My Mother & Father bought this USMMA commemorative clock in December of 1985, the year I graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Pt, NY. Over the years my Dad always told me from time to time; “when we go to ‘boot hill’, I want you to have this clock“. I always replied, “OK Dad”, thinking that day would never come. Well, they aren’t in ‘boot hill’ but they are both in memory care with dementia. Me and the brothers went through their home over the past few weeks and today we all met to resolve who gets what and to start removing items.

The clock is here at the farm now. It seems to run fine and keep time but the chimes aren’t working properly, I’ll get a local clock expert to come out and give it a tune-up,

What a depressing day.

Brother found this while going through our Mom’s cookbooks. Its a classic Hungarian style cookbook created when they lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the early 1950s. Some good recipes in here.

We got somewhere between 12-16″ of snow on Monday, honestly I was NOT expecting it. Didn’t bother to prep the attachments on the tractor (loader on the front, back blade on the rear), didn’t verify snow blower, didn’t get the snow shovels ready, didn’t make sure alternative heating fuel was full (kerosene and petroleum equipment), didn’t fill up gas cans, etc. Well it all went south when the power went out at 8:52am on Monday. Roads were pretty much impassable the rest of the day due to the heavy snow, but mostly due to a massive quantity of downed trees. People and farmers like us had to call heavy equipment transportation.

When the snow stopped around 2pm I prepped the tractor and started working on the driveway. Below was my first pass looking back from the gate.

I finished the driveway at dark, enough to allow a non-4wd vehicle to make it. Temperatures went down to 11f that night and with the ground still warm and ice fog could be seen rising in the bottoms at sunset. No power, but the steam generator we had installed for the farm in September was WELL worth it, powers everything with ease.

Here are a few pictures of the roads when we got out to help some folks on Tuesday and a short video on Zoar road..

Our son “Little” Paul and his wife Colleen had a baby boy this evening! First grandchild, everyone is very excited. He weighed in at 7 pounds 15.5oz, was 21″ long and is perfect!

My older brother Mark, his three sons (one Marine, one Airforce, and the other in college) along with a ‘brother rat’ and some friends stopped by for some firearms practice. My youngest son Patrick was with them all day, loved it. They started around 1pm and finished around 7pm when we had to put out the beginnings of a small forest fire started by a tracer round.

They brought along a barrett 50cal, a 6.5 creedmore suppressed and a bunch of other rifles and pistols.

At sunset they got out the 50cal tracer rounds and started firing on the 500 yd target. Pretty cool to watch the tracers. Unfortunately one tracer round skipped and went up into the woods. Looked like it just stopped and was glowing, but then it started getting bigger and flickering. We all scrambled to get rakes, shovels, and a fire extinguisher and raced over to the other side of Mine Run. A mad scramble through the woods and briars and I was the first one to get over there. The leaves were burning in a circle about 8 feet wide. The fire extinguisher worked perfectly and then we dug it out and piled it up in the middle of the burned circle, making sure no embers were left. Made for an exciting end of the day. Below is a slow-mo of one of the tracer round shots.

It is their wedding anniversary and we had a small ceremony at Laurel Hill funeral home and interred their ashes. Afterwards we all gathered back at the farm for refreshments and memories. Jerry and Shirley Neal were so gracious to provide a tasty spread and setup the whole thing while we were at the ceremony. I’m am very touched by this act of kindness. Below is a slide show I put together, the song at the end was playing and finished just as he passed. While I wish I could have done a better job, there were many tears as we all remembered Bob over the years.

Fighting for dominance, these pictures were from over on the other side of Mine Run.

Very sad day, my wife’s father, Robert Bishop, passed this afternoon surrounded by his family. He was a loving husband, father to three, and grandfather to seven. Bob was a great father-in-law and after we purchased the farm he played a large part in helping me manage the work required to maintain the place in some semblance of shape. Not sure who was helping who as he really enjoyed coming down and tractoring or running the zero-turn mower all day while I did my ‘day job’ in the house. Here are a few pictures over the years of him down here at the farm. He will be sorely missed.