Someone left a comment recently asking if I had a plan for an inkle loom. I didn’t then, but I do now. An inkle loom is good for weaving narrow pieces of fabric up to about four feet long, or longer if you build it with more zigzags than the one in this plan — […]
I’m turning in my dumpster diver credentials. On the way home from work I passed up, out on the curb, one bicycle. Years ago I would have taken it to Bikes Not Bombs, but I don’t travel in that direction much these days. two gas-powered lawnmowers. After fixing my electric mower, maybe I could try […]
I’m reading Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. I’m a quarter of the way through the third book, The Amber Spyglass. Don’t tell me how it ends. When I was a kid I read a Tarzan book, Tarzan and the City of Gold which greatly impressed me at the time because it switched among three […]
Just to get it on record, before the show airs, just in case this happens, Watch out for the kid they packed off to Idaho. Is his name Little Vito? I think he’s going to bust out of that camp, get a gun, and come back and wreak havoc in New Jersey. Look — Phil […]
We had a new guy at klezmer last night, a percussionist named Eddie. He had brought two drumsticks and two boxes of pasta that he was using as his instrument. “Sounds a lot like a snare drum,” he said. Jeffery, our flautist, told the director that at the next concert, when he’s introducing the band […]
What with planting pear trees and all the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, we were outdoors a lot. On one short jaunt up what we call “the logging road”, a swath of brambles and other scrub that has grown up where the trucks went when the former owners had the property logged over (there aren’t […]
I like eating apples in the fall, especially now that we have five apple trees in Casco, but even more than apples I like seckel pears. So naturally I’d like to have a seckel pear tree on the place. The nursery catalog says that seckel pears need two other varieties in the vicinity for proper […]
On our way to Maine before Memorial Day we saw three porcupines along the side of the roads, two on route 121 south of the blinking light near the Casco firehouse and one on Mayberry Hill Road going up the hill. The first two are positive IDs. The third I just got a glimpse of […]
Might have been a year ago I hit something with the lawnmower and broke the mower. I know exactly what I hit. It’s a big honkin’ hunk of cast iron, the thing the gas company could turn to cut off the gas supply to the house from the street. It’s been there all along, and […]
I hit the brakes in time to come to a graceful stop ten feet from a porcupine on North Raymond Road this evening. We only saw two porcupines last year, but this year they’re all over. Maybe I’m more tuned in to looking for them, but this one was in the middle of the road […]
