There were lots of activities in Wise County over the weekend, and photographer Joe Duty did his best to get to a lot of them. You can check out his images here.

I headed over to Paradise Saturday morning for the Paradise Main Street Festival to see the dedication of the new Paradise Veterans Memorial Park. Other than a bit of a breeze causing a few of the flags to topple over a couple of times, the ceremony went off without a hitch. I was really impressed with the amount of people who attended the dedication and the festival. Events like these really help you gain a sense of “community” that you don’t always see as much as you used to. For some very amateurish video of the festival shot by yours truly, click here.

Joe was in Paradise, at the Wise Regional Health System Harvest Health Fair, the Decatur Chamber of Commerce auction, the 4-H Explosion and Sunday’s benefit concert.

We’ve got another big weekend coming up. Bridgeport is having its annual Coal Miner’s Heritage Festival, and there are plenty of events scheduled throughout the day. The final Cruise Night on the Decatur Square is also Saturday.

Is moving one of the most demanding things we do as humans that is self-inflicted?

I cannot think of another activity that we plan and often look forward to that is more draining physically, mentally and emotionally.

Having just completed such a move, I can speak with authority. Returning to Decatur has been wonderful, but the actual process of relocating our material goods, and ultimately our lives, takes a tremendous toll.

It requires many days of physical exhaustion as well as mental gymnastics trying to make sure you keep track of essential items and take care of the important stuff like turning utilities off and on or change all those addresses.

Since we left the comfortable confines of Wise County in 1991, we have done this to ourselves five times, the last time eight years ago when we moved across town to one of Henrietta’s neatest houses, a ‘50s ranch style with some interesting features.

Leaving it behind was a bit emotional, and now we start over with a mostly vacant lot upon which to recreate a place to call home.

Starting from scratch, we can do it like we want, but we left behind a lot of toil in establishing a peaceful yard in which to sit and watch the world go by.

We won’t miss the commute, and we relish the challenges of modern-day newspapering. And hopefully a few months down the road when last box will be unpacked it will truly feel like home again.

We here at the Messenger pride ourselves on trying to be as technically savvy as possible. We’re working as hard and as fast (as deadlines will allow…) to make WCMessenger.com even bigger and better. We’re posting to Facebook virtually every day, and our Twitter following has now grown to 176 (thanks everyone for the follows!). Flickr will (hopefully) be the new home to the photography of the great Joe Duty and everyone else here on staff, and our YouTube channel is getting lots of hits.

And now we’re working on something new that will hopefully take our flagship online product, Update, to the next level:

http://www.wcmessenger.com/update/beta/

This new format will allow for bigger photos, larger video, improved RSS feeds, social-networking integration, and… wait for it… wait for it… reader comments!

It’s still a work in progress, but if anyone gets a chance to check it out and give us your feedback on it, please contact me at webmaster@wcmessenger.com

Again, this is a pre-launch beta, so you won’t find a link to it on our homepage just yet, but it is live and active, so if you feel like it, please try reading Update this way if it suits your tastes.

Thanks everyone for reading!

Todd A. Griffith
Webmaster/Production Manager
Wise County Messenger