Busted left wing

Female bluebird in the nesting bopxWednesday, there were four eggs in the bluebird nest. Thursday, I didn’t check. Friday evening, the eggs were gone. Nary a sign. No chicks, no shells. Nothing but ne(s)t.

I turned around on the slide up which I had walked to view the nest mounted to the roof of the children’s play structure. I guess I slid, because that’s what one does on a slide, lost my balance and crashed into the garden, on the way becoming tangled in the plastic netting effective at keeping out rabbits and neighbor’s cats but not so much a 260-pound lummox trying to walk on slippery slides.

Continue reading Busted left wing

Minority rule (or, Election Day is Nov. 5)

Download link at end of this column.A few years ago, we turned out a large portion of the wastrels in the state legislature. We The People were nearly uniformly unhappy with lawmakers who had, in the dark of night, given themselves a payraise.

[pullquote]Unfortunately for the majority that does not vote, we too often have government by minority rule.[/pullquote]

In the district of my home, our representative seemed to have a different excuse for each audience. He voted for it because he couldn’t stop it, he said. Besides, judges deserved a long-overdue payraise. He deserved a raise to pay for his lawyering education which, he said – after 12 years of being, by his own admission, essentially legislatively useless – would make him more effective representative of his district.

Continue reading Minority rule (or, Election Day is Nov. 5)

A walk in the woods

Grady the golden retriever looks down a forest trail.Rain had fallen in the overnight, and the piece of low-lying forest through which I wandered was mostly wetland, at the edge of a cattail-filled meadow. Beneath my hiking shoes the path was cushioned – not soggy, but like a carpet with a nice sponge under it. Ahead of me – he’s always ahead of me – Grady the Golden Retriever kept looking back to be sure I was following. If I stop, he’ll come back to me. If I reverse direction, he’ll come jogging past to take the lead on the new course.

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Corbett opts for short-term profits over environment and education

GAHS awaits students, while administrators wrangle with governor's budget cuts
Gov. Tom Corbett’s seems to believe that putting money into things like education, so that future jobs might find young Pennsylvanians qualified to take them, is unnecessary, wasteful spending. Investment, on the other hand, means continued tax breaks to gas and coal companies so they can have profits now, some of which they may later contribute to his re-election campaign.

Case in point: A report published in December revealed the state gives about $2.9 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Continue reading …

Off the interstate, into history …

Ivy covers the gray stone walls of Gray Towers, Gifford Pinchot's childhood summer home.
At about the mid-point of a 450-plus mile journey home, we crossed the Delaware River westbound from Port Jervis, N.Y., to Matamoros, Pa. ate at the Perkins, and decided to see whether there might be less expensive gasoline if we followed U.S. 6 for a bit. We found the less expensive gas, but the real treasure was on the way uphill from the center of Milford back to the interstate. Continue reading Off the interstate, into history …