The City Mouse in the Country

  I don't have a photograph of her. That's what I remember thinking when I learned she had recently passed.  I'm sure somewhere in the boxes scattered throughout my life here in Western Pennsylvania is a picture of Teri and I.  We were married 10 days after September 11th, 2001.   I still remember the day of our marriage, as we scrambled to make sure that we had a back up best man and a back up "father to give away the bride" just in case my best man, who was in the Air Force at the time; and her brother (Navy) were called off to active duty. It was a wonderful open air wedding with great food and lots of dancing and seemed like a great start to our lives. Two young people ready to take on the world.   Needless to say, the world won. Our relationship started off well but by the economic collapse of 2007/2008 we started to show signs of stress.  Sadly I lost my job and fell into a deep depression, I often say that I was "frozen" as I seemed unable to tak

If you have been following this blog for some time then you know that 2023 has not been a great year for us.   We have dealt with death, failure, job changes (which I realize was a mistake) and more negatives than positives. That's life.  It was the hand that we were dealt. Now that Thanksgiving day is upon us (and at the time of publication, past us), it occurs to me that we do have some things to be thankful for.  We do have good friends and a strong family.  We do have money in the bank and jobs that we are successful at. We have our health. We can change some things and work on making our lives better.   We also have, perhaps overly ambitious plans, for the winter and next spring.  We plan on painting this winter, which has been on the agenda for sometime but still has not been accomplished.  If we manage to get one room done then I'll consider it to have been a success.  Then in the spring, I think I'll put off planting anything like a traditional garden and instead in

When I first started this blog some three years ago I didn't have an audience.  I wasn't even sure who or what I was writing for.  Did I want to write a personal blog about life in the country?   I was playing around with the idea of homesteading and self sufficiency...did I want to write about that? In some ways over the last several months I think that I finally found a focus and an audience for this blog.  In a way I finally felt like I had found its purpose and focus.  My readership has slowly been improving over the last few months and I appreciate that. Thank you. However I published something that I knew would not go over well with the particular readership that I had been reaching.  I published it anyway because I know in my heart of hearts that I was correct in my conclusions.  The backlash I received I was not prepared for.  I did however attack a central tenet of the belief system of my intended audience.   Frankly the backlash that I received through me for a loop

 Recently there was a study about carbon sequestration in farm land.  The idea - say it with me now, is a simple one.   We remove carbon dioxide out of the air and store it in plants.  That's what plants do right?  It's called the Carbon cycle . Well...yes.  It actually does work.  All we really need to do is stop plowing.  We grow low growing plants - like milkweed; which by the way butterfly's love so bonus points - which have been showing to store carbon right after the harvest, we then increase the amount of permanent grassland.  We start to practice agroforestry and lot more and restore the wetlands!   CRISIS PREVENTED!!!   Wow!  That was simple.  Good job everyone; see you next Tuesday at the Vegan BBQ and bowling night. On a small scale it really is a simple solution and I'm doing a bit of that myself.  I've let part of my yard go wild and it will, one day, be absorbed back into the forest from which it came.   It's a natural carbon sink.   Her