Stories from Thursday, December 27, 2007

Beverly Sue Compton, 77, Nevada, passed away on Monday, Dec. 24, 2007, at her home in Nevada. She was born July 29, 1930, in Nevada, to Ermel Hadley Long and Mildred Mae Dennis Long. She married John Walter Compton on Sept. 8, 1946, in Nevada. He preceded her in death on Oct. 24, 2006, after 60 years of marriage...

This period of the holiday season is a little like being middle age plus. The preparations and excitement of Christmas have usually passed. Leftovers are the main menu of your meals, and you are worrying if you went too far with expenses, but it's too late to do anything about it now. So you just bask in what you hoped was the appreciation each person felt for your gifts...

It is without any doubt the holiday season. Kids are turning in wish lists for devices NASA couldn't operate, people are filling their yards with massive displays of Christmas spirit, which are then filled with hot air, and all at once the entire population collectively goes crazy. This is not a new experience, though. Every year people go crazy, then other people tell them to calm down. FYI, telling crazy people to calm down is not generally all that constructive...

Hitting 70 is hard enough without having to admit you're now as old as a public building. But yes, I was the first baby in the new city hospital, which opened its doors in December 1937 and has morphed into the Nevada Regional Medical Center. As NRMC trumpeted its 70 years of service to the community this year, I decided to take another look at my baby book and all the congratulatory mementoes my mother, the family historian, saved and kept in a box on the closet shelf. ...

Try to connect to Nevada's official Web site and you get nowhere, and that's how it should be, at least until Jan. 2. That's when the newly redesigned Web site should debut giving Nevada surfers more content and more options as to how they receive it...

It was a year to remember, a year to lay in preparations for the future, and a year to honor those who served the community in many ways, from the soldiers toiling in the war-torn Middle East, to those here at home, striving to keep Nevada a great place to live, both for today and for tomorrow. In the next few issues of the Nevada Daily Mail, we'll present a month-by-month recap of 2007's news and newsmakers...