades, North Carolina has ranked near the bottom of all states in the country when it comes to the public’s right to know what went wrong when a government employee is transferred, demoted or terminated for disciplinary reasons.

It is mind-boggling that in the year 2022 a barbaric, nonsensical war rages in Ukraine. It’s an example that no matter how evolved we are or how technologically advanced we become, the wickedness of one human can impact the world and destroy precious lives. 

I have not attended any of the meetings of the new Downtown Waynesville Advisory Committee, but I sense an energy, a commitment, and optimism from those I’ve discussed it with and from the stories we’ve reported. That’s quite the turnaround from the final years of the Downtown Waynesville Association.

Maybe it was one more box of Cheez-Its left open on the table, the box surrounded by crumbs, that pushed a father to post the following on his Facebook page: “Is there an age when kids stop leaving a room looking like raccoons got in?” 

The USFS recently released the final version of the forest management plan for the Pisgah and Nantahala National forests  After almost 10 years of adapting to the new 2012 Planning Rule, which mandated public participation and stakeholder collaboration, the fruits of their labor are finally released. And everyone is grumbling. Well, not everyone, but most people are saying the USFS didn’t do enough to protect the special places in the forest. My take is a little different in that everyone is grumbling a little, which usually spells compromise. 

They say nostalgia and reminiscing can do two things to the psyche: be a buffer against ailments like depression and anxiety or exacerbate pre-existing mental health conditions. Personally, I’ve experienced both sides of the coin.