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One Last Hurrah

21 Mar

Like the obnoxious guest who keeps coming back, Old Man Winter has been hanging around far, far too long.

Monday it was in the 50s  but yesterday morning the temperature dropped to the upper 30s, and it began to snow in the late afternoon. Now, “snow” here is a comparative noun. Or verb, depending upon your approach to these things.  Maybe we got a quarter inch, and although the forecast was for snow overnight, this morning was hovering around 32° F and it wasn’t snowing. At all. I had a 10:00 doctor appointment, but when I arrived the office was closed. At some point somebody had managed to come in to post a note on the inside of the glass door, but nary a word to the patients. I did stop at a pet store to buy bird seed and a brush for the cat, but those people don’t know what to charge. They wanted $10.50 for a five pound bag of peanuts, when I could buy two of the same size next door at Costco! And I am NOT paying $7 for a brush when I can -and did – get one just as nice at the Dollar Store.  Came on home and stopped to pick up a few odds and ends at the grocery store. The library was also closed – as were the public schools – so no joy there. Other people stock up on toilet paper when it snows (WHY?) but we stock up on books.

Shortly after noon it did begin to snow in earnest, but we only got 2 inches – max. A bit further north, Eldest Daughter said she had 4 inches, and the roads were slick.  At the moment it is 37° and by the weekend it will be pushing 50° again.

Ah. The Board of Education has announced the schools must find a way to make up one day to have the kids in school for a full 180 days. What on earth are they going to learn in one day? Yeesh.

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Stop The Music!

19 Mar

Fr. B was away yesterday and we invited a former rector to fill in for us.

There are three Episcopal churches in Baltimore that are so high they look down on the Pope.  Grace and St. Peter’s (commonly known as GASP), St. Katherine of Alexandria, and a parish fondly known as “Smokey Mary’s” because of the amount of incense they use.  Our organist and Fr. Fill-in had been at St. Mary’s at the same time for a short while and had a chance to catch up during coffee hour.  The organist was relating an incident that occurred while he was still there, but after the Good Father had moved on.  The parish had a new priest, just in time for a feast in honour of the Virgin Mary, probably the Annunciation – also known as Maryland Day – which involved processing around the church with stops at stations depicting events in her life. During these stops, the organist  stopped playing so the prayers could be heard.

At the first of these stops, the music ceased and everybody was quiet. Except one woman, who abruptly stopped singing the verse she was doing solo, and asked, in a very loud voice, “What happened to the f. . .ing  music?”

Everybody turned to stare. The assistant raced up the side aisle, removed his vestments, stomped down the center aisle and just about dragged the woman out the door. He came back in. She did not.

And they shall be cast into outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

 

Some schools teach that the state was named after Henrietta Marie, the wife of Charles I of England. Charles, you may remember, was having some trouble in the popularity polls and decided the best was to get rid of some of his Roman Catholic nobles was to send them off to the New World. After a six week ocean voyage, they arrived within site of their new home on March 22. They waited off shore until the 25th, which is, as I mentioned earlier, celebrated as the day the angel asked Mary if she was willing to bear the Messiah. They named their new colony Mary’s Land.

And it didn’t help poor Charlie at all, as he ended up getting his head chopped off, anyway.

 

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Eye, Yi, Yi!

16 Mar

Well, it took me two hours to find out what I already knew. I have a cataract in my left eye.

I arrived at 12:30, and was taken back fairly promptly. A young lady verified my medical history and did an eye exam – vision test and glaucoma. I was led to a waiting room, and promised “somebody will come for you shortly”. Another young lady, who happened to be the granddaughter of an old friend, did a second eye exam, and then led me back to the same waiting room, and gave me the same line. We did this dance several times. Different women, different exam rooms, but I had at least five people staring into my eyes. And then I finally saw the doctor. Who did another eye exam.

Return to  different waiting area, and then I went into an office where yet another woman – this made six – set up the date for the surgery.

It took two bloody hours, and more traipsing around than really seemed necessary. Yeesh.

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The Clock Family is Alive and Well

14 Mar

Neither of us are hoarders, and I really do try to keep a nice house, but the way things disappear around here is simply maddening.

I’ve lost a dozen linen napkins. They lived in the bottom of the corner cupboard for years and years, and now they are all gone. I can understand misplacing one, maybe, but the entire dozen? This is not the sort of item the common thief would want, is it? Most of our friends think we’re a little barmy for using “renewable” napkins instead of paper, but I don’t think anybody would take them just to make a point.

About three months ago I purchased three bundles of yarn to make a shawl. I got sidetracked and made something else while the shawl sat on the needles, but I’ve finally finished the first skein and now I simply cannot find the other two. I suppose it goes without saying that the yarn will have been discontinued if I go back to the store.

Anybody need a very short shawl? About 36 inches long and 16 inches wide.  Of course, if I unravel it to make a scarf or something, the other two rolls will show up.

A pair of earrings I lost several years ago turned up in a jacket pocket. It is not a jacket I’d have worn with those earrings, so I don’t know how they got there. A hot glue gun has been MIA for years. Even buying a new one didn’t make it show up.

And this doesn’t even begin to account for the things I just know I have in my dollhouse stash.

I just hope the Clocks bring this stuff back when they are finished.

(If you have never read Mary Norton’s marvelous book, The Borrowers, you really should. Pod and Homily Clock, and their daughter Arietty live under the kitchen in a large English house and . . . well, go read it yourself.)

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Just Ducky

12 Mar

DSCN0514For the last couple of days we have seen a pair of mallards in our pond.  The drake is, of course, unmistakable, but the duck is so drab you’d think she was another species entirely.

They come fairly early in the morning, leave, and then come back in the afternoon, before flying away for the evening.

I really don’t understand how scientists can claim animals such as dogs and cats are colour-blind. If they were, it would not be necessary for female birds to blend into the scenery.  The male scarlet tanager is bright red, with black wings; his mate is a dull green and her wings are greenish grey. A male canvasback is bright white with a russet head, while the female is dusty grey with a darker grey head. God doesn’t want the females in danger while they are nesting.

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Bread on Both Sides

7 Mar

When I was a kid I did not want to eat the heels of bread. I made it very clear I wanted “bread on both sides”. My grandfather would smile and nod, and agree those pieces were for the chickens.

Now that I make all of our bread, I’ve discovered the very best part is the heel of the loaf, hot from the oven, and spread with a good pat of fresh butter.

Life doesn’t get much better than that.

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Update

6 Mar

I put an inquiry on the local “Nextdoor” blog this morning asking if anyone knew what had happened last night, and one woman suggested I call the local police station and ask. Yeesh. How obvious is that?

And so I did.

Apparently it was a domestic dispute between a man and his dad. One of them was threatening to burn down the house, and “we took him to the hospital”. Not sure which “he” was “who”, but it wasn’t anything for us to worry about. No guns or loose cannons.

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Very Mysterious

6 Mar

About 8 o’clock last night I started hearing helicopters, very loud and very close. We live fairly close to three different military bases – two Army and one Air Force – and I was beginning to think our dear Cadet Bone Spurs had at last gone too far. A few minutes later I became aware of sirens and flashing lights, to I went upstairs to see what I could see from that vantage point.

The helicopters – three of them – were circling a house a few doors up the road, keeping their spotlights focused on the building. Police cars were everywhere.  The road was blocked in both directions, and we could hear loudspeakers, but couldn’t make out what was being said. The Squire went back downstairs, locked both doors, turned the alarm on “instant” and flipped on the lights over both the back and front of the house.  After about a half an hour, things began to subside – the choppers went away, and the various police vehicles (we think one may have been a K9 car) drove away.

The Squire stayed up and watched the 11:00 news, but there was nothing mentioned and there wasn’t anything in this morning’s newspaper, either.

 

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The Big Blowhard

4 Mar

Winter Storm Riley did a number on our area, that much is certain. The Squire said the power went out around noon on Friday, and it came back on Saturday at 1:30. We really made out much better here than a lot of other folks, but I certainly have even more sympathy for the people in Puerto Rico.  I worked on Friday and had hoped to run out and do a bit of shopping on my lunch hour. First, it snowed like mad, and with the wind whipping around at 50 mph, I’d have been driving inside a milk bottle. Then a customer reported all the traffic lights were out for at least a five mile stretch along the only road that went directly to my destination. So, scratch that. We’ll try again on Monday.
There were a lot of trees down between the office and the Rice Paddy. The road was blocked by a State Highway truck at one point, and an electric company truck at another. I could see a pole down a short distance beyond that truck. There were also wires down closer to home, where a tree hand gone down and snapped the line. A neighbor lost two huge pine trees; one had blown over and taken its neighbor with it. One house had half the siding off north side. A woman about a mile from here was killed when a tree fell on her as she was going out to the mailbox. The Squire said he himself nearly got hit, when a branch fell directly behind him. Ten seconds one way or the other would have been fatal. The wind was so loud you couldn’t hear anything else, so you couldn’t even get out of the way.
Fortunately, we have an older gas stove, so we were able to light it with matches; the newer ones have a “safety feature” that makes it impossible to do that. I don’t mind sitting in the dark, or being cold, but I draw the line at going hungry. The Squire had home-made soup ready when I got in and had brought the kerosene lamp from the bedroom to add to the one already in the dining room. Of course, the second lamp made the smoke detector go off. Fortunately, that one is not connected to the police – although I don’t think it would have made much difference without any power.

We had purchased a dozen small flashlights for the nieces and nephews at Christmas, but we didn’t get to see half the children so there were still a bunch of torchesDSCN0515 lining the mantle. I put a magnetic hook on the stove hood and hung one there, so we could see to fix breakfast, and another on the medicine cabinet doorknob, so we could brush our teeth. The Squire brought a bucket of water from the pond to flush the toilet. All the comforts of home.

We didn’t get cable service until Sunday afternoon, which meant we didn’t have a phone or computer, but we were able to use the cell phone, and had power to recharge it.  My inbox had almost 100 messages in it! About five were worth answering. ‘Twas ever thus.

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Ash Wednesday

14 Feb

I had a doctor’s appointment today too close to noon to be comfortable going to Resurrection for services, so I trotted up to St. Alban’s, an Anglican parish about five miles away.  I was there last year, and they remembered who I was!

Of course, that may have been because last year I arrived a half an hour late.

The same young priest, minus the maniple, and the elderly assistant was even shakier than he was last year. Normally, the celebrant serves the bread and the assistant goes behind with the wine.  Today, it was the other way around. The assistant had the bread, and his hands shook so I had visions of him flinging the wafers all over the floor. I can only imagine how he’d have done with the chalice! And there were no Sanctus bells. He probably rattled them non-stop.

One big surprise was running into a man who had been the rector of a nearby parish simply forever. I stopped at chatted with him for a few moments. He said he really likes using the old service, and “when I’m here I don’t have to work every day”.  Sounds good to me.

When the General Convention, in their infinite wisdom, rewrote the Book of Common Prayer, many people – myself included – did not like it. Some got used to it, some really did like it,  some knuckled down and made the best of a bad situation, and some simply dug in their heels, and said NO. The breakaway denomination now calls themselves Anglican, rather than Episcopalian. If we were no so deeply embedded in our own parish I’d transfer my membership to St. Alban’s.

So there.

 

 

 

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