It’s been snowing all day here today, and we have a couple of inches on the ground. I like winter, but not in mid-April! Come to think of it, I don’t like snow in early April either.
I’m glad I still have the snow tires on our car. I’ll still have them taken off tomorrow, but they’ll be useful today, much to my surprise.

I’m not sure how the subject of death came up for our three-year old daughter. Perhaps it was in trying to explain to her what Easter was and how Jesus died and was resurrected. Perhaps it was explaining that a relative had died and was no longer with us. Whatever the cause, our daughter has been asking questions such as, “Daddy, when will you die?,” and “Daddy, will you die?”

Of course such questions give one pause. But strangely enough, I don’t mind hearing them. I’d rather live with full consciousness of my mortality and full appreciation of the gift of life. I’d rather pause and consider my own end, then resume life with thanks and praise.

Earlier this week the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced that it would be spending $500 million dollars over the next five years to lead a national campaign against childhood obesity. The foundation likened this new campaign to work it has done previously to address tobacco use.

The foundation’s press release describes the childhood obesity epidemic and its costs in stark terms:

During the past four decades, obesity rates have soared among all age groups, more than quadrupling among children ages 6 to 11. Today, more than 33 percent of children and adolescents—approximately 25 million kids—are overweight or obese.

Preventing obesity during childhood is critical, because habits that last into adulthood frequently are formed during youth. Research shows that overweight adolescents have up to an 80 percent chance of becoming overweight or obese adults. Earlier onset of obesity leads to the earlier onset of related illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer.

In addition to the toll on our nation’s health, obesity also poses a tremendous financial threat to our economy and our health care system. It’s estimated that the obesity epidemic costs our nation $117 billion per year in direct health care costs and lost productivity. Childhood obesity alone carries a huge price tag-up to $14 billion per year in direct health care costs to treat kids.

The foundation wants to reverse this epidemic by 2015, and promoting physical activity will be one part of the solution. I liked this quote from the foundation’s president, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, which gets at one of the causes of the obesity epidemic: “Physical activity has really just been engineered out of our life” (from an NPR interview).

Let’s start engineering physical activity back into our lives and into our communities. Keep on the lookout for upcoming Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grants that can be used to address obesity in your community.

I attended the City of Northfield’s Comprehensive Plan revision public meeting last night along with several hundred other folks. According to the consultant leading the meeting, the turnout was better than at a similar meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts, recently.

One thing we did was to identify on a map the “strong” and “weak” places in Northfield - or desirable and undesirable places. The consensus at our table was that Northfield’s strong places include the downtown, the historic neighborhoods on the east and west sides of town near downtown, and the Carleton Arboretum. The weak locations are the highway 3 corridor south of town, the same corridor in the center of town, and the cul de sac neighborhoods in the southeast part of town. (None of us at the table lives in the latter.) Read the rest of this entry »

The tulip shoots in our garden are nestled in a half-inch of snow or so this morning - not a lot, but more than we’d like for April. Parts of northern Minnesota - Brainerd and Duluth, for example - had over a foot of snow with the storm system that went through yesterday.

Our thermometer here in south-central Minnesota read 16 degrees this morning and the radio said wind chills were around zero - too cold to ride the bike this morning. It was only a couple of weeks ago that we had a record high of 81 degrees. Things will stay cold for the next few days.

Ah, we’re enjoying the weather roller coaster of the Upper Midwest.