In 2001, I purchased a T-shirt in Moab, Utah, that read “Choose your sick days wisely.”

Let me share some paraphrased reports from department heads for what went on in the last week before I finish this thought.

The Seymour Police Department recently was joined by Seymour Community School Corp. to conduct interviews to fill a school resource officer position. This joint process just shows how strong our community partnerships are. SPD listens to the needs of the school and vice versa when it comes to making sure we have well-rounded resource officers.

Open lines of communication from both sides go far when it comes to keeping this partnership in good standing. Thank you, Talmadge Reasoner, for joining SPD for the interview process and sharing your thoughts with our squad, and thank you, Chief Brad Lucas, for sharing this in your end-of-week update so I could share it here.

From the parks department end-of-week report, I am happy to share that diamonds 4 and 5 at the Freeman Field Recreational Area are now ready to be used. These two diamonds faced more than their fair share of minor setbacks along the way but are destined to be some of our nicest playing surfaces here in Seymour. With drainage additions on the front end of the project, they will often be usable before others after rain events.

The Seymour Community Center is back open to senior citizens and is starting to ramp up programming. It is great to see such things as a recent cookout going again.

A big congratulations to part-time employee Rick Cockerham as he sets off to Florida. Thank you, Rick, for the time you spent with parks and recreation. It was noticed, and you definitely helped in many areas over the last several years.

Now back to that T-shirt from almost two decades ago. “Choose your sick days wisely” is all in fun, but as a small business owner, I rarely got to use sick days. If I did, they were in bed type of sick days, and I would have rather been at work.

Now serving as mayor, I take the same approach. I did, however, take a piece of advice that Mayor Craig Luedeman gave me late in 2019. That advice was to schedule vacations because if you don’t, you won’t make time for them.

This past week, I did just that. Zabrina and I took in five baseball games and enjoyed the time to refresh and prepare for a busy second half of the year.

Major items like annexation, budget and a new fire station will take focus and dedication to advance to the next steps, and I believe this week has given me a chance to clear my head and look toward the future. It also gave me a chance to see some programs from other cities that might make Seymour better.

Thank you to my team for keeping us running smoothly in my absence. I look forward to seeing you all soon.

Pope Francis said, “Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way, people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.”

Matt Nicholson is the mayor of Seymour. Send comments to [email protected].