First of all, I want to state how proud I am of my mother. She’s fabulous. Normally children aren’t proud of their parents… or at least, it isn’t mentioned because… well, it often is just understood.

You might have remembered my shock from last year, when she casually mentioned that she was working on her web site… in HTML, mind you. But she continues to astonish me.

After raising around a dozen children, she started working her career. First with being a secretary, she soon was running a college department for her boss… but still being paid as a secretary. After her boss’ retirement, she was able to convince the board to let her have that job, and she’s been doing a fabulous job of it.

She’s used her position to get on other civic boards and whatnot, but when one of the city’s councilors died, she was talked into applying for the position… and she got it. While she has been building her career, she isn’t that famous… even in her small town, for the newspaper, when making the announcement of her position, subtitled the article, “Gail Who?”

Which brings me to my second point… my home town of St. George, Utah and its local newspaper.

It is quite the place. But nothing explains it more than reading this article about my mom in the newspaper. Every time I returned home for holidays and vacations, I would notice their unique choice of front page articles about only local events, but it was their misspellings that really puzzled me. But neither of these would cause me to roll my eyes like their tone.

Tone? Allow me to illustrate… In yesterday’s preliminary notice, the title read, “Woman selected to fill Isom’s seat,” and in the text it read:

Bunker will fill the position left vacant because of the death last month of longtime City Councilor Sharon Isom. Isom was the first woman elected to the St. George City Council in the late 1970s.

Oh yeah, women’s suffrage in action. But the paper does seem to respond to public opinion, for after running that article which wasn’t very supportive of my mom’s new position, they posted an opinion piece that was a retraction… of sorts. I guess I can’t be too hard on the paper…

That was when I noticed on their paper the web menu heading… my home town has a “Science and Technology” section in the paper? Wow… but after clicking I realized that it was just a link to science.com. Ah… the paper has its own bookmarks. For some reason, that is more reassuring… almost as much as reading about the Mayor’s “speach” last night.