Opinion

In a field of milkweed, Rob Perez sits with Mary the Monarch Butterfly. Rob Perez: Mary, thank you for taking the time.

Last week, you may have noticed a QR code appearing in the newspaper. This has been an idea I’ve been working on for a little while, to provide an even more immersive experience to some of the news we share.

Coffee by my side, I sit on the dock, overlooking North Arm Bay of Lake Minnetonka. It is 6:02 a.m. Everyone who writes about these sorts of times describes it as quiet and peaceful. They deliberately ignore the Hitchcockian quantities of birds hellbent on their morning song. It’s loud out here. A family of geese paddle somewhere slowly, honking. A loon calls someone, maybe his mother. I face east which means the sunrise is directly in front of me, just above the horizon. Sunrises are a bit like the Minnesota Vikings, best enjoyed with a gaze that I’ll call indirect. I do not wish to be the guy wearing sunglasses at six a.m., but I suppose we all have a cross to bear.

Summer is a time for kids to kick back, take a break from routine, and enjoy lazy days. It also, in many cases, is when learning loss- aka “The Summer Slide” can take place. Summer setbacks are nothing new regarding academics and the phenomenon has been researched by educators since the beginning of time. On average, student achievement can decline over the summer by up to a third of a prior year’s learning gains. Loss is usually greater in mathematics than in reading, and higher grade leveled students are more noticeably affected than younger learners. The summer slide can be measured in both social skills and classroom discipline, in addition to academics.

Can you believe that fraud, errors, and abuse cost Medicare more than $60 billion last year? Medicare fraud is one of the most rampant forms of fraud in the US. There are a variety of ways it is committed and ultimately all taxpayers end up paying for the dishonesty of others. The Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) began in 1997 and this year, for their 25th anniversary, they named June 5th as the start of National Medicare Fraud Prevention Week. The following suggestions come from their web site at smpresource.org.

Most of us appreciate when work gets accomplished and especially when it gets done on time. And it’s even better when the work is well done.

In this column: a major update! But first, a digression/road trip recommendation. If you have a few free days, want to check out another art-filled small town, and don’t mind a six-hour drive, Spring Green, Wisconsin is worth the trip. The downtown is cute, but Spring Green’s real tourist attractions are found outside the city – two massive, strange mansions in its leafy hills, Alex Jordan’s House on the Rock and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin. (I promise that this column winds back around to Granite Falls and our program updates quite soon.)

The time has come for my Grandma’s last shipment of cookies to land somewhere overseas. For the entirety of my son’s deployment, my Grandmother has been on a mission. It started with her sending a batch of cookies to him, as she had been sending to him since his arrival at Fort Drum. Upon receiving his first shipment of “Grandma Cookies” overseas, he promptly distributed cookies to as many soldiers as he could, wanting to spread the grandmotherly love to boost morale.

If you take financial advice from this column, in the future, you may not be able to afford to read this column. That said… let’s talk digital currencies. There are more than 18,000 cryptocurrencies on the market but what is it? Most agree it’s a digital currency that operates outside the traditional government/banking control, instead using public ledgers known as blockchains. But did you know that anyone can make a digital currency with a little coding? Yes, you and I can make our own digital currency. Late Show host Stephen Colbert’s crypto is called Ijustmadethatupeum. But is it a currency?