It's Too Good To Be You...

So, there I was.

The young woman behind the counter was saying something that seemed to sound like, "I'm sorry, I can't give you this."

Huh?

"You stumped me, Steffie, what the hell are you talking about?" Yeah, well, I was thinking that. Instead of speaking, she spotted the blank look of entire loss on my face and kindly pointed to the receipt attached to the large envelope.

Across that receipt, written in longhand, was "This looks like professionally copyrighted work."

Still stumped, I smiled. She smiled back. That's when she paid me one heck of a compliment.

"Was this picture taken by a professional?"

"Yeah, me."

I laughed. She was a little nervous.

"If it's yours, you'll have to sign a release."

She wasn't kidding. The release was now pushed across the counter between us along with a pen. Happily, I signed off with a bit of chutzpah, a trace of swagger, a pinch of panache.

The above photo, they were certain, was so good it had to have been professionally done and whoever had ordered an enlargement, and that would be me, surely had lifted it somewhere. That the chump now picking up the print, again me, couldn't have taken this photo. He did.

Geez, thanks for being so nice...

Merry Christmas, or Happy Birthday, or Whatever...

Someone out there might read this and take offense, maybe actually have their feelings hurt. If that be the case, you have my sincerest apologies, so help me.

Long story short here...

I find a puddle of water behind our cellar door the other day, the door to the basement steps. I wipe it up, figuring some spill on the floor dribbled behind the door and no big deal. No more wasting time thinking about it...until this morning.

Needing to get into the basement, I find another puddle behind the door. Wifey and I are stumped. There's no plumbing in any wall anywhere near the puddle.

Then Carol nails it.

Tracing a watery trail, she finds a hole chewed in the water line (plastic tubing) which taps into our cold water line in the basement and gives us ice water and ice cubes on the front end of the refrigerator.

We have this cat, Dave, who likes to chew on the tubing when he can get his face on it. Doing a chew on this plastic line means some serious work. Dave has to somehow paw the line out from behind the refrigerator where he can get at it, then commence to chewing. This is the second time he's managed this. Dave solves cat problems which, in turn, gives us problems. FWIW, we have two other cats who have no interest whatsoever in this.

"Silver linings" and all those other nifty platitudes aside, Dave's leak brings a bonus - a brand new rechargeable/cordless saber saw, a really nice one. In the package, unopened, alone, forgotten, and in the dark, a power tool awaited.

Where'd THIS come from?

I don't know. I really don't know.

It was there, there behind the basement door, along with a pile of other tools and things that don't get a going-through often enough.

So, for whomever gave me/us this neat saw for Christmas, or a birthday, or a maybe as a returned favor, thank you!

One troubling thought; did I buy it myself, stow it behind the door, then forget it for what could be a couple years?

Might be.

Wilkes-Barre Parade Best Yet...

Realizing full well that competing with an event the size of Scranton's annual "March Monster" is a fool's pursuit, I am happy to say that Wilkes-Barre is making some big moves. W-B is working on its parade and it shows.

A tight collaborative effort by a ton of people is starting to bring results, and respectable ones at that. There's an energy among groups of younger Wilkes-Barreans that is palpable, you can feel it in many ways, with the parade being a prime example of what these people can do.

I had the pleasure of walking, yes, walking in W-B's parade this past Sunday. I'm still sore. It was, oh, about an hour or more of just standing around waiting to walk, then the walk itself, a start and stop sort of saunter, while waving at crowds that were pretty darned impressive in size. On Public Square I'd estimate crowds eight to ten deep.

I've ridden in dozens of parades, and broadcast my share where I "worked" the street, but this was my first walk of a parade route. While it's not really worth an attempt at description, walking in a parade offers a different, maybe even odd perspective on things.

The lads at left made the trip up from Schuylkill County, where their AOH Chapter carries the name of Jack Kehoe, that would be "Black Jack" Kehoe, the most infamous Molly, maybe even the original Molly, the man who started it all. It was at his saloon in Girardville where it is said that the Molly Maguires first met as a group.

Although posthumously pardoned by then Governor Milton Shapp (the very first person to be so pardoned in Pennsylvania), Jack Kehoe swung by the neck until dead along with nineteen other alleged Mollies in what's called by many "The Day of The Rope." Pennsylvania history is rich with powerful stories such as "The Day of The Rope."

(Pennsylvania history, anthracite history, local history of any kind, is not to this day taught with any regularity in this state's public schools, to the best of my knowledge. That is completely inexcusable.)

I have no trouble saying it was easily the biggest crowd yet for this parade, and let me take a guess that the parade itself might have been the biggest parade which W-B has seen so far. Ahead, even bigger and better parades in W-B, I'd bet on it.

Hey, the sky has to be the limit for any parade that has not one, but a bunch of Elvises in it. Here's just one of many along with Tux.

Then there was the Scranton parade... The March Monster!

Dowtown Scranton creaks, groans, moans, and smiles with an enormous overflow on parade day. The stats are huge: This year, 11,000 marchers strong. 11,000 people actually in the parade, while an additional 100,000 plus stood and watched.

Well, OK, some didn't just stand and watch, some got a bit jiggy. Some were consumed by the spirit, caught in a moment of Celtic pride, a feeling I know myself. There were others still whose failure to resist "the thirst" drove them to deeds beyond the acceptable in a polite society. Consider the following items taken from published reports post-parade:

• Some Jack fell down and broke his crown. That's a rough approximation of one parade-goer's day as he toppled from a wall and suffered a head injury. Bleeding as he was carried to an awaiting ambulance, he pumped air before the cheering crowd. That's when some sluggo in one of those big idiotic shamrock hats threw something at a member of the news media. An unidentified stupid man in an equally stupid hat was taken into custody after "assault with a cup of ice," following which he and his hat were taken away in cuffs.
  



• We never knew the Wallendas were Irish. Another fine citizen manages to shimmy, crawl, and balance his besotted self across the Lackawanna Avenue Bridge. No great accomplishment save for the fact that right now there is no Lackawanna Avenue Bridge, just steel beams where the new bridge will be. Once arriving at the west side of the skeletal bridge-to-be, he was promptly arrested, and I assume cuffed and stuffed. Personally, I think he should have gotten a round of applause...and then been cuffed and stuffed.
  



• Sleep it off where you drop...it's parade day! Countless calls came to the Comm Center post-parade of people lying unconscious in cars, sprawled out cold across front lawns and backyards, and stupefied and prone in assorted areas of public access. Apparently these folks don't have a drinking problem: They get drunk, they fall down - no problem.

SERMON BEGINS HERE...

I'm neither a prude, nor choirboy, nor tee-totaler. Hardly. I drink beer with joy. Not by the gallons, mind you, and not for breakfast. Having confessed to being a regular consumer of brewed products, I still find the acceptance of widespread public and apparently proud intoxication troubling...and I always have. It's not just tolerated, it's expected. If Scranton didn't douse itself in booze one weekend in March each year, you can be assured some bars would have a shaky bottom line come the end of that very same year.

The level of "...looking the other way" in Scranton jumps higher with each and every passing parade day. In itself, this is an act of wrongful ommission, it is also a practice which carries the potential of great disaster - a taste of which has already been had - and I know for absolute fact that public safety officials there feel the same way.

Why is it, then, that the bishop never even mentions the masses of inebriates stumbling the streets of Scranton on parade day as a the city celebrates a Catholic saint? He was greatly worried about organized labor's role in the parade, he's not happy about Bobby Casey or Joe Biden, yet knee-walking drunkards seem incapable of raising an episcopal eyebrow. Can I get an "Amen?"

SERMON ENDS HERE...

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Just Today...

If little things do mean a lot, here's one you might miss if you didn't stop and look.

This delicate beauty is about the size of a dime and it might be smaller still.

Stop and smell the crocuses.

Well, easier said than done. See, the crocus, at least the variety we have perennially, is maybe a couple inches tall at best, so only the elfin among us could take a whiff with any ease.

The smell, and I don't believe they have much of a scent, isn't the point. The point is that they're here, they've bloomed again. One of the first legit signs of Spring has emerged.

And these are right there in the front yard. We have a pale blue, a white, and a purple, almost violet variety around the house. Even more fascinating is that we never planted crocus bulbs. These vernal beauties have been surviving and returning for almost twenty years all on their own.

As with most of the beautiful things in life, the crocus is a delicate object. Sadly, I knocked one over trying to get these photos this afternoon. If you look at the bloom above, you'll notice some creature has already had a nibble on the crocus to the left rear. A good guess would be a squirrel or chipmunk chomped the flower right from the plant.

That's nature, where there is no right, no wrong, no fair, no unfair. Nature simply is.

Delicate, beautiful, and they'd don't last long either.

They'll soon be gone, giving way to so many other flowers of early Spring, including the daffodil, one variety of which, a dwarf daffodil, is already on the move alongside our house.

Lastly, the lowly crocus is temperature-reactive. It opens as the temp rises, closes as it falls. It can play peek-a-boo almost before your eyes. The crocuses on your left were open when I ran into the house to change lenses on my camera. When I came back out, they'd shut down for the day.

Parade weekend is straight ahead. Spring is here.

Too Early...

As always, my optimism got way out ahead of my logic and reason. I went looking for Spring too soon.

Did the first Yard Tour of 2009 with my wife today, half expecting more than was found.

Can't much say it was a total disappointment, not at all. That's a forsythia bush of ours over there on the right. All of those buds are viable, none are yet green, not one shows a sign of bloom. It's only the first weekend in March.

I get antsy. Forsythia is among the first to flower, usually in a dazzling yellow pop that comes and goes much too quickly.

Then there's this thistle, looking vibrant and good to go. Scottish thistle some consider a weed, actually spending time and money to get rid of it.

Me? Well, I happen to embrace the idea that "nature knows no weeds." Some would say "God made no weeds." Either or, the point is the same; weeds are only weeds because we think and say they are.

Plus, when thistle blooms, if you let it do so, the flower is really pretty.

Walking around the place today, one thing is for certain - the earth in these latitudes is stirring and coming alive for another season of growth.

Amen to that.

Looking For Spring...

Within a couple of days we've gone from looking for Spring to tripping over it when you walk out the front door.

(Spring versus spring, upper case "S" or lower case "s," when referring to the season of the year? It's things like that make me nuts, always have. It's one of seven dozen reasons I could never write that novel which hides somewhere within me; I'd forever get bogged down on spelling, punctuation, etc.)

I have a major adventure planned for this weekend. I live life large as can be, to the fullest. My cavalier, damned near swashbuckling plans for the weekend are focused on finding Spring around the property.

And I know where to look. That heavy gardening background of mine comes in handy from time to time and I know where to look.

I will.

Should the signs be present, I'll photograph and report back. If not, I'll write some more about the bishop. No shortage of material there.

Oh, are you Twittering yet? I swore not to do it, seeing no real use for it. I caved. I now Twitter. Look me up, I'm SPCA_Sween.