America

Sometimes, I am so proud to live in this country, I get a little misty-eyed. That feeling came over me recently when we started on plans to renovate our bathrooms. Technically, our house is listed as having 1.5 bathrooms. That’s being a bit generous.

I’m not knocking our downstairs facilities because I love the setup. I just think calling a commode sitting on a raised platform in between the washer and dryer a half bath is a little fib.

Yes, our downstairs toilet is a real throne, sitting about a foot off the ground with a shower curtain around it to offer privacy. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I don’t ever plan on moving from this area. I have friends here. I like the community. Hanover now feels like home. But if I ever did plan on packing up, I would never consider moving to Attleboro, Mass.

The city less than an hour from Boston made it onto my naughty list this week when school officials announced that they had made strides at making their school safer.

They didn’t enact some new gun-control policy. Or install metal detectors. They banned tag.

Yes, tag. The game, not the hideous body spray. Banning that would actually probably have more of a public benefit than banning the game. But that would make sense.

I love this time of year. We get that extra hour of sunshine. The sun is out, but it’s not too hot. The winds are just right. The perfect weather for me to not work on my golf game.

I’m really excited because I think this is the year that I don’t play golf better than ever before. I really feel inspired when I think about not picking up a club.

Apparently, the people in charge in the Netherlands have the funny feeling that new immigrants to the country have a little bit of trouble adapting to their liberal ways. They have developed a new immigration test that will try and make sure people entering the country have a grip on how things work in Holland. Oh, then there’s the video.

The government gives all new candidates for immigration a two-hour movie that sheds light on things that are normal to Dutch citizens, but not so much to those entering the country, particularly from Muslim countries.

I don’t want to use this space to argue the values of showing a video with a woman sunbathing topless or two men kissing. That’s for the freaky, deaky Dutch to decide.

We need to make our immigration test better.