Ole Pappy

Can you imagine what it must be like to be the person running the scheduling of events this winter? Take the average high school sporting schedule for instance. The schedule is set at the beginning of the year. When there is no school, there is no sports, so the game or games have to be called off.

So here we are. The scheduler has a “snow day”, so he goes about re-scheduling the game to another day. Only it’s not quite that easy. Once the other team’s scheduler agrees on a day, now the referees have to be contacted, buses secured if it’s an away game, bus drivers informed and notices go out to the families of the players.

OK, fine, it’s all set. Then the day comes for the game — and so does the snow. So it’s start all over again — another date, referee contact .... bus drivers, etc. It’s happened so often this winter that some games have been scheduled three or four times.

Every team likes to play some non-conference games — but when conference games are postponed, the non-conference games are the first to go. Take Minneota boys’ final game of the year against Luverne. It’s been called off in favor of a conference game.

The Minneota girls have had the worst of it. They’ve already had two games come completely off the schedule. The Brandon Valley, SD game wasn’t originally scheduled but got postponed two or three times before it was finally played. Tuesday night’s doubleheader at Lakeview was another victim of Old Man Winter.

It was set up in Cottonwood as a night of, “Honoring Our Veterans,” and all veterans were to get in free. Now, the two games have had to be re-scheduled as separate games. On the other side of the ledger, the administration has had their hands full as well. “Two hours late,” or even “Three hours late,” is the word put out the night before. The next day, school is called off entirely.

Or, take Tuesday when school was on, but by 10:30 a.m. the kids were back in the buses and on their way home because of potentially high winds causing much blowing of snow. One thing that has emerged is an “e-learning”, whereby kids can learn on-line during a snow day. Schools get credit for that day — but only get so many days.

Minneota only has one e-learning day left, I believe. So, scheduling is no piece of cake. But there isn’t much we can do. Ole Man Winter is in control, not us!

LAUGH A LITTLE: Dear Tech Support; Last year, I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance -- particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do? Signed, Desperate Reply .... Dear Desperate, First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command “! http: I Thought You Loved Me.html” and try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta. Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0. In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend! Food 3.0 and HotLingerie 7.7.

Good Luck, Tech Support (Joke courtesy of the “Laugh Factory”).

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: As my Ole Pappy used to say, “One day I was smiling and thinking happy thoughts. At first I wondered why. Then I realized I was thinking about you.” What better way to make someone’s day than to tell them you were smiling when you thought about them. Thanks Ole Pappy!