Sometimes it amazes me what makes news.

As Hurricane Milton came ashore last week in Florida, lives were lost. Millions of damage occurred, if not more. And there are people who survived who will have a drastically different life in the aftermath.

Last year, a community I covered in Georgia spent hundreds of thousands of dollars adding metal detectors to their middle and high schools.

There’s a long-running joke out there that just about anyone can be a weatherman.

I remember being a middle school student, working on a PowerPoint presentation for Black History Month, when I heard the word Google for the first time. My teacher had just found out about the new search engine with a fun name and told us we should use it for our research.

I was at the most recent Jubilee zoning board meeting, where the room was so full that you would’ve thought you accidentally got in line for a big college football game.

Online ticket broker Vivid Seats published a map before the college football season started noting the most popular team in each county in the entire country.

I spent many Friday nights on the football field at Morgan Academy in Selma, Alabama, covering the hometown Senators.

This will be the first year where Florida residents are legally – and I stress legally (meaning not using offshore sports books) – allowed to bet on the entire college football and NFL seasons.

I’ve worked in three different states during my journalism career, covering education in all of them.

There have been very few times in my life where the world has stopped and everything else has seemed to matter so much less.

Thursday, Aug. 1 was one of those days.