I make it a point to pick up money I find on the street, whether I’m running or doing errands or whatever. Turns out there’s a whole subculture of people who do this, and it turns out to be skill that you can learn and improve.
Today I did a couple laps around the ginormous parking lot of the Katy Mills Mall, and this was the haul.

The quarter is as old as I am… Makes you think, how did I and this quarter both spend 47 years waiting to meet each other in a mall parking lot on a foggy Christmas Eve morning in Katy Texas (home of the state champion football team) (and my brother in law)?

Have a holly jolly, b-b-b-blue, red-nosed Christmas

Most mornings I walk to work with Lee and we get a cup of coffee from the hospital cafeteria. It’s as good as what I can get downtown and cheaper too. We’ve struck up quite the pleasant morning chit chat with the cashier, to whom there is more than meets the eye.

Today, prepping for the festive employee lunch, she was sporting a singing, dancing hat… Really, both hat and wearer were crooning. And then she reached down beneath the register and pulled out another one, and another, and……

Vermont leads all states, again, in per capita Peace Corps volunteers. The asterisk is for Washington DC, but it’s not a state… It’s certainly true that you can’t swing a dead zebra around here without smacking an RPCV (who will likely have the skills to either resuscitate it and hook it to a plow or at least butcher it and use the hide as seed capital in a micro-enterprise making zebraskin moccasins).

We’re number 1 again, with an asterisk

Signs of the upcoming apocalypse

Even though the world is about to end, you still have to keep your feet off the wall. And the well- dressed lobsters will be the first to be rounded up and eaten.

The great turkey tureen stuffed w crab and avocado salad en route to Sherry and Prov’s for Thanksgiving dinner.

On the one hand, it’s very cool that the hotel elevator lobby mirror has these inbuilt lighted weather indicators. On the other, it’s Vancouver at the end of November, and so there aren’t a lot of surprises. Seeing the current conditions makes that 5:30 AM run just a little bit less appealing.

“Informational Picket”

It’s union contract negotiation time at the Retreat, and things have gotten difficult. Union claims that mgmt. has squandered millions in surplus funds; bosses respond by laying off over 30 employees. So far, lose-lose.

On on!!!

So I’m getting out of the boat on Saturday after the final row of the season, and I see a small group of people standing in a circle near the trailhead.

They’re colorfully dressed.

There’s chalk marks on the ground.

They’re singing.

I had stumbled on the newly formed Connecticut Valley New Trotters just downing their pre-trail beers.

Hallelujah!

Four more years

This week, we celebrated our 1-year anniversary in the 802. And yesterday we joined in a 4-year anniversary celebration with 50.5% of the rest of the country. I am in Chicago for a work meeting and I got to see the President’s motorcade yesterday and the cheering throngs marching in the street last night.

Another cycle begins. Brattleboro works on a very predictable annual rhythm, so now we get to do the things we missed last year, redo the the things we liked, and maybe ignore one or two events we tried out in the last 12 months. We have more new friends, there are some new businesses and restaurants around town, we still have plenty of construction to do: whatever happens this year it won’t be boring.

As Hurricane Sandy lumbers across New Jersey and heads for us tonight, these power lines seemed like the right image to capture. If there are problems here in B’boro it will be because we haven’t gotten around to burying them yet.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑