After two years, I've finally managed to download photos from my phone's camera. So here are a handful of random images that seemed interesting ( Read more... )

I think I've mentioned before that the drain for our driveway and rear walk sometimes has trouble, well, draining. This was a problem yet again last night, and I'm tired of that little stream of water flowing through our basement when the lake forms against the back wall. It's pretty clearly more than just the grate getting clogged that's to blame ( Read more... )

The world here had begun to warm up and start looking like spring, but a few days ago Winter decided that it wouldn't go away without throwing one last, nasty punch. So we got a layer of ice, then a layer of wet, heavy snow, then another layer of ice, and finally another layer of wet, heavy snow. That made clearing the sidewalks and driveway a real ( Read more... )

Like about half the country, I had a snow day today (which is apparently something like a once-a-decade event at Alma College). The tradeoff, of course, was that I had to get rid of a foot or more of snow along all my sidewalks and the driveway ( Read more... )

I'm not a libertarian. But there's still something oddly creepy when your local government gets into the business of regulating trick-or-treating in what seem like crazy ways. This year in Alma, the city's approved Trick-or-Treat hours are 5:30-7:30 p.m. on October 30 ( Read more... )

Kim and I recently agreed that our "We should paint first" excuse not to unpack our many boxes of books had ceased to be viable. For various reasons, painting didn't happen this summer, and we don't foresee it in the immediate future. So at long last, we finally buckled down today (Eek! Yesterday, now!) and got everything unpacked and sorted.[1 ( Read more... )

In my last post, I shared a picture of the cat who was visiting our porch:

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When we moved into our house, Kim and I knew that an early maintenance priority would be replacing the roof of the garage. The damage was easy to see; in this picture from last year, it's especially obvious along the left edge:

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Our house came with an attractive ivy covered wall in back:

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Kim's mother has been visiting this past week (I'll post pictures of our recent trip later). She has appreciated our house, but we wanted to make sure she got the full experience of living here. So as we all sat calmly chatting in the living room at the end of the day, we were surprised by a visitor:


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