Season’s Greetings!
Looks like it’s well and truly winter, even though, astronomically speaking, we’ve got to wait until December 21 to be legit. Weather adventures already! Power went out Friday morning somewhere around 3:00 a.m.--the increasing chill in the house woke me up--and stayed out until about 9:30 a.m. Coulda been worse : Ohio Edison told me when I...
Is it Spring yet?
Yeah, yeah, I know, we’re not quite there yet, but I can hardly wait. Know why? Thereby hangs a tale. A small but intrepid group showed up for the first annual (?) Make A Difference Day work event on Saturday, October 27. Not exactly surprising, since it was plenty chilly and plenty rainy and not looking like your standard “Hey,...
Biscuits and Beyond
All right! Consider yourself warned. If you missed the Chicken and Biscuits Extravaganza at the Garrettsville United Methodist Church last week, you will have another chance in the future, because it got such a good reception that there will likely be a rematch and the dessert table will feature a Greatest Hits tour with...
A Pretty Fair Day
Have I got a deal for you! IBM (Irresponsible Bad Mamma) cat had kittens on the back step, in a specially-designated box—with lining and cover, and just as the little mites were beginning to open their little eyes, she hauled them off somewhere unknown and they were not seen or heard from again. End of story? Not on your tintype! I...
Party Central
There’s got to be a time limit of some sort on Spring Cleaning. I just finished mine…in time for Party Central in the neighborhood. Whoo-whoo! Luckily, the rain held off until after the throngs had ebbed and the clean-up crew was packing up the detritus left by the crowds in attendance. Said crowds were able to sit on chairs that...
Deal Of A Lifetime
Such a deal I had for you! Could have had ‘em just like that. But no, nobody stepped up to get in on the giveaway. Ask me nice and maybe arrangements can be made. Bargains! Freebies! They’ll be going fast, lemme tell ya. What’s that? Some timid, unadventurous soul asks what the hubbub is about. What’s being given away? Well,...
Garrettsville Summerfest Wrap-Up
The farmer in the dell. The farmer in the dell. Hi-ho the dairy-o. The farmer in the dell! The definition of the word “dell”—a small, secluded valley or glen (There’s another problematic word), usually a wooded one—isn’t exactly fitting here, but if we can idiosyncratically interpret it to mean “in Garrettsville for the parade”, it was a “dell of a...
Casey At The Bat
Er…actually, it was Grimmy—Grimalkin, to be more formal—who was , so to speak, “at the bat”, and I don’t mean any kind of ballgame, base or soft. No, no it was a real bat, die Fledermaus, as Richard Wagner put it, and it was in my shoe (Plenty of room in there). Grimmy was after a bat. And here’s...
April Showers…Spring Flowers…
“The flowers that bloom in the Spring—Tra-La!”…or words to that effect. At least some of the bulbs and roots that I have planted around here did not fall prey to the squirrels’ depredations during the rather severe—for squirrels, at least—winter we have only lately emerged from. There are blossoms that I don’t recognize from last year and some that do...
Favorite Son
This commonly-used political term came to mind the other day when my mom sent me a clipping from our local newspaper back in Wellington (Lorain County, west of here on St. Rtes. 58 & 18), either the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram or the Wellington Enterprise—I really didn’t check. In politics, the term usually refers to an up-and-coming sort that has aspirations...
Yes Virginia, There Really Is A Spring
So.... I’m walking along early in the morning now and there are more and more bird sounds out there to be heard. During the winter there are always a few--cardinals, goldfinches, the ever-present sparrows, miscellaneous die-hards who have memorized the locations of every birdfeeder within several hundred yards. You also get the occasional Wrong Way Corrigan who wandered here...
It Must Be Spring!
Must be Spring, the litterbugs are out in their cars—at least I assume they’re not the type to be out walking to enjoy the benefits of nature—and they’re pitching trash out of the windows of said vehicles. I picked up, I think it was, six cans on my way around the village in the morning. ( This is all...
About The Other Chicks…
And about the other chicks…. The Sports Illustrated “swimsuit issue” recently came. A subscriber may choose to skip that issue—for ethical reasons or whatever—but I choose not to (I have no ethics that tender anyway) because I send it to my brother-in-law, a nurse and a fireman, both at once, who then is able to celebrate his birthday with the...
Missing The Chicks
I miss the chicks. Nothing to do with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; that’s got more hot chicks than a KFC convention. No, I mean real, live “Peeps”, the little , fluffy yellow (and sometimes other miscellaneous colors, especially if they’re just on the edge of getting real feathers) fuzzies that used to occasionally appear under the auspices of Stark...
A Load Off My Mind
Well, that’s a load off my mind! There was a piece in the AB-J and there have been subsequent mentions on NPR and even online about the possibility of a new “snack sensation” to be known as “lady Doritos”. Apparently, a clueless CEO at overeating icon, Pepsico, said in a podcast that women, unlike men, don’t like to lick their...
Don’t Look Now
Don’t look now, but the crazy stuff is still out there…and I don’t mean snow. That fickle pair, Punxsutawney Phil and Buckeye Chuck have predicted six more weeks of winter, so it’s pretty “old hat” by now ( a phrase that has transitioned from meaning something fairly pornographic in the 1700’s to just being considered a slangy way of...
Random Observations
A Word to the Wise…. There’s a new restaurant –reported on in The New Yorker—that you might want to think twice about patronizing this month (or any other month, if you ask me ). It’s in Paris, for one thing, not exactly on our regular circuit of dining experiences (anyplace over twenty miles away seldom makes the cut), but...
Kool Porch Kitties
Well, it had to happen. The porch kitties now have a fan base. Can a world tour be far behind? As you may have noticed, it’s been pretty d----d cold outside lately. And despite the heated, insulated luxury boxes on the front porch for the cats, there were some temperature-related issues confronting me and the denizens of the aforementioned boxes,...
Cool Critters
The porch kitties seem to have rediscovered the charms of the heated kitty condos available to them here at the manse. I now have three regulars to greet me in the morning (At about 6:00a.m., so you know what the temperature has been like) when they get their breakfast. There’s I.B.M.—Irresponsibly Bad Mamma, Moppet (named like a cow we...
Ain’t That The Way
Ain’t that just the way…. There I am, driving home from a place that I’ve never been before, after dark, with directions quite different from the ones that got me there, those, thankfully, having been researched by an usher at church (during the service?); Divine Providence all the way, considering the amount of construction going on in the neighborhood—potholes anyone?...
Haunts At Home
With Halloween coming up and all, I think that I’ll have to admit that I think that the house seems to be haunted. Not just by the bats who make periodic appearances (Though not—can I hear some knocking on wood out there—just lately) thupp-thupping around inside the place, from living room to dining room to kitchen and...
The Return of Champ
“Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.” With apologies to Robert Louis Stevenson, I believe that we can remove the sea from consideration in this case (Camp Creek down behind the back yard hardly qualifies as anything like “the bounding main.” It doesn’t even come up to the level of Lake Erie.),...
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...
Lights Out!
And speaking of eclipses…. Isn’t everyone? It’s all over the place, and with pretty good reason, since it’s been quite some time—38 years isn’t it—since the last total eclipse of the sun was visible over significant portions of the United States. It’s also the first since 1918 to be visible from coast to coast, AND the first since 1776 to...
The Wheels On The Bus… Part III
And now, as the sun sets slowly in the West…. End of competition and return to God’s country (Garrettsville, in case you didn’t recognize the description). The contests, across so many topics and fields, illuminated our strong points and our areas ripe for improvement. All team members made some critical contributions—math, nineteenth century literature, scientific notation, historical events, whatever—at some...
The Wheels On The Bus…
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go…. Wait! We’re not moving. So that was one part of the saga. Wait until you hear the rest of it. Our intrepid band of Quiz Masters (James A. Garfield’s Academic Challenge team) was off to...
Flipped WHAT Bird?!?!
All of a sudden the avian population seems to be catching my attention. First it was the “sitting duck” mamma down at the Rite Aid in the landscape mulch, then it was the geese and goslings, duck and ducklings down on the creek behind the house, then it was the blue heron below the dam, which has been replaced...
That Red Buckeye Is A Show Off!
My Red Buckeye is showing off this year—full of blossoms and looking like it ought to be the guest star at the Home & Flower Show. Stop in some time and take a look. And if you’re walking around the estate, say “Hello” to the critter who seems to me to be the one munching up my...
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...
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...
