Old School, Tom-Style

Like most of the country, Morgantown has had its fair share of cold weather this winter, and more than its share of snow. It's been hat and gloves and scarf and boots weather for months on end, it seems.

Here I am in my Old School get-up.

And I'm out in it almost every day: I have a regular morning routine, in which I head into town across the High Street bridge, stop in at the post office and ship out anything that might have sold, stop at the bank once in a while, and then head into the Blue Moose, where I like to do a little writing.  The Moose, as I call it, is a kind of local watering hole (I think I can call it that, since they do serve beer, including in the morning), but I always stick to a cup of coffee and a danish.

When I leave the Moose, I usually come back over the Pleasant Street bridge, and one day a couple of weeks I go I had one of those encounters that I seem to have here in Morgantown now and then. As I was stepping off the bridge, with my hat and gloves and computer bag, some guy called out to me from across the street. He had a duffel or a piece of luggage, and he seemed to want directions: "Hey, Old School," he said, "can you tell me how to get downtown?"

Well, I told him to just go on across the bridge and he'd practically be there, but I'm afraid I felt like I'd just been tagged with a new nickname, even if it was only in my own mind. It's going to be hard to get rid of, even so.

Slow but steady...keeps the neighbors from calling code enforcement

--not that I think there was any danger of that.  But as usual, some of the summer projects that seemed like they'd take no time at all ended up getting abandoned when the semester started. 

The major project that got set aside was getting the ivy out of the beds in front of the house and replacing it with something more interesting.  The really daunting part was over: Tom spent many sweaty hours pulling the ivy out and digging up its formidable roots.

--but once that happened, the beds sat barren for a long time, save the weeds that sprouted up in there.  Since the weather has been lovely this weekend, it seemed like a golden opportunity to try to finish.

Well, "finishing" didn't quite happen.  But then, I think about the (allegedly traditional) Japanese saying a friend told me once:  "House finished, life over." 

There's a lot more to do here, but we did manage to dig up a bunch of the ornamental grasses that have been taking over the border on the other side of the house and move them into the front beds.  Funny, these all looked small compared to their parent plants, but when we relocated them, suddenly they seemed pretty good sized!  And since they were just coming up as volunteers, they were destined to get pulled out anyway.  Let's just hope they take root and get established before the weather turns. 

As usual, this is going to be a multiple-trips-to-Lowes sort of project, since we need several more bags of topsoil and mulch, and then some kind of edging or stones to keep all the dirt from running onto the sidewalk.  (I'll say this for ivy:  it's a great bulwark against erosion.)

But still, we're happy with the result, and happy to finally be tackling the front yard, which we've sorely neglected ever since we moved in.

Life is just a bowl (or, more precisely, an 11-quart stockpot) of cherries

When we lived in Colorado, some neighbors of ours (who were also good friends) had a sour-cherry tree in their backyard that Tom coveted.  One year, we happened to be catsitting for them while they were out of town, and the cherries were just about to be fully ripe.  "Pick as many as you want," they said, "because by the time we get home, it'll be too late."

Tom has fond memories of canning cherries from his childhood.  I regularly hear the story about his grandfather swinging through the kitchen at the height of the process, grabbing a few out of the bowl, and saying, "I'll can some of those right now," as he popped them in his mouth.

So, the summer of the free (and plentiful) sour cherries remains a very fond memory for Tom.  But we haven't been able to find anyplace to get them since we moved to West Virginia.

This year, my sister discovered that her CSA could hook her up with sour cherries, but you had to buy them in quantity--half a bushel, minimum.

So, since we were all coming to Columbus for my nephew's wedding this weekend, Pam picked up the fruit and brought it down, we brought our cherry pitter from Morgantown, and Tom spent five hours pitting them yesterday afternoon and evening, with just a short break for dinner.

The result?  Literally, an 11-quart stockpot full of cherries, which yielded seven overstuffed quart bags to put in the freezer, about a pint of sour cherry juice (I feel some good cocktails coming on), and another five cups left over to make a pie this evening.

It's been bloody hot everywhere this week, but this kind of bounty is a reminder of what summer is good for.  And when we thaw out some of those cherries to make another pie (or cobbler, or crisp, or turnovers) in the middle of next winter, it will be a welcome taste of a different season.

One-shot reads

This morning when I looked out the window to see that it was snowing, again, and promised to do so all day, I just about lost it. 

We'd finally gotten all the ice off the sidewalks earlier in the week, and I was starting to hear birds singing in the morning, and it's not dark out when I leave work anymore...and then another winter blast.

My primary urge upon seeing the snow blowing sideways was simply to go back to bed, preferably with a giant bag of cookies, and stay there until April.  Or at least all day.

But my thoughts instead ran like this:  I have a stack of midterms to grade...next week is going to be crazy-busy...I really need to get back to work on that article...the mailman has to work today, so why shouldn't you?

After an hour or so of feeling guilty, I compromised:  I wouldn't go back to bed, but I would spend the rest of the morning reading Sue Grafton's U is for Undertow, which I'd started a couple of days before.

As it turned out, I couldn't put it down and ended up spending the entire day reading it all, finishing mid-afternoon.

It's been a long time since I read an entire book in one shot, and while it was a guilty pleasure, I had no regrets.  Not only did getting absorbed in the story help me get through a day that started out feeling unbearable, there's just something so meditative and Zen-like about sustained reading like that.

When I posted something on Facebook about having spent the day that way, my friend Mike replied saying he had fond memories of spending a similarly snowy day reading Donna Tartt's A Secret History years ago. 

I, too, remember other marathon reads with great nostalgia:  Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone over a rainy weekend before final exams,  P. D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin on a cross-country flight.  And of course, countless library books during childhood summer afternoons, which I consumed like potato chips while sitting in the butterfly chair on my parents' screen porch.

So, I thought I'd pose the question:  what books do you all remember reading in one shot?  And what kind of memories get conjured up when you recall that experience?

Retraction

Suddenly, this doesn't seem like a joke anymore, but rather like one of the most brilliant inventions ever.

Though frankly, the most brilliant thing ever is these puppies.  Seriously, if you live somewhere where it snows a lot, and you don't have a pair of these, buy some.


White Park, Sunday 7 February 2010

Digging out

We didn't get hammered here as badly as folks further south and east did, but we still had a good eight inches of snow between Friday night and Saturday. Since Tom and I were both buried under final papers and exams, we didn't even leave the house until today.

You might recall that Tom has a penchant for odd snow-removal devices. Well, today he decided that a snow shovel was the best thing to use to clear the snow off the car. And he was right. We also took a push broom to it after the first pass with the shovel, and managed to clear it most of the way off.



This is definitely the heaviest snow we've had in the two-plus years we've lived in Morgantown; too bad we've been so busy that we haven't had a chance to get out our snowshoes and hike over to White Park. Somehow, I have a feeling we'll have other chances this winter.

Next Stop: Winter!

Regular readers, I hope, may recall my lament about the size of the lawn here and the all-too-frequent necessity of whacking the grass, which I wrapped up by noting that "I'll probably need to adopt some protective eye goggles. That should be a look."

How silly of me--clearly, protective eye-goggles no longer provide appropriate yard-work security, as I discovered while flipping through the latest "Improvements" catalogue that was recently delivered to our house (conveniently addressed to us "OR CURRENT RESIDENT") via the US mail.

All that is missing from the picture of the "Snow Thrower Cab" is the snow shovel attachment for it to be perfectly usable here at the new house (even as a corner lot, the sidewalks are still too short to need a mechanical snow blower, so I'll have to kludge some sort of alternate attachment system I guess).

And it says it won't shrink or stretch. Maybe I'll get a second one for the long walk to campus, too.