John’s cat had some interaction with the poker game last night. In the middle of a game this fat animal decided that John’s hole card was not acceptable and started ripping it to shreds. We continued the game without the Jack of Diamonds.

I am sorry about the awful cell phone camera photos. They are blurry and low quality.

E. Jim Shannon lives in the northern hinterlands of Edmonton in Canada. They have some pretty fierce cold weather there. It goes down well below zero Fahrenheit. He had been taking in a stray cat he named Boots. Two weeks ago, in the middle of a deadly cold blast, Boots ran out onto the cold and disappeared. He and his wife called him for days but there was no sign of him.

Today, on his blog, Jim has a picture of Boots who met them at the door yesterday and ran up to the apartment and is now resting from his adventures.

Good News. (follow the link to see Jim’s other cats.)

This fine fellow used to live across the street, but the people moved away. He’s been living under the tarp that covers the wood pile.

Recently he he has decided that we are acceptable people and has moved in with us, rather than just mooching our food outside.

E. Jim has a similar situation with a cat they call Boots. I have too many damn cats as it is, but Hermie is a sweetheart. He follows Erica around and sleeps with us on the bed. The other cats could care less about us, but Hermie needs lovin’ all the time.

I guess we’ll keep him, although I’ve asked the other cats to vote one of their number out of the house.

I am cleaning out the various cameras here. I put some of them on a Picasa album here:

My old buddy Zack passed away today. I went over to Mom’s house and helped Larry dig the hole and we said goodbye to him. Zack had cancer, responded well to chemo for a few years and then had a bad relapse in the last few weeks.

Larry found Zack when he was a stray. He came to the my parent’s house house begging for food and never left. Zack was the smartest and most affectionate cat that I’ve ever met. I will always remember him because he was the only cat that ever made friends with my father. My Dad did not want to make friends with cats because he did not want to outlive any more pets. Zack took every opportunity to sit on my Dad’s lap, something no one could understand. When my Dad was dying of cancer and in pain all the time, Zack never left him and was a great comfort to him. Zack was the only cat that my Dad ever liked. Zack wound up outliving Dad and missed him for a long time.

There is a race of great cats in my old neighborhood of Central Nyack. The females are all Calico cats and the males are usually red orange like Zack. If you ever need a great pet, come to 19 Vine street in Central Nyack and see if you can find a stray – everyone in the neighborhood feeds them, so just ask Larry and he’ll tell you who is homeless and who belongs.

Since I work for the County of Westchester, I get election day off. I took some pictures and there is a google picassa album of the day. We are protected here and the trees change color later here than in the rest of the area.

The young dogwood tree turned shades of pastel pink.

The Japanese Maples turn scarlet.

Looking at my house from back in the woods:

Gracie helped me relax.

My brother Ward, who lives up in Rochester, NY, sent me pictures.

He has a new cat named Dixie. She was abandoned at his father-in-law’s farm. She is extremely affectionate. I love brown tabby cats with golden eyes. She is beautiful.

His garage burned down a year or so ago and he has finally started working on his new garage. At 24 feet by 30 feet, it is bigger than my house.

He is digging the footings and foundation with his toy tractor. I wish I had one of those babies, I would find something to dig.

He told me on the telephone that he recently stacked 6 cords of Black Locust in his cellar for his word burning stove. I am jealous. Black Locust is the best wood for heating a house.

Erica just bought us a cord of wood, which I stacked in the driveway to make it easy to get at when it snows. It is a mixed bag of hardwoods like maple, oak, beech and ash, but with an occasional red pine and a few billets of cedar. I don’t mind the cedar – I’ll save it for Christmas and use it as a yule log. It smells wonderful when it burns. The red pine, though, burns as fast as paper and doesn’t give off much heat.

Gracie uses the bathtub as a storage place for her mice. This handsome fellow met me the other morning.

I captured him in a washcloth and let him go outside. Sometimes Gracie’s catches are a little worse for the wear, but this one seemed unharmed and quite lively.

We went up to Connecticut to the flea market today. Last year we went up at least ten times and in previous years we have gone as far as Pennsylvania to shop flea markets. Because of the price of gas, this trip costs about $50, so we may not make it up again this year.

The Elephant’s Trunk Flea was quite full. Here are some shots from the north side up on the hill.

I did very well. At one table a nice couple sold me some Weird Tales Magazines and a vintage 1948 JT-30 microphone. Since I collect both vintage microphones and vintage pulp SF magazines this was an incredible coincidence. I bought a J.J. Cale album for poker for a quarter – it would have been too weird if I had found it at the same table.

The Weird Tales pulps were from 1951 ad 1952, which is not Weird Tale’s best period. The stories are mostly, if not all, reprints. Weird Tales was digging into their contracts and finding stories that had been purchase with All Serial Rights or First and Second Serial Rights. This means that the authors gave Weird Tales or one of her sister publications the right to print their story again and in some instances as often as they wanted.

The magazines were OK quality, but would not be rated good or fine if I wanted to sell them. I thought that I was getting a bargain, but I probably paid just what they were worth. They are the same age as I am, but they are too fragile to take the bus with me.

The JT-30 is a military version called a model 80.  It came with a long cable (missing) and had a rising response element. The element, of course, has been dead for 25 years. Some day I’ll find a 60 year old microphone that works. I made up for not getting a bargain on the magazines and got the JT-30 for $10, which is a very good deal.

Erica had some good luck and found some vintage quilts, which she was able to get for a very good price. They are all in need of a good cleaning, but there are not that many bad stains. The binding on the pink quilt is shot, but there are only a few small spots on the quilts themselves that need repair.

The first is a Basket Quilt top, made with Cranberry red cloth and muslin. Erica dated it from the patterns of the pieces as 1880 to 1910.

The next is an Indigo Quilt in a "9 patch" pattern (I think that this was called flying geese, but Erica isn’t sure). This was about 1890 from what Erica can tell from her pattern references. It has feed sack, Victorian shirting, and several kinds of Indigo.

Ollie and Gracie were helping us photograph the quilts.

The next quilt is an "Around the World" which Erica dates it possibly the 1920s, although some of the patterns are much earlier. There is cheddar type material and some double pink from 1880s. It also has Indigo and Victorian shirting.

John moved up to Nyack from the city. He’s down on lower Depew ave. Here is his new apartment. $1,000 a month – ouch. That’s Robert on the porch. Robert is growing a Santa Clause beard.

John is often confused with a hung over David Duchovny.

He has two very fat cats named Bogey and Mingus, who were not interested in posing for the camera.

Mingus jumped on the table to see what Poker was all about. I caught John with a weird expression on his face.

After poker Jim rode back to Birchwood Avenue on his Vespa.

I lost money at Poker. I did not have a good hand all night.

I took a whole load of pictures when Erica and I spent an afternoon on a walk from the Upper Nyack village hall to the Hook (Hook Mountain if you are not a native).

From Walk to the Hook

I used to go to the Hook to play in the sand when I was very young. The river is not really clean enough to go swimming anymore, but it is much better now than it has been.

I discovered that the images from my blog, when I use Windows Live Writer, go to a Picassa.com Album. I stopped using Picassa a few years ago because it was buggy and wanted to control all of your images. I am trying it again because I took 67 pictures and I need a good place for them. Uploading the images was a snap and you can view them by clicking the “walk to the hook” link under the picture.

The pictures are of the mansions along the way, like the Fokker mansion (German Airplane maker) and some of the houses that I have been in. There is a beautiful wrought iron willow gate and other interesting things, including views of the river and Sing-Sing, the famous prison (up the river from New York, hence the phrase sending someone “up the river”).

Upper Nyack was always know as Goose Town or Van Houten’s Landing. It was named Upper Nyack to associate it with Nyack in the early 1900s, when Nyack first started to be a fashionable getaway from NY.

We only saw one cat. It was down by Peterson’s Boat Yard.

As long as I am cleaning out pictures from the cameras….

I cut up a downed green ash and split some of the billets. That is my grandfather’s wedge that he used to split the wood that heated his cabin in the last 25 years of his life.

This is a picture of the back 40 where I was working on the cordwood.

The face I put on the Beech tree always startles me when I walk back.

Gracie, of course, had to supervise me.

Erica bought a 1950s quilt. It was not valuable, just some cotton and polyester squares machine stitched, but the quilt lining was a much older quilt. The quilter covered an old worn quilt with a new one, but the old one may be much more valuable.

Here’s a picture of Max after the hurricane passed, sitting in a patch of sunlight in the back.

I have three cameras. I use the little Nikon (free at a garage sale) most of the time because it fits in my pocket. It is about 8 years old so it does not really measure up to the quality of cameras today. Second, I use the Kodak that Justine sent one Christmas. It is an excellent quality camera that takes good pictures, but it is a little large and won’t fit in my pocket. I also use the big Nikon DX-70 that has the SLR lens and all the bells and whistles. This is especially good with the telephoto lens, but I can’t bring it anywhere where it might be stolen because it is so expensive and it is very very big.

I cleaned out the little Kodak today and found a bunch of pics that I’ve taken, but never done anything about.

First there were cute Gracie pictures (see the cat blog for more).

Next, the truck went over 175,000 miles. I wanted to catch it in the act, but as you may know this is against the physical laws of the universe.

Next, I found an odd windmill at the side of the road. This was used to aerate a pond, but it was sitting in the corner of someone’s yard.

The virginia creeper vines grew up the side of the house in the back and I was shocked to see them. I have no idea how they grew so fast.

Here are some flowers. A couple are from the back yard, but I don’t where the red one is from.

I found a strange machine on the side of the road. It had about $20 worth of vacuum tubes.

I took pictures of a publication from and H.P. Lovecraft symposium that I may blog about. I have a readable version of this on my hard disk. This article describes about how his friends got HPL drunk at a party and he recited lines from the Mikado.

Now I’ll clean out the Nikon.

I’ve got about 5 blog posts worth of stuff here so let’s start with a picture of a very hot Max on the glider on the deck.

I took some pictures of the Blueberry Bushes. These will mostly be eaten by birds before I can get at them, though.

Last weekend we went up to Haverstraw for the Farmer’s market. It was disappointing as there were only three stands. I bought some Blue Potatoes, which I love.

I took some pictures from the Ferry dock. $10 to go to wall street from Haverstraw (30 miles). This is the way to go if I get another job in the big city.

The hill there is Hi Tor, famous from a play by Maxwell Anderson. I worked at Hogan’s Diner one summer with Maxwell Anderson’s grandson. He was amazed that I had actually read some of his grandfather’s plays.

The mountains on the Hudson river have cool names, although they are hardly mountains, just hills. The names, starting at Nyack going north are Hook, Tor, Bear and The Storm King.

I wanted to show how hard it is to type on the Bus. No room for my knees and no room to put my elbows when I type. Last week I finished my second week of bussing. On Thursday the bus driver got lost on the way home and it took an hour and a half. On Tuesday I got involved with a program, missed my bus and didn’t get home until 6:30pm.

Here are some bus pictures of the TZ bridge.

My brother Larry found this searching eBay for obscure guitar parts. This picture was included with an auction for a Gibson ES-355 pickguard. He called me three times to make sure that I blogged it.

The pendant must have been a tricky paint job.