It's been a busy month! Beth (seedsower) was visiting at the beginning of the month and was here for my very small Third of July get-together. I just invited a few friends who also know Beth and a couple of others without whom it just wouldn't feel like the 3rd of July. I realized as the fireworks were about to start that I'd never taken fireworks photos with my camera before, as it was a newer model replacement for the camera that got dunked in the river last year. The reason I realized this, is because I couldn't figure out how to find the fireworks setting. I was beginning to get frustrated and finally decided I'd just take photos on an automatic setting, and that's when I got the message that there was no memory card in the camera. Oh yeah, I forgot to take it out of my laptop after uploading some photos earlier in the day. As the fireworks began, I thought I'd just take a few shots with my cell phone. Oops - I plugged it into the charger when I went in the house to get my camera. Sigh. So no fireworks photos from the 3rd.

Beth left the next day, and the following day Krysten (joyouswind) flew to New York City and I welcomed her dog, Jack, into my home for the remainder of the month. Two dogs kept me hopping. One is old and cranky and the other is young and needy. Fun times! Between the two of them being very willful and pulling on their leashes, and the extremely hot and humid weather, I was not able to walk them. When they needed to burn off energy, I took them to the local doggy daycare to play with a roomful of other dogs for a few hours. They were good for several days after each session.

Krysten spent two or three days in New York for training and team building, and then she flew to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to help train staff at an autism center in an ongoing, sustainable venture by SkillCorps. There were a lot of unanticipated problems, which anyone who does a lot of volunteering learns to expect, roll with it, and overcome. The biggest problem was the group's accomodations. That got worked out after a couple of false starts. Krysten had fun working with the staff and the children at the center, and gained confidence as a clinician. She also got to experience zip-lining and enjoyed the beautiful beaches. She got home late last night. Her plane landed around 10 PM and I found a weary, ill daughter waiting on the sidewalk outside the South Bend Regional Airport.

Let's see, what else happened in July? I was sick for most of a week. I'm pretty sure it was a sinus infection, but it cleared itself up without me wasting time and money going to the walk-in clinic. I was crippled by joint and tendon pain for much of the past week, but today I can finally walk without limping and use my hands without wanting to cry. It's a vast improvement.

Last Saturday was the annual Support the Troops Festival that is put on by an outside group in our village. It's a very stressful day for dogs, especially living so close to the center of all the activities. I packed Boo and Jack an overnight bag each and took them to spend the night with the nice doggy daycare folks. They both get very excited when I pull in the driveway of The Crate Escape and run to the play area without a glance back at me.

I don't care for this particular festival. I understand that it raises money to combat veteran suicide, but there is so much drunken shouting - much of it into the P.A. system - and the live bands and partying go on for much of the night. This year, there was still partying going on until the following evening. I end up paying big bucks to board the dogs overnight and sleep with all of the air conditioners and fans running to drown out the noise.

There is a fireworks show with this festival, so I invited Mark and Val (Old Dog Sparky and murisopsis), and Nelson (hereliesnelsonthegreat) and his lovely wife Jen over for pizza and fireworks. We had a delightful visit. While we waited for the fireworks to start, we lit a fire in the fire pit and dumped chemical powder in the flames to turn them blue and green and purple.

This time I made sure the memory card was in my camera and I figured out how to get to the fireworks setting a couple of days earlier. If only I'd worked with the tripod in advance! I finally had to give up and remove the camera from the tripod, hoping I could hold it steady enough to shoot some decent photos. A heavy metal band was screaming throughout the show, so I couldn't time my shots by the sound of the fireworks launching. Mostly I guessed and I got a few lucky shots. This one is my favorite.

Our blackberries are ripening. They're huge and beautiful and I've been picking a few every day. Today as I was picking, I noticed an odd growth on the grapevine that grows next to the raspberry/blackberry patch. You know me; I spy a weird growth and I have to take pictures and figure out what it is.

It reminds me of a sugary breakfast cereal, and like sugary cereals, you definitely don't want to eat this. It's called Grape Tumid Gall. There's a midge that lays eggs in the tissue of the grapevine and this growth, or gall, grows around the larvae to protect them as they develop. It's harmless, but I'm going to cut it off and toss it into the burn barrel. We already deal with mosquitoes and ants and wasps and Japanese beetles. I am taking a stand against midges.

It's very unusual, but I was home for all of June and July. I will be hitting the road for a couple of days in August and probably again sometime in September and also in October. It's been nice to spend most of the summer at home for a change. I finished reading The Fifty Year Mission: The First 25 Years and celebrated by watching all of the Star Trek movies this month. And by ALL, I mean even The Motion Picture, and yes, even The Final Frontier. And of course the J.J. Abrams movies.

And that's the highlights of my month. Now that I'm down to one dog and I can walk again, I'm looking forward to getting back in the habit of walking Boo around the village and maybe do a little more geocaching in August.

My daughter is off having an adventure and making the world a better place, and while she's gone I'm taking care of her three-year-old dog Jack. He is usually a very sweet-tempered animal, but occasionally lapses into puppy mode, earning him the nickname Jack the Ripper. My dog Boo, meanwhile, is a cranky old guy who occasionally, spitefully takes a dump on the kitchen floor. Maybe I should have named him Poo.

I ran an errand today and was gone for about an hour. Most of that time was spent at Meijer picking up produce for tomorrow's planned jambalaya and green beans supper. I noticed the dog toys were on a BOGO sale, so I grabbed two of those little wiener dog toys just in case Jack hadn't destroyed all my kitchen rugs (which cover some of the ripped up linoleum that happened about the time Jack came into our lives) and Boo hadn't pooped in his usual corner of the kitchen. I walked in the back door with my one bag of groceries and a tuna sandwich from Subway. The dogs had been good! My rugs were intact and there was no nasty surprise in the corner, so I gave each of the dogs a new toy - a purple one for Jack and a blue one for Boo. They ran off, happily squeaking their new toys while I unwrapped my sandwich and put it on a plate with a few chips and a handful of grapes. I walked into the living room and sat on the couch to read while eating my lunch and suddenly realized it had gotten quiet. I looked over to where Jack was lying in his bed with his toy and saw this:

That's some major stink eye! He was staring at my sandwich and sat there, glaring at me, until the last bite went into my mouth. When I got up to put my plate in the sink, Jack followed me to the kitchen and indicated that he wanted to go outside, so I clipped him to the leash attached to the cable in the backyard and returned to the couch and my book. This is what I found in the living room:

Boo must have ALL the toys! I'm surprised he waited until Jack was safely outside to steal his toy; he usually just grabs it away from him. After a few minutes, I let Jack back inside and of course, since Jack had been outside, Boo had to go outside. So I clipped Boo to the leash and came back into the living room to this:

Jack doesn't need ALL the toys, he just wanted Boo's toy. Sigh. Since letting Boo back inside, Boo took Jack's toy, Jack punked Boo by squeaking an old toy and when Boo ran to take it away from him, Jack grabbed his toy back. Then somehow Jack got Boo's toy again and now they're having a semi-serious tug-of-war over it while the purple toy lays forgotten on the floor.

It's like having a houseful of toddlers.

What have I learned?

1. No good deed goes unpunished.
2. One toy would have been enough.
3. A tuna sandwich would have been better.
4. It's impossible to enforce nap time with dogs.
5. I probably won't finish my book in the next two-and-a-half weeks.

You might read the title of this post and think it's going to be introspective, perhaps even inspiring. Nope. You can take that title very literally. I live in a tiny village minutes away from Lake Michigan. Just up the road is the town of St. Joseph, which sits right on the lake shore. There are two piers in St. Joseph that form a channel where the St. Joseph River empties into Lake Michigan. The South Pier is on the south bank of the river and has a navigation light at the end of it. The North Pier is on the north bank of the river and has two lighthouses on it - the inner light and the outer light. You've probably seen photos of the outer light in winter, coated in ice and looking like a fairy tale castle. You might have seen the inner light depicted on a postage stamp a few years ago.

My cousin Becky was visiting from Arizona last week. On her first night here, I took her out to Tiscornia Beach to walk on the north pier and watch the sunset over the lake.

It may not look like it in this photo, but the lake was rather choppy that evening. You can see how wet the pier was from waves washing over it. We didn't venture past the safety railings about halfway down the pier.

On Becky's last morning here, we had time for one activity before she had to pack her rental car and drive back to Chicago to catch her flight home. We chose to return to Tiscornia Beach and walk to the end of the north pier. It was a beautiful, sunny morning with just a light breeze, so we were confident that we could walk out to the lighthouses without getting wet. As we approached the inner light, I was amazed to see the doors standing wide open! I've lived here for 25 years and this was the first time I'd seen open doors on the lighthouse.

There were people inside wearing tee-shirts from the Heritage Museum in downtown St. Joe. I stood at the bottom of the steps and shouted up to the man in the doorway asking if they were giving tours. He said they were and told me how much it would cost, so Becky and I returned to the parking lot to get some money out of the purses we'd left in the van, then walked back out to the lighthouse.

It's not a big lighthouse, so the tour was brief, but we were allowed to spend as much time as we wished enjoying the views and taking photos. Getting up to the light involved signing a waiver, then climbing up two steep and very narrow metal spiral staircases and one metal ladder with very widely spiced rungs.

This is the first staircase. The narrowness and tiny steps reminded me of the staircase at the Betsy Ross house we toured in Philadelphia a few years ago. It was a little tight, but not scary for a 20th century sized person wearing capris and sneakers. I'm glad I didn't have to traverse the staircase in 18th century shoes, skirts and petticoats.

We had entered the lighthouse from the doors that originally led to the room containing a steam engine that provided power to the foghorn, with a room behind it that once held the coal for the steam engine. At the top of the first staircase was the actual "front door" the lighthouse keeper reached by way of the catwalk above the pier. This was so the building would be accessible in rough weather, when waves were crashing over the pier.

The second staircase was a bit narrower than the first and led to a small landing with four porthole windows providing a 360 degree view. I'm only showing you 180 degrees of the view - back along the catwalk toward shore...

... and out toward the outer light.

The scary ladder up to the actual light was located off this landing. I climbed up it without panicking, freezing or crying. I did all three of those things getting on and off the dock at Power Island a few years ago, so I was relieved that I didn't embarrass myself here.

This is what a modern lighthouse beacon looks like. (Not the guy in the tee-shirt; that was our tour guide.) The modern lights are LED and operated remotely. We spent several minutes enjoying the view (and possibly procrastinating the ladder descent) before heading back down. Going down the ladder was scarier than going up, but I managed it without freezing, panicking or crying. I was having a brave day.

Our unexpected lighthouse tour was the perfect way to end a wonderful visit with a cousin I rarely see.

While I was "out west" with my friend Maxine, geocaching took us to several interesting places. We didn't always find the cache, but we always found some cool piece of history, or beauty, or pop culture. Here are a few of the buildings (and a few non-buildings) we discovered as we meandered the back roads of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

A Clock Tower

This was more modern than most clock towers you see in small towns across America. It was cool because of the windows allowing us to see the clockworks. The cache was supposed to be in one of the drainpipes, but we couldn't find it. The storm gutters and drain pipes all looked brand spankin' new, so we suspected the cache was gone along with the old gutters and pipes.

A Couple of Old Train Depots

This one had been turned into a train station museum, but it looked like it hadn't been open to the public for a long time. I took a photo through the window.

Luckily, the ammo can cache was still hidden under some wooden steps at the back of the depot.

This pile of luggage and old milk can were outside the depot in another small town. The cache wasn't hidden here; I walked along the back of the depot on my way to the cache site and stopped for a quick photo. This was part of a museum complex that included a building filled with displays from the town's past, the old depot, some farm equipment, and other things I didn't see up close. And it was all free, but Max and I each left a donation.

Dorothy's House

Actually, the replica of the Gale Farmhouse from The Wizard of Oz movie was the least interesting thing here. We found Dorothy and the Tin Man, and the gift shop that was in an old historic house. I overheard Dorothy and the sales clerk in the gift shop talking. Dorothy had jumped out at the clerk to scare her and the clerk said, "Don't do that! You know this place is haunted!" So of course I asked to hear stories and was treated to tales of footsteps pacing upstairs and items being moved around in the gift shop. (There was no cache here, we just noticed the signs and stopped.)

Three Jails

I mentioned this one in a previous post. The cache was actually just a log book. The log book was actually the Visitor Guest Book. I wonder if whoever is in charge of replacing the guest book when it's full wonders about the weird names in it, like saintvi and MaxB On the River.

This jail was twice the size of the one above, which isn't saying much. It was still teeny-tiny, but there was at least room for a desk, and the cell was big enough to hold two people in a pinch.

This is the smallest jail I've ever seen. It's just a log with chains attached, but it could hold up to four prisoners if they scrunched up and got really chummy. That's me posing as the town sheriff. There's a photo on Maxine's camera of her in chains. The cache was somewhere nearby... I can't remember exactly where, maybe on that small sign on the left.

Two One-Room Schoolhouses

I know I already posted this photo previously, but I can't find the photos I took of the other one. It's too bad because we were able to go inside that one and talk to the "school marm" who had just finished teaching a busload of schoolchildren on a field trip.

A Historic House

As happened so often on this trip, we arrived after the last tour. But we found the cache in a sign in the front yard, just out of this shot on the right.

A Historic Bank

It's not just the age of the building, but it's status as the site of the first successful daylight bank robbery in America. It says Jesse James on all of the signs, but it was Archie Clement and his gang who planned and carried out the robbery, at least according to Wikipedia. And honestly, I trust Wikipedia more in this case because who's heard of Archie Clement?

A Couple of Jesse James' Hideouts

This was a restaurant where Jesse James used to hide. There is still a restaurant at this site - a much larger one. Most of these Jesse James geocaches were virtual caches. A virtual cache is an older type of geocache that does not have a physical container, but takes you to an interesting place and you have to post a photo or a password found on a sign or something to prove you've been there. In this case, it was a name on a plaque in front of the modern restaurant.

This limestone outcropping was located a few hundred feet through the woods behind the home of a friend of Jesse James. The stone foundations of the house and barn, as well as the stonework around the well are still visible just off the path. Once you pass them, and after a bit of an uphill climb, you will find a maze of limestone formations that could easily hide several men and possibly even horses, although we didn't explore the hidden corridors enough to know for sure. This was another of my favorite stops on the road trip. It was a virtual cache, but the sign with the password on it had been cut down, so we took photos of each other in one of the limestone corridors as proof we'd made the trek through the woods to the hideout.

A Cave

Not just any cave, but the cave that inspired Mark Twain to have Tom Sawyer and Rebecca Thatcher get lost in a cave. The name of this cave is Mark Twain's Cave and it's located in Hannibal, Missouri. We got there in the morning and they were open, but all of their tours for the day were booked by school groups. We found the physical cache outside the cave and got all the answers for the Earth Cache (another type of virtual where you have to learn an earth science lesson and answer questions) before we left. That's Max and me outside the cave entrance.

I still have another post or two to share about this trip, and then there's GeoWoodstock to write about. Who knows what else I'll get up to by the time I finish all those posts?

I've been to GeoWoodstock and back since my last post, but I still have photos to share of the geocaching trip I took with my friend Maxine the first couple of weeks of May.

It's no secret that I love cemeteries; the older they are, the more I love them. We saw many cemeteries on our trip and came across a few names we recognized.

Everyone's heard of this guy! This was his original stone, probably from his original burial on the family farm. It's now next to a more modern stone at his final resting place in a cemetery.

He and his wife are laid to rest together. The coin on the headstone was left there by someone claiming to be a cousin. It's not a real coin, and the cousin wrote on the back of it which is how I know who left it there.

The "F" stands for Frank, Jesse's brother and fellow member of the James/Younger Gang. Frank was arrested, tried and acquitted. I guess his narrow escape from the hangman's noose reformed him. He spent his remaining years as a shoe salesman, ticket taker at a theater, horse trainer, berry picker, and wild west show performer among other things.

Cole Younger was a leader of the James - Younger Gang. He also lived into his 70s, but unlike Frank James, he spent many years in prison.

Member of the Dalton Gang and leader of The Wild Bunch. Also the subject of several historically inaccurate movies and a song by The Eagles.

This outlaw is buried next to Bill Dalton. If you haven't heard of him, you should read this article to learn why he was more famous dead than alive. I don't want to summarize it; you'll enjoy the full story more.

I could write a post about being stuck in a rut in life. Heck, I could write a dozen posts about that! But this post is about literally being in a real dirt and mud rut. I am still blogging about the geocaching road trip I took with my friend Maxine earlier this month.  We were on a lot rutted dirt roads like this one:

They often led us to places with lovely views across the plains.

But my favorite ruts were on a much, much older road than that rutted dirt road above. We took a modern asphalt highway out into the prairie and pulled over at a gate that opened into a cow pasture.

There was a geocache hidden right beside the gate, and another one about a tenth of a mile beyond the gate. Max signed the log on the first cache while I was covering all of my exposed skin and spraying tick and mosquito repellent on my clothes and hat, and then we opened the gate and ventured into the pasture. We walked along a faint trail through the high grass with an almost reverent feeling. We knew we were walking in ruts, but we couldn't see them beneath the high spring grass.

We did see a snake - surprisingly, the only one we saw on the entire trip. The cache was hidden near those trees on the right of the photo above and if you look closely, you can see that it was being guarded.

Max carefully approached the cache while I was discreetly checking to see if any of those cows were bulls. They didn't seem to mind our presence too much, but they moved away from the trees as we approached and waited until we began walking away before moving back into the shade.

We walked back toward the gate thinking about what it must have been like to walk in those ruts behind wagons and horses and oxen on the way from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Those ruts were a remnant of the Santa Fe Trail, and while we couldn't see them under the grass, they are plainly visible in this aerial view from Bing Maps.

I'm grateful to the friendly farmer who allows strangers into his cow pasture to experience a little bit of history and find a geocache. His name is Ralph, and the ruts are named in his honor. If you're ever in Kansas, there are many places where modern roads cross remnants of the Santa Fe Trail. Ralph's Ruts is where you can walk on the trail... as long as you don't bother the cows.

A lot of the fun of geocaching is the cool places it takes you. We've discovered nature preserves, hiking trails, bike trails and parks in our own area that we must have driven past for nearly 20 years without noticing. It took geocaching to bring them to our attention. My favorites, though, are the caches that take me to historic places. I've shared photos in the two previous posts of cemeteries and jails, a natural well, a one-room schoolhouse, and other places rich in history. My friend Maxine and her husband planned the trip Maxine and I took; as I mentioned before, her husband ended up not being able to go and I took his place. This made it all the more special that their plans called for a night spent in a place where the history is personal to me.

Emporia, Kansas is where my dad grew up and some of his siblings were born. I spent many a summer vacation visiting Grandma and Grandpa and my Uncle Kevin, only four years older than me, in Emporia. They lived right in town, on Market Street. My great-grandparents lived just outside of town on Logan Ave., and Aunt Pat and Uncle Lou had a farm a few miles down the road in Olpe. I hadn't been back to Emporia since Aunt Pat's funeral about twelve years ago. I contacted Kevin (my siblings and I never called him "Uncle" because my older sister is older than him and she forbade it) and we picked him up at his house and drove to the cemetery a few blocks away to do some geocaching and pay our respects at Grandma and Grandpa's graves.

First we did the geocaching. One of the caches was a multi-cache. We started out with the coordinates on the cache page, which took us to the grave of William Allen White and his daughter Mary. We were to get some numbers off of Mary White's headstone, do some math and end up with the coordinates for the next stage. Unfortunately, I was too hasty in finding the headstone and didn't realize that Mary was named for her grandmother, Mary A. White, and it was the elder Mary's headstone we were supposed to use. We eventually figured it all out. One of the headstones we found in the course of our wandering through the cemetery was for a WWI veteran and had a small doughboy figure on top, complete with lance. I wonder how many of those are still intact on headstones; that's the first one I've seen.

After we found the caches, Kevin led us to his parents' (my grandparents') graves. I hadn't visited their graves since my grandmother's funeral in 1999.

Kevin then began pointing out the other, identical headstones all the way down the row saying, "You can tell a traveling salesman went through our neighborhood. That one was our next-door neighbor, that one lived around the corner, that one was at the end of the street..." etc. We dropped Kevin at his house and went to the hotel to check in and so I could take a shower and change clothes because I'd been sweating like a pig that day. We then drove back to Kevin's house to pick him up and he directed us to Grandma and Grandpa's old house on Market Street.

The gray house was theirs. It made me so happy that there was a train at the crossing down the block. Whenever we visited Grandma and Grandpa, as soon as the train signal started clanging, we'd run out the front door - usually barefoot - and down the narrow sidewalk to watch the train go past.

The other thing that made me happy was that the people who own the house now have kept Grandma's iris bed intact. You can see it in the photo above, but here's a closeup.

I won't pretend it wasn't emotional for me to stand in front of my grandparents' house, next to the irises my grandmother planted, and watch a train go by at the crossing. So much nostalgia!

Kevin then took us to a BBQ joint owned by a school friend of his and we enjoyed a delicious dinner before saying goodbye, as we had to get an early start the next day and Kevin was leaving with some of my cousins on a motorcycle trip to Alabama for a crawfish festival.

Poor Maxine got treated to lots of reminiscing about people she didn't know. I even learned a new story about Kevin... his wild ride through life started much younger than I knew!

It was a special treat for me to spend a few hours back in a town that was an important part of my childhood, and to have the opportunity to spend some time with my youngest uncle.

Here are a few more photos of my geocaching adventures with my friend Maxine as we cached our way across the counties of southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma and Texas.

We saw a lot of these...

... and a whole lot of these...

That's Maxine at what was termed the "Visitor Center" at the wind farm in the description on the cache page. We had been looking forward to a nice, clean Visitor Center ladies' room. Needless to say, we were sorely disappointed. I love this photo because of the perspectives. Max is dwarfed by the miniature windmills on the sides of the information kiosk. The miniature windmills are dwarfed by the real windmill several yards behind Max. I think this was a Virtual Cache, where we had to answer a question using information on the sign to claim the cache.

There are still a few of the old-fashioned (and much more picturesque) windmills scattered about the plains.

We found geocaches at historic homes, museums, old jails, and train depots, to name just a few interesting places.

There had been heavy rain which turned to 17 inches of wet, heavy snow in the area just a few days before we passed through. We saw a lot of flooded rivers and streams, broken trees and power poles, and other signs of storm damage. There was still a good 10 inches of snow in ditches and other low or shaded areas, even though the temperature had climbed into the 80s. The rain and snow also took a toll on the dirt roads. Luckily, most of the ones we went down had dried enough to not be a problem for Maxine's little Chrysler Journey. She bravely drove it down more than one road that looked like this... or worse...

Hmm... that's not the picture I thought it was. This road was pretty good compared to some others we were on. This particular road wound through an area called Big Basin. I'm pretty sure it was in Kansas, but we kept criss-crossing across state lines out in the boonies and there weren't always signs welcoming us to the next state. Anyway, this was the road that led through open grazing land where the buffalo roamed freely, to one of my favorite stops on the trip.

Maxine's Journey climbed up the hillside to a parking area with a sign pointing us to St. Jacob's Well a few hundred feet below us.

That little blue dot in the center of the photo is Maxine. She went down to the natural well to get the information needed for a Virtual Cache, while I stayed on the top to figure out the answers for an Earth Cache. Actually, that didn't take me very long and I spent most of the time while Max was below taking photos and shooting video. The meadowlarks were in glorious voice that morning! See that hill in the upper left of the photo above? See the little dot on top of the hill? Here's a zoomed in photo:

Native Americans would stack rocks in a pillar on top of that hill to signal that there was water below. If I remember correctly, the rocks have been cemented into pillar form to prevent vandalism, and St. Jacob's Well has never been known to go dry.

This stop had it all: an exciting road, a great view, meadowlarks, history, a science lesson, roaming buffalo... Who could ask for more?

I'll be back soon with some more photos, hopefully before I leave for GeoWoodstock next week.

I've spent the past five days recovering from an eleven day road trip with my friend Maxine. This was a geocaching road trip and I took the place of Maxine's husband, who was unable to go. Max and her husband like to "cache counties" - find at least two geocaches in every county of a state. On this trip, she was cleaning up counties in southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma and Texas. We also grabbed a few in Missouri since we were there. We found a total of 206 geocaches (and didn't find a couple of dozen), and in the process Max completed all of the counties of Kansas and Oklahoma. I think she has now found caches in all of the counties of 32 states. She is a much more hardcore geocacher than I.

We went to many interesting places and saw lots of cool things on this trip, and - lucky you - I took lots of pictures. Don't worry, I won't inflict all of them on you at once. Here are a few shots from our first five or six days on the road.

THE WORLD'S BIGGEST HAND-DUG WELL

Rather Dante-esque, don't you think?

A CEMETERY ANGEL

"Just call me angel of the morning, Angel..."

ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE...

... WITH A ONE HOLE OUTHOUSE

Notice the full moon rising over the crescent moon.

FLOODED ROADS

Nope, nope, nope... I think we detoured three times to get around the flooding.

A ROUND BARN

One of the best I've seen.

A WINDMILL MUSEUM

So much more picturesque than the newfangled ones.

A TINY JAIL

There was an amusing story about the town's chickens eating the rather unorthodox foundation materials for the originally planned building. This was thrown up at the last minute as the outgoing mayor's legacy.

That's all for this post.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring, which means that I need to finish up the Winter Scavenger Hunt. I have three prompts left and I thought I’d just do a little free-style, stream of consciousness writing for each one.

#23 – Use a dressing room.

Every woman knows that the mirror in the store dressing room lies. It doesn’t matter which store. You try on a pair of slacks and they look and feel great. You buy them and can’t wait to wear them the next day, but when you put them on and look in your bathroom mirror, your butt is as big as ever. It’s always been this way for women, but it just occurred to me to wonder if the mirrors in the men’s dressing room also lie. Do men even try on clothes? My husband knows his size, and unlike women’s clothes, men’s sizes are consistent. He just grabs pants and shirts off the rack and buys them without trying them on. Men don’t even need dressing rooms; stores should just give women ALL the dressing rooms.

#18 – Discuss shaving your head.

I took a selfie the other day for a “no makeup selfie” challenge on Facebook. Here’s the photo I took.

After posting the photo on Facebook, I looked more closely at it and immediately picked up my phone and left a message with my hair stylist. The dark roots are strong with me. It’s weird because the red, when it’s applied, is darker than my natural hair color, but over time it lightens and my roots look dark in comparison. I thought it was sunlight that bleached the color, but we haven’t seen enough sun in Michigan for that to be the cause. I guess time just takes a toll on my hair dye, like it does the rest of me. I keep thinking about growing my hair out, just a little. Shoulder length, maybe. I do pretty well up to a point. I’ve gotten fairly good at chopping my bangs back when they get too long (which they are now, but I’m waiting for my stylist to call me back before I grab the nail scissors and start hacking), but when my hair reaches a certain length on my neck (like about where it is now), it drives me crazy and I start fantasizing about shaving it all off and starting over from scratch. Except with my luck it would grow back in all gray. Suzanne REALLY needs to call me soon!

#11 – Write about a treehouse.

There is a tree in my neighbor’s backyard, right up against the top of our driveway. It’s only half the tree it used to be; the other half fell on our house in the big storm of 2004. Back before the current neighbors moved in, a family with two little boys lived in that house. The dad thought he was Daniel Boone. He was always starting these pioneer-type projects with the boys, but never seemed to think them through. Like the time he brought home a live turkey so he could teach the boys how to kill it, pluck it and cook it for Thanksgiving. That didn’t end well for the dad, but the turkey got a reprieve after the boys started wailing and the mom put her foot down. Then there was the time he brought a couple of rabbits home to teach the boys how to kill, skin and cook them. This ended up being a hutch-building project and a long career for the boys of raising rabbits to show in the Youth Fair. You’d think Dad would have learned from the turkey debacle. Anyway, the tree always reminds me of that family. At the bottom of the tree are the remains of old, rotted wood strips that were once nailed to the trunk.

They were like ladder rungs, and that’s as far as the boys and Daniel Boone ever got in their big plans to build a treehouse. It’s just as well; the tree is not healthy, as anyone could have told from looking at it back then, and as it proved in 2004.