2022, animals, Family, Farming Update, home, pets, Uncategorized

Farm Additions

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Today’s post comes from Ben. Header photo from Kelly.

Had a few real cold mornings. It was 21° on Tuesday morning, and below freezing for a couple days this week, but it was nice in the sun. I had to break the ice out of the chickens water buckets. The buckets are still outside for now. Don’t need the heated bucket quite yet. I did turn up some of the house heat.

The chickens have certainly dropped down on egg production. I got 2 eggs one night. The next day I got 8. Then 6, then 4, then 2 again. The last couple days it’s just been 2. It’s not the weather so much as this bunch of chickens is just aging out. The chicks from this spring should start laying any time now. I do add light to the pen, as it’s the amount of day light that triggers egg production. Some people let their hens take the winter off. I figure my hens have a pretty good life so I’m OK keeping them laying.

We picked up 10 young adult guineas from my friend Dave. He has an assortment of animals, mostly it seems because he and his granddaughter spend a lot of time on Craigs list finding animals. But come winter, they need to pare it down so they all have shelter. I’ve gotten good animals from Dave. And we were down to just 2 guineas, so this is nice. Kept them locked in a side pen for a couple days to learn that this is home now. They’ve been outside the last few days and the dynamics are interesting. They mix right in with the chickens and ducks, but the two older guineas are showing them who’s boss. There are 7 dark gray, two white, and a silver one. The silver one got outside a day before the others. And now they’re all shunning that one. I don’t know if it didn’t get along before or why this is happening.

Then Thursday night, as I closed doors, I was looking to see where the new guineas had settled for the night. Evidently, they were outside behind the barn as Humphrey the dog, scared them all out. They panicked and flew every which way. I saw one go up over the barn, another off in the trees, one down in the swamp. Friday morning there was only 7. Shucks. They make enough noise I’d hope they’d all find their way back together sooner or later.

I needed to fill all the water buckets one day and I knew the hose would be froze in the morning, so I did it in the dark after I got home one night. Got a lot of slush out of the hose but at least it wasn’t frozen solid. Here’s a photo of the poufy duck and some others.

I did get the pressure washer put into the well house. It’s a cumbersome process simply because there’s not much room for me AND the pressure washer. One of us at a time fits just fine. Add in some electrical conduit and a water pipe and it’s a bit more of a challenge. But if I lift it just so, and suck my stomach in, and grunt a few times, it fits. It’s in for the winter. I could find an easier place to put it… but… this is where it’s always been.

I’ve delivered some fall straw. Some for gardeners, some for chicken raisers. One of my neighbors raises strawberries so I’ve got 150 bales still on a wagon for him to cover the plants before winter.

One day on the blog I mentioned my dad helping and how Kelly looked forward to “Dad Stories”; me telling her what he had done that day, whether it was breaking something and going home, or just making me crazy. Oddly enough, now I can’t really remember any. When I had the Deutz tractor, it had a manual parking brake by the seat. A mechanical one you pulled up to set, then turned and pushed down to release. It wasn’t a very good parking brake given how many times we drove off with it still engaged. Dad did that often. I’d get in the tractor after him and the brake has been on for the last hour. That frustrated me. And he hated AC, so he’d open all the windows, filling the cab with dust. I’d roll my eyes.

EVER GET LOST AS A KID?

102 thoughts on “Farm Additions”

  2. I did, must have been under 6 years old, in downtown Storm Lake, IA. Wish I had asked my folks about that later on, but what I remember is being at the police station with a nice policeman and an ice cream cone, when Dad rushed in to find me.

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  4. When we were on vacation in NYC with an 8-year-old Joel, we were walking paths in Central Park, and he wasn’t staying with us, didn’t get how in a strange new city, you can’t just take off and run ahead of your big people. To teach him, we hid behind something briefly, so when he turned to find us, he wouldn’t see us instantly, and it worked – he saw how dangerous it would be in a strange city. He stayed with us after that.

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    1. Maybe that’s what Jane was doing to me. We were on honeymoon, and we were in Underground Atlanta, my first day outside of England, Scotland, or Wales, at age 51. It’s a mall, under the modern roads. We were together, then I turned around and she was gone. No problem, I turned and looked some more, and didn’t see her, turned right sround, looked everywhere. I couldn’t see her, and started getting scared. I didn’t know anything about finding her in a strange country, and she’d been abducted, I mean, you know! I just looked and looked! And then she was right there, she’d just seen an ATM and got some cash, that’s all.
      Oh yes, I see it. Didn’t see it just now.
      Really scared me.

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  5. i’m living mom stories now
    she 93 and still doing great
    she lives in an old folks condo and has lots of stuff to do
    she and i go to the movies on tuesdays and coffee concerts with minnesota orchestra and guthrie plays
    her body and brain are not running on all cylinders but she’s doing good
    i remember that she has only so much more time left and i should enjoy rather than be frustrated
    i was lost in daytons department store at age 5
    we went downtown to celebrate the shopping experience of the big city and we were on the 10th floor of the downtown daytons and my mom was shopping for clothes . i discovered that in the middle of those circular clothes racks was the best hiding place
    well i hid so well there was no mom when i came out
    took me 5 minutes of calling out and running around frantically to find her shopping without even noticing i was gone
    i remember searching frantically with surrounded by ladies skirts and butts in the bustling shopping area

    maybe first time freaking out

    i also got lost in san francisco and couldn’t figure out where to turn but i think drugs may have been involved

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      1. i think it was around height ashbury but i was freaking because it was dark unfamiliar and pre gps so as i’m trying to make my way toward familiar reference point traffic is fast and furious and i don’t know which way is north or d so out

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    2. I thought it said Ben. I thought, Ben’s acting like Tim, he’s just like him all of a sudden. What’s he doing?
      Good stories, Tim style.

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  6. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I get lost easily, especially when a sense of direction is required. I am absent that, so I naviagate via landmarks. That makes navigation in the country very difficult. One cornfield is often indistinct from another one unless the cornfield has a distinctive site like an oak tree, a grove, a stream, etc.

    When we visited Kentucky in the Appalachians years ago, we got directions from a local person. We were looking for Red Bird Mission, about 25 miles from the town where we stopped.. She said, “Well, take that road out of town and ya go a ways to the grey barn on the corner. Then ya turn right and go a ways. You will see a road. Turn right again. Then ya go a ways and ya’ll see a sign sayin’ Red Bird. But it is still a ways.”

    I cannot even tell you what a feeling that was of being lost in the mountains among the trees, the locals, and the illegal cannabis fields that replaced moonshining for cash.

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    1. So you weren’t “lost”…. You just didn’t know where you were at the moment. That’s how I always look at it. And our family joke is our destination is “just at the bottom of this hill“ or “just around the next corner”, haha

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      1. When I drove trucks, I wasn’t lost. The place I was looking for was. It was on the map. But it wasn’t where the map said it was. Usually, later, I’d find that the person who’d borrowed it had put it back.

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  8. OT:Title: It’s not ALL bad.
    I drove back into the village a couple of hours ago. Jane was back from work, out in the street with the dogs. Looking under the bushes by Antonio’s house. Turned and smiled and said “Black baby”, nodding at the bushes. Translation: “the black and white kitten we haven’t seen for several days, who is very probably the brother of Meep, who lives in our house, is alive and well and under that bush, there now being a total of three kittens under the bush”. She held up three fingers smiled right at me some more, gave me a thumbs up, and went on up the road. Tight jeans and a tank top. And by the way, I Tell You What: coming up 54 years old
    What you might call the larger lady
    Cuddly then
    Like when we met.
    If I’m not causing accidental upsets,
    If I’m not being a smart aleck online,
    I’m staring at that woman, whether she knows it or not. Like I have for thirty years.

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    1. I wish I had my former marriage to do over. I would work much less, really listened more and looked for every opportunity to make her day end on a positive note.

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        1. Can you find an agreeable time to talk about when things were great and then reflect on why that was?
          Look at me. A marriage failure. I know what I should have done.

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        2. Wes, I am a committed, though not very successful, would be philanderer. I’m not proud of that, but can’t and won’t change. Being here in the same house with Jane makes me feel I’m rubbing her face in it. Not that I actually would.
          I am in a quandary though, knowing her health will deteriorate faster than mine. I can’t bear to think of her without help. But as I’ve said, I hadn’t better tell her THAT.

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        3. As a footnote to that. Isaac recently told me that his grandma had hoped he’d be gay. So he wouldn’t leave his mother. It amused both of us.
          I don’t actually know yet, whether he is or he isn’t.

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        5. Come to think of it, I’ve known gay people who were a long way from theit mother’s house. But then again, I’ve known one or two that were in the same house.
          Sandra is kind of more interested in ideas than facts or logic, anyway.

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        6. check meetup.com
          a chance to find folks with interests that provide wonderful starting points to do your upcoming stuff better

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  10. Yes, like tim I was lost in Daytons while my mom shopped.

    I think I have written before about the lake where my brothers and I grew up. The neighbors were all “summer people” and we were year-round. So in the fall it was time for my brothers and I to become the “Lost Explorers” and go snooping along the shoreline and around all of the homes that were on the northwest shore of Cannon Lake. We weren’t actually lost, of course. We had a really large outdoor playground. Sometimes we were as far as two miles away in a woods way up on a hill that overlooked the lake. I don’t know who’s woods it was but we built forts and swung on large vines that were hanging from the trees. How lucky we were to have so much freedom! Kids are much more supervised today than we were. That kind of outdoor freedom and the need to rely on one another is a great learning experience.

    I really can’t get lost. I have a great internal navigation system. It rarely fails me. In southern Minnesota and the other plains states, most of the land was surveyed in the 1800s and laid out in a precise grid pattern. Knowing that, I find it hard to get lost. I’ve actually tried. Usually if I’m on a gravel road somewhere I’ve never been, as long as I know where the sun is, I won’t get lost. It’s harder in places where the flat landscape gives way to river valleys, lakes, or the driftless areas of southeast Minnesota and northeast Iowa, but I still don’t get lost.

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        1. I usually was late. And it got so most trucks were tracked, and they could see me driving round in circles like a fool. I’m glad it’s over.

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      2. Are you wondering about the monkey’s mother, or the mothers of the two boys who stole the monkey?

        Poor thing, though it’s hard to believe that it could have been on the loose in the store long enough to die from starvation. I hope that’s not what happened.

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        1. I was jocularly assuming the monkey’s mother had also been shopping. I seems to me that there would have been plenty to eat if the monkey had the run of the place after hours. There were the restaurants and also the Marketplace in the basement.

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        2. That’s what I thought, and I love the image that brings to my mind’s eye.

          I haven’t been in downtown Minneapolis in ages, and I have no idea what’s now in the old Dayton’s building. Anyone?

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  11. Great header photo from Kelly. Nice job. Happy to see some birds, right side up for a change. Do the guineas lay eggs or do they have other jobs?

    My attitude is similar to Ben’s. I don’t think of actually being lost. Never have. Though there have been a couple of times as an adult where I temporarily had no idea where I was.

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  12. I wish I had my former marriage to do over. I would work much less, really listened more and looked for every opportunity to make her day end on a positive note.

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    2. In other words, if you knew then what you know now, you would have done things differently. Or as Maya Angelou put it: “When you know better, you do better.” There’s great wisdom in acknowledging, at least to yourself, that you were part of the problem. As my old boss in Cheyenne, Mr. Earl Armstrong, used to say: “Too soon old, too late schmart.”

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        3. Up until about 2015, we hadn’t taken advantage of gps and were still relying on maps whenever we ventured into unfamiliar territory. But late that year we went to Wales. None of the rental cars were available with automatic transmission but the ones we were given had built-in gps. After a day of trying to navigate Wales with maps, we decided to try programming our destination into gps.

          In Wales, many of the roads we encountered were single track and minimally marked. They may have been on the map but they looked like someone’s driveway—unpaved and unsigned. If gps hadn’t instructed us to take them we never would have suspected they were a throughway. It was remarkable to us that gps accounted for as many insignificant roadways as it did.

          Our experience in Wales led us to begin using gps more often at home. We haven’t been lost since.

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        4. Bill, I’m not against the use of gps, nor am I saying it’s not a useful tool. This is what you might call a philosophical question. I think we can agree that gps can be extremely helpful, especially navigating in an area that you’re not familiar with. I am merely suggesting that using your own innate sense of direction, whenever possible, is a good way of maintaining a skill that I fear may otherwise be lost. How many people do you know who don’t have a clue how to make change because they have come to depend on the cash register to do the thinking for them?

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        5. Oh, I agree. I still prefer looking at a map and having a “global” sense of where I am about to go when I can. But in totally unfamiliar places and especially those where there’s no overlying grid to rely upon, gps is miraculous.

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        6. Totally agree. There’s something almost magical about putting the address of something specific, the hotel where you plan to spend the night, for example, into your gps, and have it take you straight there. In a big city that you’re not familiar with, arriving after dark, a gps is a godsend.

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        7. GPS has failed me frequently, most recently by insisting that there is no American Boulevard in Bloomington; I try to always have a good idea of where I’m going before I leave home.

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      2. We, too, have spent hours and hours of driving because husband chose to listen to his gps as opposed to me with a Rand McNally map in my lap. One memorable trip back from Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa took at least three hours longer than it should have due to road construction that our gps didn’t know about. Turned that trip into a daylong debacle with three unhappy passengers in the car.

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        1. I’ve also had mixed results with GPS. It can take you there by the best possible route, perhaps knowing that the slightly longer, but major road, is the most efficient. Or it can ignore that road, and take you through winding country roads, or intricate city streets. I’ve encountered a traffic block and dialled an alternative route, and simply been taken round a circle back to the traffic block.
          My first day trying it, delivering parcels in a van, went like a dream apart from a guy in the office mistakenly putting his home post code on one item! I did sort of wonder why the address on the parcel said Old Windsor, but that wasn’t the town I’d arrived at. The next day I went out in a truck, and just about the whole day was a nightmare, and I probably had to use maps to get me out of the messes I got in, but for some reason I stuck with it. I was easily the last back that day, and a guy had to stay late to lock the yard. Horrible.

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      3. I’m not sure where this comment is gonna end up but it’s meant to go under PJs “ if you’re r truly sentient do you need GPS”. Well, I hope I’m truly sentient but despite gos and I not being best of friends, it is indispensable for me. As I’m sure I’ve reported before, one of my best friends, Lori, says that I can get lost in a church parking lot. And she should know because she was there when it happened.

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    3. I wouldn’t say lost, but GPS and I do not get along well. I am constantly missing turns because suddenly the map zooms in when it looked like I had a bit to go. Or when it says to turn but doesn’t give you the street name. Both of these things happened to me yesterday at the same intersection. I said bad words.

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      1. I think of GPS as an assistant. I want to have a good idea of where I’m headed anyway, then use it to help me know when those turns are coming.
        The other day I drove up to the cities. As I neared my destination, a new place to me, it said turn in 1000’, yet the directions said turn in 100’. I didn’t know if I was turning on a street or into a warehouse lot. Good thing I saw their van parked out front.

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  14. Anyway, Ben.
    I came in the house earlier and peeled my sticky shirt off and chucked it in the laundry. Then I read about breaking ice on water buckets. Isaac had told me we were officially having an abnormally warm October, and for some reason I said, no we weren’t. Wrong again.

    I love keeping chickens. I’d intended to donate the chicken house I have in the garage, to the cats. But I wish I could use it somewhere. I actually have the use of a field that’s half an hour’s drive away, belonging to someone I work for a little bit. But I can’t justify driving up there enough times a week to look after a dozen hens. Keep thinking about it though.

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    1. In fsct I’d made tentative, mental plans, I’d forgotten. Dump a house full of chickens in a field round here, and pretty soon predators will wipe them out. I bad partially figured out a fold unit. That’s a little, movable enclosure that you slowly slide along onto fresh ground every so often. Say, 15/20 feet long. 6 or so feet wide. With built in shelter. No floor, so the chickens clean up the grass, weeds, creepy crawlies, whatever’s there. I’ve wanted to do it that way for years, and when Jane told me why it wouldn’t be practical, I was so infuriated I determined to do it and make her eat her words. I could go a bit bigger, I need to make a hand winch to move it, as I can’t get a vehicle in. I have the parts kicking around. I could leave it for a week or more, then fill up the feeders, pick up the eggs, move it, go home till next time. On the day I work for Lynda next door to the field. Right, let’s do it. Soon as I’ve built the covered “catwalk” (literally) above the back yard. Fixed the chimney liner. Etc. Tidied the garage.

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      1. I know someone who made one of these portable chicken shacks and it worked. He used it for several years. It was on wheels and somehow he was able to lower it to the ground once parked. Then he could raise it to move the shack around.He was still able to market his chickens as sustainably raised, free range, and organic.

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        1. Krista, the ones I’ve seen just slide along. Move them really slowly, and there’s no need to shut the chickens in.
          Jane’s objection was, where I had intended to put it, there were fruit trees on part of the ground. But not all. Jane went ahead anyway, and said, you won’t have room to get your van in and pull it along, because of the trees. She went further. She said that “I would discover” etc. That I would discover that she knew more about things that I had done all my life and she hadn’t. That’s what enraged me. I know if I can get in and pull something with my van. She doesn’t. She doesn’t need to be questioning it. That’s what enraged me. Hmm, I see I’m getting carried away here. Sorry.

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        2. My friend’s portable chicken shack was triangular shaped, on wheels, had a hitch to be pulled with a small tractor, somehow was lowered to the ground when parked and raised with the hens inside to move it. I think he moved it every few days. There were shelves inside for nest boxes and screened windows for cool night sleeping.

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      2. Listen then, guys. One more confession, just one, and that’s it.
        Jean Marie Schwartz. I met her Christmas 1983. Drove her to a bus stop somewhere, in February /March 1984, to get her to an airport somewhere. A quick hug, and I never saw her again. I’m fascinated at the thought, that just maybe, although I don’t know how I could ever find out, if just maybe it was February 23rd, 1984,the day my Spanish teacher was born. Reme Tolsa Seguer. One heartache ended (well it eventually ended), another one on the way. When I started lessons with Reme, she was half my age, almost to the month. Ridiculous to fall in love with her, but I did. That’s my confession. Now she’s gone away, and I’ve had a tough couple of years, compounded by my guilt over Jane, who I also love. I didn’t really imagine I would tell you this.
        And Reme was so disconcerted when I eventually confessed to her, that
        she doesn’t know what to say to me. I’m trying to just let the memory go, after a long period of denial. I feel such a stupid fool.

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        1. It’s an “on a pedestal” kind of love. That’s what she deserves. I would be frankly embarrassed, at 71,to admit to sexual thoughts about a girl who looks to be under 30. The thoughts are there, locked firmly behind a door which I have never once tried to open. I never intend to, for my sanity’s sake, and out of my respect for her. If Jane knew that, I don’t know if it would make it better, probably not. She does know that I like Reme more than I should.

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        2. These are such personal confidences that it’s difficult to respond but not commenting seems like a comment in itself. From my experience, the thirty-year-old me is still inside the 70+ me and I can enjoy him there but it’s best not to let him out.

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        3. Bill, I know, in these days of texting, I find it’s much more difficult to answer things that even my sister says, than it would be face to face or on the phone. I appreciate your answer.

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        5. I hope this won’t go ectopic. Bill and Barbara, I should know that people don’t know what to say. Firstly, it’s happened to me on this blog on occasion, that I’ve suffered guilt for not having a thing to say to someone who is in deep difficulty. Secondly, I can’t do likes anyway(the initiation ceremony looks very intimidating), but if I could…. Steve pointed out that it doesn’t really seem the thing to “like” someone’s pain.
          I need to get it into my head that if I must say something, I must. But just trust that people will read it, people will care. I just need to trust you all.

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        6. Barbara I’ll explain about the “denial.”

          I thought, I’ll do classes with her forever. When I’ve learned Spanish, I’ll learn Valenciano. Then English. Philosophy? Maths? Of course it was painful, just one hour a week, with her not knowing how I felt.
          Nearly two years ago, I finally confessed to her what a mess Jane and I were in. I’d always said such genuinely romantic things about her(Reme approved of all that). But Reme was very understanding. Then she told me a secret. And this bit meant an awful lot to me, because she’s not a gossip-Emilio was working from home that day, and we heard him fiddling about outside the classroom door for a minute. Now they have a real love story. They have everything Jane and I haven’t, and really, I’m glad for her, that she didn’t get a chester like me. They don’t have significant secrets, beyond a couple of funny little things she’s told me different times. Yet the moment she heard him there, she paused, with a – well the look you would have when you were just waiting for someone to go, so you can dish the dirt. After a couple seconds, she did a mock huff, kind of hmmph, you know. Then he went. It wasn’t dirt she dished, just the news that Emilio had a new job in Geneva, and would be going soon. She and her two little boys would join him when they could. But not soon, because her aging parents needed her right now. She told me that
          secret behind Emilio’s back, and it finally came home to me she liked and trusted me. Devastating news for me of course, but hey, she wasn’t going for a while.

          But soon he was gone. And she was struggling, at age 37 she’d never been parted from Emilio in the twenty years they’d been together. And after a couple of weeks or so, she texted me and said, regretfully she couldn’t cope with classes any more. Striking tragedy into my heart. Difficult decision, etc.
          She continued, if you need to talk, or just have a coffee, drop in, I’m usually here. Now this was absolutely stunning, and I really could have jumped over the moon right then. We don’t get asked into Spanish people’s houses. I’ve read it, and I’ve experienced it. They’ve got their life. We’ve got ours, though we’re welcome at fiestas. The only non English house I’ve sat down in, is Reme’s, when I’ve been doing my class. But she wanted to see me, and be my friend, and talk about politics and the things her family and many childhood friends won’t or don’t talk about. Laugh at the same things.
          And what happened is a long story, I’ll just say, I concocted an excuse for going for coffee with Reme, and I was three minutes away from her front door, being her best platonic friend, her gay accessory. And I had to cancel at a moment’s notice, with Jane in a rage at me going in “that house” in a pandemic and drinking coffee, and me with a guilty, broken heart. It was that close, and I never was going to tell her I loved her, I was ready to suffer all that pain and guilt just to see her, without even having to work on learning something. Because she wanted to see me, too. And I thought, Jane will come to see that it’s platonic ( ha ha, oh sure), and Reme will relax, and we can be friends. And that’s the part I was in denial about. And it’s still terribly, terribly painful, but she’s mostly gone now, and I’m starting to accept it. But she is some girl. It’s the only kind I go for.

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        8. But it was so CLOSE! I wanted to believe it could happen, and it was snatched away. And I STILL thought it could happen. That’s what I was in denial about. Maybe she would still like to be my friend. But she can’t.

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  15. I got lost when I was about nine or ten. We lived in California then. Usually I had a pretty good sense of direction, but there was a confusing intersection with three or four streets coming together. I knew which street I was supposed to be on, but it didn’t know which direction I should go in. I tried one way and then the other, but nothing looked familiar. I finally knocked on a door and told the woman there I was lost, and she called the police. I remember being in the car – I was sitting in the front seat, and there was a note on the dash that read “runaway juvenile”.

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  16. I got lost in the local mall, Apache Mall, in Woolworths, when I was maybe 6 or 8. I must have looked at something and when I turned back mom was gone. I cried, a kind woman took me to the mall managers office and they called mom over the PA and she came for me. I remember her mostly being upset I didn’t just look around better for her; she says she was just around the aisle. You know, I was the youngest of five… she wasn’t too worried, haha

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  17. When Isaac was tiny (taller than Jane now, though that’s not necessarily that tall), at least three people told stories of taking their baby out in the pram or pushchair and leaving them outside a small shop. Then coming out and forgetting the baby until they got home. With personal experience of taking Isaac out, I still can’t imagine how you could possibly do that. Absent minded as I am, it never even almost happened, that I would forget shch an overwhelming responsibility. Mind you, he behaved so unpleasantly, he was impossible to forget.

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  18. I don’t remember ever getting lost as a child. However, when YA was about four, we were up at the Golden Valley Humane Society for the annual walk for animals. The walk hadn’t started yet, and there were lots of vendors, including a vendor who made dog houses. So there were several quite large, fancy-dancy sample dog houses all set up along the edge of the driveway. I turned around to pick something up or sign us up, I don’t remember, but when I turned around YA was nowhere to be seen. And I mean nowhere. It turns out that she was in one of the fancy-dancy, dog houses (not hiding, just exploring) but it took me about five minutes to find her, and I gotta tell ya that was one of the worst five minutes of my entire parenting life.

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    1. Kelly takes beautiful photos; she has a good eye.

      The guineas. We bought 10, only have 5 now. Shucks.
      After they scattered that night, I found a pile of feathers from a white one. Which is odd; they can fly so why didn’t it get away? Was it caught sleeping? Did it get hurt in the panic? Then the next day, the other white and silver ones disappeared. Shoot. The remaining 5 have started to get along with the two elder, and go in at night, and seem to be managing.

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    1. Great one, Wes.
      For a while, when it was my turn to put Isaac to bed, I’d sing “Knoxville Girl,” “Silver Dagger,” “Banks of the Ohio, ” and “Down in the Willow Garden.” Oh and “Barbara Allen,” Everlys style. I made sure the intercom was turned off. Drew the line at the inimitable Shangri-Las.
      He may not have liked those songs, so I didn’t ask.

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  21. Blog is very nice. So there were several quite large, fancy-dancy sample dog houses all set up along the edge of the driveway. I turned around to pick something up or sign us up, I don’t remember, but when I turned around YA was nowhere to be seen.

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