Disaster strikes

A couple of days ago, my wife and I were coming home from…somewhere, I don’t remember where, exactly. As we came down the road in front of my house I looked up my graceful sweep of overgrown lawn and sat up a little straighter, alarmed by something out of place amidst the ragged grass and […]

Weekend Update: Summer’s (near) end edition

Well, we’ve hit the penultimate weekend of ‘official’ summer and already we’re seeing the signs of the winding down of the season: one of the big baseball camps in the area is already empty, already moving in the bulldozers and heavy equipment for what will almost certainly be another expansion. The big camp is still […]

Public Writing

When I was a kid, I loved to draw. I drew pictures every chance I got, and I was told by some tat I was pretty good at it, though in hindsight, I think I heard that mostly from my mother, so maybe I wasn’t that good. Somewhere along the line, I stopped. When did […]

The Reading List (The Third)

Well, well, it’s another sheet torn off the old wall calendar, and not just any month, but September. That means another quarter of the year gone, and that means it’s time for the reading report! If you want to see what else I’ve read this year, here’s Part I and Part II. But before we […]

Monday Musing: Clunky Computer Edition

This is one of those mornings where my computer is wheezy and sluggish and unresponsive. It gets like this once in a while, where it takes forever to switch between tabs, and heaven forbid if I try to close a tab or a window or anything like that. It’s times like these when I make […]

We Have “Leaf” Toff!

Oh, that’s a bad title, isn’t it? Yes, it is. And I’ll use it again on my personal Facebook page. I’m not too proud. Last week, while mowing the lawn, I checked in on the fabled chestnut tree and saw that it appeared to be doing nothing. Well, not entirely nothing. The buds looked round […]

And Again…The Chestnut

Here in this corner of America, Memorial Day marks the start of summer, Labor Day the end. Yet Columbus Day is, in many ways, the real end of the tourist season (though to be fair, fall foliage is just peaking now, and then there’s hunting season–but neither of those things really do a lot compared […]

We Interrupt this Short Break…

…for a chestnut update! As you can see, the little tree is starting to join the rest of the vegetative world in these parts. Daffodils are up, violets are blooming, even some wild strawberries. And now, the chestnut is starting to leaf out. I’m glad to see that the brutal winter we had didn’t kill […]

Weekend Update–Chestnut Edition!

It is spring. So says the calendar, anyway; the weather is not quite so sure. However, we’ve had a lot of water in the streets and in the creeks this past week, and there is some greenery to be had. The growing season is not quite upon us, but I thought it was time to […]

Once More, The Chestnut

Hi, all, not much to say here today for a variety of reasons. This being the end of September, with summer officially over as of last week, I thought I’d break out a couple of quick pics from this morning. The American chestnut has survived the summer, and while it didn’t do as well as […]