Memnison Journal

State Ag department:  http://www.agr.state.il.us/markets/farmers/ Farmers Markets Online: http://www.farmersmarketonline.com/fm/Illinois.htm

Susan and Meredith are supposed to leave tomorrow in the morning for Lincoln, Nebraska, to the roller-skating National competition, and they will have to work really hard to be ready by then. I worry about Susan burning the candle at both ends mentally and physically with this trip, but there’s darn little I can do [...]

Christmas Eve is usually the day we spend with Susan’s aunt and mom at Susan’s aunt’s house in the  northwestern suburbs of Chicago; dinner is followed by passing out the presents (a small child is usually too excited to sit through dinner in any sort of relaxed fashion, and is the elf who supervises the [...]

Another thing that was going by the wayside recently was any advance planning for the future.  At this point, it’s starting to rev up again…I have two memberships purchased for me and Mere at Capricon and a room reserved; now to make sure that the $$ is there at the time. On Monday, I’m going [...]

Meredith’s 10th birthday (and that of her twin sister Mer, of course) is today, and we are having a series of birthday parties for her; the first included Susan’s aunt(s) at their home in Elgin over the weekend, and the next is a just-the-household one tonight, and then this Saturday night, Mere has five pals [...]

Just the thing for your Thanksgiving feast: White Castle Hamburger stuffing to go with your turkey.  Mange! Vite, vite! Yes, I’d use it for fun if we were having a weird-food-party this New Years Eve.  Which, unfortunately, we won’t.  (Mere and I like White Castle; its one of the odd tastes that I got from [...]

Rampaging red squirrels in France Kashmiri militants, meet bear.  Bear, eat militants. Dead bison stink really bad: South Dakota meat producer abandons meat storage locker full of 44 tons of kosher bison, and the power gets cut for nonpayment.

How do you maintain your set of personal favorite recipes?  If software, which ones work or don’t work? And if you’re inviting people over for dinner, what sort of leave-time do you give to start in case people come late – as in, will you hold dinner and for how long  – before you start [...]

Marion’s Piazza in the Dayton, Ohio area, hands down.  Mushroom, sausage, pepperoni and (if I’m eating by myself) anchovies.   Yes, I like anchovies on pizza, so long as they don’t have bones.

I have been listening to enough rants, hate and nonsense in the last year and a half to last me a lifetime or more, and I’ve been more than fed up with it all.  But I started realizing that this sort of crud is endemic; uninformed people who choke off their sources of information to [...]

Stupid thief of the day: Dayton, Ohio cops catch man outside barbeque joint, reeking of grease while the burglar alarm was going off (yes, I know the newspaper’s writers say wreaking; I can’t help the fall of journalistic standards) – he claimed he was dumpster diving for leftovers, but the cops found that he’d broken [...]

The workmen are out in the back of the house, digging the French Drain thing for the drainage project; I hear a steady thonk-thonk-thonk (there seems to be a total of two guys to do the digging and all, and man, that’s got to be killer work by hand) and will have to go off [...]

New Zealander taekwondo champ trying to open a whorehouse in his home country to support his bid to go to the London Olympics in 2012.    Well, it’s not as nice as a Wheaties box…

Right here.   The really hard stuff, too.  And then you can go for these, too.

Due to overload on the family (and that I’m unable to handle the mower at present) we depend on a mowing service to come over and do the lawn – a very nice operation, really, and we recommend them to any locals that might need it. But the dogs have been plagued recently with some [...]