Category: retirement

  • Windy Terry Trueblood Trail

    Windy Terry Trueblood Trail

    Day before yesterday was the eve of Christmas Eve. We ventured out on the blustery day despite the forecast for winds in excess of 40 mile per hour. We got started late in the morning and the temperatures dropped like a rocket in reverse about an hour later because of wind chill. A thin film…

  • Kindness Alert!

    Kindness Alert!

    This is just a brief announcement—a Kindness Alert. This past Saturday, we got our first load of snow of the season dumped on us, which meant we had to go out and shovel. Our driveway is pretty big. We don’t have a snowblower. This means we were out there about an hour and a half…

  • Wild, Flying Tree Warriors

    Wild, Flying Tree Warriors

    A couple of days ago, Country Arborists cleaned up the debris left behind in our back yard from the derecho that smacked Iowa in August 2020. They are wild, flying tree warriors. That was a scary storm and if the straight-line winds had blown in a slightly different direction, our house would have been all…

  • Music Can Heal

    Music Can Heal

    Here’s another post on music. This one got started while watching Eric Clapton Crossroads Guitar Festival 2019 last night on the Iowa Public Broadcasting Service channel. It’s great pizza and beer music. It was the fifth event of its kind since it got started in 2004. Part of the profits go to support the substance…

  • Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: What’s in a Name?

    Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: What’s in a Name?

    Last night I was half-dozing while listening to our cable light classical music channel. It was the usual lineup of 200-year-old white males of the 3-B variety—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. You see a photo or artist’s rendition of a guy in a powered wig, often looking depressed or constipated, alongside of short biographical blurbs. Many…

  • Pleiadian Zombie Turkeys

    Pleiadian Zombie Turkeys

    We noticed the wild turkeys hung back close to edge of the woods this morning. They didn’t move out across the open land or trot across our back yard like they usually do. It’s easy to imagine that they might be more wary because they know it’s Thanksgiving Day. Usually a dozen or so get…

  • Happy Anniversary

    Happy Anniversary

    The basic definition of the word “anniversary” is the date on which an event occurred in a previous year. There are many events to which it can be attached. However, wedding anniversaries most often ring the bell, literally for those of us who got married at the Little Brown Church in the Vale in Nashua,…

  • Camping in Our Basement: Week 2

    Camping in Our Basement: Week 2

    It’s week 2 of camping out in our basement because our wood floors underwent sanding and resealing. Today, the workers finished up and the floors look great. But we still can’t move back upstairs because that would ruin the finish just applied on the floors. The final coat went on last Friday. It’ll be this…

  • Camping In Our Basement

    Camping In Our Basement

    We’ve been camping in our basement since yesterday. We’re having our upper level wood floors sanded and resealed. This has led to a new sense of togetherness for me and Sena. We had to get all the furniture off the floor. We were lucky enough to be able to find places to move them. We…

  • Frank and His Stump Grinder

    Frank and His Stump Grinder

    This is a follow-up post on Frank and his stump grinder estimate from last week (“Stumped”). By the way, he was the only stump grinder to return my call about getting a quote for the job. The name of his business is Corridor Stump Grinding (CSG) and the web page says it all: “We Remove…