Category: Tales from the front lines
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Banging the tin cup slowly
as the seasons greet us! The widescreen HDTV (not the b&w Philco) quit in the middle of the Lovely Lisa’s Hallmark channel melodrama, another episode where cutesy kids and impossibly affluent young adults chirp mindlessly about getting in “the Christmas spirit.” (Tugging on our pants: I got yer Christmas spirit RIGHT HERE!) Even a chance…
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Have a heart for Luke Fickell
Ever have to face the music in public? Probably ought not to expend our thimbleful of empathy for a football coach. We switch channels when encountering those appeals to rescue shivering dogs. Still, we feel the discomfort of taking the hot seat at the post-game press conference after being humbled 44 to 25 by a…
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Ready for a long, cold winter
Battening hatches! We will no longer be surprised if the 45th and 47th President announces as his next appointments the Menendez Bros for Supreme Court. They would job share. “How amazing that in the rosy glow of election, he will spend so much political capital and goodwill on confirmation fights he may well, and certainly…
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Doing pretty good for an old guy
How about you? On this sparkling Tuesday morning in August, the gentle aroma of purple and white phlox wafts into the home office of what I euphemistically call Stately Blaska Manor. In the meadow outside my window, tall yellow cosmos dip and weave in the gentle breeze. It’s great to be alive, which, given the…
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Send help! We’re without cable!
First-world horror story from Madison WI We bloviated the other day about kids’ addiction to smart phones and how it’s making them all squirrelly. Would you not know it! Blaska is experiencing delirium tremens because our cable for TV and internet went out at Stately Blaska Manor during Tuesday night’s wind and rain storm 05-21-24.…
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Let the kids play!
The smart phones can wait! Mother pointed out the seldom-used front door of our farmhouse east of Sun Prairie WI toward a small white building on the horizon — the one-room Oak Lawn School. Her oldest child would walk there the next morning, unaccompanied, to learn how to read greatly aided by listening to the…