Checkered Lounge Pants

Blog Good morning from Boston's north shore. It's been almost 6 weeks since I pulled in the driveway. It seems like yesterday until I begin recalling the events. Seconds into that flashback and the snapshot seems to becomes a photo journal log. Like now for instance my quiet blog moment out on the back-porch has become a litany of self-answered questions and inquisitions by my 4 year old granddaughter once she discovered I was self-sequestered out in the backyard. movie day Today is a beach day. We have had camping weekends, ocean days, park days, McDonald days(best wifi for d/l movies and the Daily show), dunking donut runs, and a lot of naps(kids and mine), shuttles, snax, juice boxes, sippy cups, and that's just baby's itinerary. The grandson is not quite so complicated. Northshore league baseball games, soccer camp Monday to Thursday at the parks rec and Canabie Lake amusement park. Anyhow, where was I? O ya, blogging. The days have flown into weeks, wh...

Once again we loaded up the vehicles with tents, sleeping bags, firewood and ice laden coolers for the weekend drive up to New Hampshire brave the wilds of the New England cottage country. Chatting with friends back home and they hope for a week on eastern seaboard and I suggested a weekend down at Martha's Vineyard later this month. Three weeks plus since I drove to Boston and a weekend sans overtired disobedience is appealing about now. My sons rearing skills mirror his grandparental generation but it seems effective as long as the consistency is unbroken and that chain disconnects regularly in Papubs presence.  My heart is heavy tonight as my cousin has a Kidney transplant this week. He has been diligently going through the medical tests for slmost a year that accompany an organ transplant along with his donor sister. It brought me to tears when he called the day before his admittance to the hospital and, with voice cracking full of emotion, told me his wife of over35 years of...

Why are Canada's Trains Vulnerable? Good Old Capitalist Cost-Cutting Leo Panitch The fireball in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, flashed around the world last week as a very hot news item. Thirty-five people are now confirmed to have been killed, with 15 more still missing and presumed dead, as a result of the explosions of crude oil carried by the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway's runaway freight train. When Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper quickly showed up to offer his condolences, this also made international news. What has not received quite as much international attention as it has here in Canada, is what has since been revealed about Transport Canada, the federal government regulator of the railway industry which decided only last year to allow MM&A to run each train with only one engineer. Amidst all the apportioning of blame -- and there is plenty enough to go around -- our sober attention must also turn to what this appalling incident, like the terrible Ba...

http://www.cbc.ca/q/mobile/touch/2013/07/08/climate-change-isnt-cool-jians-essay/

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/news-video/20130707-lac-explosion-tictocmp4/article13058248/?service=mobile

Hi from Ayers Lake in New Hampshire . Drove to Boston a week ago and after a week if refreshing my old feeble memory of the neighborhood, the kids loaded me and the granddaughter up in two cars and we went camping. The campground was waterlogged from earlier rains but the kids won't deter a camping trip for any reason short of a climactic calamity. They set up the campsite while I backtracked to town and hit up the Lowes for fire starter to torch the trunk load of firewood we carried with us. Within 30 minutes we were sitting around a howling campfire sipping campers specials. Morning came quickly and baby and i mustered a bathroom recon and the campfire was quickly rescued from obscurity before the mystery of a morning coffee was addressed. Once the campers fully wakened a breakfast run was orchestrated followed by a stop at the local general store to replenish stocks if unique country fare. The weather did nothing to salvage a lakeside camp-spot and we bugged out and headed b...

Bonne fête à tout les citoyens Canadien francophone et anglophone de la côte est de l'antlantique à la côte ouest pacifique :)