I hope a lot of Bellevue residents are planning to attend the budget hearing on Monday. Bellevue Council needs to hear your voices when it comes to their plan to increase property taxes by a quarter-mill and raise the sewer surcharge.

The fiscal situation in Bellevue was summed up quite brilliantly by council president Kathy Coder at the last meeting: "It's like having cable t.v. when you have no food on the table."

She was referring to Bellevue financing a swimming pool while not having money for the necessities.

She gets it.

Some others clearly do not.

It once again is that time of year when many of us shop until we drop, either from exhaustion or the weight of the debt we've accumulated.

And as the holidays draw closer, the desperation level increases. How to find the perfect gift? What is it? Where is it?

What we forget sometimes is to look to the practical, rather than the fantastic.

Although Bellevue Council meetings have been lengthy and full of redundancies lately, the outright hostility of meetings past has been a bit muted.

At least in public.

Out of the public meeting chamber, the skate plaza and resignation of the assistant DAS have lit the simmering embers of outright loathing that exist among some members of council.

Apparently some members of council blame some of their colleagues for the loss of ADAS Katie Hale, even though it has been reported that personal circumstances may have played a major role in her decision.

The more cynical among us have probably already noted that the Northgate School Board waited until after the primary election to decide that, darn it, they were going to have to raise taxes after all.

The rest of you better catch up fast.

Because after telling everyone that there would be no tax increase this year, that's exactly what this board plans to do Monday night, as announced one week before they planned to vote.

We tend to expect a great deal of our elected officials, even on the local level. This results in varying degrees of disappointment on many occasions, and perhaps we need to realign our expectations.

The one thing that I have always maintained is a fundamental expectation that must be met is attendance. The least anyone can do is show up.

Whether it's students attending school, employees going to work, or elected officials making it to meetings, if you can't show up, the likelihood of you accomplishing anything else of notable significance is pretty iffy.

I'm always amused when people get the precise government they asked for with their votes, and have to face the consequences.

A perfect example is the election of Tom Corbett as governor of Pennsylvania.

Only a few short months after the majority of Pennsylvania voters bought into Corbett's promises of balancing the state budget and cutting state spending, they're finding out that the way he's going to do that is by pushing the tax burden onto local government. Over all, each of us will end up paying more to maintain the same or fewer services than we now have.

I have to applaud the Avonworth School Board and administration for the creative thinking that has gone into dealing with the district's budget deficit.

No one wants to lay off employees or cut programs, but Avonworth officials have demonstrated that they are willing and able to do what has to be done to live within their means.

At this point, any thinking is good thinking, and we're seeing no thinking coming out of Northgate officials.

State Sen. John Pippy and Rep. Mark Mustio are inviting constituents to a town hall meeting to discuss the state budget.

When I was in college, I took a class on Native American culture that introduced me to the writings of Carlos Casteneda.

Now, Casteneda -- in spite of, or perhaps because of, the ingestion of various natural mushroom-type substances popular at one time in our not too distant history -- imparted several fascinating personal philosophies. The one that has stuck with me over the decades is that reality is a relative concept.

It is time, once and for all, to shut down the Glaser Avenue sidewalk project and just admit that it was a bad idea that only got worse as time went by. Which is what generally happens when no one puts a stop to bad ideas.

There are any number of serious subjects in the news this week, and I certainly could blog about any of them in some detail.

But it's Pet Photo Contest Week in The Citizen, so let's deal with those pesky serious issues and get on to the fun stuff.

The vast majority of Lincoln Avenue building and business owners missed a great meeting this week about the Allegheny Together program.

By "vast majority" we mean all but about a half-dozen. Actually, less than that.