About: Margaret Vander Weerdt

Most of us can’t wait. “April showers bring May flowers,” the saying goes. I’m told a group of ladies was at a local restaurant recently and somehow were talking about this saying and other sayings for other months. Some thought for sure there would be little sayings for each month. Some also thought someone should...

All right, let’s have a show of hands: Who is ready for this bitterly cold weather to be over? Some days it seems it has never been this cold ever before. We did have a milder January than normal, but several times this season on a certain day, all 50 states had at least one...

Thank you to everyone for all the kind words about the newspaper awards we won and reported in last week’s issue. I especially like the people who said the judges were right on for recognizing us for our weekly efforts because we do a great job each week. But we can’t just sit back and...

I love pleasant surprises. I shouldn’t have been too surprised by what happened last Friday evening because we have a very talented and fabulous staff. Did you get that? We have a very talented newspaper staff. Friday, Faye, LeAnn, and I attended the Iowa Newspaper Convention awards banquet at the Marriott in Des Moines, expecting to...

I saw articles about some interesting words on my favorite website, dictionary.com. If you don’t love words like I do, it’s okay to skip this column this week, you’ll be bored. Here are eight interesting and wintry words to defrost your vocabulary.

1. Hibernaculum: Come colder climes, bears, snakes, and other torpor-prone critters retreat to their hibernaculums, or...

Homographs are words of like spelling, but with more than one meaning. A homograph that is also pronounced differently is a heteronym. I’ve said this very often before and writing it again, you think English is easy? I think a retired English teacher was bored and wrote this and ... IT IS GREAT! Read all the way to...