Back in the days when carpenters built the whole house on site from start to finish, they’d start by building a couple saw horses which they’d leave for the new home owners when the house was done. Not many carpenters still do that but you can. A sturdy saw horse […]
Was out walking the dog today when a friend working in her garden mentioned that a big black bear had just walked by between our place and hers. I was happy to hear it. It’s been some time since we’ve had one in the neighborhood. We’ve always had bears until […]
Betrayal of a Great Man by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society (This article first appeared May 31, 2021 on the ‘If Americans Knew’ website https://ifamericansknew.org/) A Tribute for Memorial Day I don’t use the word hero lightly. If you don’t either, you might ask how a rank and file […]
India: Cremation fires, the coming monsoon, riders on the storm “When the monsoon fails to blow, India starves and dreams of Nirvana.” Will Durant. Our Oriental Heritage. 1935 May, 2021. India contemplates itself shimmering in heat waves of pandemic where days and bodies are over a hundred degrees F. Last […]
Karl Kruger: Stand Up Paddleboard (Article from June 2017 DC) There’s a new word in the language this week. It is ‘Kruger,’ a noun, meaning an accomplishment commonly considered to be physically impossible—done with style, alone, in a big landscape. A Kruger is in the realm of free climbing El […]
What’s up with all these people not shoveling out their fire hydrants? Shoveling the closest fire hydrant to your house takes a couple minutes when the snow is soft. If a house catches fire, and snow like this has frozen hard, and it costs the Fire Department even a minute […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 1. Introduction: So, you’re living in the long shadow of a hoarder’s house with never a bit of maintenance on the outside in twenty years. No paint. Gutters fallen off. Yard full of dead cars, old tires, an unplugged freezer with God-knows-what in it. Moss, bushes […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 2. The Players: Owner, Leader, Neighbors, The City, Saboteurs working against you The Owner: The first and most important thing in doing a clean-up is, you have to get the owner’s permission. And get it in writing. Without that, you’re nowhere. For good reasons, private property […]
Neighborhood hoarder Part 3. The Clean-up Organization: Once we got permission to clean up, we simply went over and dove in. No firm plan, no set schedule. We have about 18 hours of daylight in mid-June so helpers could carry on long before, or after, the regular work day as […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 4. Junk Car round-up “We break in to cars when we gotta. With pickaxe and hammer and saw. They say this garage has no license, yet it’s little care I for the law. Ta me weigh hey tow it away, the Lincoln Park Pirates are we, […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 5. Landscaping Satisfying as it was to clean up the junk and cars. A little bit of landscaping after was like one of those makeovers you see where they give a street person a shave and haircut and turns him into cover material for Gentleman’s Quarterly. […]
The neighborhood hoarder Part 6. Maintaining the groove and breaking into cars During the clean-up someone raised the question, “What’s to stop it from going back to the way it was?” My thought was that it wouldn’t happen. Almost none of the stuff in the yard had been Dave’s. […]