CHEERS: to the staff and management of Evergreen Valley Nursing Home, which celebrated National Nursing Home Week by holding a formal dinner for residents and their families and friends. The staff dressed in bow ties and served a special menu for the occasion. A disc jockey was hired and played music from the '40s and '50s. A photographer was on hand for family pictures. Some staff members worked from 7 in the morning until 8:30 at night to make sure the affair lived up to promise. Residents were left with the distinct impression that members of the staff truly enjoy their jobs, as we all hope they do. The entire presentation was a cut above.

While Cheers and Jeers remains one of the best-read sections of the newspaper, we occasionally get jeered, ourselves, for focusing attention on the minutia of local daily life. We should instead be concentrating on the bigger issues, critics say. Who knows -- maybe they're right. The heavy readership tells us there's an interest in the smaller matters, however. Along those lines we offer a:

JEERS: to a driver on Miller Street in Plattsburgh last week who pulled a beauty -- a small beauty. The driver was headed south, approaching the Post Office, behind the Press-Republican. A street sweeper was lumbering along in front of him, about to sweep beside the curb on the east side of the street, right across from the Post Office. That's a section of the block where cars are almost always parked while patrons run in to take care of their mail business. Miraculously, this time, as the street sweeper approached, there were no cars parked there -- the entire length of the curbside could have been cleaned out. Except, this impatient driver swung around past the sweeper and parked right in the middle of the parking section, meaning the sweeper had to miss practically the entire area. All right, having part of the street go unswept isn't going to start any wars or stop any clocks. But you have to wonder why the driver couldn't see what was going on and just wait another 30 seconds until the sweeper had completed its pass.

CHEERS: to honesty, which never goes out of style and never fails to deserve a mention. A woman reported to us that she had inadvertently left her purse at the Burger King at Skyway in Plattsburgh. When she realized what she'd done, she sped back to the outlet, hoping but not expecting to retrieve the lost goods. To her delight, "a man in a black shirt" had turned it in to the office, all contents intact. We hear a lot of these stories. In a time in which treachery and dishonesty are becoming the order of the day, we never hear too many.