Our House
Started out the month about like last month. Just before Easter, we headed on up
to Das Dutchman Essenhaus and had a good
old-fashioned German-American dinner. They call it "Amish cooking" but that's just
to make it sound exotic to the citified Easterners. Tastes like good down-home farm
cooking to me. It's
a great place to go, and they have all these little shops (sound familiar?) and Kathy
bought a small handmade-in-Indiana rug to go with her new decor in the living room.
It was on the way back from there that we got the background photo "Sunset at Goshen".
One Friday evening we got in the paper and saw that they were going to widen Wooster
Road by 3 feet to accommodate a bicycle lane. Now we're in favor of this, but
construction was to start on Monday. So Kathy had to dig up her bloomin' tulips
and transplant them. Well, about half were in the path of the bulldozer but she
got them dug up and moved by Saturday dusk. Hate this daylight savings, you can
nearly kill yourself working until sunset.
Kathy had a bunch of ladies over one evening, which is a great reason to clean
house. Unfortunately, we had to make do with some "in progress" upholstery work
but we parked the air compressor out of sight. Air compressor? Oh, yeah. That!
Well, you see, the frames of our 11-piece sectional are solid oak, and the
staple gun just won't drive a staple all the way in. Even bought an electric
staple gun but it wasn't even as good as the manual, so we took it back. So
Kathy borrowed a staple gun from the fellow at Dwayne's Upholstery (his "old"
one) and borrowed an air compressor from Lowell Collins, neighbor across the
street, and boy does it work! She was wondering why they used so many staples
as she was taking them out, and then she found herself putting in a lot of them
just for the sheer fun of it -- bing! bing! bing!
Speaking of Lowell, he's been catching skunks. They really tear up the yard looking
for grubs in the ground. Almost as bad as chickens. He killed one skunk with a pellet
gun and he's caught several in
humane traps and carted them out to the country. As I write this, there is a trap
set in his front yard. And Kathy keeps "deer mesh" over her tulips and such. In the
winter we have to cover the shrubs, but in the summer the flowers are much more tasty
(I guess -- I haven't tried eating tulip leaves). So between the skunks and the deer
it's hard to raise anything.
Finally got out the grill, the hose and lawn mower. Had to move aside a bunch of Christmas
stuff to do so. Gotta stop building Christmas decorations until I build another shed?????
Anyway, the point is that the weather warmed up to where, when I chainsawed the last of
the hickory I almost took off my shirt. Time to think of grilling outdoors and such.
The impetus for that operation was getting out the hose so we could put on Weed&Feed,
and then put down bug killer around the foundation because the ants are showing up in
the house again.
Now about that duct tape in the photo --
Notice that the car has Massachusetts plates on it. Well, daughter Kriss has been trying
to buy a Honda Fit since
about last October. Dealers just sort of don't have them, don't know when they'll get one,
not a high-profit item I reckon. So at work, in the afternoon when things slow down of
late, she would call a dealer or two and ask if they had one she could actually buy.
Finally, she found one.
Now keep in mind that the Saturn, with nearly 100K on it, had not been serviced since
October. Sunroof never did work right, it was leaking when it rained, oil was rotting
the insulation on the wiring largely due to a fuel pump about to go out, etc. etc. You
would never sell this, er, "vehicle" to anyone you knew, and, if you told anyone the
whole litany (more than what's enumerated here) they would charge you to haul it away.
So she "negotiated" for a trade in. Well they took it "around back" to do an estimate
on a trade-in. (I think they weighed it and called up the scrap metal dealer so they
could give her the price of scrap iron by the pound, less towing it over there.) But
being an in-town dealership, the new Honda was at an out-of-town location so she had
to drive the Saturn one more day, home and then back to the dealer. As they
drove the Saturn around front, as it was approaching, (no, the brakes didn't fail but
that was another item that needed work) half the front bumper fell off. Just like
the Blues Brothers if you saw that movie, only not quite as dramatic. Couldn't have
been more perfect. Papers signed, check signed, boom! It's their problem now! Most
states have this rule that once you drive a car off the lot, you keep it regardless.
Well it was signed over to them and they drove it, turnabouts fair play....
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Weather
So April came in sort of cold and rainy but it warmed up as it does every year. Glad to have the
snow gone, although it actually snowed on Easter and at least one other day. Doesn't stay around
very long, though. By the end of the month it wasn't freezing most nights. But this is
northern Indiana. "Ve haff three seasons: Yooly, Augoost und Vinter."
You can see from this photo where Kathy was rescuing the tulips, and that line of white
rock and shrubs is what we couldn't rescue.
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Grace College
We went with Paulette Sauders (English Dept.) to hear a talk on C.S.Lewis and G.K.Chesterton.
The talk was at Taylor University, about an hour and a half drive from here. We've been
fans of C.S.Lewis for many years (Narnia, Sci-fi trilogy, Mere Christianity) and they have
an extensive collection of Lewis' writings at Taylor.
Anyhow, the speaker was Dale Ahlquist who looked somehow familiar. He's the president of
the G.K.Chesterton Society among other things. We spoke with him afterward and come to
find out, he's the author of the book Kathy had in her tote bag because she was reading
it at the time. (It was a library book or she might have had Ahlquist sign it.) But they
have a series on the Catholic Channel (EWTN?) on Sunday nights, "Chesterton, the Apostle
of Common Sense". Now it is true that Chesterton was Catholic, but his writings are
chock full of wisdom and defense of Christianity in general. A most uncommon sort of man, he
debated Clarence Darrow in New York City in about 1930, and made Darrow look like a
monkey that time. You'll recall that Darrow browbeat the dying William Jennings Bryan
at the Scopes "monkey" trial in Dayton, TN, about five years previous. Chesterton was
without equal in his day; in fact, Lewis knew him and was an avid reader of Chesterton's
books. Many of Chesterton's ideas show up in Lewis' writings a few years later. Recommended
reading, definitely. Oh -- and it turns out that Ahlquist is also the host of the TV show.
(That's why he looked so familiar!) Indeed, it is one of the few shows worth watching.
Certainly better than the blood and sarcasm
on the networks and somehow preferable to Sr. Martha reciting the Rosary. One of the few
shows (other than NASCAR) that I will sit still and watch all the way through. They will
re-enact Chesterton's debate with Clarence Darrow sometime during the coming TV season.
Should be something between fascinating and hilarious. They will be using the transcript
of the debate as the script. Sundays 9:00, 8:00 Central, don't know about Pacific time.
We stopped on the way back at Ivanhoe's, an ice-cream shop with 100 flavors of milkshakes.
After a short time, in walks Ahlquist and a couple of his hosts from Taylor. I reckon that
Ivanhoe's is a "must" anytime you're going to or from Taylor, right there on the main
street of Upland. It's only a couple of miles from I-69 and is a most delicious break
in your journey. But get the smallest size; they're really intense!
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Geek Stuff
Biggest project of the month was a program to help the Helping Hands. Let me explain that.
Helping Hands is about getting people together; those who need some help (yard work,
fixing the porch railing, emergency child care, etc.) with those who are willing to help.
There are enough people involved that the tasks are divided up into "categories", each
of which has a contact person with a list of helpers. Simple enough, but you really don't
want to be calling the same person every time, and some people can only help after work or on weekends. Reckon a stack of filing cards would work, but we need a way to keep the
information in a central location for when people are out of town or whatever. It all sounds very straightforward, but there are all kinds of little nuances that we would like the
computer to handle.
So part of the work was done by my User Interface Design/Visual Basic class. I think they
learned a lot, especially just before finals when some of the specifications suddenly changed. Par for the course in programming. We will have to wait and see whether the
program is (a) useful and (b) usable. After a trial period, if it looks good, we will
offer to give it away. Source code and all! Open Source! But to change anything, you
gotta have .NET running on your computer (Windows XP, or a Linux add-on), and Visual
Studio/C# in particular. .NET is required to run it, but it's built into XP and Vista,
which most of y'all are using anyway.
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That neighbor cat is so cute!
And we hope this silly woodpecker is smart enough
to stay out of her way.