We were so glad to see cold weather!

I've always been a firm believer in cold weather. It makes you stop and plan ahead a little, something nobody seems to have any time to do these days. And if you don't plan ahead in cold weather, the consequences are right on the heels of just about any dumb move -- freezing your behind off if you don't put on the long johns and that unstylish but warm coat!

So, while we were at the Thread That Runs So True Sewing Club, where we are making a peace quilt to send to the White House, we got to talking about the weather, since that's the old ice-breaker in just about every gathering (I used ice-breaker because Elvira said it was a good pun. Thank you, Elvira!).

We decided to go ahead and send the quilt to the President, since it looks like we'll get it done before the war's over, but we have decided, too, that the President could stand some cold weather, being from Texas and all where it's mostly warm, he doesn't have enough experience in planning ahead.

I think the young folks call it chilling out, and even though we voted for Bush and we support many things he's said, we can't say the same for a lot of things he's done, but we know why he does them. It's just because he hasn't had to deal with much snow and ice, like the rest of us. Right now, he's out there in the cold freezing his behind off, so he will appreciate the quilt a lot more than he would have, anyway.

We have some Democrats in the club, but we don't let that stand in the way of a good time or anything. The Democrats among us do seem to be enjoying meetings a little more than they have in a long time.

They're talking more and their stitches are getting tighter, and one of them (No, I won't use her real name!) even suggested that we send the quilt to Congress, so we talked about that for a while, then decided we had to send it to the White House for the First Lady, since she reads more, has a lot to put up with and wears sensible clothes. Her husband kind of goes where the weather suits his clothes.

Not much else is going on that you'd be interested in. The furnace went out at the Good Shepherd Church, so Sunday services got cancelled. The maintenance committee met at the church Wednesday night, and decided it was time to buy a new one, and since it was so cold, it didn't take them nearly as long to decide as it does on most other things.

I'll see if Hubert has anything to say.

Well, I do have something to say. I've been setting here these chilly evenings and thinking about letting all these kids out of school every time there's a little skiff of snow.

What else can you think about when there's nothing on TV worth watching, and if there is, the program's over before you can find it in all these new channels! They've got more channels than they've got stuff to put on them, and the whole thing is sinking from its own weight!

Anyway, we never got snow days off when I was a kid. I had to walk two miles to school every day, rain, snow or shine, and it was a long walk (Up hill both ways!). But this just toughened us up. And back in those days, we didn't have namby-pamby parents that got into some kind of fit every time their kids slid onto their bottoms. It is padded there, you know. Also, we had teachers who knew what to do with a bunch of kids when the cold and snow showed up. Enough on that....

It sure seems like we've got a bumper crop of candidates for the elections in 2008. A new one pops up every other day, and I don't know how they will ever figure out who won the thing, since there are so many of them that nobody's going to get more than 2 percent of the vote.

It's nearly a joke the way they're asking everybody what's wrong, then running around the country and the state saying something's got to be done about the wrongs, but they never do say what. What all this really says is that we're in a pickle, and nobody's got a clue about how to get out if it. It's a sad thing to say, but whoever gets elected will spend the whole term trying to fix the mess left by the one before.

It's just like I told them down at the roundtable the other day when the coffee was scorched. This is what you get when you're trying to do too many things at once. It just makes everybody grumpy and hard to get along with, because there's nothing worse than being caught in a mistake you already know you've made and don't need anybody to mouth-off about it.

Everybody stopped eating about this time, so I went on about how two-thirds of the people in the world are mouthing-off these days. You can't read, see or hear much of anything except people talking, talking about talking, then talking more about what those who are talking about what the talking are talking about.

I'm sick of it, and I want to see somebody like old Roosevelt come on the scene and just tell everybody to put up or shut up. It's like my dad used to say when he loaded all of us on the sled to take us to school when the snow was too deep to walk through.

You're gettin' an education, he'd say. But he never did stop there. He'd go on to tell us what to do with it -- so you'll know when to shut up. -- Hubert and Pearly Jean Boneset, your local correspondents