Cat Walk
The kitties–Rusty and Nipper–and I tried to go for a walk the other day–not a real big success in any terms that I might use in a family paper. See, I had been taking them, intermittently, to yoga on Saturday mornings, not when it was too cold for any of us to be out, not when it was so miserable...
Local Highlights
Step right up ! Bargains galore ! OOPS. Cover everything. Garage Sale weekend had its moments–some of them rather damp. Lots of stuff out there to be checked out, maybe bargained over. Lots of evidence of families outgrowing all sorts of things. Lots of families growing into new fashions and looking for a bargain or two. Clothes…toys… appliances…you name it,...
Aww… Take A Hike Folks
The 28th Annual Portage County Park District Foundation Awards Dinner and Auction on April 25, was a full-grown success. The evening featured a celebration of fifty years of the county’s original park, Towner’s Woods –and its not-well-known-enough features of a Hopewell Indian Burial Ground, a historic Railroad Switch Tower, a pristine Glacial Kettle Hole Lake, woodlands, wetlands and meadows....
April Showers….?
Nothing was said about April snows, was it? Earth Day coming up on the 22nd is about it for celebrations this month but maybe someone can rustle up a snow sculpture contest. Heaven only knows that after having the warmest March ever recorded (since dinosaur days when nothing was being recorded anyway) and one of the latest cold snaps anyone...
Cat Walk
Y’ know there’s a saying that goes, “No good deed goes unpunished.”--mostly meant in fun when things seem to go wrong, but sometimes more true than we’d like to believe. I decided to try giving the kittens, Rusty and Nipper, (more like CATS now, they’ve been growing) a little treat by letting them come outside with me. They’ve been hanging...
Coming or Going??
What’s that old one about March ? Comes “ in like a lion and out like a lamb” ? Or is it “comes in like a lamb and out like a lion”? Which was it that we got this time? The OFA (Old Farmer’s Almanac) closed out its entries on March with a saying that seems to have straddled the differences...
Shop Til You… What???
Well, here we are at All Fools’ Day and I’m not even talking about politics–not yet, but the primaries are coming; are you registered? Never mind. I’m talking about shopping today. Shopping for anything is practically a contact sport now-a-days. One lunch group at church recently got onto the topic of prom dresses…and young persons’ fashions in general. We were...
Mad Dogs and Englishmen
The saying goes that only, “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.” (This was a remark from colonial times when the British Empire was spreading into tropical lands where they had no climatological experience at all and besides that, they were sure to be sending other, lesser locals out into the sun to do work and...
Annoying? …. “To a T”
This is high on my list of recent rants. We are all starting to sound like Brits–and not the upper crust, Oxford & Cambridge near-royal types either. I blame it on the Beatles. They showed up here and were followed by hordes of others in the same genre–not that I object to the music, for Pete’s sake, but their...
On The Road Again
The Road Apple Roubaix has come and gone once more, and left us with memories of probably the most “spring like” day yet. Makes one think that the Vernal Equinox might not be just a fig newton of our imaginations. Beautiful morning to be out riding, and lots of the riders seemed to be having a fine time and...
Secret Recipe
I’m here to tell you how to lose twenty pounds–give or take an ounce or two–in one fell swoop…or maybe it was when the swoops fell…whaever. I’ve been following some of the items that have been popping up on FB for the last few months, items about losing weight ( Is somebody out there trying to send me a message?)...
Olym-past… and none too soon
Okay, now I can actually get something done…or not. I had forgotten how enticing it can be to watch superior athletes do their thing. The summer Olympics were far away and this was a whole new venue, with challenges we don’t often see around here–this year being “the exception that proves the rule.” Speaking as one who has been wrapping...
Definitely Uphill
Whoa !!! The Olympics certainly have some MAJOR MOMENTS ! Lindsey Vonn and her ill-fated return to the Women’s Downhill, for instance. What a thing ! She wipes out her knee, her Achilles tendon anyway; she vows to go back at it; and she does, then lucks into a fracture and gets helicoptered away. We’re talking drama here, friends. Also...
PG-13?
As I have mentioned before, somebody out there in ComputerLand.Internet thinks that my name is REALLY Ivan and, therefore, I must be interested in “guy things” and messages. This means that I get some pretty interesting messages in my SPAM pages (there are lots of them); some having to do with topics like ED (erectile disfunction) ( Did that...
What’s Cookin’
So I am putting together my piece on the meeting of the Twentieth Century Club of Garrettsville, when all sorts of related topics and events just happened to come up. Karma, I guess. First was an article in The Week, a news magazine which I enjoy, partly because it has some off-beat items once in a while. Such as the...
Bbbbrrrrrrrrrr
Well, here we are again. We definitely DO NOT need Greenland. We’ve already got the weather and claiming anything else would be a pile of brown stuff–or white stuff, as the case may be. Anyone who’s not seeing climate change as a real thing, obviously does not have a real firm grip on reality. Hotter summers, colder winters–hmmm, what’s that...
J-E-LL-O
Don’t try this at home. Are you seeing all of the latest hype about the “jello trick” ? It has replaced the “Pink salt trick” online and all over as the latest means of reducing one’s overabundance of avoirdupois (fat of one sort or another, in various locations) . If one just watches the pitch for these products, one might...
Signs and Portents
Christmas trees abandoned on the “devil strip”. Wrappings and tinsel in the weekly trash pick-ups. Peppermint and/or chocolate overload. But the surest sign that Yuletide has truly passed is the appearance of Valentine's Day promotions on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Keep your eyes open for the Easter Bunny, he’s up next. And, of course, every news outlet is offering up...
Welcome To Nuuk
What? You didn’t know that Nuuk is the principal settlement in Greenland,( a province of Denmark in the Western hemisphere)? Have you happened to notice how very much we seem to be resembling that particular location just lately? But then, of course, the prognosticators are teasing us with follow-up forecasts ranging up into the fifties some time later this...
Sing We Now of Christmas
The songs will rise on December 21 at three o’clock in the Garrettsville United Methodist Church, set on the air by the Chancel Choir, the three handbell ensembles and the interpretive narrators telling the story of “Glory to the Newborn King–Celebrating the Light of Christmas”. This outpouring of seasonal praise will incorporate biblical readings, familiar tunes and themes, in...
How Now, Brown Cow
Countryside Veterinary Services keeping you in good health? Well, yes, but dogs and cats are getting even more premium care at the Garrettsville outpost since they have secured a full time veterinarian to offer complete ,non-surgical care at their facility. Dr. Lori Cavalcanti (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine)now joins Matilde, Ingrid, Deidra (vet techs), Cheryl and Alisha(client care specialists) and the...
Holiday Howlers
No. I am not communicating with owls, just miscellaneous rants for the season. I have been saving up a number of “pet peeves” to air out when everyone is in a better mood, comparatively speaking. Take a break from moaning and groaning about the prices and the crowds and the goods available and let me complain about something altogether...
Salt of The Earth?
Visited the Himalayas lately? Lost tons (!) of weight? Paid ANY attention to the latest in food(!) fads online? Got the recipe? A person can hardly open up any random commercial site without seeing somebody urging you to LOSE pounds and POUNDS and POUNDS of ugly, unwanted FAT. And how do you do this, you say. Well, it’s the Pink Salt Trick, of...
(OFA) Old Farmers’ Almanac
The Daylight Savings Time switchover has not often been so noticeable …for me anyway. Probably because of the looooong autumn (bordering on summer, really), the early evenings have seemed quite abrupt. Mornings, of course, are lighter–I do not have to use my flashlights as much--though I still do–and I trust that folks can see me coming better than had...
(OFA) Old Farmers’ Almanac
Done with All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, done with Election Day, done with the Full Beaver Moon (Didn’t see them out celebrating), daylight has been saved once more…what else is on our plate for November? We already did “Clock hands spin, let’s sleep in! Snowfalls begin and frost nips your skin”. Well, to further quote the OFA, “Veterans deserve...
Candy, And Then Some
Gotta get me a clicker/counter gadget so that I can have an accurate reckoning of how many trick-or-treaters that show up at my porch. The guess this time was somewhere around two hundred or so. Other estimates around town were pushing for three hundred–not exactly a surprise, since most other communities around did their ”beggars night”, as it is...
Hello Again
Let’s get down to brass tacks. I am, to put it politely, unreliable. Gimme a week off and, “Lo, and Behold !” I’ll take whatever the traffic will bear–one week, two weeks, whatever. The danger is, will anyone even notice and say, “Whatever happened to that non-sport columnist that wrote about odd stuff from the almanac and such? Who...
Rusty…
The new boarder seems to be settling in just fine. "Rusty" the light orange kitten , newly acquired, is eating just fine, is being prime kitten-like in behavior so far...cute, cute, cute. He follows me, or anybody, really. I heard that he followed the postal worker the other morning...also somebody walking home from the Y. He's getting to be...
The Cat’s Meow
Well, maybe. We have a new prospective Porch Kitty. Rusty (not a serious automotive epizootic but a light orange mini-kitty) has arrived. He is currently exploring the territory; the porch itself and the front steps pretty-much define it so far but the veteran Porch Kitty, SunnyBoy, has not been exactly a Welcome Wagon representative. There were plenty o’ low growls...
Keep The Change
The on-line spoofers are at it again. Second or third call this week letting me know that I have won fabulous sums of money, if I will just call back to this number. What the number is, I cannot really tell because the caller either speaks so fast that their words (numbers) are unintelligible or their whole message is...
