There’s a distinct difference between taking a real vacation and simply having a whole week off from work.
I did the latter last week and loved every second of it. My wife Montra was unable to take the week off too, so I stuck around the house with plenty of work to do inside and out. I also served as dog sitter for our neighbors across the street when they took vacation. You get the point.
The great thing about taking time off is there’s no timetable, no planning for travel. I last had a week off in November, so I was in no hurry for artificial deadlines. Plus, neither Montra nor I have visited the license bureau to obtain our “Real IDs” which to me is another layer of unnecessary government bureaucracy, especially for two people who were born and raised about a mile from the house we bought 20 years ago.
So I settled into my daily routine of coffee, morning walks with my huskies, Ranger (5) and Lakota (3), and making repeated trips to the nearby stores for groceries, potting soil, furnace filters and the like. When I’m working, those trips are done as quickly and efficiently as possible. When I’m off, I putz around looking at things I might want to buy, like maybe a new clothes dryer.
Just in time for the first heat wave of the summer, our HVAC company came by to tune up the air conditioning unit. We have a two-story house of roughly 2,000 square feet, so it takes a three-ton unit to keep it cool. We purchased the AC in 2008 and the furnace in 2011. Those items were expensive enough back then, but with COVID in 2020, spiraling prices for parts and now higher tariffs, replacing them now is a financial burden few people can afford. The technician who serviced our AC said buying a new AC/furnace system is like “parking a car.” It took me a second to realize he meant, “buying a car.”
He said given the age of the two units, we should think about having them replaced sooner than later because costs will rise even further. Ugh. We live in a state where both are absolutely essential to live comfortably. When I got out of the Army in the 1980s, I rented a duplex from my grandma Korando that didn’t offer so much as a window unit. I sweated out two very hot summers using an attic fan and box fans. At age 59, that’s not a scenario I think I could repeat.
Like many people my age, we’re naively waiting to purchase big-ticket items until there’s a big reset in the economy and prices and interest rates fall to the levels they were before 2020. We really wanted to build a house in Festus, but faced mortgage rates that would have doubled what we pay now. That might be economically feasible for couples in their 30s, but I deemed the venture too risky at our stage of life.
As I punched back in and wrote this column on Sunday morning, I began to collect the all-state and all-conference lists for baseball and girls soccer. When production on our four papers ends Tuesday, I’ll start planning previews for the fall season, which promises to offer more success at the state level for county athletes and teams.
That topic starts, as it has many times, with Festus cross country. The Tiger girls are the defending Class 4 state champions. Some of the runners helped the school’s girls track and field team win its second state title (Class 4) last month. Wes Armbruster is the head coach for both squads.
The Tiger boys, led by soon-to-be senior Carson Driemeier, are poised to win a 12th state crown under head coach Bryant Wright. Driemeier is the defending individual state champ.
Jefferson County has sent the Hillsboro (2023) and Festus (2024) football teams to Columbia to compete for the Class 4 state championship and will look to make it three years in a row.
Seckman’s football team has a big plus (29-4 record over three seasons) and a big minus (two straight blowout losses to Jackson in the Class 6 District 1 championship game) to ponder as it opens fall practice. The Jaguars are now a proven winner under head coach Nick Baer. The next step is finding a way to beat the Indians and reach the state quarterfinals.
The other defending state champion we’ll be following closely this fall is the St. Pius X girls volleyball team, which beat Jefferson City for the Class 4 title. It was Lancer head coach Shannon Leftridge’s second state win; St. Pius won Class 2 in 2017. She loses her daughter, Hannah, to graduation, but setter Elena Ruble and middle Bennett Raterman are a rock-solid foundation to retool around for another trip to Cape Girardeau in November.
We’ll get to all of that soon enough, but for now enjoy the coverage we provide for American Legion baseball and the Jefferson County Blazers in the St. Louis Amateur Baseball Association. There will also be surprise features this summer.
Stay cool everyone.