I never cease to be amazed at the dire financial predicament that Illinois is in and the creative ideas that people come up with to get out of it.

This week, of course, the state is on the brink of approving a capital projects budget that would be financed in part by expanding state gambling, privatizing the state lottery and spending extra gas tax revenue.

Thank goodness for gas and gambling, eh?

Really, though, the state’s problems are no different than mine. I’m in financial straits, and everybody I know is, too. It’s all part of this complex, “I’ve already spent my next paycheck” mentality that’s taken hold in recent years. We buy what we want on credit, then hope that the debt will get paid off. Unfortunately, the only person who makes money on that scenario is a guy by the name of Visa.

Perhaps we should use the example now being touted by the Illinois Department of Transportation, which this week sent out a release asking for advertisers on its Official Highway Map for 2009-2010, to offset operational costs. You can have the back cover, front cover and inside border. Heck, if you had enough money you could probably have your name over the map itself.

I admire the advertising approach. Let businesses pay off your debts, instead of adding to them. For instance, I live close to the Watershed Nature Center in Edwardsville. I would be more than willing to let the city pay me $100,000 a year to draw an arrow on the front of my house, pointing the way.

I’m also in the flight path of St. Louis Regional Airport, which is about eight miles to the northwest. A helpful sign on my roof would guide the pilots overhead — and help pay my Ameren bill.

And, if Dr. Pepper realized how much soda was consumed inside my home, the company would happily place a billboard out front.

There must be a million creative ways to pay off those debts. If the state can do it, anybody can.

Sometimes newsrooms are like a hive, abuzz with activity. Sometimes we’re nothing more than abuzz.

Tuesday, we were busy as bees, with a story that is simply a perfect illustration of what goes on behind the scenes at a newspaper.

It started with a call to the City Desk, from a local beekeeper on his way to Delhi School in Jersey County. A swarm of honeybees had somehow found their way into a classroom, and he had the duty of removing them. Did we want pictures? he asked.

Sure, I responded and immediately set forth to line up my cast of characters.

Photo Editor John Badman, whose sense about such things I’ve never questioned, immediately wanted to know if we had the OK to get inside the school. “I’m not driving 30 minutes if I don’t have to,” the gas-wary shutterbug proclaimed. He’d been stung before on such assignments.

A quick call to the school proved him out. Schools are more skittish about publicity these days, and the principal was hesitant to give us the OK unless we had the superintendent’s permission. The school secretary said she’d call me back.

I waited 10 or 15 minutes, and Badman was calling back, wanting to know what to do. I assured him I was working on it. He had no time to spare if he was going to drive to Jersey.

I waited a while longer and Badman was back on the phone, now telling me he was already at the school and was not making headway.

“Call the superintendent!” he barked.

Bee nice, John, I thought.

Even as I was talking to him, reporter Laura Griffith was doing what I had asked her to do. She was on the phone with school district headquarters asking to speak to the superintendent, Colleen Legge, who as it turns out was gone on Tuesday.

“Ask for Ken Schell!” I frantically said to her, thinking about next-in-line administrators.

Laura worked her magic and got the district office to call the school. As I called Badman with the news I could hear the principal in the background, talking to him at the same time, relaying virtually the same message. We got in, got our pictures and, as it turns out, a really good story.

It took me longer to transcribe this anecdote than it did for the actual story to transpire. I sincerely do appreciate the folks at Delhi School — and the district — for putting up with us.

In these days of confidentiality and concern, schools are more wary than ever about opening their doors to a photographer. They are public places, but no one, including media, can just waltz in unannounced. Still, such policy only makes our job more difficult and answers the question of why we don’t do more school stories and photos.

Sometimes the setup of a story is as interesting as the story itself. We managed to avoid getting stung this time. But there will always “bee” tomorrow.

The old children’s game “duck, duck, goose” has nothing on the real-life scenes that have played out before me three times in the past month.

The first time I was driving through the heart of the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville campus when I had to stop for a pair of geese and their goslings marching across Circle Drive. It was a great sight, first the mama, then four or five babies, then the dad, following in the wake.

In recent years, SIUE has had more than its share of adventures with geese and the droppings they leave behind, so the sighting there was not terribly unexpected. Still, it was cute.

Then came this past Saturday, in Wood River. I was just crossing the Phoebe Goldberg overpass heading west toward Alton. It was early and traffic was not a factor, but in the distance I could see that a pickup truck had stopped in the opposite lanes of Route 143, in front of the Bel-Air Motel.

As I got nearer I could see a passenger in the truck had gotten out to guard a group of ducks as they crossed from north to south, heading in the direction of the motel, perhaps to sleep off a long night. I counted a mama, at least three babies and one concerned citizen.

About 12 hours later, I encountered an amazingly similar scene as I pulled into the American Legion in Edwardsville, en route to a wedding reception. There on the Legion driveway was another mother duck, leading her little ones to the opposite shore.

All this waterfowl misadventure just quacked me up.

Rarely do I get to enjoy such sights, but here I did three times in a month and twice in a day. I guess it was nature’s way of telling me that all is not so bad in the world.

I’ve had a lot of stories fall on me through the years.

Some “fell” in the sense that they fell apart. A few others fell on my head, the result of not paying proper attention.

But last week, one of the really interesting stories I’ve ever dealt with fell in my lap — twice.

It started on Tuesday, the day after staff writer Linda Weller reported on a shooting incident Sunday in the 1500 block of Mack Street in Alton. Knowing of our interest in the story, Police Chief Chris Sullivan stopped by the office that day to hand me a copy of a DVD. Some time back, we told the chief of our new ability to broadcast video on our Web site. Anytime he had surveillance footage or crime scene footage, we told him, The Telegraph could help get the word and images to the public via a whole new medium.

What Sullivan gave me, however, was far more than I bargained, and it bordered on the unreal. It was a home video of a fistfight-turned-gunfight that was, in the days that followed, the talk of the town — and viewed around the world. The fight was organized to settle a feud, as was the filming, but the gunfight that broke out at the end of the footage, seemed to just happen. Fortunately it was not fatal, but the MAC-10 semiautomatic gun at the center of the event continues to draw attention.

For me, the story wasn’t over, even after we wrote about the video. Last Friday, a 17-year-old man at the center of the events, Bryon Blake, called the newsroom to tell us he wanted to get his side of the story on record prior to turning himself in. Police had been looking for him since that Sunday. I just happened to be the one to take the call.

The half hour that followed was a blur — a series of calls to me from Blake about everything from the shooting to his life growing up to the reason he dropped out of Alton High School. He would talk a while, ask me a lot of questions, hang up, think of something else and call me again. After his last call, he said he would be calling me again. Instead, within the hour he was turning himself in at Madison County Jail.

I wrote a detailed story about the conversation that ran Saturday. Here, I’m leaving out some of the facts just to move the tale along. The police and prosecutor’s office and a judge are now going to have to separate the fact from fiction. More charges are being contemplated so this story is far from over.

We’ll see which way the rest of this story “falls” and whether or not any of it will fall toward me.

Somehow it always seems to.