By Jim Poling I t is warm and spring like outside but when I open the side door and step into the kitchen suddenly it is Christmas. Flour dust covers the table one end of…
A fine balance
T hey say the only constants in life are change and beer. Well they say something like that. The Beer Store recently announced it will be moving its Minden location from Water Street where it’s…
Sunny ways and cheap shots
By Jim Poling Sr. T he politicians are back on Parliament Hill apparently having learned little from October’s general election. It seems to me that we voters told them clearly that we want an end…
Event of default
By Chad Ingram The province has the ability to terminate its contract with Carillion. This is not earth-shattering but is something I can write with stone-cold certainty now that I have a copy of the…
Did you ride the magic bus with Ed?
To the Editor Fortunately we may be lucky enough to have somebody special come into our lives. If you rode the big yellow bus with Ed Pritchard you had the company of such a person…
Keep a part of Minden’s past
To the Editor This is in response to Tim Pritchard’s letter in the Nov. 26 edition of the Times . I totally agree with Tim’s statements as I wrote about when this issue came up…
Salvage yard not a good idea
To The Editor On Thursday Nov. 26 residents from Hunter Creek Estates and Gull Lake attended the Minden Hills council meeting. The extremely large group came to protest the proposal to create a salvage yard…
Scrap
W ho says municipal politics can’t be interesting? Minden Hills councillors were greeted by a protest as they made their way into the township building for last week’s meeting. Yes a protest with placards and…
Whispers of winter
By Jim Poling Gentle mists caress the lake like a mother’s hand massaging her child’s back calming her to sleep. Sleep for the lake is delayed this year. Winter’s approach usually loud and bullying is…
The bigger story behind Sherborne Road
By Jim Poling Sr. I t is remarkable how tiny pieces of news help us to see much larger worrisome trends. For instance we now learn that the Natural Resources Ministry has been poking about…
Time of the season
By Chad Ingram D uring the weekend I attended not one but two Santa Claus parades because well my life is just really exciting like that. The annual parades in the villages of Minden and…
Race to the bottom
During the weekend someone set fire to Peterborough’s sole mosque. Police are investigating the arson as a hate crime and while there is no proof it was some kind of response to the horror that…
Wild thoughts on a wet day
By Jim Poling I listen for sounds of movement but the woods are as silent as the wet stones on the hillside. Rain drips off my hunting cap brim each drip telling me that no sensible…
Common census returns
By Chad Ingram It’s far too early to make any judgment about how newly minted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is doing although that of course isn’t stopping detractors. There have been a few Minden murmurings…
Snoopy would be proud
By Jim Poling I have a new granddog. His name is Rusty and he is a rescued dog from Los Angeles. Rusty was given up by his owners who kept a bunch of backyard dogs…
New level
By Chad Ingram The phrase "water levels management" will likely cause many pairs of eyeballs to immediately glaze over. And that’s OK. That’s a perfectly normal reaction. However it’s a subject of great importance in…
Who is buying the pizza?
By Jim Poling I totally get why Education Minister Liz Sandals feels the way she does about receipts. They are a pain in the butt. So difficult to organize. Always impossible to find when needed.…
A bright idea
By Chad Ingram Minden Hills Councillor Jeanne Anthon has suggested on more than one occasion the upper tier of Haliburton County should institute some kind of standardized approval framework for lower tier councils to use…
Settling Frost Centre ghosts
By Jim Poling Each Halloween I perch on a rockcut across from the Frost Centre watching for the ghosts to appear. They always do. I see their excited faces as they step down from arriving…
In opposition
By Chad Ingram Canadians awoke to a substantively different country Tuesday than they had Monday the country’s Conservative majority government replaced by a Liberal one and the man who’d been Prime Minister for nearly a…
Yellow jackets and health care
By Jim Poling It was plenty late arriving but Sunday’s first hard frost fell from the sky like George Bush’s shock and awe campaign in Iraq. It hit fast and hard and completed autumn’s Job…