Rob's family

We have a foster dog with us this week - Dakota.  He's a mostly well adjusted dog with a predilection for random barking.  We're using little fingernail sized doggie treats to persuade him to be good rather than barker.  For convenience, we're keeping a stash in a small metal cup.  My children know my penchant for small dishes.  I love small serving dishes with unique colors and uses.  We have dozens and I use them frequently for entertaining.   Julianne and Collin were here last night.  They went out for dinner together and joined us as we were finishing our Friday fun nacho dinner.  As they came in, we quickly set up a couple little dessert cups of chocolate this and chocolate that.  Tasty. My mistake was to miss an immediate  opportunity to clear the kitchen island of every day stuff.  Like Dog treats. Julianne noshed on chocolate this and tried a little bit of chocolate that.  She did not count on dog treats being...

Melinda stopped taking piano lessons (the first time around) in 8th grade.  This story probably starts about 8th grade (2012 or so).  She had started playing around with GarageBand and doing recordings of herself.  I was doing my best to be Dad - biggest cheerleader.  Annoying in ways only Dad can be. My Dad really likes piano music.  He had a Richard Clayderman CD he loved.  One of the songs on the CD was de Senneville's Ballade Pour Adeline.  I must have heard that 500 times.  I like it too.  So I found the music online and printed a copy for her.  As I remember it, I just put on the music stand part of Tracey's childhood piano and said little (if anything) about it.  I probably nudged and pushed a little guilted about father's day...  It never got played. Fast forward... Melinda bought herself an electric piano this year and has been making a point of playing it.   And it's my birthday this year... she played it li...

  What was something you liked to eat as a snack after school? In the fall, Dad bought apples.  I think he said that a bushel of apples was $3.00.  ($20/peck in Chicagoland 40 years later) He traveled through apple country on his way to Wayland from Maynard and he’d buy a bushel of apples often (not quite weekly?)  A bushel is a lot of apples.   Hungry?  Eat an apple.  Thirsty?  First drink a “Turkey” glass of water.  The Turkey glass was enormous - 24 oz?  Then you can have a glass of Tang.   We had saltine crackers with  butter (margarine, we didn’t start eating butter again until Winnie joined the family.  Butter was too expensive).   Once in a while, someone would buy twinkies for snacks.  They come 10 to pack.  4 kids, 2 days of lunches. 2 “extra,”  The extra never made it very far. I remember Winnie made chocolate chip cookies to take camping one year and hid them in the cold oven i...

From: Mary  You got me thinking.  My mother said that I remind her of her mother.  She was small - on the petite size and could be feisty.  She loved to cook and bake apple pies.   The neighbors next store had a Green Granny Apple tree and the branches on Grandma side of the fence provided her with plenty of  apples for pie and applesauce.  Back in those days Grandma had a  wringer washer machine.  First the hot water had to be heated by coal furnice. The laundry was soaked hot soapy water and put the wringer by hand.  Then the laundry had to be hung out clothes lines in the back yard and propped up with wooden sticks.  Grandpa like to help hang the laundry after he retired.  It was a all day job.  Grandma had a old Singer sewing machine in the kitchen. One Thanksgiving the pumpkin pies were placed on sewing machine and covered with dish clothes.  I did ...

 My buddy Mike documented our Alaska history 30 years ago and then modernized it with annotations last fall. https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/15/one-summer-in- alaska/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/16/living-in-a- closet/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/17/lets-go-get-em/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/21/destined-for- the-sea/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/23/imposter- syndrome/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/28/im-just-here- to-observe-the-fish/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/11/30/staying-the- course/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/12/05/alaska-days-14- 15/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/12/06/weve-survived/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/12/08/mal-de- debarquement/ https://mikenmitch.wordpress. com/2022/12/12/one-summer-in- alaska-epilogue/

  The Boston Marathon is typically run on the third Monday in April - Patriot's day.  Three doors down from our house in Wayland (10 Snakebrook to our 4) lived the Salazars (they were Boston Globe customers and it was difficult to understand their Cuban accents).  One of their kids was Alberto and he ran/won the Boston Marathon in 1982 (12 years older than me - much later banned from the sport for life).   In Massachusetts, the herring spawn in the ponds they were born in.  Those ponds connect to streams and rivers (e.g. the Charles River) that empty into the Atlantic also in the spring around the same time. Herring is a pretty generic term - in Massachusetts they're Alewives (we just called them herring).  When I lived in Boston in 1991, I took the T - Redline - into the city and caught the train at Alewife. Although there has been lots of damming of the rivers, society has built fish ladders so that they can jump up...