The month of May has not been kind to the three Steele County teams in the Gopher Conference. New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva, Blooming Prairie and Medford are a collective 2-11 in May baseball. Both of those two wins belong to Medford. 

Owatonna High School’s newspaper, The Magnet, is one of 14 newspapers in the nation to be recognized as a Distinguished Site out of the 1,656 schools that use School Newspapers Online (SNO). 
SNO is a company that was created to make journalism advisers’ lives easier by making WordPress websites for scholastic and collegiate journalism programs and gives them tips along the way. 

With construction season in full swing in Owatonna, motorists can expect some more delays in their commute. 
Construction on the $3.2 million project is slated to begin Monday, May 18 on Old Highway 14 also known as County Road 2 and Hoffman Drive. Work will begin at the western Owatonna city limits and continue to the intersection of Steele County Road 45 and State Avenue. 

Olympic champion Bruce Jenner’s gender identity has been in the national spotlight since he announced on “20/20” last month, “For all intents and purposes, I’m a woman.”
Jenner said that as a child he’d dress up in female family members’ clothing, then carefully place the clothing back in the dressers or closets where he’d found it to ensure he wasn’t caught.

The massive bird flu outbreak that has wiped out millions of turkeys across the state has found its into Steele County, the first county in southeastern Minnesota to end up with the deadly virus. 

Blooming Prairie residents Pete and Mary Kittelson brought the popular television game show, Wheel of Fortune, to town Thursday night, April 30, as they were big winners.
Family and friends of the Kittelsons watched Pete and Mary as contestants on a previously tape recorded episode. The Kittelsons were contestants in January and sworn to secrecy as to what their winnings totaled.

After a shaky 3-6 start, the Triton softball team has won four straight games, propelling itself above .500 for the first time all season.
 “It was a great week for Cobra softball,” said Coach Laura Strandell after the third win.
After a 19-0 loss at Zumbrota-Mazeppa on Thursday, April 23, the Cobras hosted Lake City for a double-header. 

There is a lot of controversial issues and breaking news going on in Steele County or close to Steele County in the case of the feedlot dilemma in Westfield Township. 
I’ve worked at larger city newspapers, and at times have been inundated with tough issues and decisions that boards and others have had to make. I have also been involved in covering disaster stories.

It doesn’t take much to figure out that the world is changing around us, and not always in a positive way.
I like to consider myself a “half full glass” kind of person and not dwell on the negative aspects of life. But sometimes it becomes important to focus on the negative things in an effort to create something more positive.