Water, water everwhere...

This is a late afternoon cloud photo, over our cemetery, I took a couple of days ago and it turned out to be a major producer of a couple of inches of rain. Our Western Mass area has been inundated with all sorts of storms lately. We are just coming off a July that turned out to be the wettest on record and August is looking to already be the same thing. Most of the storms are in the afternoon and evening and we are getting everything from torrential rains, to hail, to high winds, and even tornadoes. The upside of this is that our cemetery has never looked better but the downside is that we never get done mowing and weed whacking. Our crew now carry their rain suits with them, on their mowers. We have taken to mow and cut weeds even when it is pouring out or else it wouldn’t get done.

Another casualty is getting to be that our farm crops are not appreciating the constant bombardment of rain. Rains once or twice a week is ideal but every day? The tomato crop is hard hit as the tomatoes don’t know when to stop growing and they look terrible and disease is much more prevalent. The tomato pictures are of my very own crop. They look great, green but once they are ready to pick they are not appetizing. Our tobacco crop is suffering and the upcoming apple crop is taking a hit.

John Edwards is a scumbag! Really, really, sad.

Relief is just a drop away!

We went for supper last evening at our daughter’s home and out of desperation I asked her “what can I blog about?” in fact I asked her several times as I was experiencing the dreaded “Blogger’s Block” and needed help.. She walked up and said “blog about this” as she tossed a box of Fresh Drops to me”. The scan of the box is below but the person sitting on the toilet caught my eye and it was blog at first sight.
This posting is a bit of a learning experience for me as I never really appreciated the fact that Americans are consumed with elimination of bathroom odors, post-defecatory bouquet removal, passing olfactory judgment from your personal throne of kings, eliminate malodorous gases, the ever so popular flatulence odor removal, and the equaly repeated Stinkey Odors. Every web site I visited, in researching this subject, had a different way of explaining the problem.

The best use of the English language in explaining the problem was a blog site, appropriately named ”The Dethroner” “post-defecatory bouquet removal” [even though my spell-checker went wild with defecatory]. The author also managed to use the following phrase in the same sentence “passing olfactory judgment from your personal throne of kings”. Great work Jason. I’m not sure why the product “Drops” was on their blog but it didn’t seem as though Jason was pushing the product because of 1st hand experience. A visit to their Blog site with the hypertext above will give you a great ad to experience.

Moving onward through the Google Search I came upon FREE! Oxi Odor Eliminator touts the fact that unlike sprays which just mask odors, FREE! has a powerful, effervescent oxygen releasing formula that eliminates 100% of the odors at the source and prevents odors from lingering.
So put out the matches, blow out the candles and stop gasping for air. All you need is FREE! Visit the website and find out how you can get a month supply and have an odor-free bathroom all month long.

If you would prefer more substancial proof about a product you can always look and see if there is a US Patent covering the item and this is what you get:
Bathroom odor eliminator
Document Type and Number:
United States Patent 5307525
Abstract:
As an improvement for eliminating lingering bathroom odor, a few drops of an appropriate fluid mixture such as a chlorinated hydrocarbon containing a small amount of a volatile fragrant fluid is added to water in a toilet bowl prior to the use of the toilet. A unique property of the first fluid causes the resultant mixture to spread quickly over the entire surface of the water, forming a nonpermeable film across which the odor emanating from unflushed feces cannot pass. The second fluid quickly vaporizes from this film allowing the resulting concentrated fragrance to neutralize within the toilet bowl the flatulence odor produced during a bowel movement. A person sitting upon the toilet seat actuates a semiautomatic fluid dispenser.

As I wander the aisles of our local Walgreens Drug store with a fresh outlook and a discerning eye for odor elimination I can’t help but wonder why we Americans are so determined to be odor free [actually that is “bad” odor free] as most of the odor solutions involve replacing bad odors with “good” odors. When I was on the Diesel boats, in the Navy, Canoe is what we used for everything.We want good odors; in our kitchens, in our bathrooms, in our beds and bedrooms, in our mouths, in our arm pits, in our private areas and behind our ears. I have yet to test any of these products but I will. I had expected my daughter to report back on the response of her family to “Fresh Drops”. Her purchase of the product started this posting after all. Her, two, odorous, guys should be excellent test subjects and I am looking forward to reporting back to you on the results. Maybe we can even put up our own U-Tube posting on the subject. I've noticed that with all of the different fragrences that have been tossed around for cleaning up the bad bottom odors no one has mentioned Citrus. My Dibs!

What a Croc!

What a Croc!

And that is what these are….”CROCS” This all started out because my daughter Ellen send me an email with a web site called I Hate crocs dot com. And I took a look. I didn’t even know that I hated Crocs but there it was right in front of me. The closest I had ever been to a Crocs [outside of Florida when I got way to close to take a picture of one and it came after me, but that’s a different story and I got the picture. Maybe that was an alligator.] was a pair of pink ones my daughter has. She said she has them because she likes to wear them when gardening or at the dog park. Seems they clean up easy. The red pair above appears to be the latest offering from the real Croc, Inc. on line store. They are called “Cyprus” and you can purchase them for $49.99 . More clicks kept dragging me further and further into this story. Next stop was a Newsweek.com story by Steve Tuttle entitled Make.It. Stop: The case for ending our long national nightmare.
Steve was talking about a press release from Crocs Inc. when he said “The other part of the press release is the announcement of some new footwear styles -- upmarket Crocs priced anywhere from $54.99 to $69.99 for "a high performance boating shoe that combines Crocs lock ™ H2O pods for advanced wet traction and the Crocs Exo-Frame that wraps the foot with a protective Croslite ™ material shell for a supportive fit." At this point I noticed that my story about Crocs was getting way to technical as I had no idea what an H2O pod is and “spell check” was flatly rejecting “Croslite” so I moved on and the next click took me into the financial world. Zac Bissonnette is a blogger and the title of his post was "crocs announces absolutely nothing". WOW, no one likes anything Crocs says in their press releases as according to Zac “Shares of Crocs, Inc. (NASDAQ: CROX) have been in free fall since the end of November, when the stock hit an all-time high of $75.21. After a guidance cut that sent the stock down about 50% last week, Crocs management are searching desperately for whatever it takes to get the stock to do something other than go down". Sounds kinda scary for Crocs, Inc. don’t you think? Well I thought so and I was playing taps and digging a hole for them in our cemetery when one more click brought me to the Denver Post and this story. "Sheri Schmelzer is living every inventor's dream. The Boulder mother of three launched a tiny company selling decorative accessories for Crocs shoes from her basement. Each month, the company sells $2 million worth of Jibbitz, which retail for $2.49 apiece. It has sold more than 6 million of them since the company was launched". Right here and now I have to tell you that a company selling and shipping $2 million dollars worth of product a week is not, what I would call, “a tiny company”. Her basement must be huge in order to ship $2 million let alone create it. Where do the kids play ping-pong at? That won’t occur in my basement because I couldn’t hire anyone taller than 5’5”.

This week, she and her husband, Rich, sold the year-old company called Jibbitz LLC to Crocs Inc. for $10 million, with the potential for another $10 million if it meets certain projections. Only in America does this stuff happen. So what is a Jibbitz, you might ask, so here it is, everything I didn't know about Jibbitz. The numbers, towards the bottom of this picture, tell the story of why it was worth $20 million to Crocs, Inc. [double clicking the picture helps]

I have examined a couple of bloggers who hate these things and I went into this posting thinking that I too hate Crocs but it is definetly a great example of how our free enterprise system really functions. For years our Farmers, Ranchers, contractors and anyone else caught in the mud have been wearing these things. All of them are black and don't offer much of a fashion statement and then along came Crocs. With all of the holes in Crocs, Jibbitzs had a place to go and everyone made money. My daughter even told me that she was going to buy me a pair, Blue I think, and I might just wear them but no Jibbitz please. I might just invent something that would appeal to the guys that will be wearing them. Basketballs, footballs, guns, brands of beer cans, naked women. We'll see what my wife will let me plug into those little holes! I'm going to call them "Bongers"trademarks and patents applied for. Motorcycles, branches of the military, rank obtained, submarines, airplanes, barbecue grills, cars. I'm calling Crocs, Inc. right now.

Putting puppies to sleep

This is how you get your puppies to sleep. I really couldn't believe this video when my wife sent it to me. Wish I could get our two puppies to mind so well. think I will try singing to them when they start tearing around and we want to sleep. I'll let you know if it works. This is one of those video's that you say "AWWWW" when it is over.

pellet stove

With skyrocketing oil prices, the cost of heating homes is jumping off the charts. The Department of Energy expects heating bills to be 27 percent higher this winter for people who heat with oil and 41 percent higher for those who heat with natural gas. In cold-winter climates, this number will be closer to 30 percent. What can you do? I say "convert to wood pellet stoves">
This is the new fuel: wood pellets. Instead of logs, pellet stoves burn a renewable fuel made of ground, dried wood and other biomass wastes compressed into pellets. They are some of the cleanest-burning heating appliances available today and deliver high overall efficiency. Because they pollute so little, pellet stoves do not require EPA certification. Most pellet stoves need a little electricity to operate, and can be easily vented through a wall, unlike log-burning stoves.

My latest challenge is converting our home over to a pellet stove heating source. I build a porch addition on to the back of the house, two years ago, and it has had little usage. The floor is about 3 feet up to the main house and it hooks on to the house where the kitchen and the living room are. I put in two walls of used storm windows and a large overhead fan for ventilation. It has a cathedral ceiling as I came off the existing house with a shed roof. The room is about 12 X 24. Coming out of the kitchen onto the porch is a door. The wood stove will sit next to the house in the far corner from the kitchen. I am punching a hole into the wall above the stove which will be into the living room and I will cover this wall opening with a register with a built in fan. My living room opens to the dining room and at the front outside wall there is a small foyer that is open into the parlor/office which also has an opening into the kitchen. The main floor is actually a pretty good circle. I am hoping for a good natural convection air flow to heat the main floor fairly evenly. Upstairs are bedrooms, the laundry and a bath. Getting the warm air up there will be a challenge. I think I will probably have to use the fan on my oil furnace to circulate the air up there or maybe punch a hole in the ceiling in a couple of places and put in floor registers. The return (cold) air will hopefully spill down the stairs.

We were given a wood stove (Breckwell) and it has very little usage. I need to finish the installation of the stove which means: hooking up the vent pipe; putting a 4" hole in the outside wall for the pipe; pluging the stove into a 110 outlet. When I built the addition I put a 4x4 tile area into the corner where the stove was going and I think it is close enough to the outside wall to vent it. This is a fairly ambitious plan but I think it will work.

In anticipation of it working I have been out trying to buy wood pellets. Tractor Supply, which is in Easthampton about 10 miles away, sent us a coupon for a discount on the pellets and time to pay for them. Welllll, we went over to the store on Friday and if I bought them right then and there I could get the discount and I would be on tractor trailer load no. 11 and they don’t even have a confirmed shipping date for truck no. 1 yet. However, if I took them up on the plan to pay 50% down and the balance by Sept. 1st then I would be assigned a truck when the entire amount I was reserving was paid for. Probably tuck #31. I need 2 ton, I think, and so I only bought 1 ton at $246. I came back to Westfield and checked all of our local outlets and they were out of pellets but one of them was taking orders for delivery when the truck comes in for $285. I bought another ton. From there the prices are expected to go sky high. We will see If I have really purchased any pellets or just some blue sky. When I first started seriously investigating this, about one month ago, the cost of pellets were $250/ton and they had them on hand locally. Procrastination really pays off doesn’t it? Keep watching as I will have the up and downs of this experiment hanging out for everyone to see. Photos at 10:00

More Lilies

These are all cemetery Lilies

Lilies of Easthampton

These are Lilies sent to me by GG of Easthampton. A bit of a Lily herself.

This last one is a bit of a cranky Lily called Magee of Easthampton. My favorite. Thanks for the Pics GG!

Batman

So who is this? It's the new Batman of course, Terry McGinnis (Batman II, The Tomorrow Knight). This guy has actually been around over in Europe, for the past 8 years, fighting evil. Maybe your more of a "now" movie buff and will want to remember Batman as looking like this portrayal, by the late Heath Ledger

Personally, my preference is with the comic book additions.

These are two more types of Batmans' and after the comics I liked Batman: the Movie and TV

These are 4 batman leading men. See if you can ID who they are? I could not get them all so my daughter helped me. This posting is at the insistence of my Grandson Sam and he provided me with the Batman and Beyond comic book to get me started. We blogged Batman together and we both learned a lot. It was a good experience. Our searching gave us the following information:

• 1939 First Batman comic book



• 1966 was "Batman: The Movie" and TV series. You may remember the words "Biff,""Pow", "Thwack" and Robins "Holy _____" Adam West had the lead.



• 1989 it was the best "Batman" with Michael Keaton and Jack Nickelson as the Joker



• 1992 "Batman Returns with Michael Keaton



• 1995 "Batman Forever" played by Val Kilmer



• 1997 "Batman and Robin" with George Clooney



• 2008 "The Dark Knight" with the late Heath Ledger

upper left Adam West; upper right Michael Keaton; lower left George Clooney; lower right Val Kilmer.

I have no idea why I posted this but I had so much information after surfing the net, I figured I should unburden myself of some of it. There, I feel better. Now I can sleep tonight.

Glasgow Lands Scottish Festival

Glascow Lands Scottish Festival







This is the opening ceremony of the Glasgow Lands Scottish Festival that is held in Florence/Northampton MA every year about this time and the time for it was this past Saturday. We all jumped in the family van and headed North for this one. 1st of all we're all Scottish; 2nd of all is that we were involved with the festival a few years ago as vendors; thirdly our daughter Ellen is a member of a dance troupe called "The Small Planet Dancers" and they were performing and I was to take pictures for their website. [actually 3rdly should have been firstly] . The video, you first encountered, when you clicked on this posting, is of the Opening Ceremony last year but I wanted you to have a feel for this festival. I don’t do my own video yet but I need to get moving in that direction as it has a lot to offer. We old 4x5 press camera photographers are a hard lot to change.
The pictures that I took are the following ones of The Small Planet Dancers and my daughter. They needed to be on an entertainment stage not a performance stage as they were with all of the young ladies being judged for dancing skills and their parents. This was their 1st year and were willing to take what they could just to get in. Next year they have been promised advertising and appearance schedule with the other entertainers. The troupe performed very well even if some of them pointed their toes the wrong direction.
We all had brought our portable chairs as we knew it was going to be a long hot day and it was. Temperature was in the 90’s as was the humidity and breathing was tough. I found a nice shady spot between the food venders and set up our chairs, which come complete with attached side table. It was an excellent location to people watch as most of them were in Scottish garb because their was band performances, individual Highland dance, bagpipe and drum competition. A lot of the Clans were represented with tents where you could join, learn, buy clan things or just visit. We were picnicking between the Fireman’s hamburger tent and the ice cream trailer, next to the information booth and across from the fish vendor. The only problem they had was the lack of tents for people to get out of the heat but the night before a microburst hit and wiped out most of the tents, destroying them. Tough on a not-for-profit where all of the money they make is promised to local charities.

If you see an add for a Scottish Festival I highly recommend that you go. If you're not into the dancing you can go watch the various Highland Games, tossing small telephone poles, big rocks, etc.

Yellow Lily

Sometimes the photo op's jump right out at you. This is from our friend GG's side yard where we were visiting this morning. She has about 10 plants and all equally beautiful.

More Medicare

Ahh, Medicare what a trip. Got an email from them giving me my new secret codes that will allow me to enter and navigate through “My Medicare . gov. The also sent me, the wildly popular pdfs, “My Medicare.gov Quick Reference guide” and the equally popular “Dashboard Reference”. They also told me that I have to: go get a physical and take a test for “Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm” which is done with ultrasound but I have to pay 20% of the cost; Have Cardiovascular Screening lab tests; Have the choice of a Colonoscopy, Sigmoidoscopy, or a barium enema [three tough choices I would say]; get Pneumococal pneumonia vaccine; Digital rectal exam [Whoopie]; Diabetes screening. Sounds like they want to catch it early whatever it is.

Stopped out at my Dr’s office this morning to get things started. Found out my PA is no longer there and there are only Nurse Practitioners [all female], and Drs. there now. Scaled back the size of their service. The earliest I could get an appointment was August 20th. Our dog groomer is about 3 months out so when you put it in perspective I guess 1 month isn’t real bad.

Road Trip

My son-in-law was in need of a cap for his short bed pickup but they needed to haul their two big dogs around such as taking them to the dog park and to the river for a swim. They just got rid of their Jeep, which worked good for hauling the dogs, but daughter teaches about ¼ block from their house and son Sam is starting there in the fall. They really don’t need a second vehicle, especially a 4x4 gas-guzzler.

We all figured that the two dogs would do a number on the cap so we decided on a used one. I started looking online and on Craig’s List I found one that would fit in Greenfield MA about 50 miles away. My Daughter called and found out it was about what we needed and the guy only wanted $10 bucks for it but later said “If you will come and get it out of his yard we could have it for free!” ROAD TRIP!!!!!!

We had a few problems scheduling the trip but two days later we headed out in the late afternoon for our adventure in Greenfield. Only my Daughter and I could get the time to go. Thank God! Usually when we have a trip like this the whole family has to go, which would have meant two vehicles and we would have just overwhelmed these poor people up in Greenfield.

We found the house and met the couple and their cats [4 or 5 as best as I could count]. She explained that she had decided to be a rescue house for stray kittens last year but they quickly overwhelmed her and then when they had to give up the baby kittens it was too much so this year she is holding them at arms length. Had a couple of dogs, in the back yard, so we all understood each other. Kinda talked the same language and all. Anyway, we liked the free topper, so I gave him $20 for it? It was about the same color as the pickup, and we clamped it down on Michael’s pickup ready to head out again but that isn’t the end of the story,
We got talking with this couple about everything and I said that Michael was from South Dakota, heck we all were, and the conversation switched to 2000 miles to the west. Seems like Bill, topper owner, spent a year out in Rapid City, out of High School, because he had family in the Air Force at Ellsworth AFB. He just hung out having fun in the beautiful Black Hills. It turns out that his cousin married some guy from Sturgis [our home town] and moved to the Denver area to live happily ever after. Well, don’t you know, her husband and I graduated from High School together, all 112 of us. It really is a small world. This is the reason that all of us go on these adventures together. The rest of them missed it and we could have had a picnic or something.

Rescue Dog

This past weekend our Grandson Sam, daughter, son-in-law, Boo [Black Lab] and Randy [Golden Doodle] all headed over to a favorite Dog Park in Connecticut. After some intense playtime they took the dogs around back, where there is a river, so that the dogs can swim. Really it is only Boo that swims [as you can tell by the picture]













and when you look at the picture of Randy standing in the river you could say that “Randy doesn’t like swimming” and hit the nail right on the head because this is a photo of Randy’s best effort. This is as good as it gets.










Sam usually jumps right in and swims with the dogs. On this day Sam was walking in and not paying attention where he was and walked off the edge of the stream where it gets deep. He got tangled up somehow and was thrashing a bit. Boo immediately spotted Sam in trouble, jumped in and swam out to Sam and then circled him to get close so Sam could grab his collar. He then swam to shore bringing Sam back in. Kind of dog you want with you when you have kids and water, don’t you think?

Fenway Franks

Saturday Sam, his Mom and Step Dad all took a bus to Fenway park and got to watch the Red Sox trounce the Orioles 12 to 1 and took the division lead at the break. They got to watch 4 homeruns and one of them be a Grand Slam. Best of all [according to me] they watched Tim Wakefield do his magic on the Orioles batters.

Best of all [according to them] was they got to devour 3 Fenway Franks. Upon leaving they got mixed up and couldn’t find their bus. Finally after a one-mile sprint [according to them] they got hooked up and made it home safe and sound. A great time was had by all.