Fragments From Floyd

I'll be escourting my wife to Boston for her professional conference in early November. Sure, she could go by herself and I could stay home and tend the house and the dog. But we were in Boston five years ago this time (for this same organizational meeting) and frankly, it wasn't a bad experience for me as big cities go. I will have all day to take the hotel shuttle to downtown, Harvard, and other touristy places, camera in tow, while Ann enjoys schmoozing with her cohorts in clinical nutritional pharmacotherapeutics.

On our first trip, we had just moved into this house and had spent our first night a few days before leaving it to the ladybugs, empty and quiet for five days. It was so odd to come home to a house we did not know yet, and know that in time it would be our home. Now it seems like we've never lived anywhere else.

Just got a call from a neighbor who had a big hemlock tree come down in his front yard during the floods of Hurricane Jeanne a few weeks back. Now Hemlock for firewood probably burns more calories in the woodcutter than it will offer back in the woodstove of a frigid January morning. But as much as I lament the rapid loss of these trees from our invasive insect hordes, I have take this opportunity to use what nature has provided in this windfall (water-fall) gift. So I'll be putting a new chain on the bar here directly. I'll head down the road. The mister and I will do the obligatory geegawing about the storm, the coming winter, the sorry state of the world. And then I'll commence to dissecting the remains of a remaining Hemlock that should not have died in vain.