A couple weeks before Christmas, I was reminiscing with a friend about how great it was to get a Lionel train for Christmas. Then I wrote about a childhood experience with a train set. My wife, Nancy, was paying attention and damned if I didn’t get one for Christmas. It was a genuine Lionel Polar Express Battery-operated set, not one of those old metal ones that cost a thousand bucks. But it … [Read more...]

I'm going to retire and live off my savings. Not sure what I'll do the second week.   Old age is coming at a really bad time!   I don't have gray hair. I have "wisdom highlights".   My people skills are just fine. It's my tolerance of idiots that needs work.   Even duct tape can't fix stupid ... but it can muffle the sound!   The kids … [Read more...]

On a December morning many years ago - I suppose it was around the time Rose Mary Woods accidentally erased 18 minutes from his President Nixon’s secret tapes – a half dozen of us rose before dawn to drive and meet a charter captain at Callao for a fishing trip on the Chesapeake Bay. As I recall, several on the trip had finished their first Bloody Mary’s before we got to Richmond and then … [Read more...]

About 25 years ago, I got a call from Neil Selby up in Remington. “Can you be up here about 5 tomorrow morning? We’ve got geese and lots of them.” Neil, a long-time friend, owns Shady Grove Kennels, a hunting preserve. Neil also is a master dog trainer. “Sure,” I replied. “See you at 5 AM.” It happened to be on a Monday in early February and I remembered I had not bought … [Read more...]

Thousands took to the streets last Friday when their CvilleBuzz did not publish. Well, maybe not thousands, but at least 100 people were heartbroken and distressed to no end that the Buzz didn’t happen. Okay, it was three. Three people actually asked why they did not get their weekly on-line publication. It turned out to be an Artificial Intelligence failure when a company called Mail Chimp … [Read more...]

How wonderful it is to walk into a house with tantalizing aromas oozing from the kitchen. But which kitchen smells are best? Which ones make you want to eat everything in sight?  Here are some of my thoughts in that regard. First of all, fried chicken. Who can resist the smell of chicken legs and breasts frying in hot oil? And for me, if I even think about fried chicken, I have to cook some … [Read more...]

I have a dream that is likely never to come true. It’s an impossible dream that one day I would be able to take a handful of ice cubes from the refrigerator without having at least one escape and go sliding across the kitchen floor. Yesterday, it almost came true. I only dropped one cube. Our refrigerator has an internal automatic ice maker, and it works to perfection, keeping our ice tray … [Read more...]

Things to Know About the South - A possum is a flat animal that sleeps in the middle of the road. - There are 5,000 types of snakes and 4,998 of them live in the South. - There are 10,000 types of spiders. All 10,000 of them live in the South, plus a couple no one's seen before. - If it grows, it'll stick ya’. If it crawls, it'll bite cha’. - Onced and Twiced are words. - It is … [Read more...]

The cottage on the Greenbrier was magnificent and we spent much of our time on the spacious porch overlooking the river. It was a perfect place for our rendezvous except for one problem - there were three of us and only two bedrooms. I was not concerned - at first. There was a spacious couch in the living room, and I take some of my best naps on couches. So, I brought sheets, a blanket and a … [Read more...]

“Hey, I just caught some fish down on the dock. Anybody have a cooler I can ice them down in?” “Take mine. Take mine,” they all say. Bull! No one wants one of their coolers to be used to put fish in. Why? Because once you ice down fish in a cooler, that cooler is destined for life as a fishing cooler. My fishing buddy, Tim Tigner, and I have discovered a crappie hotspot at a lake close to … [Read more...]