Cheaper than a Movie

Hubby got a call from  a city council member about an upcoming agenda item they thought he’d be interested in and he decided to go to the next meeting and say his bit about the matter during the open comment section. This was last Monday.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I’d never been to a city council meeting before but I had been vaguely following the stories in the local news about our tough new city council president who was cleaning house at the council meetings – in particular during the public comments period. Before he got there, there was no time limit. Public comment time came and anyone and everyone could get up and just go. On and on. And apparently, they did. He initiated two firm policies. 1. There’s a three minute time limit. 2. There are guards to escort you out if you raise a ruckus.

I learned some things, thought about some things and observed some things at my first city council meeting. First, the matter we were there about. Currently, there is no method of redress if an individual or business doesn’t clear their walk of snow. The tenants of a big corner business go bankrupt, the bank repossesses the property, and nobody plows all winter through. Happens all over town because there is no penalty for not plowing. Same with foreclosed homes. Bus stops are not accessible, you’ve got people walking in the streets, and then people in wheelchairs and people like hubby, who use a cane, are just flat out of luck – or down in the street themselves if they can even get there.

So, hubby said his bit about accessibility for persons with disabilities. Another woman got up and talked about falling on a unplowed walk and having permanent knee damage and another woman got up and talked about walking in Saginaw Street with her 6-year-old this winter because the sidewalk was impassable. A man from a landlord’s association got up and said something that made good sense and then a laid-off UAW worker got up and asked the city to employ Lansing’s unemployed doing snow removal next winter. The city employee who initiated the whole thing got up and spoke  about how much it cost in staff time to track down absentee-landlords and what it would cost to recoop that. All good. I was heartily impressed.

Then. Then perfectly reasonable-looking people got up and said some of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. It’s not nice to make fun of people so I’m not going to go into what they said because I think some of them may have had cognitive difficulties but the city council meeting degenerated to the point that we had to flee the room before I started laughing hysterically. We met other people in the hallway in the same condition – mostly, though, they were irritated and angry. Democracy at it’s best, I think.  I mean, we were complaining beside the chocolate fondue fountain with cut fruit and whole grain bread with spinach dip that some good-hearted citizens had brought to liven up the environment of the meeting. Democracy at it’s best.

Also, two people got home-town hero awards because their neighbor’s baby’s father showed up and tried to take his child against the court custody order. While the baby’s father held two guns on the neighbors the neighbor just stood his ground and talked the guy down until the cops got there. Nobody got hurt. Hometown heros indeed.

And hey, one guy got up and said that Lansing was the home of Malcolm X and there is not one statue or street in this city to memorialize him. I totally agree. I’m on board the Malcolm X street bus. The man then degenerated into talking about something vaguely related to Frederick Douglas, which kind of hurt his Malcolm X case if you ask me, but I’m still on the Malcolm X street bus with him.

I don’t think I’m going back to the city council meeting unless I have something to say myself on a particular matter, but it was interesting. Perhaps sometime I’ll tune in on government TV.

First Bloom

Van Horn-Eagle Rocks

My mom got this in the mail, it’s for my grandma.

Canada Tidbits

As much of my most extended and long-ago family still lives in Canada, and as I started out so woefully ignorant about Canada, I have done a little research. Here’s more of what I learned:

• 75% of Canadians lives within 100 miles of the United States
• Only 2% of the Canadian population is Native American
• Read almost all of the pertinent chapters of “…for Dummies.” I now feel clued in enough to get some Canadian jokes about Americans. I have a slight swagger to my step now. I am beginning to feel “cool.”
• Looked at maps of Canada enough to get a general feel for the geography of the areas my family was in and am surprised to learn so many of the areas we’re talking about are so close to the U.S.! Toronto is only a 5 1/2 hour drive from here! GO OTTAWA RIVER VALLEY!!

Philippians 4:12

This was on my grandfather’s memorial card. I would like it to be true of me, too, true enough to have on my own memorial card:

I know what it is to be in need, and

I know what it is to have plenty.

I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

Lumbermen Vs. Timbermen

Remember how I started out with “Canadian History for Dummies” as a point of reference? OK, I have now graduated to the kind of reading I need for specifics, a detailed history of the industry and economics of the Ottawa River Valley in the nineteenth century where my fourth great grandfather Simon lived. His town had fewer than 1,000 people in it in the 1810s and has fewer than 2,000 now. Go Ottawa River Valley!

A quick synopsis of the difference between lumber and timber…

Lumber often refers to sawlogs – where you take enormous trees and square them for ship masts etc. They’re squared in the forest where they’re felled and then moved by water or train to their destination. It’s actually a very wasteful process as much wood is left behind to dry out and then provide kindling for massive forest fires.

Timber is in board feet for building and furniture and such, y’know, the kind of 2X4s we’re used to seeing. They’re produced at saw mills.

Oh! and then there’s pulp, which is the industry the Valley switched to at the beginning of the 20th century when the larger trees played themselves out.

Looks like “Chapter 2″ is going to cover economics as one of its topics.

Forgot My Passport

Ever go fantasy shopping? Y’know, you go window shopping for something you’d like but in all likelihood will  never have?

Hubby and I decided to go fantasy shopping last fall at a store that had 1 item we’ll never have, 1 item we might have some day, and 1 item we thought we’d buy that day. We thought it would be a fun trip, y’know, look around and dream, maybe come home with something. Unfortunately, I didn’t dress for the trip and our zip code ratted us out.

See, the store we went to is in O., the snooty town around here. I’m in Lansing, in mid-Michigan, so snooty is pretty relative. You put the center of a protractor on my town and draw a radius of almost any size around it and you’re going to get field, corn field, field. Lansing itself is a factory town. Omm, where the factories have shut down. The biggest employers are the state government and Michigan State University in East Lansing. It’s a very ordinary place. We’re not “cool,” we admit it. 20 miles away they have different aspirations. There’s a little joke about O. – that you have to have a passport to get in.

So there’s a store in O. that has all three items on our fantasy shopping list. I’m in sweat pants and a plain, mostly cotton shirt. Hair is in a ponytail (which is not a sexy look for me, I’ll give you that),  sneakers. Hubby is in weekend pants and a T-shirt.

The first thing we ask about is the thing we might have: a gas fireplace. We thought we’d like to convert the wood-burning fireplace in the family room to gas. We even went so far as to put a gas line in the little storage room behind the fireplace. We figured that would be the most expensive part so Hubby and Stud Boy #1 did it a year or so after we moved in. We budgeted $900 for the rest of the project – the part someone else would have to do and the materials to along with it – and figured we would save that and see if it was still a priority when that much had been put aside.

The sales pitch started out slow. The kind of sales pitch where they ask you what you’d like to drink. They double-teamed us from the start. They had a lovely display room. You start talking about models and no one is talking about prices. They break out a catalog and the catalog has no prices. I get the clue that $900 won’t exactly cover it. When they’ve finally seated us to discuss the type of “log” we’d like (because, after all, the warm glow of the look of the fake log is what makes the gas fireplace “homey”), the adding machine comes out. $4,500 to start. We smile politely and say this is out of our price range. They ask where we live. We say Lansing. The salespeople smile politely. They suggest someone in “our” town that does this type of work. I am not even kidding.

This place also sells outdoor furniture and that’s the item we thought we would buy that day (I didn’t intend to impose my ponytail on them with no remuneration). Hubby has a nice chair for outdoors but the one I use is of the $14.99 from K-mart 15 years ago variety. We thought, cool, we’ll get Snakelady a nice chair for whiling away the warm evenings.

The outdoor furniture also has no prices but I figure, hey, I’ve priced these things at Lowe’s, I have a pretty good idea of what this is going to be. They have some NICE outdoor chairs – rockers with mold-resistant fibers. I pick my favorite two and go get prices. Over $300 a piece. I say politely that is out of my price range. Out of my LANSING ZIP CODE price range.

The final fantasy item that this place sells are hot tubs. Hubby yearns for a hot tub. While I purused chairs he examines an 8-seater hot tub. By this point it is embarassingly obvious that we won’t be buying anything. They’re very, very, very polite. When we go to leave they walk us out. I’ve been walked out of stores before but I’ve never gotten the feeling that it was to make sure we’d actually leave.

There Are No Funny Pictures Because It’s Not Funny

I am a blogger. I blog. If something comes up in my world that would be a good blog posting, I try to post about it. My blog follows my life and my interests and my activities. I hope you all are interested in genealogy, ’cause you’re getting a lot of that right now.

Good blogging involves a certain level of visual interest – photos, maps, scanned images, etc. I’m pretty lame at this aspect of blogging – I’m a lousy photographer so I don’t bore you with a lot of bad pictures.

So, what makes for a good picture? What could even a bad photographer make look good? Well, a cream colored carpeting with clearly visible sooty black paw prints frolicking from one end of the room to the other, that would make for a pretty amusing photo. I am aware of that. It’s not that I don’t know that. It’s that sooty black paw prints are not amusing. They are expensive. So the only shot you got the other day was of the most damaged section.

It’s a second time around boys and girls, second time around.

The morning after the carpet cleaners came and steam washed the soot out of the cream colored carpeting in the basement family room I get up as usual and make my way to the kitchen to start a pot of  coffee.

All over the kitchen countertops are – you guessed it – black, sooty, putty cat paw prints. ALL OVER. We make this little joke, ha ha, hee hee, that the cats take over the house when we’re at work and probably – oh isn’t this cute – sleep on the stove. Well, they don’t. I can tell you that because I know exactly where they spend their time on my kitchen counter tops – EVERYWHERE BUT THE STOVE. THE CATS WERE EVEN UP ON TOP OF THE FLOUR CANISTER AND THE CEREAL CONTAINERS.

There is no cat food and no cat treats on top of the flour canisters and never has been. And yet, they were up there, way up there, way up under the cupboards:

No, I didn’t take a picture of the paw prints. I sprinted down the stairs to see what the basement looked like. It wasn’t as bad as the day before, but it wasn’t good, either. Sooty paw prints all over one end of the cream room, out onto the linoleum, up the stairs, up onto the counters. Of course there was soot cat vomit. TMI? Yeah, for me, too.

The two big containers of craft materials that we’d used to block the fireplace were pushed casually out of the way. I scrubbed down the kitchen while the coffee started. I didn’t take pictures. Yes, they would have been amusing. This situation is not even remotely amusing.

From the kitchen I went on a kitty hunt, looking at paws. Candy is the culprit. Little orange-and-white soot-eating monster that she is:

This weekend we decided to take care of the soot situation. We emptied, vaccumed and washed out the fireplace. Ever washed out a fireplace? Yeah, down on your hands and knees with bucket after bucket of not-ever-going-to-come-away-clean water it feels pretty much like that. And no, soot does not come out from under your fingernails or in the cuts on your hands very easily.

As I write we are waiting for it to stop raining outside so we can wash down the grate in the backyard, then put the whole thing back together again and wire-tie it shut. We wanted to drill it shut but the metal won’t support that so wire ties it will have to be. We don’t use the fireplace so it won’t be a loss. In between now and then, even though it’s been thoroughly washed down, here’s the state of the fireplace:

I can’t guarantee we’ll take that chest away even when it’s wiretied shut.

Canadians Totally Making Fun of Us

In my continued efforts to learn about Canada. This is hysterical:

Vermont?!?!?!

Did I mention I have an ancestor who served in the Revolutionary War? Yeah, you can look him up in the military records of the National Archives and Records Administration: Nicholas Schryer, Yates Militia, 14th Regiment out of Albany, New York.

This is definitely cool genealogically speaking, and it’s not about the Revolutionary War or any war in particular. It’s about records and record keeping. The feds do a great job of keeping track of soldiers. Yeah, yeah, you hear about red tape and all the rest but for the most part the feds do a good job of keeping lots of records on soldiers.

But. But after reading a dissertation on the town where my ancestor served I have learned that while I am still eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution (not that I would people, jesus, you know me better than that), my ancestor served DURING the Revolutionary War but not directly in the cause of the Revolutionary War.

Yates’s militia was formed to quell the violence of the people-who-would-be-Vermonters and those in New York that supported them.

Vermont? Yeah, we defended New York against people who wanted to form the state of Vermont. Who cares about Vermont enough to die for it? OK, not me, that’s for certain. Mostly the would-be’s filed lawsuits in England but they also conducted raids into New York to prove their point. Little I-heart-Vermont riots. Crimany. My ancestor had to get out of bed in the middle of the night because of Vermonters?

The 14th militia, under another general, curbed loyalist activities and did regular Revolutionary War-type activities, but us? We were the riot police.

What a let-down.

Oh? And by the by, my family moved to Vermont pretty much immediately after the stopped them from rioting against New York.