I live a mile downhill from Buckley Draw. Amid wildfires and mudslides, the past couple of weeks have been frightening. On the evening the wildfire erupted, I joined the crowd of onlookers at Bicentennial Park. For hours, helicopters dropped graceful red plumes and thousands of gallons of ...

Heaven help me, I married a grammar guy. I did NOT know about this defect in his character before we were married. Luckily, he doesn’t go around correcting the grammar of strangers, so I can mostly overlook this fault. Also, thanks to my dad the linguist, my vocabulary is better than his, so ...

Is it possible that a group of neighbors can make a positive impact on the community? Can people come together, regardless of political party, religion, gender, age, or any number of other things, and find common ground? Can thousands of voters really change a city? In Orem, the answer is ...

When our daughter was young, we lived in Houston, Texas. Not wanting to lose touch with family and friends who all missed our little Catherine (not so much us, apparently), I created a website where I posted our doings that month. I didn’t consider the fact that there might be some things ...

Over the past couple of months, I have been approached by people asking me to share the full story behind the building of Orem’s new City Hall. They felt that only part of the story was being told and that some of the people now taking credit only played a small role. It's like a pitcher ...

The issue of gerrymandering has taken a bit of the stage in politics lately. It’s because Texas is trying to redraw its district lines, this directive coming from President Donald J. Trump through Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican majority in the Texas House of Representatives. As ...

I took a dumb fall last week, a hard tumble on rocks of the high Uintas, as if they’d been piling and solidifying for hundreds of millions of years just for the opportunity to throw me down upon the polished slabs. Now I’m pecking this column out with a fractured right thumb dangling above ...

Since its inception, America’s Constitution has been dynamic. History reveals our Constitution has been amended and modified to meet the demands of our changing society. The 21st century has been filled with change. From the genesis of technology, which has literally placed good and bad ...

Hey! Not to brag or anything, but I actually got artificial intelligence to do what I wanted yesterday! I wanted a picture and, if you can imagine such a thing, there was a free website that was really free (Craiyon) and it gave me just what I wanted. I realize that this experience is the ...

A recent guest opinion in this paper painted a distorted picture of the last few years in Orem. It claimed that during the last four years, a group of like-minded city leaders somehow hijacked the city and ran it with unchecked power. The writer wants voters to believe that a 4-3 conservative ...