abisuz's blog

As a child, I wasn’t big on volunteering my time. I didn’t want to spend my Saturday mornings collecting trash on the highway or painting over graffiti.

However, if my teachers would have come up with something like Merced’s Farmdale Elementary School did, I might have thought twice about helping out for a good cause.

A few weeks ago, Farmdale teacher Jamie Hillhouse said she heard that Project Linus was in need of blankets for ill and traumatized children. After speaking with a few teachers and school officials, Hillhouse decided Farmdale’s students could help by making blankets themselves.

I may have cursed a cable guy or two under my breath for making me wait around on installation day, but I’ll think twice before doing it again.

After all, how could you be mad at the people who are helping clean up your community?

This Saturday, local Comcast employees and their families will join students and parents to spend the day repainting walls, cleaning up the grounds and planting at Atwater Castle Head Start Preschool.

I’m not much of a gardener, but I do have a “green” thumb when it comes to high school football stadiums.

I have worked at three papers in my career as a journalist and each coverage area now has – or soon will have – an artificial field and all-weather track.

While working at the Union Democrat in Tuolumne County, Sonora High School spruced up their stadium with the help of a now-cancelled TV show called Three Wishes. The show granted wishes to a family in need of a new home, a man who wanted to adopt his stepson and a school in need of a new football field.

Just like many teenage girls, I often toyed with the notion of being on the North Monterey County High School cheerleading squad. High school might have been over for me a decade ago, but I still remember wishing I was a Lady Condor, yelling loud at football games and pumping up my fellow students at rallies.

And although I never had the guts to actually try out, I did learn a cheer or two during my years at North County. I still remember these cheers, though I thankfully don’t find many reasons to perform them these days.

Count Rugen had it right when he told Westley in the Pit of Despair, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”

Without a clean bill of health, it would be impossible for any college student to receive the training needed for a successful career.

So it makes a lot of sense that Merced College is holding a health and career fair from 9 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, April 9 in the campus quad.

Education reporters end up writing the same stories year after year. I’ve written dozens of stories about the first day of school, graduations and everything in between.

Read Across America is one of those events I have written about every year of my career.

But as I researched the event for my story in Tuesday’s newspaper, I came across some information I don’t remember ever seeing before – a short biography of Dr. Seuss.