“The Wind that Shakes the Barley”, Mom’s 90th, unexpected overnighter
(posted from home)
(This post covers 1 – 6 November, 2008)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, 6 November-
Today Labashi and I went into town on a few errands. We took Mocha Joe in for an oil change (I’ve found I can get it done at Wal-mart for just a little over the cost of doing it myself) and shopped Wal-mart for a few small items. We had a great lunch at the nearby Isaac’s using a coupon from the ‘One Book, One Community’ program. After taking a “should-we?” look at the sliding miter saws at Lowe’s (Labashi loved the one we borrowed from Maypo last Spring when we were doing the crown molding work), we went looking for a new telephone calling card at BJ’s. The cards were a big disappointment. The cards are a rip-off. Both AT&T and Verizon (the provider for the BJs-logo card) sell you a card for ‘n’ number of minutes of about 3-cents-per-minute calls. But the rate only applies to state-to-state calls. If you read the cards carefully, you see they deduct FIVE minutes for every minute of in-state calls in Pennsylvania. You think you are getting 3-cents-per-minute calls but are actually paying 15 cents per minute for most calls. And if you make the call from a pay phone Verizon deducts $.95, AT&T $.35. No thank you!
Our Costco MCI card is about to expire and the reload price has gone up but even with the price increase it’s a far better deal.
We stopped by Target and bought a replacement blender and then headed home. I walked three miles along the creek today (plus another mile or so in town).
-------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 5 November-
I spent much of the day reading the post-election news on Dailybeast, Slate, Salon, NewsMax, Anchorage Daily News, CBC.ca, The Economist, and the local newspapers. Then I turned to the gun forums I regularly read and saw a different type of “shock and awe”. On the Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association web site, a few members admitted to voting for Obama and were heavily attacked, leading the moderators to delete multiple posts and issue conduct warnings and a temporary suspension (to the offenders). One guy was distraught upon learning his daughter voted for Obama and told her he will no longer pay her college tuition. Another declared
Late in the day I walked my four-miler.
-------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 4 November-
Labashi and I only had an hour’s sleep overnight. My brother took over the watch this morning. Labashi and I went downtown to breakfast, then parked Mocha Joe in a nearby parking lot (at the library) and zonked out for a couple of hours of catch-up sleep.
We spent the afternoon and most of the evening with Mom. Around supper-time she was transferred back to the nursing home, apparently having weathered this crisis.
After a short visit with Maypo, we headed home and made it back home by 2130 and watched the election news. At 2300, CNN projected Obama as the winner. Yes!!
No walk today.
-------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 3 November-
Until yesterday we had thought we’d be leaving home today to help my brother Orat. He bought a house last week and we volunteered to help paint. Yesterday we learned the project would slip by a few days. I mowed the lawn today (hopefully for the last time this season) for my walk-time.
And late today we received a call about Mom. She seemed fine yesterday but today was admitted to the hospital with a serious condition.
We loaded up the van and drove to the hospital, where we spent the rest of the day and the overnight hours with her.
-------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 2 November-
Today we drove to Chambersburg for a birthday party. My nephew had driven down from the Rochester area yesterday and brought along some toys. We flew radio-control helicopters and a plane. We foolishly tried to fly the plane in windy conditions and crashed it. It looks bad but hopefully will be repairable.
The party was for my 90-year-old mother. It was a small cake-and-ice-cream get-together with Mom in a very nice private glassed-in area at the nursing home. She was in good spirits and particularly enjoyed watching her one-year-old great-grand-daughter and three-year-old great-grandson.
After the party we returned to my brother’s home. It didn’t take long for the boys to want to go outside to fly the helicopter. I hung around with them for a few flights, then I went for a walk.
I walked over to and then behind Penn Hall to the Conococheague Creek. Near the railroad bridge I found the Wilson College Interpretive Trail—a new one for me. It appears to now be abandoned as an interpretive trail (the signs are old) but the trail is still open enough to be enjoyable. It leads along the creek and past the heavy stone remains of a fulling mill before climbing into a heavily over-grown farm field. I remember this field from my days as a teenager living in this area (in the Sixties). At the time this field was a grassy pasture and I remember having to be careful to check where the bull was before I climbed over the fence. I always made sure to leave myself an out by not venturing too far away from the fence when the bull was around and on more than one occasion I made a dash for it when he headed my way from the far end.
But today the field is heavily grown over but has wildlife-management trails. Apparently someone mows the trails once or twice a season with a bush-hog to keep them from being closed off by the heavy growth of bushes and briars. I was very surprised to see fifteen-foot-high bushes and thirty-foot-high trees in this old field. Has it really been that long since I’ve been here?
The trail paralleled the high bank of the Conococheague—an area where I used to hunt squirrels and try my luck at bow-fishing—but then turned up the ravine toward a mature woods. That woods also shows the signs of active management. I began seeing the little numbered metal disks used to inventory trees. And I saw seedling tubes used to protect new seedlings from browsing deer.
The trail led to the top of the hill, where it ended at the new (to me) soccer and softball fields. This area was all open farm fields when I lived nearby. This would be a GREAT place to fly the RC planes and maybe even do some winter-night star-gazing.
As I walked toward home, Labashi called me on the cell and said everyone was going out to supper. I was only a twenty-minute walk away so she left the car for me and and went on with the group. Afterwards we sat around talking about the election before Labashi and I made the trip home.
--------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 1 November –
I spent much of today cataloging video clips from the Alaska trip. This is a slow process and I never seem to make as much progress as I think I should. The day was a pretty, above-sixty one but I spent most of it in my reading chair, working away on the laptop.
By 1530 I couldn’t take it anymore. Labashi and I took the four-miler along the creek and stopped to chat at some length with one of our neighbors. She and her husband used to buy ring-necked pheasants each Spring and try to get a local population of them going but foxes proved too devastating to their efforts.
That evening we watched “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”, a movie about 1920’s Ireland and the Irish Republican Army’s attempt to cast off British rule. The storytelling was a bit confusing for us. We don’t have enough background to pick up on the references. We watched with the subtitles to help us wade through the accents and that helped but we still felt like we were barely keeping up with the storyline at times.
===== END OF POST =====
(posted from home)
(This post covers 1 – 6 November, 2008)
-----------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, 6 November-
Today Labashi and I went into town on a few errands. We took Mocha Joe in for an oil change (I’ve found I can get it done at Wal-mart for just a little over the cost of doing it myself) and shopped Wal-mart for a few small items. We had a great lunch at the nearby Isaac’s using a coupon from the ‘One Book, One Community’ program. After taking a “should-we?” look at the sliding miter saws at Lowe’s (Labashi loved the one we borrowed from Maypo last Spring when we were doing the crown molding work), we went looking for a new telephone calling card at BJ’s. The cards were a big disappointment. The cards are a rip-off. Both AT&T and Verizon (the provider for the BJs-logo card) sell you a card for ‘n’ number of minutes of about 3-cents-per-minute calls. But the rate only applies to state-to-state calls. If you read the cards carefully, you see they deduct FIVE minutes for every minute of in-state calls in Pennsylvania. You think you are getting 3-cents-per-minute calls but are actually paying 15 cents per minute for most calls. And if you make the call from a pay phone Verizon deducts $.95, AT&T $.35. No thank you!
Our Costco MCI card is about to expire and the reload price has gone up but even with the price increase it’s a far better deal.
We stopped by Target and bought a replacement blender and then headed home. I walked three miles along the creek today (plus another mile or so in town).
-------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 5 November-
I spent much of the day reading the post-election news on Dailybeast, Slate, Salon, NewsMax, Anchorage Daily News, CBC.ca, The Economist, and the local newspapers. Then I turned to the gun forums I regularly read and saw a different type of “shock and awe”. On the Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association web site, a few members admitted to voting for Obama and were heavily attacked, leading the moderators to delete multiple posts and issue conduct warnings and a temporary suspension (to the offenders). One guy was distraught upon learning his daughter voted for Obama and told her he will no longer pay her college tuition. Another declared
Late in the day I walked my four-miler.
-------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 4 November-
Labashi and I only had an hour’s sleep overnight. My brother took over the watch this morning. Labashi and I went downtown to breakfast, then parked Mocha Joe in a nearby parking lot (at the library) and zonked out for a couple of hours of catch-up sleep.
We spent the afternoon and most of the evening with Mom. Around supper-time she was transferred back to the nursing home, apparently having weathered this crisis.
After a short visit with Maypo, we headed home and made it back home by 2130 and watched the election news. At 2300, CNN projected Obama as the winner. Yes!!
No walk today.
-------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 3 November-
Until yesterday we had thought we’d be leaving home today to help my brother Orat. He bought a house last week and we volunteered to help paint. Yesterday we learned the project would slip by a few days. I mowed the lawn today (hopefully for the last time this season) for my walk-time.
And late today we received a call about Mom. She seemed fine yesterday but today was admitted to the hospital with a serious condition.
We loaded up the van and drove to the hospital, where we spent the rest of the day and the overnight hours with her.
-------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 2 November-
Today we drove to Chambersburg for a birthday party. My nephew had driven down from the Rochester area yesterday and brought along some toys. We flew radio-control helicopters and a plane. We foolishly tried to fly the plane in windy conditions and crashed it. It looks bad but hopefully will be repairable.
The party was for my 90-year-old mother. It was a small cake-and-ice-cream get-together with Mom in a very nice private glassed-in area at the nursing home. She was in good spirits and particularly enjoyed watching her one-year-old great-grand-daughter and three-year-old great-grandson.
After the party we returned to my brother’s home. It didn’t take long for the boys to want to go outside to fly the helicopter. I hung around with them for a few flights, then I went for a walk.
I walked over to and then behind Penn Hall to the Conococheague Creek. Near the railroad bridge I found the Wilson College Interpretive Trail—a new one for me. It appears to now be abandoned as an interpretive trail (the signs are old) but the trail is still open enough to be enjoyable. It leads along the creek and past the heavy stone remains of a fulling mill before climbing into a heavily over-grown farm field. I remember this field from my days as a teenager living in this area (in the Sixties). At the time this field was a grassy pasture and I remember having to be careful to check where the bull was before I climbed over the fence. I always made sure to leave myself an out by not venturing too far away from the fence when the bull was around and on more than one occasion I made a dash for it when he headed my way from the far end.
But today the field is heavily grown over but has wildlife-management trails. Apparently someone mows the trails once or twice a season with a bush-hog to keep them from being closed off by the heavy growth of bushes and briars. I was very surprised to see fifteen-foot-high bushes and thirty-foot-high trees in this old field. Has it really been that long since I’ve been here?
The trail paralleled the high bank of the Conococheague—an area where I used to hunt squirrels and try my luck at bow-fishing—but then turned up the ravine toward a mature woods. That woods also shows the signs of active management. I began seeing the little numbered metal disks used to inventory trees. And I saw seedling tubes used to protect new seedlings from browsing deer.
The trail led to the top of the hill, where it ended at the new (to me) soccer and softball fields. This area was all open farm fields when I lived nearby. This would be a GREAT place to fly the RC planes and maybe even do some winter-night star-gazing.
As I walked toward home, Labashi called me on the cell and said everyone was going out to supper. I was only a twenty-minute walk away so she left the car for me and and went on with the group. Afterwards we sat around talking about the election before Labashi and I made the trip home.
--------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 1 November –
I spent much of today cataloging video clips from the Alaska trip. This is a slow process and I never seem to make as much progress as I think I should. The day was a pretty, above-sixty one but I spent most of it in my reading chair, working away on the laptop.
By 1530 I couldn’t take it anymore. Labashi and I took the four-miler along the creek and stopped to chat at some length with one of our neighbors. She and her husband used to buy ring-necked pheasants each Spring and try to get a local population of them going but foxes proved too devastating to their efforts.
That evening we watched “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”, a movie about 1920’s Ireland and the Irish Republican Army’s attempt to cast off British rule. The storytelling was a bit confusing for us. We don’t have enough background to pick up on the references. We watched with the subtitles to help us wade through the accents and that helped but we still felt like we were barely keeping up with the storyline at times.
===== END OF POST =====
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
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