Abbie Cady

Abbie Cady is looking forward to March 9th when she and her teammates, will attend the UCA International All Star Championship in Orlando, Florida. The UCA International All Star Championship brings together the best all star cheer and dance teams from around the globe at the most magical place on Earth – Walt Disney World. The competition is held at the prestigious ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.

Abbie is the daughter of George and Kersha Cady of Seadrift and a sixth-grader at Seadrift Middle School. Abbie attends gym/cheer classes at Manning Gymnastics in Victoria. In cheerleading for three years, she attends class four days each week, about 12 hours per week. She is very dedicated to the sport, attending classes year-round.

This is Abbie’s second consecutive year to attend an International Competition- Disney Last year her team won 1st place for their division against teams from all around the world. This year Abbie is on two teams that will be competing in Florida. She is on Manning’s Junior Level 2 team and on Manning’s Junior Level 3 team. She has had a very successful season so far this year bringing home awards from seven competitions already. They will attend one more competition in Texas on Feb. 18th in San Antonio before they go to Internationals in Florida.

Two of Abbie’s teammates who will also be competing in the Internationals are Taylor Creamer and Laynie Wood. Taylor Creamer is 11 years old; she is in the 6th grade at Travis Middle School. She is also on two teams, Level 2 Junior and Level 3 Junior and she also attends gym four days a week. She lives in Port Lavaca and her parents are Kenny and Melissa Roberts. This is Taylor’s first time to Internationals because she took a break last year, but this is also her third year to cheer at Manning.

Laynie Wood is the daughter of Calhoun Cheer Coach Ashleigh Blinka-Wood and Brian Wood. She is 10 and is the 4th Grade at Jackson Elementary in Port Lavaca, where she also lives. Laynie is on three teams at Manning: Level 1 Youth, Level 2 Junior, and Level 3 Junior. This is her third year as a Manning Cheer Cat. She goes to gym four days a week as well. She also attended Internationals last year with Abbie and the Manning Cheer team where they won 1st.

As the years go by I realize I have probably talked about the common themes for each month or season a couple times over in the nearly six years of writing this column, especially when it comes to the holiday ‘season’ of October through February, which allows articles on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and of course the star of this month’s theme, Valentine’s Day.

That of course means talking about love, the one feeling that no one can really live without, no matter how much they may say they can.

But what is love?

Mankind invented the alphabet and language skills to be able to better communicate desires and intentions to the other people around us, but it is still a pretty clunky system, like doing calculations for a space shuttle launch on an abacus, especially when it comes to words that seem like such absolutes like love or its less desirable sister of hate.

Love can have many forms, from platonic love for your best friend to the unbreakable bond and love between a mother and her child or the love a fan may have for a sports team of certain genre of fiction.

All are valid forms of love and although all the above examples are varied and scattered across the human experience, they all have a string connecting them.

The emotional impact that cannot be expressed when something or someone, not even just limited to ‘things’ but when even a moment, a night, a dawn reflected in the eyes of our greatest passions can bring on a sense of all being right in the world, things just make sense for once, for that brief period people have labeled the ‘salad days’ back in the past, be it the first time you were with the love of your life or that perfect Summer of your youth that you did not know was perfect then that makes you smile.

Impacts like those are what make love and being loved one of the best experiences in life and also can cause love of the unwanted and unrequited kind bring up the opposite of feelings, so strong is the magnitude of the emotion, that it can fill us with light or leave us longing in the dark.

However, for something to be born so dark, it must have fallen from a great source of light.

Hardest of all to achieve is the greatest love of all, which is self-love and should never be mistaken for arrogance or someone who appears on the outside to be perfect and have it all figured out, but might just not be all they seem to be.

I suppose because from the time we are born till the time we all die we all look for some form of love, it makes it one of the most encompassing desires across the entire planet, taught by our prophets no matter the religion, at the heart of our wildest dreams of a perfect governmental system is the society based love we hope we one day achieve for our fellow man.

Hopefully this soon will mean that as we all desire love in one of its many guises, it should become easy to both give that love out and receive it ourselves.

Testengeer, Inc. announced that it has reached a safety milestone of 7,000,000 Occupational Safety and Health Administration injury-free safe man-hours worked as of December 31, 2017.

Headquartered in Port Lavaca with offices in Victoria, Corpus Christi, Freeport, and Houston, Testengeer has provided engineering and technical services to the Gulf Coast region since 1979. As a prominent leader in the engineering industry, Testengeer has demonstrated through this milestone how quality services can only be achieved when an organization and its employees are dedicated to safety.

“Testengeer employees’ commitment to working safely has been a very significant contributing factor to our other successes and accomplishments as an organization.” said president and chief executive officer of Testengeer, Inc., Shane Dworaczyk. “This significant safety milestone once again demonstrates Testengeer’s unwavering commitment to safety and a safe, healthy work environment.… Safety, quality of work, employee morale, and productivity are very closely related, resulting in a safer, healthier more efficient organization.”

Testengeer offers full service engineering from concept to actuality and is actively involved with a wide variety of clients ranging from chemical, petrochemical, refinery, petroleum, industrial, and commercial manufacturing industries.