Animators beware

                                    what happens when the gremlins take over
                              (you  can also run this full screen, it shows up better)

When I got up this morning (6WS)

It was 31 degrees
This is not necessary
I have filed a letter of complaint
with the proper authorities

Can anyone read here today

Is anyone else having trouble reading here?  Someone just emailed me to say they were having trouble with the RSS feed (of which i know nothing)...and if you can read here, just let me know...

Color Me 13

yellow
yellow orange
orange red
red
reddish purple
purple
purple blue
blue
bluish green
greenish blue
green
greenish yellow
yellow

THURSDAY THIRTEEN

never count the old tree out--part 2

a year ago last october I posted  pictures of our old apple tree in the back field:

the tree had rescued itself from firewood status by suddenly sprouting leaves--and eventually produced two apples.

today I went out to take a look at the tree, and found this:

I'd say, by and large, it's doing quite well for an old lady tree,
in spite of the sags and wrinkles and bits falling off here and there,
And maybe, come this October, there will be apples again.

how to spend a winter day (6WS)

If I had to go to that desert island...boom box in hand...

1. Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam)
2. Willie Nelson
3. The Be Good Tanyas
4. Iris Dement
5. Richard Thompson
6. Dire Straits
7. David Gray
8, James Taylor
9. Bonnie Raitt
10. Highwaymen
11. Bob Seger
12. Joan Baez
13. Joni Mitchell


THURSDAY THIRTEEN

Day late, as usual

13 ways to start the season


1. find the mower
2. find the book that tells you how to start it
3. find the gas can
4. scour the lawn for last years tools
5. prune apple trees
6. build compost bins
7. move compost
8. mow
9. mulch
10. prune what should have been pruned in March
11. hook up outside hose (yessss!)
12. apologize to the cat for the bath
13. admire



Thursday Thirteen

Spring poem

Green

While you were away

the seasons passed

from dark to light:

leaves fell, snow fell.

Now the fruit trees

bloom with rare abundance

as if they knew

of your return

and so rejoice.

More than once your shadow

fell across my dreams:

this was, after all,

the place you started from.

The seasons changed.

Now green again

and fruitful

I, too, rejoice.     

spelling--ruminations and an apology

The English language is filled with spelling traps (I often wonder about other languages, but I KNOW this one for sure) that we spend most of our lives navigating like mine fields.  It doesn't help that we now have elf-sized keyboards to turn even decent spellers into typo kings.

Some words are spelled the way they sound, and some are spelled very very strangely: brougham, trough, Worcestershire,  sough,  Wednesday...

The root of the problem is genetic: we are born with the spelling gene either intact, or with it just wandering around out there making cute typos and errors that the good spellers pounce on, endlessly.  I am cursed (some would say) with the Good Spelling Gene.  It's not pretty, trust me.

Sometimes I think we exist just to annoy the rest of the world,  and our penance is to always come in first in those horrible Spelling Bees (do they even have those now?) and sometimes make it all the way to the semi finals and the final finals, only to be defeated by some snip called Marcy who rips out the proper spelling for "discotheque" and you, who have never seen it in print, spell it as 'discoteque" and the audience "awwww" resonates in your ears for the next hour...

Our life long curse is to see words spelled (spelt) badly and wildly, and are unable or unwilling to correct what we see.  Ugly, I tell ya. Ugly.  With the advent of Tablets, teeny keyboards,  people who think they can touch type but can't,  people who touch type and shouldn't, and a new wave of phonitic speling (as someone said, "you can figure it out, right?") and Spell-Check that threatens to undermine even the Spelling Bee proponents, and I do begin to wonder, why bother.  I can figure it out, right?





(but I don't want to...)

The Gentle Slap in the Face (6WS)

When you go into a store--thrift shop, used furniture,  etc--and discover that the mixer/serving dishes/utensils you bought as a bride have now been upgraded to "Vintage".

When an old classmate recognizes you and you not only have no idea who he/she is (even when they introduce themselves) and you realize that  he/she thinks you're someone else...even when you introduce yourself back, and they say, "no you're not"--and now you are suddenly in a world of alternate universes

The books you loved as a child are now in the category online of  "collector's items"

Everyone you went to school with, were a bridesmaid for, or you threw baby showers for, is a grandparent.  They are suddenly old.   Too.

This is charming

The new memory

As we get older our memory becomes a strange and wondrous experience. Today I was once more confronted, for some reason, with what appears to be a periodic 'cleansing" by Google to make sure we are all where we should be and not someone else.  When this happens I quietly go to pieces, because I know a terrible thing is going to happen.

You see, I have about 80 skillion email addies at Yahoo, and have over the years been adding and removing them as the tides turn and the weather changes.

One of them I use in here.

Easy, right?  heh

I also have two email addresses for Google.  One of them I use in here.

When I am asked, on occasion, to sign in rather than just hit the button and begin posting,  the panic starts to prickle down my spine.  Which one oh my which one is it...

So I dab at one, and it says, 'your  password was changed three months ago. is this true?" and they ask me to verify it. [see paragraph 2.]  If you hit the wrong one you are asked to reset your password and the first time it went swimmingly until I was asked to sign in here with it and  realized that I had forgotten to write it down...

Finally I found one that would work, after being told repeatedly that Google now keeps track of your passwords and you cannot, simply cannot use that again, its already in use on another account.   It gets better.

After carefully writing this down and having it approved you are asked to present a verification email address in case of lord alone knows what,  which means another search for another yahoo address and another password and finally, an hour later and (should have been a five minute event) i have a new password, and this time I took a screen shot and saved it in my photo program...

I just hope I can remember what name I used to save it under.

Frozen Lakes

   The first heavy autumn rain soon became a week-long torrent, and then two more unexpected weeks of it; a steady numbing downpour that invaded their souls, filling the otherwise silent rooms with the sound of  a river rushing through a ravine.  Leaving the house was nearly impossible--Katy said it was like swimming through a waterfall, the radio reminding anyone listening to head for higher ground, as the autumn floods were rampant and getting worse as streams further north began to rise and join the swollen rivers in the valleys that surrounded them.   

   After the power went out on the first weekend they slowly began to revert to a rhythm much like that of their not so distant ancestors--eat, tend the fireplaces, sleep, read; turn on the generator just long enough to keep the freezer and refrigerator cold.  The radio stopped working, and they finally understood that the stations were no longer broadcasting. 

   Long unused board games and dusty decks of cards were unearthed and the days were filled with Monopoly, Parcheesi, Gin Rummy, and Chess.  There was plenty of food and fuel for the present but, aware of long term possibilities, they instinctively meted out their supplies carefully--"good time to go on a diet" they agreed, laughing a bit too hard...

   After the rains stopped and the sun reluctantly came out they waited, like Noah's Ark inhabitants, until  the waters abated a bit and the road became a passable if not driveable road again;  living on the highest point of land meant flooding was ordinarily from the ground up, and as Peter said more than once, if we flood, the rest of the world is in trouble.

   The road of course was impassable in a vehicle, so they ventured out on foot to see what had happened to the valley; without even a telephone for communication they had been utterly isolated for almost the entire three weeks--even the cell phones had stopped working, and they were simply unprepared for what met them halfway to the end of the long steep driveway.

   They saw trees bent and broken, uprooted, floating in a glistening lake of brown water that glowed serenely in the sunlight. Houses along where the main road had been were gone,  although here and there stubborn chimneys were still showing above the stinking water, and debris still contained dead animals, floating bodies, household possessions buoyant enough to float. 

   The silence was complete, except for the sound of water moving steadily and firmly past them, and now and then a tree giving up its muddy struggle with gravity;   no one spoke--they finally turned, stunned, and struggled up the devastated road toward the house and warmth and the reality of a shrinking food supply, dwindling fuel, and a winter, if they survived that long, of frozen lakes. 

one of those darned observer dreams (6WS)

the observer/reporter for a plane crash,  as a voice over:  "the parents had refused the baby seat for their 6 month old child--when the plane crashed, it was the one thing that saved the baby's life, since the spot where it would have been firmly strapped in was directly under a luggage holder, which dropped all its luggage onto the spot where the baby, pinned by the seat, would have been crushed.

As it was, it had been thrown out of the mother's arms and rolled--or crawled--under the seat in front of it, protected and safe. The parents were killed by the falling luggage.  The baby's angry cries were detected by a flight attendant who had been commandeered to search for any signs of life--she found the child, slightly bloodied but mostly just angry and hungry--the attendant had just given birth to a child a month previous and without even thinking  took the child to a secluded place, opened her tunic, and nursed it.  Fifteen minutes later someone found them, nestled against a pile of lumber and rubble, content with each other and ignoring the disaster around them. "

and then the camera moves back to show one small woman nursing a small baby while workers continue the search for more casualties...

These are the oddest dreams,  this is probably the fourth in a series. They all seem to encompass humanity, a newpaper article being read which turns into a visual and a voice over--this one took the form of a news reporter and a movie type image not of the crash but of the aftermath...

And if I record  it fast enough, it comes back nearly verbatim.  =)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Random

which is where I seem to be right now

ad on a local radio station which always reminds me of how the other 99% of the world lives

"our house was so drafty and cold  all last winter it was like living in a refrigerator.  Why we had to wear two sweaters just to keep warm... "   Poor babies. they couldnt just wear long underwear and slipper socks and a scarf and maybe a nice heavy down vest like the rest of us???



I know we are on the other side of winter here, because no matter how cold it really is at any given moment,  or how high the snow is, we keep forgetting to feed the fiyahs.  They get restarted a LOT now.    I would say that psychologically wintah is ovah.  Now if we could just convince the weather gods.
The light suddenly seems different.  The sun now rises way over there instead of directly across the field, and of course its been sliding northward for 2 1/2 months, we just havent noticed.  And in a very few days it will be the first of spring.  (fist pump)  

When I was a little girl one of my favorite books was one of Robert Louis Stevenson's, with charming 30s type pictures of little boys and girls playing with hoops and kittens and such...and one which always puzzled me--the poem for March (or spring, anyway) showed a little girl on a swing, green grass all around her, and she is wearing a little girl dress and a sweater...
I had no knowledge of Britain  or different climates, and it was very hard to relate to that little girl on her swing,  wearing only summery clothes outside in March...


Sorry about the lack of anything in here,  i think im in brain freeze right now.  no promises, no guarantees.  Ill leave the cookie jar here and the coffee urn. help yourselves in the meantime

1.                  

For Harvey

                                                            rose and bee balm

                                                              mammoth dill

                                                                monarch butterfly

snow sculpture

Sometimes You Just Have To Laugh =) (6WS)

Proof reading this before it went public might have helped, lol

(then again, maybe it was...)

I'm fine, thanks, just fine

Went to the dentist yesterday,  a minor filling. The dental assistant was pleasant,  maybe in her frowzy mid-fifties,  very talkative, which I like.  After the filling, the dentist left and Maggie tried to help me up out of the chair. 'I'm fine," I said, struggling to overcome Bad Back Wonky Hip syndrome,  reaching for my purse. She hurried to get it for me, and hovered, I swear, hovered, over me...
She kept asking if I were okay, if  I needed help, was I dizzy--and she continued to hover like an officious hummingbird, ready to grab me if I staggered.

I suddenly felt like a fragile old lady.

When I finally managed to break free and get out of the room, she was right at my elbow, and once or twice I could feel her trying to take my granny elbow and steer me.  I said, you're on my blind side,  I can't see you, so forgive me if I walk into you...

She accompanied me to the office and told everyone there what a good patient I had been, in a slightly raised kindergarten voice,  and finally left.  She did ask once more if I was going to be all right and I assured her I was fine, just fine.

And now I understand what a disservice we do to older people by insisting they be as old as we think or insist they are. It unsettles them to be regarded as too old to move without help,  to have their freedoms restricted by the young and nervous,  to be asked continually if they feel okay...I'm fine, really.  Just fine.

Just sayin'

-17 degrees Fahrenheit
-27.2  degrees Celsius
245.9  degrees Kelvin
-21.7 degrees Reaumur
442.67 degrees Rankine

Happy Man

Something for a Snowy Saturday Morning (6WS)

Sat and watched this whole thing,  learned a neat new way
to take tight corners, too...

My Own Version of Wordless Sunday

right now we need some summer (6WS)

Last week

Monday afternoon in the kitchen, and I could hear water gushing from somewhere and the well pump (which is in the cellar not in the well) running, but not the water tank. The gush was under the sink, where a pipe had come apart at a joint and was trying very hard to turn my kitchen floor into the next flood plain.  oh yes. all under the sink, the insulation, the dishes, the newspaper we used for insulation, the rugs...

Couldnt turn the water off, the levers are meant to be hammered, not turned, apparently.  and the pump  is running and running...couldnt close the  water faucets down cellar, they need superhuman strength or orangutan blood to operate...and the water is running and running...

Husband is out plowing, by the time he got back I'm on the porch in wet slippers waving at him.  Actually waving is really too mild: "gesticulating wildly" might be closer to the truth

He had all he could do to stop the Niagara Falls  under the sink, all he could do to turn the main switches off down cellar...

Some things you just know are going to happen. Last month for no particular reason I bought a new clothesline that I really didn't need yet , and earlier in the fall two good ten quart pails, of the sort suitable for carrying water from a well.  And I have had a 1 gallon jug of drinking water in the fridge, something i never do.

So while he figured out What Went Wrong and What To Do Until theDoctor Comes,  I  hunted down the two shiny new pails, the old blue well pail with the fishing sinker on it, and then made my knotted well rope. Old habits have a kind of muscle memory,  ain't it grand.  Got the dug well cover off and sure enough, there's water down there.                                                          

                                                     

makes you want to run right out and haul water, don't it

Half an hour later we have water in the house, if not in the faucets.  He's got his owner's manuals out, and I'm trying to adjust to the very real possiblity of no faucets for maybe a week or more.  I'm spoiled, that's what it is...and while he turned pages and made funny noises I mopped up the water on the floor, moved the wet papers and rugs and such to a place where they could drip silently,  and pulled all the stuff out of the cupboards.    By Tuesday  he had a new faucet in place, new piping, and i am in awe. 18 hours without water and it was as if a switch had been shut down.  I kept turning it on, watching the water flow, feeling  like Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker...

The icicles on my mother's roof (6WS)

Harvey asked me a really good question today:  How has age changed you? How has your thinking changed?

Had to stop and think about that for a bit,  since time moves faster for all of us, as we discover there is less in front to discover and more in back to remember.

I seem to have stopped writing. Not totally, but it no longer seems to have a presence in my life. Now and then one gets away from me, but for the most part they don't dominate the way they did.  Yeah.

Some days its all  memory,  some days its 'where did I put the scissors" and by the time you find them you've forgotten why you needed them and when you do remember, you 've lost the scissors again

I make a sandwich, the phone rings and I wander away to answer it,  then off to start a project,  and an hour later come back to the kitchen to find that the cat has made himself a sandwich and is just now licking up the last of the crumbs...

Tell the doctor about the wandering memory and he goes straight into denial, "You do NOT have memory loss!"  and slams that door shut...

But getting older has forced me to move a bit more slowly, and in doing so I find a joy in pauses:  watching a flight of geese, walking through those trees, seeing  it  become something other, something that will outlast us.  And knowing that I have less time than I had, and that dark wall looms closer every year,  
I'm less willing to assign importance to things that I cant change.

Years ago we had one of those high snow winters,  and Mother was sliding into her dotage, but still  in her own home. One night she called me, terribly distraught, wanted me to come over and "do something" about the icicles that lined the front of the house like prison bars. She was afraid they'd break off and damage the windows.  The fact that we were having yet another storm and her front lawn was already four feet deep in snow wasn't important, and she started the "if you loved me' thing.  Finally she said, "at least you could help me worry!" and hung up.

  I refuse to worry about icicles I can't reach,  or events that will change whether I'm here or not.

Thanks,  Harvey.

Damage Control

Sometimes you will see a delicate piece of glassware slide off the table and out of reach, and all you can do is watch as, incredibly, it bounces when it hits the floor, and only on the second bounce actually shatters.
And you think, if only I had been there to catch it --although I've always wondered if it wasn't already broken but didn't know it yet, and possibly the damage was  already done, as it shattered in your hands.

There are also times when a friend does the same thing, slides out of his life imperceptibly,  and you work to save him, with nets and love and hands holding his--but he eludes your grasp, and like that glassware, hits the floor a second time, and shatters as thoroughly.

You knew the damage was already there;  saving him would  have been saving something that had broken but not yet shattered, a long time ago

By The Side of The Road (6WS)

or sometimes on the other side 

 or over there where the rocks and ledges end, and (small) animals live in (possibly) small caves under the ledges there

if  you choose your morning with a bit of ground fog that rose before the sun did, and you come to a turn in the road...

                     or wait until late afternoon when the sun slides in under the branches

                             and realize that this is what you've been waitng for,  for a very long time

                                        and maybe just maybe  it was worth the wait

Merry Christmas

from all of us to all of you

Another Solstice Rears Its Ugly Head (6WS)

(so I'm a little late)

WINTERSONG--

     HARVESTING THE LIGHT

In winter we carry mirrors

to dark rooms,

harvesting the light;

December’s pale sun thus becomes

a multitude of suns.

We send candles into the darkness.

Nothing is wasted.

Seen from the proper angle

morning sun becomes an infinity of light

reaching back to the first sunrise

on the first day,

reaching ahead to the last.

Dark rooms are transformed

by prisms of clear light.

As winter moves into spring

we adjust the mirrors

in rhythm with the lengthened days,

tinkering with the available light;

harvesting, harvesting.

By March we nearly have it right.

Snow, Rain, Sleet, Snow, Snow, Cold (6WS)

What, no thunderstorms?  No hail?  No gale force winds?   Only one blizzard this month and that was two weeks ago...

Something is terribly wrong, the temps are actually above 0 F. (thats -17C, folks) and I may be able to go outside without fearing for my life, my bone structure, and my dignity.






Maybe tomorrow.  When I can no longer see my reflection in the surface of the driveway

Suspended Animation

Over the past few weeks I've been reading into the "Next Blog" place;  its amazing the number of people who have just stopped posting,  usually just before a cliffhanger, like the birth of a child, or a trip, or a wedding.  Maybe they started up another, elsewhere, a year or two later, or just  never went back to take the old one down.

In a way its like finding an unfinished undated letter that begins,
"Dear Mom and Dad, 
things have been a bit rough here but  we seem to have gotten things back on track, 
now that both kids are home and safe now,  I promise to keep"

--and there's a photo of two cute kids,  boy and a girl, he has a leg cast and she has  a huge plaster across one side of the head.  you'll always wonder who these people were, what happened to the kids, and what happened to let that letter be abandoned.

Unfinished blogs are like that, too. They just hang in the air, some of them started years before, hundreds and hundreds of photos (and oh I do wish they had taken down the kids pictures first) and hundreds of posts. And for five years or longer those blogs have sat there while the parents aged,  the kids grew up, the dog died, and their  life moved away and down a different street;

The kind that started mostly as a kind of textual howl of rage or annoyance, page after page filled with self pity and really REALLY strange pictures, and then disappeared;

Bad poetry, mostly written by girls with too much green hair, fake tattoos and ugly glittery shoes. Or fan sites in another language which are little more than paeans to young rock stars or anime characters;

Now and then a serious connect with someone , in that way that happens when you least expect it,  you somehow collide in mid-blog with someone and keep going back.  You lurk. They lurk back. Its like a dance with one person and yet you're watching that other neat person across the dance floor, who is also looking back...

You wonder if anyone in those abandoned blogs even realizes--or cares--that they're here apparently forever, in suspended animation, part of a life preserved under glass.

5 Degrees: Need I say More (6WS)

Somehow...

this wasn't exactly how we had planned to spend Thanksgiving.  We got  a foot of snow yesterday, heavy, wet stuff that packed down as it fell,  with the shoveling consistency of wet cement.   Add to that,  the driveway was recovering from a half inch of warm rain,  meaning Mud;  So we have, basically, hot brownie with vanilla ice cream.  
Does not Plow Well.  Does not blow well.

We lost the power just after dark and spent the rest of the evening enjoying the ambience of oil lamps and the dulcet tones of an industrial strength generator in the shed,  so we could still use the computer, run water, and keep the freezer and fridge running properly.

Today I spent quality time on the kitchen roof getting reacquainted with the view up there.  While his relatives were happily sitting down to dinner 80 miles north of here I was shoveling the  roof off.  While they were swurping up deviled eggs and lemon meringue pie I was bringing in wood for the stoves  and shoveling off the porch.

The Bobcat got a serious workout today, working its way across hot brownie trying to remove the vanilla ice cream without digging  a six foot hole in the brownie.  Not a pretty sight.

All in all, a more productive day (if one must examine such things that way) than if we had gone a-visiting and stuffed ourselves full of turkey and ham and potatoes and lemon meringue pie (one must be polite, after all) if only to keep peace in the family.

I can hardly wait to see what the weather gods bring us for Christmas.

Land Trust Progress

At this stage we have finalized the paperwork; the two towns involved have futzed and convened and discussed, and agreed that this will happen.  two weeks ago we went to The Signing, amid small speeches and entirely too many photos  (and no you so do not need to see those) and papers signed in what seemed to be an endless number. Not unlike closing on a house, but with a  LOT more people involved.

So. It's done.  We learn to live with the rules we insisted on, and its just a damn nice thing to have done with.  And ironically, the people who border us seem to be intent on clear cutting with great resolve. It angers me, but its also nice to know we wont be part of THAT process.  Look on the bright side, as one neighbor said, maybe in a few years the undergrowth will come back and we'll have rabbits again.  And our view of the
ridge across the way will be clearer.

this was back in September, for anyone who wants to see where we were then.
http://mittens-stonesoup.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-i-spent-my-summer-vacation-land.html

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

cold, cold, cold, damn its cold (6WS)

Three stoves running and its not even December yet.
sorta wonder just how long before  'too much wood" will 
turn into"almost enough" wood which may or may not be
the same as "not quite enough" but still conjures up
images of chopping up furniture ("well how many chairs 
can we sit in at once anyway"--or, "I never liked that
table, could never find a place for it...") or hauling wood
out of the forest  on a sledge in February, bundled to 
the eyes to keep out the gale force winds.


Pitiful, ain't it. 

Google scary

Yesterday I had to clear the cache and cookies (for various reasons) and in the process must have upset Google.  This morning when I went in they told me quite firmly that I was not me, and I had better do something about it.
(This is when your blood pressure begins to inch above the danger mark)

I looked up the password and was told, nahh, you changed that four months ago.
No I didnt.
So I tried another.
Nope.
It has become almost impossible to find help at Google now, because, haha, if you're not signed in
you can't, and if your password isnt working anymore, you can't get help to find out what your password might be.
I finally found a teeny button that said "help" and I started rowing toward that.  Finally got my old password changed (no no they say, you already used all those,  find another.)  and then I had to give them an altenate address. None of which are acceptible because, golly, they are already being used by google. "YES THEY ARE,  one of them is being used by my old blogger account and it worked just fine yesterday..."


so several tantrums later I have a new account addy, no verification second addy (since they are all locked up as google account addresses in the seekrit vault), no thank you, I cannot give you the number of the cell phone I don't own, and I pushed the magic button and here I am.

If for some reason I don't appear after a reasonable length of time it's because I can no longer access Google, yahoo, or the blog  and this blog will join the ranks of the thousands of blogs out there that were just fine until that last post and then WentAway.

Worth the watch

http://vimeo.com/79369173

Weather Report in Just Five Lines (6WS)

Perspective

You watch the east and say,
what a fine day
 its turning out to be
I watch the west
and prepare for rain

For some reason this just fits--(6WS)

The Second Coming
                William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some  revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Care Instructions, Syrup Cold Water Pot (6ws)

whatever it is, be careful with it 
(an unaccompanied warning sheet that was tucked inside a book someone gave me)


As it is made of glass,don't hit it with hard things

Don't put it directly on the fire

Don't clean it with metal brush, hand matters of caustic cleaner

Using sponge and plate cleanser to wash it.

The Ultimate in Plane Spotting

http://www.flightradar24.com/AWE718/496aed1

you can zoom in or out with the mouse wheel,  you can move the image with the cursor,  and yes, those planes are moving.  you can identify individual planes,  and on the left find out what the schedule for that  plane is, landing and take off.

this is more fun than the earthquake map.

ive listed it in the interactive list >>>> over there

oh I love AccuWeather

This just in:  AccuWeather is predicting a 7% chance of rain (at least only on Spring Street) which will last exactly 160 minutes, from 8:40 am to 10:40 AM  with a minute by minute breakdown of what's happening when...if I lived on Spring Street, I would be getting out the umbrella, the rain coat, and boots.

And  if there is only a 7% chance of rain,  how can they predict the times it might happen, if it does happen?

Its been that kind of week (6WS)

                                              Barred Owl in his Grumpy Phase

The New Toy

At the top of each page, just above the post box and to the left, is something called   "next blog>" and when you click on that, you get just that;  a random blog, good or bad,  amazing or terrible; some have been floating unused and abandoned for years, some are new, some will make you jump.  
No way of knowing what will come up next, but if you do find one you like, get the URL or something, because you may never find it again.
Yesterday I spent an hour playing Next Blog.

I think Im hooked on this.  =)

Farmer Bear

                                                           ee-yi-ee-yi-ohhh

Mine Mine Mine

Six Things I Miss (This Week) (6WS)

1. typewriters in all their clacky glory, including the futzing with the ribbon and Cleaning the Keys day, and using one my dad had (and I still own it), and teaching myself to type with the help of a touch type manual from the 40s...

2. the Social Security Death Index when it was out in public, and I used it to find family, friends, it was a valuable tool for everyone--until Ancestry.com put it behind a paywall and changed it around to point not at the info you wanted but the info they thought you wanted

3.  old computer games that were ascii symbols like Hack and NetHack, and floppies with text games ('you are standing in front of a house.  There is a mailbox there."), and box games for your old dos run computer...

4 Christmas cards that had sparkly snow and fuzzy touch-me santas or stand-up scenes-- and the week before Christmas when you got to Dress Up to go shopping in town.

5. The first day of school; a new grade, new shoes,  new clothes.  Getting used to the unfamiliar teacher and her funny voice,  until you  got used to it and then it was okay

6. my mother's barn with the 30 foot long rope swing

just for harvey

                                         is this better? =)

I think its going to be an early winter

sometimes it feels like one of those maddening puzzles where you have to move the rings, one at a time, from one of the three poles to the other side, but only so that the top ring is always smaller than the ones it sits on.


                                                                        Woodpile:

to shed:

                                                                                                                                                       

to stove:

one armload at a time...

Now and then...this is just what's needed on a rainy Saturday night

Short poem for a Saturday morning (6WS)

porque te vas

sing of the coming dawn

weep for the passing night

cling to the moon as it rises

and sets with the faintest of light

cherish the night as it cradles us

keeps us close in the dark

remember the heart is fragile

when the arrow has found its mark

so let us huddle together

to keep the morning at bay

I will watch you in your dreaming

and know you are going away

Follow up to "Someone is not reading what they're writing"

Saturday I got this 'special' looking envelope that gives you instructions on how to open it,  fold here, tear carefully, step one, step two, etc.  When I opened it  I discovered that my bank had given me a new pin number for my debit card.
wasnt that nice of them, I thought. A kind of follow up to the phone call(s) I made last week about setting my pin by phone.

then I looked at the number.  ho ho  ho.  its a different number.  So now it gets interesting.

1. is this the real pin number, invalidating the old 'new'  number?
2. do they both work?
3. and no one on the phone last week said anything about my old card (the old old card) being automatically invalidated as soon as the new (now known as the "old new" number) number was given/used/validated...I could have two cards, three pin numbers, and none of them speaking to each other.  lol
4.  if I use this to try to validate the card, will my card be eaten by the ATM and armed guards arrive to beat me senseless?
5. will using this number cause both numbers to become illegal?
6. if I use the other number,  will that open a hidden trap in the floor and both I and the offending card be thrown in among wolves and spiders?
7. will neither of them work, forcing me to invent yet another pin number?  shoot, after four years I finally had the old one memorized,  this new one took two looks...
8. I believe this calls for shoes and  a trip to the Bank in the City, so that if I do go up in flames I will be doing it on their territory and it will be their mess to clean up.

Stay tuned.  Film at 11, with video.

open the door, close the door (6WS)

I think we all have events that happen to us over which we have little or no control:  the loss of a friend, or a loved one, a misunderstanding that escalates into something way out of proportion to the original intent--a life-changer, perhaps.  You can't seem to get your balance back, and even years later you find yourself reliving bits of this and bits of that, perhaps even inventing a different ending.  Or a different beginning.

And then we get all embarrassed and worried, because we are "obsessing" and we tamp it down even harder.

I'm trying something  a bit different.  Im writing it out, the way I wanted it to be.  You imagine, perhaps, that an old buddy or an old flame has suddenly come back into your life twenty, thirty years later. Write it down from where the possiblities kick in,  and then play it as you want it to go.  I tried this a few days ago, working my way through a possible  if imaginary reunion, and somewhere near the end, something magical happened. I wasn't writing it anymore, it was writing itself.

The reason Im doing this, is when ordinarily I write something as a prose piece, once it gets said, typed out, and corrected,  it goes into a drawer and I forget about it. Ive said what I needed to say,  and its over.  I thought, why not do this with reality?  Granted, its a reality that will never happen, for whatever reason. But its a stab at a reality that could have happened, given a few shakes of the snow globe.

And now I have no more desire to write it again, to play it out, to invent.  To obsess.

How I spent my summer vacation--Land Trust talk

this is part of the property we have in the Land Trust--we've been chipping away at access roads,  and the more I see these, the more excited I get about this. This particular road runs from behind our house for about a half mile back into the property, and ends at an old cellar hole that was, according to the deeds, abandoned around 1856.  Why, we have no idea. There was a fair sized barn and a small house, situated fairly close together, a well, and what might have been a privy.   

We are down now to small changes in the wording,  lawyers being fussy about loopholes, and all...another site visit, and we may have this nailed by winter.  

http://mittens-stonesoup.blogspot.com/2014_11_01_archive.html

Someone is not reading what they are writing

Last week  I received a breathless letter from our bank informing me that my debit card was one of many that had been "compromised" when someone apparently hacked in to the computer system there.  oh, treats.
Now.  This is where it gets really interesting.

My card is apparently compromised.  They are going to send me a new one very very soon.  Until then, my old compromised card is still live, still out there like a dead fish on the dock.  They also state that the old card will remain active until the end of September (excuse me?) at which time it will be rendered inactive.
At that time, once its been wiped from their books and the password is history, they tell me I must then destroy the card so that no one can use it.

If the card is  deactivated, how can anyone use it?  Wouldnt it have been much simpler to just have me change my password?  Now?