Dear Editor,

We received news that the hospital, RMCH, will be applying for Critical Access designation.  We look forward to learning more about how this designation will impact our community and the care that RMCH provides.  Importantly, we would like to see how the community can support the hospital leadership in this transition.

We hope that CEO Whitaker will organize town halls with the community.  These would be an opportunity to encourage honest dialogue and questions.  The trust of the community has been badly worn, and dialogue can be a path to healing and understanding.

It is important to operate health care entities with standards of transparency and commitment to...

Talking about unpaired socks is like talking about the need to eat food — it happens to everyone. Anyone in the history of humanity who has ever done a load of laundry has ended up with a missing twin sock. This is what it means to be human. Death, taxes, missing socks.

Fortunately for my five-year-old daughter, this isn’t a problem. She purposefully mismatches her socks, matching her constantly imaginative personality. Maeve sees unpaired socks as an opportunity for self-expression.

There is a verbal equivalent of unpaired socks — unpaired words. And, just like missing socks, you’ve encountered them, thought about them… yearned for them, even.

Unpaired words are words...

When an individual purchases an annuity, they name one or more beneficiaries who will receive the benefits if something happens to them before the contract ends. This could be due to death, disability, or another event that would cause the individual to no longer need their income from the annuity.

The ultimate beneficiary of an annuity is the individual receiving the payments; however, there can also be additional beneficiaries. These can be named by the owner or automatically assigned through the contract. It’s essential to understand who these beneficiaries are and how they will be affected by the annuity payments to best plan for retirement income needs.

Primary Beneficiary: The...

In the Ghostbusters movies, the eponymous heroes blast ghosts and otherworldly beings with their proton packs, and the ghosts explode into a mess of slimy green ghost goo. This goo is called ectoplasm. I first encountered ectoplasm through Hi-C’s companion drink, Ecto Cooler, in elementary school whenever I brought my lunch. Ultimately, Ecto Cooler couldn’t hold a candle to the greatness of Kool-Aid Blasts and Capri Suns.

The late ’80s and early ‘90s were a wild time for brown-bagging it. Of course, my kids refer to anyone born before 2000 as people “born in the 1900s.”

On the theme of “words that end in ‘-asm,’” I’d like to discuss neoplasms. While...