Calhoun County Veteran’s Services Officer Ron Langford will meet with veterans to provide advice and assistance to veterans and their spouses wanting to apply for benefits or pensions. He is at the Calhoun County Courthouse Annex 8 a.m. to noon every Tuesday; 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. every Wednesday. He is at Texas Workforce Solutions from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. every Thursday.For more information, call Ron Langford at 361-553-4685.

The Port O’Connor Community Center Board of Directors is pleased to announce the July meeting of the new Board of Directors was full of good news and success. President Kathy Yearwood reports that some much needed repairs and updates are underway but may not be completed until cooler Fall weather allows some of the projects to move forward. The community groups and organizations using the Community Center routinely should be aware that repairs of the outer doors will include new locks and rekeying to enhance security. If you have a need for the new key, please see Board Member Wanda Redding at the POC Hardware Store prior to your event. The keys will need to be returned after each use and picked up again for the next event to allow equal and secure access for all parties using the Community Center facilities. All rentals and reservations will still be made through April at the County Commissioners Office, 361-785-3141. All reservations will require a signed use contract prior to any scheduled event, and groups using the building routinely are asked to update their agreement when new officers are elected or new individuals are using the center. Those will be available at the Seadrift Commissioners Office, The POC Hardware Store, or from a local Board Member.

It is the intent of the Board to make our POC Community Center available to all community events and individuals in a fair and equitable manner and to maintain the building and resources at the highest level possible. We are working closely with the county to safeguard the building, contents and resources for the benefit of our community. The original gift from the donors making the center possible specified that our community youth and citizens should be the beneficiaries of the center. The youth room, the large room and the kitchen as well as the pavilion are to be used for that purpose. We hope that the POC Community Center will continue to be a gathering place for community events and organizations for many years to come. All groups and individuals who utilize the center will need to partner with the Board, the County and the community to preserve and maintain the POC Community Center. We look forward to working together.

Nothing is more annoying than a toothache.

It disrupts your sleep (because when you are at rest you tend to notice the pain more as your other senses have less stimulation), makes you constantly aware of it’s presence and may be the most annoying thing on Earth next to Gilbert Gottfried.

Mine usually pass after a few days, but there is minor relief until then in some old home remedies for toothaches. A hot wet tea bag next to the source of the toothache, rinsing with both warm salt water and a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide and the disgusting but somewhat effective method of letting a Tylenol or aspirin melt next to the gums in the painful area.

Today, rinsing with the peroxide mixture, it occurred to me that a bad thought or negative persona is very similar to a pained tooth: The tooth usually causes great distress, especially in the quiet moments and additionally the methods we use to fix the issue usually solves nothing, it is only a mask, covering up the issue to avoid real forward action.

Like the tooth, the best method is removal of the bad thought completely, or at the very least repairing it so it is no longer so sensitive and causes no more discomfort.

Methods for doing this will change with what you read and take in, from the Buddhist method of just acknowledging the thoughts exist and letting them pass by like a floating leaf on the water to psychology where these rotten thoughts are examined and re-framed in cognitive therapy.

A pretty deep thought for one poised over the sink, looking ridiculous in the bathroom mirror as he swishes the mixture around his mouth for the recommended sixty seconds, but one that seemed appropriate, as I am sure we have all indulged our ‘sweet tooth’ for bad thoughts from time to time, even if we are seemingly the most put together person on the planet.

Getting angry at that reckless driver who cut you off in traffic on the way to work, getting irritated with the service at a restaurant or retail store, family members who you love dearly but if they do that one really annoying thing they do one more time…

On most of these daily little negative thought transgressions the enamel has already worn off, it was after all some of those little things, the small touches be they good or bad that really become the main theme of life.

However we keep the ‘bad’ events in us the same way we keep the good events, labeling them and filing them away for future use. Except they have no future use except to give us grief later on if not immediately in how they color our daily outlook.

Personally, I find using logic and reasoning against such incidents to work for me, although it can and has backfired at times, as the world does not work on logic most of the time.

Still, anything is better than a root canal, especially being in need of a mental one, brushing and flossing away those nasty thoughts as they arise is much easier when all is said and done.

OK, with the Wild & Wonderful month of July behind us and school starting just around the corner, I’d think things in Port O’Connor would normally begin to slow down. But this year, from what I’ve seen, it won’t be so. 2017 has been a real record breaker, so many people coming to see what POC has to offer.

In one day the Chamber received two calls asking for relocation packets for our community, which shows we are no longer the “Best Kept Secret on the Gulf Coast”. Seems also a few new businesses are opening up. With so much action, the Chamber is growing and looking forward to more involvement from our growth.

If you’d like to get involved, the next Chamber meeting will be Sept.11th, 6:30 p.m. at POC Community Center. If the Chamber can be of help to you or your business, give us a call –361-983-3898 or email– 361poc@gmail.com.

Welcome, New Member:
Boat House Storage

Well here we are it is August already. It is a fair bet that most of us have not got two thirds of the stuff done we wanted to accomplish in the year. But the year never misses, When August is done it will be two thirds over.

Last month I noted that July was named after Julius Caesar. August was named after another Caesar, his nephew Augustus. Before that they called the months Quintilus and Sextilus. In those days they only had ten months. The Romans must have had a lot of holidays. I guess were lucky that the months weren’t called Caesar I and Caesar II like we do World Wars.

This makes me wonder; the words July and August have been in our language for two thousand years. Who actually invented language? Goodness knows there are a lot of languages around the world. How did the same thing get so many different names?

Even within a country the words aren’t the same. Texas has its own dictionary. One of my favorite Texas phrases is “fixin to”. What is yours? We gave one of those dictionaries to a friend from another country so he could make it in Texas.

It is also interesting that the grammar is different around the world. In English we say something like, “He walked away limping.” While in other languages they would say “Walked away he, limping”. Those of us who are Star Wars fans of Yoda know about that kind of way to talk. Why did they eliminate him in the newer versions? Unhappy the force is.

I recall the story about the guy who says he understands every language except Greek. When someone spouted something to him in Russian he said I don’t understand, that is Greek to me.

I can tell you that because I have been lucky enough to travel in many different countries a lot of those languages are Greek to me. I did spend a lot of time in Germany on business, not as a soldier, and that is a funny language.

The Germans make new words by stringing together old ones. As the joke goes the German word for Atomic Bomb translates as follows: Das is louden boomer mit smoking an snorting. Then they make hydrogen Bomb by adding and all is kaput.

I have no idea how the oriental like Chinese and Japanese ever came up with the word they use. As I listen to them it sounds to me like they are coughing and clearing their throat in preparation for saying something.

It is just amazing that folks like the Russian’s don’t even use the same alphabet that we do.

It is hard enough to get understanding between two folks in who use the same language naturally. It is no surprise to me that the world is basically a little, if not a lot, screwed up. Instead of a tower of babble we seem to have a world of babble.