Category: Dear Diary

Peggi and I headed out to the mall this weekend. We don’t get out there much but Peggi needed new jeans and our niece told her Old Navy was the best place go for jeans. The corridors to the big box stores are lined with small vendors and once I figured out what this Russian guy was selling I took out my camera to grab a shot. He asked, “What are you doing? I said, I’m taking a photo for my father. I know he would want one of these but I don’t know which team.” What was I supposed to say? “You have a bizarre product line.”

Our neighbor, a writer, reads plenty and she is a library regular. We returned a pile of their books when they left town for a bit and she commented that “the library fines here are draconian.” We had a short pile of books that we forgot about until the automated reminder call came from Monroe County. Our fine, which we chalk up to supporting the library, totaled twelve bucks. The little note above was tacked to the cash register.

Saint Francis of Assisi, the Italian mystic who took a vow of poverty, is usually depicted with birds on his shoulders. In fact I have a small statue of him in the window near my desk. St. Francis was the first recorded person to receive the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s Passion, and these marks are shown on the small hands of the statue. If there was a popularity contest for saints, he would easily win.

He is the patron saint of animals and the environment so it is fitting to have found him lying flat on his back in the woods.

OK, we do have time to read the newspaper in the morning so it’s not that bad. We’re painting the ceiling in the kitchen so we’ve been having our coffee out in our newly painted living room. Kinda nice to have the drop cloth out of there. We finished that yesterday but I missed a few spots with the roller. I have bad luck going back in on a ceiling so I’m trying to decide how to get those spots. I don’t want to do the whole thing again just to cover my tracks.

We went to Home Depot twice today. Once to return an extra bag of tile grout, an electric box, an extra jug of tile sealer and an extra bag of ThinSet and then once again to look at laminate for our new floor in the basement. We were there until they made the closing announcement.

We would have set aside some time for skiing if everything wasn’t melting. Our nephew is coming from LA for the weekend and he was hoping to go cross-country skiing but I had to break it to him that the temps are headed into the fifties.

I wonder if the “Lincoln Logs” will make a comeback as a tie-in to Spielberg’s new movie? I used to love those things. Especially liked putting the red wedge shaped chimney on that Adirondack green roof once I had built a structure.

Peggi had to take her sax in to Carl at Shuffle Music today. Where else would you take your horn if you had knocked it off its stand and it had crashed to the concrete floor at the Little Theater Café?. Jazz Fest promotor, Jon Nugent, was just coming out of the shop as we entered. Carl did a few quick adjustments and asked Peggi to play a little bit. He told her she was too timid and should push more from down below.

It was a beautiful day so we drove out to see my brother, Fran, the best mason in this area, “first call” as they say. He’s been telling us about this log cabin he’s working on out in Gananda, a “master planned community” about a half-hour outside of Rochester. Our friends Barbara and Tom lived out here for a while before selling their place and hopping in a camper to travel the country. Fran apparently had just finished the twenty five foot tall fireplace in the living room because the dry-wallers were going at it and he was nowhere to be found.

We’ve got a little project going in the basement that involves moving a concrete block wall. It is surprising how easy it is to bust out a concrete wall. Like a lot of things in life it’s just one small step at a time. We knocked a sledge hammer (or maul) against the first block until the mortar cracked and then we moved on to the next block. The bottom course had some souvenirs in there, bottle caps from beverages consumed when this place was first a construction site, back in the late forties.

I expected to find Genny caps in there but had never seen the “Ale” cap. I used to like Ma’s Root Beer and I sort of remember their “Imitation Cherry Soda” but we called soda “pop” around here and still do as a matter of fact. Interesting they would use the word “Imitation.” Now days they would just call it “Cherry Soda.” The Royal Crown, Squirt and 7up were all national brands. I don’t remember “Cliquot Club Pale Dry” from Rochester’s Qualtop Beverages and I don’t remember “Park Club Beverages” either.

Some varmit has been nibbling at the fresh growth on our acorn squash plants. We were pretty sure it was a groundhog because our neighbor spotted a few fresh holes in the ground below the garden. He had already armed his Have-a-heart trap with some fresh apple slices and asked if we would bring our trap down to augment his arsenal.

I went out back to get the trap and the flaps were down indicating someone had taken my bait, a corn cob from the fresh corn Rick and Monica had given us from their Vermont vacation. I looked in the cage and caught a glimpse of this grey and white thing. I was afraid to get too close because we had been smelling a neighborhood skunk lately while we read on the porch.

I went back down and told my neighbor that our trap was occupied and I thought it might be a skunk. He couldn’t wait to see for himself and interrupted his Rubino’s sub to come up and have a look. A former farm boy, he walked right up to the cage and said, “You caught a baby possum.”

He suggested I take it somewhere and unload it and he offered his pickup. He said, “Just so you know, it is technically illegal to take animals from one place to another so just don’t let him go in front of a cop.” So I drove down to the park entrance, where all the dog people meet, and let the little guy off. As I backed up to turn around in the last house’s driveway I saw a woman in the window watching me and possibly jotting down my neighbor’s license plate number.

It has been so warm this year we could have had our plants in a month ago but we just got around to it today. No excuse or anything, I’m just saying. We usually go to Cases’ on Norton and it was good to see them so busy today. We bought some tomato plants and some Jalapénos (our staples) and basil bit they didn’t have the Italian basil so we bought Lebanese. It has smaller leaves and tastes a little spicier. We sampled some of their lemon basil but that was sort of intense. We bought a small box of eggplant plants and some zucchini and I looked at a oregano plant and don’t remember putting it in our cart but we came home with it. We seem to have red bell peppers at every dinner in one dish or another so we bought twelve of those plants. Now we’ll hope to keep the rabbits, ground hogs and chipmunks at bay.

It was fairly cold today, just below freezing but nowhere near typical February weather for this part of the country. The daffodils in our back yard are up, maybe four or five inches. We’ve only skied a few times and are still waiting for a good storm. We spotted this salamander in the middle of a trail and thought he was was dead. I rolled him over with a stick and he started wiggling his vestigial looking legs so I rolled back and he slinked away.