A little bit about a lot of things:

• Shaken and in some cases sore, but for the most part sound, sixth-grade students at Yolo Middle School rolled back into town Thursday evening from a field trip they will long remember.

What was supposed to have been a day spent hiking in Yosemite’s magnificent splendor was instead interrupted when the two buses carrying the local group collided on their way into the park, sending a dozen students and a chaperone to area medical facilities to be treated for their injuries.

Fortunately parents, school officials and the community as a whole were able to breath a collective sigh of relief upon learning that nobody was seriously injured in the accident.

Initial media reports coming out of Yosemite suggested that the number of injured may be far higher....thankfully those first accounts were incorrect.

“School bus accident” are three terrifying words, and there were certainly some anxious moments before it became clear that the community was not faced with a full-scale disaster in part because of the conflicting reports early on.

We heard nothing but good things about how the adults and students on the trip handled the crisis, the emergency services response to the scene and how well the group was treated by the park service while waiting for replacement buses to arrive for the trip home.

Plenty was happening back in the district as well, where Yolo Principal Kathy McWilliams and her staff, district administrators and the Newman Police Department were all involved in the response, from the initial notifications to parents to tracking where the injured were taken to making arrangements for the students to arrive back home out of the eye of waiting television cameras.

From all appearances, everybody involved rose to the challenge to make the best of what could have been a very chaotic situation.

While Thursday proved to be a very long and difficult day for students, parents and school staff, everybody was safely home when it was over.

And that’s the story which matters most.

• I’m a big fan of pennies, those much-maligned coins that don’t warrant a second thought from most of us.

Being, well, me, I try to make exact change when I can, so it’s always handy to have a few pennies in my pocket.

Leave it to the postal service, however, to make the penny a nuisance.

Don’t get me wrong.....I greatly admire the work of our men and women at our local post office branches – they go the extra mile for their customers, which isn’t always the case elsewhere, and we genuinely appreciate that.

But when the price of a first-class stamp goes up by a penny, as it did Monday, that single cent causes more confusion and frustration than it is worth.

I’m sure that the penny translates into a huge revenue increase for the postal service, but suspect that the greater financial impact comes from all those suddenly outdated 41-cent stamps that find their way to the back of drawers in homes and businesses across the nation, never to be used.

I don’t even bother with going to buy a sheet of one-cent stamps to make up the difference. I have enough trouble keeping track of one sheet of stamps, let alone two, so I usually just buy new stamps at the higher rate and be done with it.

Occasionally the old stamps do surface. Kathy found some 32-centers (how long have they been hiding?) that we used to send a card this week. Probably put one one more than we needed to, but we wanted to be sure....

At least we knew what those were worth. Many of the new stamps are gorgeous, but don’t reflect the amount of the postage. I have a sheet of flags that might be 39-cent stamps, but I’m not really sure.

Maybe I’ll do the smart thing this time and buy a sheet of penny stamps to go with our carryover of 41-cent stamps.

We’ll see.

One thing for sure, though. Whoever said pennies no longer matter might be thinking twice when it comes time to mail a letter.

• Mark your calendars.....graduation season is fast arriving.

Starting with Yolo Middle School in just two weeks (May 29) and continuing through Gustine High’s commencement on June 6, our local schools will host a total of seven graduation ceremonies (high school, alternative education, eighth-grade programs) in little more than a week.

Both will send students off to the unknown.....seniors will collect their diplomas and march out into the world, while eighth-graders make the jump to high school ranks.

We look forward to the special occasion of graduations, and to honoring all our local graduates in a special section published May 29.

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