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My Summer of Water and Smoke
Water, man. What a miracle.
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The Gaches Mansion
I love Victorian houses, with their elegant porches, dormers, scrollwork, and spindles. I particularly love the Queen Anne style, because towers and turrets make my imagination run wild. I can see myself living in one of these magical manses, wearing high-collared, full-length dresses. I just can’t picture me paying the heating bill. One of my…
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Several Layers of Warmth
The joys of home ownership. The repairs to my fireplace wound up costing me twice as much as I anticipated. To say this is a hardship for me is putting it mildly. Living in the Seattle area is wonderful for many reasons, and because of that it’s expensive. Brutally expensive. I walk a precarious tightrope…
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Maybe If…
So I decided to go camping in British Columbia during the Perseids meteor showers. I love astronomical events of all kinds, but the Persaids is one of my favorites. And it was supposed to be particularly spectacular this time around. I had been planning this trip for nearly a year. I had no idea that…
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Found on the Side of the Road
The other day I was driving along the I-5 and in the middle of the road was a shoe. A single shoe. One hopes it did not have a foot in it. The way the traffic is around here, I certainly wasn’t about to stop and find out. How did that lonely little shoe get…
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Chicken Panic
My late sister used to have a tiny farm in Missouri. One day she woke up, looked out the back window, and saw a smoking black circle surrounded by snow where her wooden shed used to be. When the insurance company came to investigate the claim, they concluded that it was caused by “chicken panic”…
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Remembering Another Connecticut Tragedy
On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus came to town in Hartford, Connecticut. This was a very special treat for people who had been suffering the deprivations of World War II, and it brought with it a great deal of excitement and anticipation. In fact, 7,000 people came from all…