Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2007 > Labor Day 2007 Edition
Isis has long had her bandage removed, and now the fur is growing back on her neck where the tumor was removed. There were some tiny wounds were the sutures fell off, but these have healed nicely. Isis is doing very well in her new home.
During the past month I got out of the way two projects, which I had planned on going after I bought the house.
The first project was the replacement of the western window in the upper room. The seals on both panels were broken, so that there was serious condensation -- so much so on the bottom panel that it had a half inch of water built up inside the panes. The screen was also damaged. So I took the panels to a glazier in Gas City. The glazier measured one panel; it turned out the two were slightly different. So I ended up visiting the glazier's every Saturday for three weeks: The first to measure a panel and fix the screen; the second to repair the upper panel; the third to fix the lower. And it was cheaper than I had thought it would be.
The second project was the removal of two dead trees along Buckeye Street. One of my neighbors had a fellow carpenter who cuts trees down (and up) in his free time. So I asked him to cut down the trees one Sunday, and paid him eighty bucks for the work. I gathered the pieces into an organized pile along what was once a sidewalk along Buckeye Street. It was too far off the street for the local street department to pick up the debris.
I would have liked my sister the teacher to bring Padre's trailer to pick up the wood, since she has a wood-burning fireplace she uses during the winter. But she is in the middle of a remodeling project, and was using the trailer for storage of wall panels. I waited a week. Then, the Sunday after the trees were felled, I gave the wood to a guy in a large pickup truck, who also burns wood in the winter. (We have a lot of people here who heat their homes with wood, and people keep asking me about the wood.)
All that were left were the branches and bark pieces. I gathered them right along the street, and the street department picked them up in lots over a period of three days.
I am told that car accidents are a fairly common occurrence on the intersection in front of my house. There are obvious stop signs facing only north and south on Buckeye Street; there are none on Fourth Street because it is a fairly major thoroughfare. Despite the obviousness of the signs, people still speed past them, or stop but not notice the traffic coming from either side.
I have heard, several times, of one guy who was roaring down Buckeye Street, ran the sign, got smacked by an eastbound car, and ran off the road into a house that was being refurbished at the time. The car was going so fast that it pushed the house off its foundations.
I bring this up because while I was finishing this page, I heard a loud brief sound, something between a bang and a crunch. I looked out the window to see a red car rolling down Buckeye, not only in the wrong lane but in the grass as well. I had thought the car might have run into the boulder on my corner of the intersection. After going downstairs to check where the car went (it stopped in front of my neighbor's to the south), I looked out the front to check for debris around the boulder -- and found a truck right at the boulder, its side dented, its passengers milling outside, a woman weeping with a bruised arm and a baby crying because it was freaked out.
The passengers of both cars were more or less okay. The car's front was totaled. The back window of the truck was shattered (pieces of which lay all over my front lawn). By four o'clock the neighborhood was back to normal.
I will see if I can get more boulders for that corner. Until my mortgage is paid off, nobody is going to push my house off its foundations!
Remember the three projects on the last entry of this site? Here is a progress report:
I found that during this summer there was another winner of the Caitlin Clarke Scholarship, a young lady this time, who wants a crack at American Idol, the Fox TV series were people get to go on stage and make total fools of themselves before a panel of three decidedly weird judges.
Anyway, she is the second person to have received the scholarship, even though it has been three years since Ms. Clarke passed away. I guess the scholarship was meant to be annual, but it worked out differently.
What caught my eye was that I found the application form for the scholarship on the Web site of Geneva College, which holds the summer high-school theater awards which hand out the scholarship. I was amazed to find that the scholarship form is based on the scholarship page of the CC Page site, right down the introductory paragraph.
I have no business to complain, even if I wanted to, because much of the CC Page is based on other peoples' works. If they haven't complained, I shouldn't, either.
I would like to remind you folks out there, that just because El Dubya has been discredited, it means that: