Anne and Matt have been talking about a fire pit for quite a while. Last weekend we did some serious planning. Matt and I went to the Naples Aubuchon Hardware store and came back with 720 pounds (9 80-pound bags) of ready-mix concrete. Matt dug a circular trench for the foundation (the middle wants to …
Author Archives: deanb
Shaker Woods Nature Walk
Not this past weekend but the weekend before, Sept. 6 it must have been, Arlene and I went on a guided nature walk at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker village. That’s the last Shaker community left that’s a going concern. There are four Shakers right now, two elderly women, one middle-aged man (one other man was …
Earworm report
OK, right now I have running through my head a song we did in klezmer last night. I’ll follow the strategy Mark Train advocated in “Punch, Brothers, Punch” and try to get rid of the problem by talking it through. Since I don’t have an MP3 of it to post, there’s no real danger of …
Sweater update
OK, by the end of last week I finished the back of my Aran sweater. I started the ribbing of the front on Saturday night. Some problem, I forget if it was a counting error while increasing for the start of the pattern or what, on Sunday morning got me disgusted and I ripped the …
On Chrome
I just downloaded the newish (new this week but not brand brand new) browser from Google. The WordPress “write a post” page looks the way it does on Safari, not on Firefox. That’s mostly to say that a toolbar that lets you put in links and edit the post in HTML (among other things, but …
Weekend scorecard
Two apple pies (Cortland apples picked this afternoon) Six half-pints plus one Bonne Maman jar, about another half-pint but I guess it’s a quarter litre, hot pepper jelly from three red chili peppers Sue gave us, three long green hot peppers from Hannafords, two small sweet green peppers from the North Pine Hill farm stand, …
A quick convention note
If Barack hadn’t been running, and Bill hadn’t been in the picture, Michelle could have beaten Hillary one-on-one.
Southbound warblers
The Atlantic flyway seems to have a traffic jam right at our apple trees. Our yard was full of warblers this morning. We’re not positive what most of them were, but we got good looks at a black-throated blue, redstart, black-throated greens, and probable Nashville, Canada, and yellow warblers. The tree just outside the kitchen …
Anniversary party
Arlene and I just had our 40th wedding anniversary. We invited a lot of relatives and close friends up to Casco for the event. We didn’t have people staying over in our house (except for Anne, Matt, Charley, and Aunt Lee) but there were about 40 people here on Saturday. We rented a ten-passenger pontoon …
High on snakes and bass
I set out for a walk around Cutler Pond today hoping to see one of those northern water snakes that were around regularly last summer. I had only seen one so far this whole year. Along the near side of the pond, on the dike between the pond and the marsh along the river, a …