Saturday 9

Saturday 9: One Less Set of Footsteps (1973)
On Saturdays I take a break from the heavy stuff and have some fun…

 

Unfamiliar with this week's tune? Hear it here.

1) Jim Croce sings that "tomorrow is a dream away." What are you dreaming about today?
How to get up to the cottage before I have to close it for the season. Minor problems just kept popping up. Like a crown coming off or weather problems.

2) He promises that his lover will soon hear one less voice a-talking. Who is the most recent person you spoke to? (Texts, e-mails and IMs don't count.)
The lady at the counter of the farm store where I picked up eggs, milk, and farm fresh chocolate chip cookies!

3) He admits that he and his lover have run out of things to say to one another anyway. Let's turn that around: Is there someone in your life with whom the conversation always flows freely?
My brother.

4) He mentions the jeans hanging upon her door. Do you often wear blue jeans? 
Always! I used to get all dolled up going to the doctors… but that showed my age. Everyone else are in jeans except us old folk!

5) As a high school student, Jim Croce was not especially interested in music. During those years he concentrated on foreign languages, especially German. Say something to us in German.
Guten Morgen

6) His focus changed when he got to college. That's when he joined a choral group that was chosen for a foreign exchange tour of Africa and the Middle East. When did you first travel far from home? Where did you go?
When I was little we drove to every state this side of the Mississippi in July visiting every battleflied and sometime staying at military officer housing and then in August we spent the month at my mother’s cousin cottage on Lake Winnisquam in New Hampshire. The last time I was there was when we bought our boat for the New Hampshire lake cottage that my parents bought in 1975. The cousin we stayed at died many years earlier and her son ran the business.

7) In 1973, when this song was popular, Norman Mailer was atop the best seller lists with his controversial biography of Marilyn Monroe. When you curl up with a book, is it more likely to be fiction or non-fiction?
Fiction.
Off in the stars fiction with space battles ot magic.

8) Home calculators were innovative in 1973. You could choose a large desktop calculator that featured big keys and plugs into the wall, or a hand-held, battery-operated model. Today every cellphone and laptop has a calculator built in, so do you ever still reach for a stand-alone calculator?
No.
But it was 1972 when HP launched the HP-35! I was in engineer school beck then. Do you know how many slide rulers went into the trash? I didn’t buy one, one of the kids in the dorm rented his out. He had a sign-up list on his door. Buck an hour, five dollars to take it to a test.
Yes, he was very shady. He made bugs, you know listening devices, but he was know for “Blue Boxes” where you could call anywhere for free and he sold them big $$$$.
He got busted! Instead of jail time… he made Blue Box detectors and sold them to the phone company. He was always in and out of legal trouble.

c
Probably groceries. Or an audiobook.

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The oak is always the last to surrender; its brown leaves will hold on through the wildest of blizzards and surrender only when new life starts to bud.

Now that most of the trees have shed their leaves, the state road that I talk about—it's the diagonal line about halfway up—is visible, and you can see the west-facing cliffs. That is typical for around here; the mountains are called the "Hanging Hill," which was made famous by Frederic Edwin Church in his painting West Rock.

There is another artist who painted around here… you might have heard of him if you like the Hudson River School of painting: Nelson Augustus Moore.

He used to live about half a mile away alongside the same brook that runs near my house, which the land trust is buying. I can look out my window and see the same mountain that he saw. When I was little, we used to play along that brook, and back in high school, our science class even panned for galena, a mineral of lead, silver, and sulfur that was mined right there during the Revolutionary War.

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In the “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another” department:

Yesterday it rained for the first time in fifteen days and it poured! It came down in buckets. It was impressive, but luckily there were no winds, unlike the downburst on the Fourth of July that knocked out power for four days.

A couple of hours later, I heard a drip… drip… drip… The classic sound of a leak.

I found it in the atrium. I also found other water stains on the window sill. Now what?! This is a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, two giant window assemblies. Back in 1990, it cost $3,000 each!

However, since the windows and skylights are over thirty years old, I have already been budgeting for their replacement. This just moved the schedule up. A number of the thermopane windows are also fogging up between the glass.

All these age-related repairs… even the front door lock needs replacing because I have to wiggle the key just to open it. It is all these little things!