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The End

O.K.  So I want to invite everyone to the second annual M-O-M / T-A-T (Machine -O-Mania / Touch-A-Truck) coming up--rain or shine-- on Sunday, May 22 from 10:00 to 2:00 at J. A. Garfield H.S.; admission: adults--$5.00, kids--$3.00. It’s a fund-raiser for the Garfield Academic Challenge team, the QuizMasters, and gives kids of all ages a chance to see...

Law & Government

Many friends and neighbors are talking about drilling leases.  I have had several clients bring them to me and have had dozens of people ask in general terms what they should say.  My best advice is to get an attorney and ask him or her to review your lease.  Even before you speak to an attorney, however, here are...

Going, Going, Gone!

Well, going to an auction is often an adventure.  This last one, though, was more than I had bargained for. First of all, it was being held at what must, surely, have been the last--or nearly the last--farm in Aurora.  I saw a sign --kind of faded--that seemed to indicate that this was once the location of a working sugarbush...

Horticultural Report—Summer, 2017

Well, the ferns and the jack-in-the-pulpits were riotous this year and some even had to have some of their fronds evicted from the cozy jungle which they had created. There was green stuff everywhere! And moss!? The water feature/rock with a modest up-spout of gurgling liquid is burbling away but the water is encouraging a bumper growth of really...

No Computer! Received via email — Thank Goodness!

So…the lightning storm took out the computers—desk top, laptop, probably the remote control for the alarm clock, for all I know—and the Villager deadline is looming on Monday.  What  to do?  What to do? The schedule is filling up : The computer guru who is working on the problem will be arriving with his bag of magic spells and incantations,(...

How’s your Easter Bonnet look with snow on it?

Good Grief!  Polar Fleece and long johns, peeps and bunnies with frost on their little noses…er…beaks…er …whatever.  Deep frozen chocolate eggs and jelly beans, rock-hard marshmallow anything.  How crazy has this season been so far?  This is Spring from the old days, the ones where hardy ancestors walked two miles to school every day, uphill both ways, rain or...

Caution ~ Auction!

The Kiko folks have taken to putting up signs of this nature along roads where one of their commercial activities is going on, and with good reason.  These secondary highways are plenty full of just plain drivers, let alone the avid auction-goers looking for a place to park--without sliding into a ditch or quicksand (as I found to my...

The machines are out to get me!

Does a computer count as a machine or a device? Matters not, they’re after me. So I’m sitting at the computer typing away at my much-anticipated column for this week, when, out of the blue—or whatever color cyberspace is nowadays—the screen went black (that color I know) and totally unresponsive. I wiggled and jiggled various plugs and...

This is Getting OLD

Don’t you just every so often look out the window or open the door or read the weather forecast and feel like the little boy  on the  internet the other day?  The little guy must have been about four years old, bundled up to a fare-thee-well in mittens, hat , snowsuit and he was out shoveling snow, clearing the...

Party On!

So...there’s this big birthday party at my house, see...first big event here since Christmas, see...significant birthday, see.  Oy, oy, oy...such a party!So, the party is to be utilizing the park-like backyard and the covered porch and the custom deck and the flagstone patio and the flood-lit arbor (I told the local photographer, Ronda Brady, that the place was “wedding...

Going Batty!

So...my question is, if bats (Myotis lucifugus--lucifugus means “flees the light”) are supposed to have such a great echolocation system in their little heads where they emit sounds and then decipher the rebounding sound waves to avoid obstacles and catch their dinner, why can’t they figure out the fact that my front door is wide open so they can...

Choosing The Right Caregiver

As medical science continues to find ways to help Americans live longer, it also requires us to examine some of the challenges of people living longer lives. The biggest, from both an emotional and financial point of view, may be providing ongoing care for a disabled adult. By the numbers According to the Family Caregivers Alliance National Center on Caregiving, 34...

Spring Thaw?

Was that it?  The Spring Thaw...New Year’s Day was the whole thing?  When the subject comes up for the rest of the season we get to say, “ Been there. Done that.”  Doesn’t seem right somehow.  We ought to get a chance to get out and wash cars or something; mine is middling filthy--salt-splash and  mud-luscious décor bumper to...

Notes From The Vineyard

It’s been a good year, actually, let me rephrase that – it’s been a GREAT year! Sure, this year has definitely put up a good fight for us... we’ve survived some bad economic times, we’ve dealt with a loss of crop from a late freeze last year, we’ve dealt with losses of loved ones this year but as I...

Fair Season

So here we are in the Fun Season...the Fair Season. Everyone comes up with a reason to promote hot grease and sno cones and enough sugar to sink the island of Puerto Rico. On any given weekend one can drive across the Buckeye State and catch a whiff of the abovementioned gastronomic outrages at nearly every turn....

‘Tis the Season?!

“Tis the season! For just about everything, I guess.  The other day, a container of blueberries and two squash magically appeared on my front porch sitting on some literature from the Jehovah’s Witnesses or some other well-meaning group and next to the comic strip umbrella from the AB-J.  Tasty stuff!  Then the model neighbors on the corner (You know who...

That was a fine old time!

That was a fine old time! Well, if you weren’t trying to get anyplace in a hurry, that is.  The annual Garrettsville community garage/yard/porch sale seems to have attracted quite a crowd for most of the weekend.  Some of the narrower thoroughfares were a challenge for those just trying to get into their own driveways.  Down Park Ave. some savvy...

Welllllll…..

No flies on us last weekend.  The place was hoppin’.  Basketball games all over the place; Geauga Theater opened its holiday run of “It’s A Wonderful Life”; Santa and his clones--you know they’re all the REAL Santa wherever they are--were breakfasting and eating pizza and just chatting with the younger set at several venues ‘round and about; the Home...

Notes From The Vineyard

2011... wow – I can’t believe it! Where did 2010 go? Oh well... now that 2011 is here, it is time for me to get started on all of my exciting plans for this year and not dwell on last year. I know that 2011 is going to fly by just as fast so I am ready to start...

It’s Navy Week

Avast, me hearties…and a “Yankee Doodle” doo to you! It’s Navy Week.  It’s Navy Week and it’s being observed in Boston by the first sailing of the oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy, the U.S.S. Constitution--“Old Ironsides”-- since 1997 (It’s been tugged to a few places but this is the first time under its own sail power since its...

File Under…

File under “Sorry we missed this one.” New Years celebrators in London this New Year’s Eve were treated to  an interesting array of flavored fun-type  festivity-promoters.  Indeed! There was banana-flavored confetti, there were orange-scented bubbles, peach-flavored snow, for starters.  Mercy!  So who first checked out this stuff?   Somebody just stuck out his/her tongue   and lapped up a healthy (?)...

Memories of Christmas Past

Isn’t it funny how a smell can instantly take you back to a time and a place where you first experienced it? For me, when I smell crayons, I’m six years old, and back-to-school supply shopping. My mom would take me and my platoon of siblings to Kmart, long before the invention of the world’s largest retailer. There we’d...

Election Red, White and Blues

Can we please have a rest until closer to November? Good Grief!  It got so that I was seriously thinking of just letting the phone ring--I never do that--until the machine picked up or the caller got tired--no caller I.D. here, Chatty Kathy, no screening of calls.  In the end, I did not do that; I’m always worried that I...

Gone, But NOT Forgotten

Gone, but not forgotten…that’s my Bob, a classic over-achiever. How he became afflicted with liver disease--he wasn’t much of a drinker—is still a mystery to me, but he did use up what were left of his nine lives trying to fight it off.  Not that he wasn’t apt to milk any situation for all it was worth to get what...

Law & Government

The primary election is over. Except for the Presidential campaign, some of you may not have known there were elections. Let’s be honest. Many of us realized for the first time at the poll that we had LOTS of decisions to make. For those of us who voted a partisan ballot, whether Democrat or Republican, we voted for several...

Quick, check the calendar! Is it winter yet?

Wholeeee Snowleee!  When the real thing hits, It’s gonna be “Bessie bar the doors!” if this is just the preview.  Wouldn’t you know that this exercise in inclemency--weather division--happens in the year that the powers-that-be down in Columbus, where the sun never sets, have decreed that there will be only three snow days.  Kiss the early end of school...

Spring Things

How’re you liking Spring so far? Yes, indeedy, the official astronomical beginning of Spring was on Wednesday, March 20 at 7:02, EDT ( Or 11:02, UTC).  Actually, I lied; according to the Farmer’s Almanac there is no “official” start to any of the seasons.  That all depends upon the climate of an individual country.  It IS, of course, the Vernal...

The Big One

And speaking of what’s happenin’ in 2017.... Make your reservations NOW for Beatrice, Nebraska—it’s in Gage County, in case you were wondering—to get the best look at “the Big One” as the astronomer-types are calling it—a 2.35 minute totality of the complete solar eclipse, being brought to us here in the United States at 11:37 a.m. (CDT) on...

I’m Doomed

I know; this may not be news to some but I was sort of hoping to avoid a swift descent to the fiery furnace for another decade or so, maybe more if I kept moving and eating enough  dark chocolate. This assessment has been confirmed by finding in yet another slick magazine in my too-wide assortment of subscription reading material(...

Garden Fun…

So… I’m out playing caretaker here at the Manse and I’m deciding that what we’re running at this location is the animal equivalent of the food court at the mall when a whole cohort of teenagers--boys mostly--shows up to attempt to fill their hollow legs. The “water feature” is bubbling its little heart out and any creature passing by can...

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