Aerie Report, February 12, 2012

I haven't written much this week, but it's certainly been interesting in a couple of minor ways.

Terry got a gift of a vase and a bulb for a paper-white narcissus for Christmas. It sat o n the counter for nearly a month before she added water to it and within a week the roots began to grow. A couple of days later the green leaf shoots started lengthening and then two flower stalks emerged.

Well, for a week and a half we could almost see those greens growing skyward if we just stared at them long enough. Everyday they'd be a half inch or more taller in the morning and another half inch by bed time. Things grew like Jack's beanstalk!

Last Sunday, the flower buds burst open and two clusters of pretty little white flowers appeared.

I was out of the house most of Monday, but on Tuesday my eyes started itching, my nose stated dripping and I started sneezing hard enough to tweek the muscles in my lower back. If I sneezed any harder, the walls of the house would have given way!

This continued on Wednesday and Thursday despite my taking my daily Loratadine tablet every morning. (That little pill makes it possible to have three cats in the house.) Trying to think of what might be causing my obviously allergic reaction we finally settled on the paper-white narcissus and it was exiled to the guest bedroom around noon on Friday.

It took a while before I started to recover, but by Saturday I was back to normal and continued to be itchy-eyes, runny-nose and sneeze free. Coincidence? The only way to find out is for me to go and sit in the guest bedroom for an hour. And I, for one, will not tempt fate.

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Friday saw the temperatures around the Aerie begin to fall down below the historical averages. Clouds moved in and by Saturday noon hour it was flurrying. Not much, but enough to say it was doing something. Forecast initially said we would have only an inch or so but then they changed to "up to 3 inches" later tin the day. It was to stop by 8 PM. And it did. But then we started to have snow squalls all day Sunday. One minute the sun would shine through a break in the clouds and the next we would have white-out conditions with the wind whipping the powdery snow that fell on Saturday about as much as blowing the new stuff sideways.

And the Sunday morning temperature was just 7 degrees. Got as high as 18 though. Still, that's colder than the folks running the Yukon Quest are experiencing.

Tomorrow, they say, it will be mostly sunny with the temperatures reaching the upper 30s so, except for the deck, I left the snow lay where it fell. Mother Nature can do the cleanup this time around.

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Terry and I were going to support the local church yesterday by going to their beef and chicken dinner. We scraped the snow and ice off the Tundra's windshield and drove down in the snow and were surprised to see that the parking lot was empty. Either Terry got the wrong night or the wrong church, or the thing got cancelled because of the snow. At any rate, we found ourselves down the hill with no firm plans for dinner. So, off to Mansfield and Papa V's for some fine Italian food.

We passed on the pizza and went for an appetizer of fried calamari and entrees of chicken parmigiano. Mmmm-mmm, good!

By the time we got home, I had to put the truck into 4-wheel to assure we would get up the hill. Drifting snow from the fields and pastures at the base of the hill had filled in much of the road.

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Only thing that intruded upon a nice dinner out was some college aged kid sitting at the next table with his girlfriend and, I suppose, his mom and dad. The kid was loudly pontificating on the need for more than a high school diploma to get a job, the gas companies, the rise of tuition at Mansfield U, and education cuts made by the Governor.

I finally had enough and asked him to lower his voice since some of us wanted to enjoy our meal and had no interest in his ill-formed opinion. Surprisingly, he did.

I later thought of his comments and, if I had had the desire, could have put him in his place with just a few points. The gas companies are hiring people left right and sideways. Some of their jobs need special training WHICH THEY WILL PROVIDE so even a high school grad can get a gas job. The influx of gas workers has caused a boom in numerous support businesses in the area and there are help wanted signs up all over. I'm sure lots of those jobs do not require more than a high school diploma. How many more high school diplomaed kids would get jobs more easily if the high schools still taught skills like auto shop, carpentry, home economics (specifically cooking) instead of believing every kid must be trained to go to college? (On the home ec front, some entrepreneurial young ladies in the area have set up a housekeeping service to tend to the many single gas workers and drill rig offices that need cleaning up after. They say business is booming!)

Rise in tuition at MU? You mean the school that just had a building spurt and put up a couple of big dorms? Does it still teach things like "women's studies"? Why?

As for the cut in education monies the Governor has put in his budget (some $900 million), spread across the state of Pennsylvania that's not much at all. And in this area we actually had a round of consolidation recently because some schools were being underused. Imagine that.

The fact that this young man was spouting his opinions in an eatery that just doubled its size because of the gas boom and from whose windows one could see a micro brewery that didn't exist a little over a year ago and a Mexican cantina that is just two years old, and just down the street from a local bank branch that handled $130 million dollars in deposits last year--mostly from gas royalties payed to land owners...well, that was icing on the cake.