My Sacramento Accent

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
North Central
The West
Philadelphia
Boston
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Start your day with an ash-can fire

What a smell, burning cigarette filters and dog-ends. It's bad enough people have to smoke in this spot, which has an overhang, keeping the smoke close to the entrance to the library, so that it gets on your clothes.

Anyway, it looks like the mobile posting is messed up again on Blogger. So I will post these some other way for a while, until I get really tired of it an give up entirely, or the fix the problem.

Beaver den

In the middle of Spruce Swamp

Getting kid after checking out a school

Not this one, but it is just down the street.

Sledding in the State forest

Carefully groomed run

Night tennis at Trull Brook

I'll feel it in the morning

Back to Working Assets

We had canceled our Working Assets long distance service because we decided to go with a cable TV/internet/phone bundle to save money. So they called us with what sounded like a good deal on wireless. They'd buy out our current contract, give us two of these Katana phones, which the guy said were the latest thing and would take better pictures than my Motorola, and all for about what we are paying now.

Wrong. He didn't know what he was talking about. It would have cost considerably more to get it to send pictures as text message attachments, $15 per month (currently I pay about $5) per phone. Worst thing, though, was that I got this box of phones and stuff via UPS with little instruction as to how to make them work. The packing list said the phones were ready to go, which was completely wrong, they didn't even have phone numbers. And when I tried to use them they connected me to Sprint. They wasted about three hours of my life without any kind of idea of how they might make recompense, so I bundled everything back up and shipped it back to WALD.

Dropped son at prospective school

He did not like it at all.

The dentist's bathroom

Just got out of x-ray and cleaning and am spitting blood and chunks of mouth-beef into the sink.

Finally some snow

About two inches last night

Break-fast fundraiser

The electric pancake griddles keep blowing the 10-amp fuses. So we stood by the breaker board in shifts to keep resetting them. Then on the way to work the radiator on the Subaru finally fell apart.

Lesson number one

Let there be rock

International incident

Caught in the Canuck flag

Maggie's 1st fur-cut

Has to go to the groomer every 3 months, though

I had an idea

Quartered breathing

Fixed it w/a roto-zip and chisel

See the camera in the reflection? Don't know what's so hard about putting these things in the right place and hanging the doors so that they actually close and latch. New house, less than 2000 square feet. But three doors were screwed up the day we moved in. It's hard to sculpt with a roto-zip, but it it even harder to use the roto-zip bit in a regular drill because you can't find the stupit chuck device for the roto-zip machine.

Maggie took this from the upstairs bath

Toilet paper. She tore it apart, leaving a trail all the way from the stairs on the other side of the house, while we watched The Chronicle of Narnia up there. Something about the cardboard in the middle is tasty, I guess. But you have to take all the white stuff off to get there.

D

Tracks in the snow this morning

The picture doesn't really do justice to how small these things are. They are about as long as an aglet and almost as thin. I should have put something in for scale. It doesn't seem to hop like a squirrel, and they seem smaller than squirrel tracks anyway. They came from the farmers porch in the front of the house and ended at a hole next to the birch tree that we had to cut down two years ago. I didn't see where they went after that, so the hole may have something in it.

9-year-old son made dinner for us

Beautiful, Isn't it? Pasta with red sauce and some sort of meat in it (onions, too). The salad is green leaf lettuce with dried cranberries and cherries, mandarin oranges, balsamic vinagrette. Then there is bread with garlic and olive oil dipping bowls. The drink there is some sort of sparkling water with blackberries in it. That is his hand, on the left hand side, gratin fresh parmesan cheese onto the pasta. He made it all himself, even boiling the pasta and draining it, etc. My wife helped with advice and instructions on certain fine points, but he conceived the whole thing and carried it out himself.

Finally started my pirate story

Only a couple of weeks left to put something together for Glimmer Magazine's pirate story contest. I've been toying with an idea for weeks now and finally found a free hour to get going on it. The pencil, perched lovingly on Edward Rowe Snow's Pirates and Bucaneers of the Atlantic Coast has been carefully (but not quite silently) chewed by Maggie. I thought it might be something in the cedar, but the Wife says that Maggie likes the carbon, for some reason.