When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held tight by Velcro strips, a piece of equipment that I, a professional humorist with less mechanical ability than the average primate, need to remove every night when I go to bed and reattach in the morning. My wife could do this in a jiffy but I made her go to Minnesota to play the opera (she’s a violist) because I love her and because I don’t want her to see me as a pitiful helpless wretch.

Have you ever heard the saying, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” According to Dictionary. com, this proverb means that “people are often reluctant or unwilling to change old habits or long-held beliefs.” Oxford Languages states the idiom means “you cannot make people change their established patterns of opinion or behavior.” Regardless of whether you are familiar with the saying or not, you no doubt have seen this happen.

Earlier this year, I was surprised to find that many Facebook friends apparently had new professionally- done profile pictures – portraits, rather, flattering artistic images. Somehow, they had become oil paintings or cartoons.

Last weekend saw showers and thunderstorms push across parts of the region. Southern Minnesota even had a slight risk of severe weather due to the warm temperatures, elevated dew points, and a cold-front pushing through that moist environment. It is that time of the year for severe weather possibilities.