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!