The Port O’Connor community food pantry, located at Fishermen’s Chapel, has fed dozens of families dozens of meals already this year. Families of all sorts in need of a little assistance will come by or call for help. They may have small children, a house full of teens or a senior citizen living alone. Sometimes they have been affected by a job layoff, a plant shutdown, sickness, family crisis or some tragedy of life. Sometimes they just need a helping hand to get through the week or the month until the next income is available.

The pantry offers meat, fish, carbohydrates and vegetables to those in need in amounts and measures appropriate to their family and situation.

The exciting news is that the pantry recently received a tremendous blessing. A new 20 foot walk in freezer was installed on a new concrete pad behind the Chapel and will be available for storage of frozen and perishable items donated to the community food pantry.

Pastor Don Smith and his men’s fellowship group of Arlington Heights Assembly of God Church in Ft. Worth, Texas in cooperation with Chapel members and staff worked long and hard to assemble, insulate and wire the donated freezer last week and it is now up and running, ready for groceries. A big ‘thank you’ goes to Lonnie, Larry and Danny in particular who traveled from North Texas to help.

Our economy is a bit rough right now. Many are seeing their budget crumble under job layoffs, oil price drops, insurance cost increases, stock dips and other changes. We are happy to think that the pantry will be there when people need help.

If you would like to donate food to the pantry, feel free to drop it off at Fishermen’s Chapel anytime. The door is always open. If you have perishable items, please call first so we can arrange to store them. If you would like to donate money, give to the POC Community Benevolence Fund at First National Bank, POC. If you find you or someone you know in need of help from the pantry, please call your pastor, or pantry coordinator Pastor Erny McDonough at 361-983-2613. The pantry is here to serve those in need.

Darin Luna of Port O’Connor was inducted into Victoria College’s Zeta Gamma Chapter of the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society at a ceremony on Thursday, March 24.

The Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society, established in 1918 is the largest honor society in U.S. higher education, with more than two million members and 1,200 chapters. The honor society recognizes academic excellence of two-year college students and provides opportunities for individual growth and development through honors, leadership and service programming.

First Baptist Church of Port O’Connor sponsored a community Easter Egg Hunt on Saturday, March 26. It was a fun event for children of all ages, with candy eggs, filled eggs and golden prize eggs hidden in progressively more difficult places as the age of the hunters increased. The toddlers picked them right off the grass while the preteens had to search high and low and consider unusual places. Each age group had a golden egg winner and they all had an eggcellent time.

Congratulations to Emery and Mia, granddaughters of Tucker & Kim Sonnier, who found golden price eggs at the hunt.

Several books are on my list for this month; one very special and one which emphasizes light but informative reading, and the last not, so good.

The first is THE WINDOWS OF HEAVEN written by Ron Rozelle, a resident of Lake Jackson, and a teacher at St. Thomas High School in Houston, Texas. The book is a semi-fictionalized account of the Hurricane in 1900 that destroyed much of Galveston. Many of the characters in the book are actual people, interesting and concerned residents including the brothers Cline, who worked for the Weather Bureau and had tried to warn residents of the potential disaster; the Sisters at the Orphanage on the beach, where only three children survived; and the Kempner family who gave shelter and food to many. Reading a description of those people as they tried to survive water rising and rising accompanied by the strong, gusty winds definitely brings home to us in Port O’Connor of the damaging hurricanes from which our area has survived and rebuilt.

I heartily recommend this book for any to read and learn; the sad fact for Galveston was that many residents had tried to have a seawall built for protection; but could not successfully battle the corrupt members of City Hall for its protection.

The second book which is the first in a new series is HOMICIDE IN HARDCOVER written by Kate Carlisle, a study of creative repairs of books; i.e., bookbinding. Set in my home city of San Francisco, the plot is well designed; the characters are interesting and somewhat amusing, and the fascinating procedures in bookbinding and restoration are well written and researched. Not a heavy story, but one that holds your attention. I look forward to others in this series.

But the disappointing book was written by a well established author, Lisa Jackson and entitled AFTER SHE’S GONE. The story line is a little strange and somewhat confusing; the characters seem light and not realistic; and there really is too much unnecessary off-color language to fill the pages. This is somewhat sad as the author has written other books in previous series that gave the reader a knowledge of the areas in which the major characters lived; a well written and taut plot, and an interesting twist in both the people and plot. Hopefully, this will not be the successive path this author is taking, and that she will revert to her previous skills.

We at the Library look forward every December to putting up our tree and proudly displaying the decorations we have accumulated over the years with the wonderful help of so many caring residents. But this year we will have an extraordinary addition to our Christmas Season: a stunningly beautiful house created by the very famous painter and author, Thomas Kinkade. This very unusual Christmas house is a gift from a new resident, Edna Paine, to whom we are very grateful. As Shirley and I have not completely decided where to best display this Christmas house in our Library, we welcome any suggestions from our many visitors. And, speaking of Christmas, although it is only April, we will once again be accumulating recipes for our Christmas Cookbook. So, if you or other members of your family prepared a special food during our wonderful Christmas Season, please think of giving it a place in our Cookbook for 2016. And, if you missed our very first book, come see us. We can probably find one for a special spot in your home.

“When an old person dies, a Library burns down.”
Karin Gillespie

We all have a birthday month, and for that matter a certain day in that month. It is always interesting to see if any one famous, other than you, was born in that month. Just in case you might think you are not famous, look it up. Merriam Webster says ‘famous’ is someone known to many. Many is an indefinite number of people. I definitely don’t know the exact number of people who know me. Therefore an indefinite number of folk know me. That actually fits most of us, if not all.

Be that as it may, my month has folks like Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo DaVinci, William Shakespeare and the current Queen of England. Of course, there are also a lot of recent celebrities. However, today’s celebrities are tomorrow’s reality stars or something a little less glamorous.

The real question might be what the statisticians call the Birthday Paradox. That is how many people, say in a room of strangers, have the same birthday as yours. That is a puzzle.

The amazing thing is how little a number it actually takes. It really isn’t hard to logically figure the probability out. The straight math is, like a lot of math, relatively simple but a bit like grinding a big block of wood into a pile of wood dust. It takes time.

Take your birthday, for instance, it is one day out of the 365 days of a normal year. There are 364 days that aren’t yours. When you think about it, the next person you meet has a one out of 365 days chance of their birthday being the same as yours and a 364 out of 365 (364 divided by 365) of not being yours. That is a 99.7 chance it isn’t yours.

To figure out what the probability that anyone in the room would have your birthday seems daunting at this point. However, if you remember that the two events are mutually exclusive, it is yours or it is not yours, then it becomes simpler.

In a two person deal as described above the probability your birthday is yours is certain or one. The chance of their birthday is 99.7 that it isn’t yours. So the chance that it is yours is I minus 99.7 or a 0.03 chance.

Now you can grind the block through the number of people in the room with similar combinatorial math. As you move through the second, third, fourth and so on you will get to 23 and at that point you discover that the chance is slightly better than a coin flip that one of them has the same birthday as yours. If you grind on through to 70 folks, you would find that there is a better than 99.7 chance that someone has your birthday.

Leap year and other things can change the decimal point, Mathematicians use things like binomial coefficient and factorial to make it more elegant. But, the fact is it is a very small number.