Monthly Archives: April 2012

This post is the eulogy my wife Becky wrote and delivered at the funeral yesterday for Florence Lion. You might not have known Florence, but I suspect that there is a Florence somewhere in your experience who suffered heartache during her life but kept giving and kept smiling.

Here’s a picture I took of a tree with the first leaves on it a couple of weeks ago. The green is so light it looks almost golden and of course this color does not last long as the leaves turn a darker green. I was reminded of a Robert Frost poem:

Nature's first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leaf's a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay. 

Beth Markley is a FB friend who lives half a world away in Japan. She posts the most interesting links, observations and pictures, all reminders of how this electronic media brings the world to us.

Beth’s daughter, Rachel, is at the University of Chicago, studyi ng to be an actuary. She’s taking calculus as a freshman and likes languages, having studied Serbian, Japanese and Latin (six years). She crochets, spins her own yarn and won a grant to ‘yarnbomb’ the campus with yarn made objects. One of her talents is making crochet animals.

Her proud mama adds, “I find her to be a delightful person.” 🙂

By going to the site below and clicking “like,” people can support her desire to learn to be in the circus.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150662641548225 &
set=o.185063821542169&type=1&theater

To which mom adds, “I know, right?”

It’s good to be back in the glass-enclosed brain center of the Biscuit City studios. There has been a little renovation work going on here while we were on spring break this past week. The old carpet is gone, although the new one is not in yet, and the chair where I sit writing this has a new vinyl pad under it to keep from scraping the hardwood floors. Unfortunately, the studio was built by the lowest bidder, which means that the floors aren’t exactly level. I sit down in the chair and it goes rolling back to the side wall. Not exactly what I had planned, but a nice trip anyhow.

My brother Ron is a wonderful renovator and repair man (even fixes acoustic guitars), and he says that projects have puppies. By this he means that you start out fixing one thing which causes something else to break or not work correctly so that you’re then working on two puppies from the original case. Or a project has puppies by not going as you expected it to.

I started a project this weekend using landscape timbers for edging the front of our front azalea bed. I had had experience last year with building some raised beds for a  couple of hydrangeas so I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to run 40 or so feet of the timbers, one atop another to form a wall,  across the front of the bed.

Wrong again. The problem is that with the raised bed I was using about six-foot lengths of the lumber. The present project uses eight-foot lengths which have an unfortunate tendency to curl, twist and bend when placed in some semblance of a wall. I can pry and persuade and force them into place but that’s a whole lot more work than I thought it would be. The thought project puppy. Now there’s an app we can all do without!

Right now my “retaining wall” looks like strands of spaghetti at the end with the timbers going every which way. I’ll take a picture for illustrative purposes.  But I’ll get them into line with a combination of foot-long pieces of rebar, a bunch of six-inch lag screws, a long pry bar, some muscle (such as it is), most likely some personal injury (I manage to whang myself with the pry bar at least once during such proceedings–look for the mark on my forehead–ouch!), American ingenuity and some German persistence courtesy of my ancestors. Or, as my mother used to say, “Persistence or stupidity: I don’t know which it is with you.”

Here are the warped ties, in place but warped! Twisted! Misshapen!

And a couple of shots of completed sections where the timbers have been “persuaded” into place.

And so, as the sun sinks slowly into the west, we bid a fond adieu to Biscuit City Beach until next year…”Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” Oh, wait. Wrong program. Oops.

Biscuit City is back to normal (whatever “normal” is) on Monday! Hope to see you then!

The fun rolls on at Biscuit City Beach! If you’re in the area, join us for this evening’s Big Biscuit City Barbeque and Cookout right on the beach!  Nancy Whiskey is digging the fire pit and all the gourmet cooks on staff are whipping up their specialties! It’ll be food, fun, surf and Jimmy Buffett on the boom box! (There’s a rumor that Jimmy himself might come to entertain…so we’ll have shrimp and margaritas in his honor…just in case!)

That’s Nancy Whiskey to the far left, before she was dropped from the team for rough hitting. (Note: not a real team, and a stock photo of a beach volleyball team from somewhere.)

A couple of BC staffers (wearing Manassas Chorale shirts, for some reason) enjoying the sun and surf at the Biscuit City Resort and Day Spa. Come on down and join them!