Adirondack Angst

Hilarious

patrickjegan

[After the shovel and before the car door incident.  Photo is mine.]

Once upon a time not so very long ago, there was a man who lived in a house, with his faithful and patient wife, in the Great Wilderness known as the Adirondack Mountains.  These mountains are located in the far reaches of upstate New York.

This man was sore of back and gray of hair.  He had recently spent five weeks in the high desert of California.  He went there looking for solitude and warmth, but instead he found himself surround by neighbors with strange cars and small barking Chihuahuas.  He also wore fleece nearly every day, until it was time to leave…of course.

The man’s eyes stung from the smoke of distant fires and he went through five and a half boxes of tissues, so frightful were his allergies.

Upon returning to his home in the North…

View original post 464 more words

My 400th Blog!

patrickjegan

[Hi, I’m Fluffy. Remember me? My human, Pat, has used me in other posts in shameless attempts to peddle one of his books.  I hope you like this one. You see, Pat suffers from severe Post Holiday Blues and if he doesn’t get a lot of likes and comments…well, I may have to be sent out to pasture, if you get my drift.  Photo source: Google search.]

Writing four hundred blogs is not an easy thing to do.  Even if you’re retired and have little else to fill your time.  It’s an accomplishment of which I am proud.  Some bloggers have written thousands…some have written three.  I know how easy it can be for some people and much harder for others.

Back in the late 1990’s, I taught at the Town School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  One afternoon, the technology teacher, Al Doyle, mentioned to me that…

View original post 394 more words

A Short Walk Up Boot Hill

patrickjegan

[An unknown prostitute of Dodge City]

My reason for being on the road for so long has a great deal to do with my growing dislike of the winters of the North Country.  It also enables me to wander and explore my interests.  I love history, I am attracted to stories of the pioneer days, the cattle drives, the lives of the Native Americans and white settlers on the prairie, the exploration, the hardships and the state of life, love and death in the Old West.

I’m also fascinated with the human stories of individuals that never made the popular history books…those who came into this country with hopes and dreams and expectations.  The lives of people who live on the edges of society are compelling to me because they are so human, and therefore, so flawed and full of missteps and errors and simple bad luck.  Clearly, the life…

View original post 585 more words

Reality Check: 66% Of The Road Trip Is Behind Us

patrickjegan

[Organ Pipe Cactus]

We are roughly two-thirds of the way through our long and event-filled road trip.  As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks, about 263 dusty, windy and empty miles from Tucson.  According to my four weather apps on my iPhone, it’s going to be nearly 80 F today.

We need warmth.  I’m still wearing fleece in the evening.  I’m not shocked by that fact.  As a science teacher for over thirty years, I know that deserts aren’t defined by temperature, but by rainfall.  And we haven’t experienced very much precipitation since it snowed on us in Silver City, NM.

This is the country of the cactus.  I bought a small field guide-book to the shrubs of the Southwest but I can’t keep up with all the varieties of cacti I have seen in the past week or so.

I took many photos of many succulents and…

View original post 340 more words

Honky Tonks, Bordellos And Celery

patrickjegan

[This soiled dove was from Cripple Creek, CO.]

We watched January turn into February in Silver City, New Mexico.  A former mining town from the 19th Century, was a place where miners, tired and in need of a drink and a little love to purchase, would come up from the valleys and down the mountains…and find paradise amidst the prickly pear cactus.

And, the first person many of these rough and dusty men sought was Madam Millie.  I’ll get back to Miss Millie in a minute.

By association with everything about the Southwest USA and our neighbors to the south, Mexico, our 51st state, the last thing we expected was a winter storm that would freeze our water line, render us helpless in the 13 F weather, keep our inexpensive (read ‘cheap’) Wal-Mart space heater churning full-time, unable to cook (dirty dishes, remember), flush the toilet or even wash our…

View original post 1,558 more words

The Great Guano Goldmine of Rainbow Lake

patrickjegan

[WARNING: The subject matter of this post may not be suitable for general readers.  If you are offended by such words as “droppings” or “do-do”, then please move on to another, more appropriate blog about late summer recipes or crocheting cat napping pillows.]

On the afternoon of August 6, 2015, I was sitting quietly in my Adirondack Chair on our back deck.  Beside me, on the little table where we burn our citronella candles, was my new Exterminator.  At first glance, it appears to be a small tennis racket and that’s the point.  It’s not supposed to look like an Exterminator.  Inside the handle are two batteries.  When a black fly or other biting and sucking insect approaches my arm, I pick up the “tennis racket” and zap the bug with 500 volts of electricity.  How one can get 500 volts from two D cell batteries is…

View original post 920 more words

Dance Like A Wave Of The Sea

patrickjegan

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…

–W. B. Yeats

Three decades have passed since I last walked the streets of Dublin, Galway and Sligo.  A great many things have changed in those years.  And, a great many haven’t.  The smell of peat-fires in Dublin on a December night, the blasts of wind from the North Atlantic that sting your face when you look out to the west from Donegal and the foamy black pint of Guiness…these things never change.

I will be in good company.  My wife and my son will be on their first visit.  Where does one begin to plan such a trip?  What to see?  What to gaze upon?

We shall avoid the touristy places like Blarney Castle.  But, we will stand above the sea on the Cliffs of Mohair and look up at the keep that is the Egan ancestral castle..Castle Redwood…

View original post 336 more words

The Preference For Fog On The Downtown Bus

patrickjegan

The M1 bus stop where I was standing was on 5th Avenue and 98th Street.  It’s across the avenue from Mount Sinai Hospital.  It wasn’t raining…it was a downpour.  My flimsy $5.99 umbrella protected my head and shoulders but little else.  The front half of each shoe was soaked.  My outside flap of the shoulder bag was wet, dampening my small notebook and my three sheets of passwords I needed to carry with me.

I should have stopped at CVS and bought a box of ziplock baggies.

It was a chilly windy and very wet Monday afternoon in Manhattan.  I held my MetroCard in my teeth, keeping my lips open.  I didn’t want the chapstick to smear the little plastic case that I used to keep my card.

With my one free finger I felt the inside of my right arm.  The gauze wad was still in place.  I was…

View original post 980 more words

From My Cradle To Her Grave

patrickjegan

The first woman to see me naked is lying six feet down in the silt of the Susquehanna River.  It’s a small cemetery in a small community…not even a town or village…just a cluster of houses several miles down river from the town where I grew up.

On the last day of May, I will celebrate the moment she saw me, not only naked but bloody and dripping wet.  What makes this so very powerful an image for me is that she was the first person, woman or man, who witnessed the first moments of my existence on this planet.  She saw the tip of my head before my own mother did.

She was the doctor who delivered me 68 years ago in some long forgotten room that was once the birthing ward of Binghamton General Hospital.  It’s probably been converted to a storage area.

Maybe not.  Maybe babies are…

View original post 269 more words

The Birdcaged Candles of Litchfield County

patrickjegan

I was at the cozy bar in Torrington, CT.  My wife was in the next seat.  Since I had been freezing all day, I chose a seat away from the door and the window.  There might be a chilly breeze blowing through the closed window…after all, our hotel window had leaks as bad as a pasta sieve.  I thought that maybe that’s the way people liked things in Connecticut, those hardy New England yank types.

We were looking over the menu for dinner.  For me, there was no choice, it was the chili.  What else would anyone else eat on such a cold spring night?

I looked to my left and noticed three 12 inch candles sitting in a bed of wax.  That’s not a big deal in most cases.  Who hasn’t seen four dinner candles sitting in their own melted wax…and the wax of previous candles, in a New England…

View original post 587 more words