Weekend Hangover

Farewell holidays.

We spent a couple of hours or so Saturday driving to my parents' home in north central Iowa for a belated Christmas. My father had heart surgery Dec. 1, which kept them from the holiday road. Pile the lousy weather on top and you've got Christmas on Jan. 3.

Speaking of piles, there's a whole lot of snow to our north and west, much of it whipped into remarkable drifts. Even four-lane US Highway 20 seemed to be a pretty thin ribbon of pavement plowing through an ocean of white.

It's beautiful in a way, but also desolate and isolating.  It was well below zero in the middle of the afternoon.

You start thinking about how all that's keeping you and your family from becoming characters in a Jack London novel is a Honda 4-cylinder engine. Granted, London's characters didn't have to keep stopping the sled team so someone could go potty. Nor did they have  iPods set on shuffle.

But we felt like brave travelers testing our mettle against the forbidding landscape just the same. We made it there and back, hauling a full load of American Girl dolls, some new sweathers, etc. and a bottle of 15-year-old scotch from my thoughtful brother. Alas, I bought him a 12-year-old bottle. Scotch foul on my part.

There was also some news.

The Register's Jason Clayworth did a fine job over the weekend detailing Iowa's pricey love affair with sales tax breaks, with a total price tag that now eclipses sales taxes collected. We've got a legislature that caint say no. Now they're in a terrible fix.

Like those pesky, expensive tax credits, lawmakers need to dig in and figure out what we're getting for those dollars. Not all of them are bad, but pruning is probably in order. Although this has been tried before with little success.

U of I researchers are trying to tell if sloth bones found in southwest Iowa came from the same family. One promising sign is that it appears they may have been  fighting over the TV remote. Rim shot, please.

And hey, Mitt Romney's coming back to Iowa to promote his book. He's no sloth. But researchers digging through the remains of his last presidential run in Iowa have unearthed shattered expectations. Surely it would be different this time around.

Have a fine week.