sobering kitchen job

I'll come into the kitchen and leave the Civil War out on those fields.

The faucet was broken. Fix-its from the local hardware store didn't do the job. I went to Lowe's and bought a new faucet. A year ago I switched from Home Depot because its CEO made inordinate millions in one year when workers were laid off.

I had assumed that this was a job for a plumber, the soldering together of copper pipes. No. This too has been plastisized.

The towel is to catch water drips and keep me away from who knows what chemicals. Photo taken with manual settings, new for me.

a sobering read

Not all information at our pixel outpost in Monterey gets digested from online. Here's an actual tree technology book. I read it last week.

Faust is the president of Harvard, but, I guess, first of all a historian. Don't ask me to borrow it. I'm putting it up on Amazon, whence it came. Got it for half of the listed $28.

An entirely new niche to the war research of 1861-65--the impact of death. We're talking here of 620,000 youthful, mostly, bodies. A few civilians. We're talking here of acres of corpses in summertime.

Not only was the anguish over the death itself, but over the loss of identification. Over half were never identified. So the parents in Vermont, say, didn't know if their son died in Virginia or Kentucky. We would say closure was never possible.

Who picked them up? How and where were they buried? What did the preachers said about death. It sheds light on the context of the Gettysburg Address--by 1965 getting around to respecting the bodies. Let's see, we're the civilized half of the world, right?

wi-fi lights the night

Thanks to a slow laptop on loan from my work and wi-fi in our house thanks to the ingenuity of Joel, well, work can go on and on.

While some neighbors debate the salvific nature of buggy whips, we're wildly embracing wi-fi.

While some neighbors are reading the Sugar Creek Budget by kerosene lamp, here's Dorcas working on a seminary course on biblical interpretation by the glow of pixels.

backstage

My blog is usually photo driven. The photos come from a hand-held camera. Now to go backstage and see one more gadget.

I can't believe this--for $20 I have a decent tripod. There's the corner of the piano on the right. I didn't bother to crop.

I'll see if, how, and when this gets put to use.

new recorder

Church music requires recording for rehearsal, checking performance, teaching, and composing. Here my new recorder sits on the floor of our house. Floor boards were put in by my Dad as a sub-floor. Woah, more history coming.

I remember a reel to reel tape recorder sitting on that floor, close to the base of the steps, in about the year 1955. My Uncle Titus Sensenig and Aunt Edna had brought it along on one of their visits. Titus loved new gadgets.

Now this new gadget can do a bit more. Maybe I can figure out how to play something on the piano (southeast six feet from this photo) and put it on the blog. The recorder itself is an H2, the item that looks rectangular.

local store

By evening I had to find a snack. After three and a half months in the area, I finally got to Landis's. Real locals talk about the egg salad sandwiches they got there when they were kids. Everyone goes to the local store. Even the police. Univest with the eagle logo and blue background says something about money. I liked the little shopping cart cars racing the cruiser.

This Landis store is in Telford, a twin town of Souderton--like 2 miles away.

hungry in Souderton

Let's finish our ride to work at Souderton. Here, underneath the reassuring American and Pennsylvanian (well, with a name like Keystone) flags, is enough local color and cuisine to satisfy any man-sized hunger. For me it's usually Wednesday breakfast. The ice cream du jour is "nix besser." I asked for it. Oh, it's just a joke. At check out you can buy Mrs. Benner's famous slap jack hard candy.

fun for February

I don't know, but these grim days of short February brighten up when someone sends me a link like this.

http://tinyurl.com/2xmqds

up in smoke

East of Monterey, when I drive to Souderton for my job Tuesday morning, I see the Limerick nuclear machine. One of those puffs is me turning the pipe organ on and using electricty.

I see this sight right after I turn north off of Route 23 in the village of Histand, which is 2 miles or so east of Route 100. If you like the Byzantine Pennsylvania web of roads, this is West Bridge Road. In four miles I'll be in Spring City. Cross the Skylkill and I'm in Royersford.

Hey, I like farmers who leave the corn stalk in the rough. Monterey farmers whack and chop them to the ground asap.

m-i-a is m-e-o-w

Sadly the spring tryst is over. The missing-in-action gray, tempted away from her boring routines by the sleek black, is back. It's once again meowing to get breakfast. It's once again keeping an eye out for Fritz, the neighbor dog. It's once again facing the dull realities of living with limited brain power hearing decline.

Better to have loved and lost...as the saying goes.

Black is gone, too.

valentine gift

Dorcas gave me a garden sculpture. It's a poppy. The ribbon and tag will come off. Since the ground is frozen I couldn't sink it into the poppy bed. It's in the poppy bed, slid against one of the bricks (which came from the Milton/Lois estate in Kirkwood).

I love this abstract shape. Thanks, Dear! She got it at the garden shop close to Central Market.

Poppies were propogated on our Monterey property by my mother. We left them grow and they spread.

Valentine's Day visitor

Before all your anti-feline feelings get you mad--this is Valentine's Day. The black visitor came unbeckoned. It was not fed. It runs like crazy when you open the door and go out for a stroll.

Don't blame me. I don't know what's going on. They don't, either. I like the shadows on the barn.

last hurrah of the suitor's coat

Here's me, wearing for the last time what we called my Russian coat, heavy enough to tough out whatever chilly tortures nature had in store for me in New Hampshire or Grantsville.


Bought during my first church job, in Exeter, N.H., at a rummage sale for (do I remember correctly?) $2.50, it saved my life, kind of, during my first, solo trip to Grantsville, New Year's Day, 1977, in a green VW bug with a totally useless heater. In this coat, coasting on a sled on a hill near Mapleshade Farm and probably on Dorsey Hotel Road, Dorcas thought, she tells me now, that maybe things will work out with this guy. I was already hooked.


The rest is history. She was right. I was right. Over 110 trips to western Maryland later, time to junk it. I'll put it on one last time.

The first year we were married, travelling again in the VW with no heater and by now a rust hole in the back floor, this coat helped me survive. At Chambersburg at midnight we stopped at a Howard Johnsons along I 81 and warmed up in the lobby. The graveyard shift clerk was either apprehensive or afraid, but what could she do as we stood over the hot air vent. If I were superstitious I might call the coat a talisman. The coat did hold me when the big moment came--choosing Dorcas.

Actually, it's that beauty by my side that did most of the keeping warm.


After about 15 years of just hanging in the closet, it's time to put it down.

buckle up, in

Okay. This takes me back. In college, one year, I owned an Isetta. It had a single door--on the front. Power came from an Italian motorcycle engine in the rear. It was Italian.

I bought it from a foreman at Weaver's Poultry. Drove it to Eastern Mennonite in Virginia and sold it to Jim Bishop who had his first date with his wife in it.

What is this car? Deal with it. In twenty years this may be the only vehicle driving down Route 23, where this picture was taken.

Milton and me at subway

After meeting at the parking lot at noon, Milton and I drove west on the Old Harrisburg Pike to the Subway on Dillerville Road. I'm proud of my new t-shirt from Iowa, thanks to Ryan.


After setting the camera on the trash bin for a timed photo, a clerk offered to snap the picture. I think her thick glasses pushed us off center. We tried again, but got the exact same shot. So here it is.


We had just finished an informal discussion of what to do with the funds in the Lehman Foundation in these times of low returns on capital.

gray day get-away

One thing to do on an overcast, gloomy-weather day in February is to meet your brother when he gets off work at the Cokesbury bookstore at the Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster. Then set your camera (with my new 50 mm lens) on top your car and get a pic.

Milton has given me many good years of brothership, sunny days and gray.

melons at Gordonville

This is the end of the Gordonville USA pictorial.

I couldn't resist this photo of melons, grapes, strawberries, pineapples, and lettuce.


What are you gonna eat after thirty years of delivering babies? This would do it for me.

Gordonville food

There's something about fire hall food. My question--do those chicken salad buns underneath the pile have decorated toothpicks too, stabbing the ones on top?