Happy birthday and a corny wedding anniversary, brithistorian!

That's what the mechanics in North Adams MA said when they looked under my truck's hood by daylight. In fact that was a good sign.... The serpentine belt had destroyed itself without taking along any of the expensive gizmos it connects. But it took a flatbed "tow" all the way across the mountains to get to the point of diagnosis, all in all a ( Read more... )

I thought about mentioning this book in the Waxwings post but was only halfway through, and you never know how a book will pan out. But it's good ( Read more... )

A few days ago I heard the... metallic trill? purr? not-quite-musical chime? that I recognized from seeing a barberry bush full of cedar waxwings last fall, and it sounded very close to me where I was working at the compost bins; I found a pair of spotted-breasted juveniles (I presume) in a box elder just above my head level, with the sounds of ( Read more... )

Fireworks duty with the ambulance was uneventful (I didn't take the responsibility of driving the new rig, and there wasn't so much as a skinned knee from falling in the dark during the mass exodus). Just sitting around up close on the sidelines with department-issue earplugs. And wearing a dopey little reflective vest over the rare appearance of ( Read more... )

The other morning while I was drinking my coffee and reading outside, a large beetle bounced off my hair and landed in the coffee. It looked approximately like the dreaded asian longhorned beetle ( Read more... )

I finally got my ass down in the right chair and did a bit of sewing ( Read more... )

Pre-growing season spring was long and strange. The sap was still running and sugaring going on when the spring peepers came out, which isn't supposed to happen ( Read more... )

I just read a 2003 book I'd never heard of -- The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. It was a rotation collection book (from the tri-county central library) so I thought I'd better grab it in case I never saw it again (but now a paperback has been donated to my regular library). One of my faster reads of a 500+ page book. I've picked a few ( Read more... )

The libraries around here are all part of the ( Read more... )