Stories - Petey and Emerson

I lost Petey Sunday evening.... Well sort of lost him. See the thing is he is never more than 5 feet away from me at any time. So I was wandering around the house Sunday evening putting stuff away and just generally picking up and I realized that my shadow was missing. I went from room to room and couldn't find him anywhere. Thought back to what I had been doing and decided to look in our bedroom closet (no noise coming from there just thought that I had recently put some tops away) As a preface to opening the door, let me tell you that we recently replaced one of our flat oval mirrors in the guest bathroom with a real medicine cabinet with a mirror. While deciding what to do with the flat oval mirror we are storing it horizontally on the back wall of our closet. Petey loves to chat with the "dog in the mirror". Well you guessed it, I opened the closet door and out pops and hops and jumps Petey, oh so glad to be let out of the closet and not at all angry with me for shutting him in. Do you think he will spend a little less time obsessing with himself in front of the mirror now??? Ok, now for Emerson. Emerson is the little town that we actually live in. Only 1000 people. In fact it is so small that it can't deliver our mail to us which is why we have a Cartersville address. Well when there are only 532 eligible voters and we are electing a new mayor and two new city council members and when folks are cutting down trees in our area faster than you can blink, I was thinking that I really should start paying more attention to what is going on and actually vote today in a city election. Well easier said than done. For one thing where we vote seems to be a little murky. Some folks think it is one place and some think it is another. Who to vote for remains a mystery since there has been no publicity about any of the candidates. So yesterday I subscribed to a daily version of the local paper instead of just the Sunday version. Aha!!!!! Just today what did I learn???? We vote in a location unknown to anyone that I talked to and it is open only from 8-5 (What kind of voting hours are those for working folks???). I learned that our water rates are doubling!!! I learned that our newly moved in next door neighbor, the out our front door view destroyer, is also planning to have rezoned another 2 acres that he owns from agricultural to industrial!!! I learned that the highway patrolman that I luckily saw just in time to slow down and avoid a ticket yesterday, is part of a new program, just in our county, to prevent trucking accidents. Boy am I glad I am getting the new and very easy to read quickly, daily version of our local paper!!!! (and you guessed it, I think I have to get involved in local politics- who ever heard of not knowing where you are voting or what you are voting for or who is on the ballot- until the day of the election!!! we've got to at least have a little more publicity about this, right?