Point Made

The weather headlines on television tell me there are floods and tornados in Louisiana. The front causing this activity is covering the entire US from Northern Michigan to the Gulf Coast. In Wisconsin, we were predicted to get 8 - 10 inches of snow. Mandeville got some rain. Appleton got 3 inches of snow. What does 3 inches of snow look like? Note the garden hose is crawling off the picnic table. The pictures and paintings are crawling out of the boxes, scattering themselves about the house, some of them have scaled the walls and are hanging in place. Pieces of furniture have found their final home after a tortuous journey through various rooms.  We settled o ne benchmark in house history . Lucy's food and water bowls have found a place in the kitchen. Take a look at the photo above and note her paw prints in the snow. Lucy is reacquainting her backside to the snowy surface. Not joyfully, I must say. This snow will be gone before you read this blog. It is ...

This is our new backyard. The water will recede. It will become a swamp, then a dry hole, but it will always be Lake Maria. (Thanks to Jeramey Jannene for the Name.) Yes, there a pair of Ducks setting up housekeeping. Yes, I'm concerned about them building a nest in an area that will soon be a pile of wet leaves. I know what it means to move to a place only to find out you're going to be moving again. But enough about moving, let me tell you what happened when we moved from subtropical Louisiana to snow storm threatened Wisconsin. Someone has to explain to me how you can move twice in less than a year and, you throw away, give away and sell stuff you think you don't need and the same sized truck is still full when you pull away from the driveway. But I digress. The crew dropped the moorings and the good ship, with its port o call, Miami Florida on the ships papers, pulled out of Mandeville, Louisiana, on Monday, March 14, 2016. Our destination was Effingham Ilin...

And why I choose to disparage female dog's, I can't explain. I'll hazard a guess that  it's just a bad habit. Each room of our house has a stack of packed moving cartons and a couple of open, partially full cartons waiting for completion. In some ways, this is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that has multiple solutions built into it. As I pack, I use the balanced weight theory. A box full of books is heavy. A box with some books and some knickknacks or linens is easier to pick up and move. This takes planning flexibility and patience. As my wife will be more than glad to inform you, I have some capacity for the first two and almost none of the last. We'll see. We agreed that only in some circumstances would we move something we haven't touched in the time we've spent here. If we haven't needed it in the last eight and half months, we more than likely don't need it. Since she hates my corduroy sports coat I'm sure she's hoping that...