Oh my goodness — I definitely got up on my soapbox today in my weekly newspaper column. Usually I write about my kids or my grandson Capt. Adorable or my husband or my friends or the weird things that happen to me as I try to impersonate a got-it-together grownup adult woman, but this week as students get ready to head back to school I’ve been hearing stories from teachers in art and music and theater about having to cut back and do without and it just made me mad. We must support arts education in our schools. I know times are tough and, like we do in our own families, we have to sacrifice and make unpopular decisions. But dropping arts education cannot be an option. Read more at http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20090807/ARTICLES/908075005/1031?Title=We-want-our-arts-music-education and tell me what you think.

And my husband, John Pitts, the sports editor at the Tupelo, Mississippi, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, has a new blog up at his paper’s Web site,  http://nems360.com/. Click on http://nems360.com/blog/3079620/Sports+Buzz for a glimpse into SEC and Mississippi sports — and sports news from all over — and a look into my husband’s eclectic and cluttered mind. Even if you’re not a sports person, by reading this blog you’ll be able to knowledgeably drop a sports comment into any conversation and sound as if you know exactly what you’re talking about. My husband’s guidance turned me from someone who only went to football games for the halftime show into someone who can say with authority, “Its’ all up to the special teams.”