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johnschneiderblog · 3 hours
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Mystery car
Beyond the question of why somebody would abandon a car in the middle of the woods is the question of how. This car is in a fairly thick woodlot adjacent to our property, a quarter-mile from the closest road.
I can only conclude that the car is older than the woodlot; most likely Its former owners - the people who once farmed that land - hauled it out there simply as a way to dispose of it, before the woods grew up around it.
However, to a person prone to flights of imagination, the bullet holes in the right rear quarter panel may suggest a more dramatic history. Think bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde fleeing the Feds ...
Nah ... it probably was just somebody using the car for target practice after it was abandoned.
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Reckless disregard
The melting snow reveals more the crocuses. The ditches on both sides of our rural road are trash magnets - depositories for the those who see the whole world as their dumpster.
I can't help but wonder what goes through the minds of people as they toss their junk through the windows of moving cars. Judging from the stuff we find, alcohol is a factor, which is no excuse and, in fact, raises other concerns.
In a short walk Tuesday, I ran out of hands. I'll try to remember to bring a bag next time.
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johnschneiderblog · 2 days
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The X factor
As you can see, this contraption is for sawing long pieces of wood. You can cut them on the ground, but that's likely to strain your back and dull your chain.
It's called a "sawbuck," as is a 10-dollar bill. A linguistic connection? You betcha! Here's what the Internet says:
"Sawbuck is an old-fashioned slang term for a $10 bill. The word reportedly reflects the fact that the Roman numeral X, which resembles a wooden sawbuck, was traditionally used on U.S. $10 banknotes to denote the number 10. The X disappeared from the reverse of the 10-dollar note by 1880, but the nickname stuck until fairly recently."
I was browsing the Internet one when I came upon plans for building one. It requires four 8-foot-long 2-by-4s, three bolts and nuts, a handful of washers and wood screws.
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johnschneiderblog · 3 days
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Gathering winter fuel
I always dedicate these soggy days of late March - when the promise of spring danglles in the air like an plum we can't quite reach yet - to the final state of firewood procurement.
The solid ground of winter is for cutting and hauling; Spring is for splitting and stacking the 10 face-cords we'll need to heat our house nest winter.(A face-cord is pile of wood stacked four feet high, eight feet long, one log wide.)
Friday's snowstorm sidelined the project but we were back at it Friday. I split; Sharon stacked.
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johnschneiderblog · 4 days
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On the job, 1987
The other guy in the top photo is my long-time bud, Greg DeRuiter, a former photographer at the Lansing State Journal. He and I often teamed up on stories .
(And no, I'm not wearing a Halloween costume; that's now newspaper reporters actually dressed in 1987).
Greg texted me a copy of the photo Saturday. He came upon it on the "memories" table at a memorial service for his friend, Bessie Rey. (You can see it near the middle of table in the bottom photo).
The picture was taken at Eddie's Restaurant in Lansing, where Bessie waited tables for 42 years. I don't remember why we were there, or who took the photo, or how it landed among Bessie's memories.
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johnschneiderblog · 5 days
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Spurned!
Another aspect of spring that proceeds regardless of the weather: the birds and bees.
This Tom (top photo), eager to show the local hens that a little snow was no impediment to his hearty stuff, spent much of Friday afternoon strutting it in our field, in full display.
A group of curious hens came out (bottom photo) looked Romeo over, then headed back to their cozy thicket.
Nice try, pal.
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johnschneiderblog · 6 days
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Payback
During that unseasonably balmy weather we enjoyed earlier this month - the weather that inspired me to pull out our driveway markers and put the snowblower in mothballs - I heard it said a dozen times: We'll pay for this.
Meaning, of course, that, in the course of 365 days, it's the natural order for Michiganders to suffer a given amount of miserable weather. No exceptions.
So, if a string of sunshine comes our way in early March, you can be sure its counterpart - a late-March snowstorm, say - will step in to even things out .
That's the way we think up here - even the non-Catholics.
Well, the bill is arriving as I write this. Snow is falling and some predictions say we'll have have 5 inches before it's over.
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johnschneiderblog · 7 days
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Lord Huron nuggets
We parental groupies never tire of the Lord Huron nuggets that come our from way from friends and relatives way out there.
Things like, "We were in a restaurant in Dublin and 'Not Dead Yet' came on ...' or, "My hygienist noticed my LH tatt and went on and on about Lord Huron at Red Rocks ..." or "They played 'I Lied' during 'Atlanta' last night ..."
In the case of this photo, a friend of ours was in a coffee shop in Monteverde, Costa Rica when she spotted this young LH fan. It was good of her take the photo and send it to us.
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johnschneiderblog · 8 days
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Welcome, spring!
It was around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday when I glanced out our bsckward window and saw two straggler turkeys hustling toward their roost in our woodlot.
The news here is not that the turkeys were calling it a night; the news is that there was more than enough light - at 7:45 p.m. - for me to get a good look at them.
It's important in these early days of fledgling spring to concentrate not on the weather, but on the daylight that expands a little each day. It's crucial to our hearts and souls to look past the snow, to what's emerging from the eartth beneath it.
Officially, spring came to town last night on the red-eye - arriving at 11:08 p.m. That makes today the first full day of spring, no matter what the weather says.
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johnschneiderblog · 9 days
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A straightforward apology ...? Shocking!
I wasn't at Bobcat Bonnie's Saturday night, and, based on this Facebook post Sharon showed me, I'm glad I wasn't.
On the other hand, it makes me want to go. there because this is something you don't often see these days: a genuine, straightforward, no-excuses apology: "I'm so sorry."
As opposed to, "We're so sorry that you felt offended"; or "We're so sorry you didn't enjoy your dinner: or, "We're sorry, mistakes were made (not by the staff, of course, but by the gremlins running around the restaurant that night)."
It was the Saturday night of St. Patrick's Weekend (an authentically American invention) and Bobcat Bonnie's was, I trust, slammed. Maybe the staff was caught off guard by the St. Patrick's Day extension.
In any case, this public apology should go a long way in restoring the faith of Bobcat Bonnie's customers. And it might bring in some new ones.
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johnschneiderblog · 10 days
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Green and white
Like green hats and drunken students roaming the streets of East Lansing, snow on St. Patrick's Day is practically a tradition in mid-Michigan.
When the day dawned sunny, I thought we might dodge it his year - especially since late winter has been so spring-like. But tradition is tradition and by late morning clouds were joining forces in the northern sky.
By mid-day they were spitting a few wispy flakes that soon turned into genuine snowfall that cycled on and off for the rest of the day, leaving a minor dusting on the ground.
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johnschneiderblog · 11 days
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Popular piper laid to rest
Would it have been possible to send Terry Carroll off without pipes and drums ...?
Sure. And, it would have possible for Carroll, at some point in his 89 years, to give up the pipes in favor of the English horn. Possible, but a sin against nature.
At the post-funeral reception, Carroll's mates from the Glen Erin Pipe Band played Carroll off stage in fine form. It was an appropriate farewell to a man who, as the old song goes, played at wakes and weddings far and wide.
As I noted upon Carroll's passing last month, he played his pipes at both my older son's wedding and my older daughter's funeral.
The fact that people were lined up to get into Carrolls funeral mass at St. Martha's Church Saturday morning says a lot about the man. The old piper was a popular figure in mid-Michigan.
One of people who took the podium Saturday said that, in his final days, Carroll didn't really care whether he went to heaven or hell because he had a lot of friends in both places.
That was Terry Carroll.
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johnschneiderblog · 12 days
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History lessons from 'The Gray Lady'
For my birthday, the California kids sent me a handsome coffee-table book featuring replicas of every NYT front-page published on March 14 from 1949 through 2023.
(Incidentally, the March 14, 1949 one included no mention of my birth. It did, however, feature a prominent story about Arab-Israeli conflict.)
The bottom photo here shows the front page from 1998 - the first March 14 that included color. This was a big deal in journalism circles because the Times was famous for its deliberate lack of color, which was part of its conservative approach to newspapering.
The paper wasn't known as "The Gray Lady" for nothing.
I'll have fun with this.
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johnschneiderblog · 13 days
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We can see clearly now
The world south of our house had become cloudier in recent months as cobweb-like stains in the space between three of the double-panes windows bloomed and spread .
Moisture. After 40 years, the seals meant to keep it out had failed on three of the windows.
Enough soon became enough. On Wednesday we had 80 square feet of fixed glass replaced: two 8-by-4 footers and one 4-by-4.
We're seeing things more clearly these days.
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johnschneiderblog · 14 days
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Diamond jubilee
I woke up this morning suspended exactly halfway between 70 and 80. Not that it was a surprise. In fact, it’s been coming for 75 years.
Still, for that young person who dwells in my mind, seemingly oblivious to certain hard facts, it's a little hard to grasp.
“It gets your attention,” said a friend of mine who recently turned 75. “Somehow, it seems a lot different than 74.”
I know what he means. Even if I live to be 100, 75 is a long way down the road. And yet, I’m happy to be here, comfortable in my advanced position, my weathered skin.
Longevity is, of course, largely a matter of blind luck. Yet, turning 75 seems like an accomplishment. On to the finals ...
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johnschneiderblog · 15 days
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On the cusp
Like a lot of other people, we've been lured by recent spring-like weather into spring-like chores.
In a collosal leap of faith, I pulled up our driveway markers Tuesday and took a couple of preliminary steps toward taking the snowblower off our tractor and installing the mower.
Meanwhile, Sharon slashed and burned, raked and burned, dragged and burned ... Look carefully and you might see her behind the smokescreen.
The forecast for today in mid-Michigan is 68 degrees and sunny, but temperatures well below freezing are in the picture for early next week.
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johnschneiderblog · 16 days
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Dead zone
My generous digital-camera tutor, Lansing State Journal photographer Bob Killips, gave me a lesson earlier this week in shooting video.
My first one - not surprisingly, a backyard turkey trot - was moderately successful and I'd show it to you if it weren't for the fact that the Internet way out here just couldn't carry the load. It's that bad. And that confounding.
Yeah, we're rural, but not like Yukon rural. We're 15 minutes from MSU, 15 minutes from downtown East Lansing, 20 minutes from the state Capitol. Still, they say we live in a bit of a cell/ Internet dead zone.
After years of experimentation, we settled on an AT&T Hot Spot. I guess it's time to reopen the experiment.
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