The City Mouse in the Country

  I could not let America's 250th birthday pass without some comment.   I love this country, but frankly this is not the country that I grew up in.   I'm not sure exactly where we went wrong and although it would be very easy to blame the current administration and the whole MAGA movement, that is to easy of a solution and not entirely true. What ills America today is a combination of things.   A combination of errors, bad decisions, mistakes that created a cascading effort.   We simply are not the country we thought we were and the proverbial chickens have come home roost.   Nor do I have a solution.    So why write about America's 250th birthday at all?   Because I believe in this country, despite where we are currently.  Because I am a student of history and we have seen all this before, and we have seen the solution to it as well.  Because after much thought about the state of the world and reading ...

 I lay in bed this morning as a summer thunderstorm rolled over and through me.  It was early, about 5:30 AM when the deep rumble woke me from a sound sleep.   The rain was hard, fast and beat down on my metal roof with a chaotic pattern.    The room temperature dropped and both my black cats scrambled off the bed as a BOOM echoed in the distance.   Susan, me wife, rolled over and tucked herself in a little more, oblivious to the storm outside the windows. There is something about a summer storm early in the morning.   The air is cleaner, cooler and the dirt and grime of the world seems to be washed away with only potential remaining.   I'm been thinking a lot about potential.   Several years ago my step daughter was putting together her Zombie apocalypse team because that was a thing.  I was honored when she included me.    "Oh," I asked her, "what is my job?" "Bait." She said laughing.  "You have...

The month of May for what ever reason seems to be passing slowly, but the year seems to be flying by.   Suddenly we are nearing the end of the month and I'm only now getting to work on the yard.   I did go in search of an electric powered riding lawnmower, for the same reasons that I went in search of an electric car.    Both searches failed, as the local hardware, lawncare and "big box" stores simply didn't carry any electric riding mowers.  I could have ordered an electric mower off of Amazon, or similar site, and had it shipped but then I would be looking at a two week delivery timeframe, and would have exceeded t he budget that I had set for myself. The grass, though high and feeding a variety of pollinators and other insects would simply not wait much longer.  Plus ticks are always a concern in Western PA at this time of year, and one way to control them is to keep your grass cut.   I had already had a few instances of dealing with...

 It's been a bit.   When I started this blog I was in a stable place and a stable condition.   I thought that I was done with moves and surprises.   I would have been perfectly happy to just work for another five or ten years till I retired.    If I'm being completely honest with you but since moving back to Western PA just about six years ago, things have been odd at best and difficult at worst.   I've questioned why we moved but for better or for worse, this is home. Then I lost Facebook and that was one of the drivers, if not the main driver that drove people to this site.   Then my job situation changed drastically.   At first it was fine but it was clear that the company really didn't have a spot for me, and as they transitioned from "work from home" to "return to the office" it became hard for me to justify a commute of over 100 miles each way.   The jobs that I worked after that were temporary in...

 Before my mother passed back in October of 2020, she and my dad has basically consolidated their lives to a small 2 room apartment building.   In the brutal logic that both my mom and dad practiced it made sense.   Less to maintain as they grew older meant less to worry about. Their sons were married and had moved away from home a long time ago. They didn't need much or wanted much.  They lived simple lives and would rather spend their days on things they enjoyed like watching a family of deer romp in a field that their balcony overlooked.  Going out to dinner and spending time with loved ones and family. When she passed unexpectedly and Gary, my brother, and I cleaned out the apartment, we were still amazed by the junk they had accumulated.   Somehow, we managed to get through the days.  When my dad passed , it was a little easier to not only deal with his passing, but to clean what he had left in his bedroom. The original paint and d...

Even though we are nearly two weeks away from the New Year, I've decided to try and write what has traditionally been the last post of the year now.  For me it's always been a brief review of what I've covered, accomplished and achieved in the past year.   Like the above meme says....I made it through. Maybe it's due to seasonal depression, maybe it's due to my writing this blog for slightly over three years and my audience is still in the hundreds, not the thousands like previous blogs have been but I think this blog may be coming to an end. Although the low readership that I have could be due to the blogging platform I use, which is neither supported by nor promoted by Google anymore.  However I love the ease and simplicity of this particular platform and see no reason to change it at this time. This lack of comments and low readership are making me wonder if it's worth it.  Plus, if I'm being honest with myself, this blog has lacked focus as I seem to be ...

 First off, I don't write fiction.   However it occurred to me that what I've been writing about lately is difficult to get our heads around.  Climate change is really happening in today's world, and at the risk of hyperbole, it really is end of the world type stuff. I needed to find a way to break it down to the indivdual level.   That thinking, and some natural curiosity about the New Madrid fault lin e got me thinking about how easily things could go bad for a society if a series of natural disasters hit in rapid succession.    Thanks to this writing prompt, something started to form in my head.   Please keep in mind that this is the first draft and it deals more with the themes I'm hoping to explore.   It does not have a current title. So without wasting time...here we go. The world, at least as most people understood it, ended on a rather ordinary Tuesday afternoon.    I remember it was a perfectly ordinary da...

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 t...

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 b...

 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 w...