Yesterday evening I surprised myself by how much energy I seemed to have. I knit several (well, at least a few) rows on one sleeve of my sweater, carved an eraser stamp, and carved a jack-o-lantern. I started the sweater in the middle of last winter and got the body done, then sort of bogged […]
Surprisingly enough, I’ve carved several eraser stamps recently. First, I did a maple leaf, strictly for a practical reason. We’ve been looking around our woodlot to see if we have any maple trees we might want to tap next spring. There are a few scattered along the trails. How can we recognize them next March, […]
I took a day off on Monday Oct 8 (my company doesn’t have Columbus Day off) so that we wouldn’t have to leave the wedding early to come home. We’ve left weddings in New Jersey on Sunday before, but this one was farther from home and there were more people Arlene wanted to have plenty […]
On Sunday we rode with Joel and Millie to Forsgate Farms Country Club in Monroe, NJ, for the wedding. It was an unusually hot day for October. It would have been a hot day for September, and a warm day the last week of August. We had expected the ceremony would have been planned for […]
I’m not much of a baseball fan. When I was a kid living in Flushing, NY, three of the sixteen major league teams were in New York — the Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants. We were Giants fans. My dad took me to see games at all three of Yankee Stadium, […]
When we were walking around the block yesterday, we notices some witch hazel growing along the other association’s road. I learned about witch hazel from Lois & Sandy Brown probably thirty years ago. It blooms very late in the year, even after frost, and keeps its flowers through a lot of the winter. Insects have […]
There were eight wild turkeys in our side yard today, chowing down on crabapples and whatever else was around. I hope they found a few japanese beetle grubs. Anne and Matt had seen turkeys on our property last year the day before Thanksgiving, but this was the first Arlene and I have seen any here. […]
The backyard in Casco was covered in white-throated sparrows and juncos today. That’s a pretty good sign that winter is really on the way. We saw a couple of (undoubtedly southbound) palm warblers, some yellow-rumped warblers, and some other sparrows, probably chippies and a field sparrow though we were hoping for a white-crowned, on a […]
We were in New Jersey last weekend for Heidi’s wedding. Heidi is the youngest child of Arlene’s first cousin Diane. She’s the only person of that generation (other than my own kids) whose date of birth I know. We were staying at Diane’s sister’s house in Albuquerque when the phone call came to say she […]
Last night (Weds 10 Oct) we went to shul so Arlene could say kaddish for her father. We reached for the prayerbooks and, what’s this?! Unfamiliar new-looking prayerbooks. We had been there just under two weeks ago for the anniversary of Arlene’s grandmother’s death, and these were new since then. We found out as soon […]
