The Battle of Trenton

Today they are reenacting the Battle of Trenton.

Here's a good summary from my buddy, Chris.

Ten years ago I participated in the 225^th anniversary of the Battle of Trenton, and it was only few months after the terrorist attacks on September 11^th.  There was something like 900 hundred participants. They did a pre-dawn crossing of the river (and another later in the day for the benefit of the public) and then marched 9 miles into Trenton. A handful of women wanted to make the march, and so we followed the army  in. We’d missed breakfast, be unlike Washington’s army I wasn’t starving. My feet were cold in my straight-lasted shoes, but at least I had shoes. I had fresh water in my canteen. I was reasonably well rested, having slept on a cot with adequate blankets.

We stepped off in the pre-dawn walking as close as we could to the original route. The hush was broken only by the sound of hobnails on the road, and I didn’t see a single car at that hour. I watched the sky brighten, and as we started passing through more residential areas, I noticed the occasional family standing on their front porch – some waving, some just watching. And some came out and started marching with us. But the part that I’ll never forget was the WWII Veteran standing out in front of his modest home in the biting cold, back-lit by his porch light. He had a 3’ x 5’ American flag on a short pole in one hand, the bottom of it braced against his thigh as he saluted, not us, but what we represented.

And I burst into very quiet tears.

Here's a longer description, including footage from that day 10 years ago.  (No, it's not embedding.)

http://youtu.be/4vzBz4Nc_lY

An old job

The Adaptive Curmudgeon has a post up about, um, some interesting past home repairs.

Which reminds me of a previous life when I used to manage some properties. There were about a dozen, and some were historic and residential, some were historic and commercial, and some were just old farmhouses. I’m convinced that when The AC’s hicks moved on, they must have worked on some of these properties. I mean, who installs a heating oil tank directly over the sewer line leading to the drain field?

Or the plasterer that had a rather fluid understanding of schedules and deadlines. We found that a cold 12-pack of his favorite brew depositing on the scaffolding (I don’t remember if they were 12 or 14 foot ceilings) early in the afternoon offered an excellent incentive to show up and yielded outstanding results. (I can feel the OSHA reps out there cringing.)

Then there was the water heater that had split open, top to bottom, with water pouring into the cellar under the house. It was a tiny little farmhouse, and the cellar was dug out enough so I could stand upright under about 2/3 of the foundation. The other 1/3 wasn’t dug down as far, and the top of the water heater was sitting on that ledge, and the top of the water heater was about level with the top of my head. I don’t remember who turned the water off, but I do remember standing down in the cellar wearing rubber boots with the water well over halfway up my shins and thinking “You can’t have a water heater turned on with no water in it – that’s dangerous!” So I went over to flip the switch to the water heater and saw that it didn’t have a switch. Instead, it was simply hooked up to the Romex with a couple of wire nuts.

Okay. So I realize that the wiring in this house was put in B.C. (Before Code. Or “In Spite of Code”. Or, “What’s the hell is ‘Code’?”). And I realize that heaven only knows what interesting shortcuts have been taken. And that there is a bare bulb swinging from the ceiling and that I’ve got water halfway to my knees. So I beat it out of the cellar into the house and find the main electrical panel and ... nothing’s labeled. I throw the main and shut down power to the whole house, and pray that the water heater was included.

I then went back down into the pitch black cellar with a flashlight. This was 20 years ago, and it was your basic big old dim flashlight. I waded over to the water heater and realized that if I stood on my tip toes, I could reach the wire nuts. And since I wasn’t 100% sure that the wiring wasn’t still hot, I needed two hands to make sure nothing touched anything it shouldn’t. So I held the flashlight between my teeth and I carefully reached over my head and unscrewed one of the wire nuts, pulled the wires apart and put the wire nut back on the end of the Romex. Repeat on the other side.  And sloshed back to the door, went upstairs and turned the power back on.

And then I believe I went home and had a drink.

Music Meme

Tam started it, and now all the cool kids are doing it, so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.

Top 25 songs on your playlist. (I will say that about a third of these are of Sweet Daughter's choosing, and no, she doesn't listen to Nine Inch Nails. )

Rolling in the Deep; Adele

Hey Soul Sister; Train

Say Hey (I Love You); Michael Franti & Spearhead

Twilight Zone; Golden Earring

Perfect; Pink

Rhythm of Love; Plain White T's

Fall at Your Feet, Crowded House

Firework; Katy Perry

Take Me Home Tonight; Eddie Money

Pain Lies on the Riverside; Live

Amazing Grace; Dropkick Murphys

Fields of Gold, Sting

I Still Believe; The Call

Everlong; Foo Fighters

Let there be Love; Ice House & Iva Davies

The Impression that I get; The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Favourite Shirts; Haircut 100

Cuts You Up; Peter Murphy

Good Enough; Evanescence

Walk the Last Mile; Love and Money

Our Day Will Come; Seven Nations

Take Me on the Floor; The Veronicas

No One Like You; Scorpions

Private Idaho; B-52's

Head Like a Hole; Nine Inch Nails

Deleted my blog roll

So, I was attempting to do a little blog maintenance yesterday and all I managed to do was delete my "I haven't met you yet" blog roll. So if you link to me, or you're one of my favorite blogs, please let me know in the comments. I managed to reconstruct/update some of it, but that was a bit of a cluster in and of itself and I know I'm still missing a bunch.

Let's hope this is the last of 2011messing with me, and not a harbinger of 2012.

Guest blog from Gramps

He would have been 77 when he wrote the following. (Updated to show the Dutch Roll links ...)

Thursday, December 26th. 1974. This evening, when I went out for my walk, I passed Hawthorne School, where I attended the grades sixty-five years ago. Part of the playground has been flooded by the city to make a skating rink. The field of ice is 90 ft. by 200 ft., perfectly smooth and level. The temperature is 28 degrees, a three-quarter moon, light south breeze, a perfect night for out­door skating. But not one person was using the ice. I wondered where the children and young adults were and what they were doing.

When I was a boy, there would have been at least fifty people using this ideal facility. Perhaps they are inside watching tele­vision, or attending a movie. Our ice skating was done on Bear Creek, or on Kirkham’s pond, just west of third Avenue and Sixth Streets southeast. Or on the pond, just above Uncle Joe Alexander’s dam. Sometimes we would skate all the way down Bear Creek to the Zumbro River and on down to the Hill Pond in Northeast Rochester, a little southeast of where the Kruse Lumber Company is located.

Quite often there would be at least thirty of our own cousins and relatives in the group. We would form a long line, hands on shoul­ders, as we did the “Dutch Roll”* down the ice. As we got close to the Mill Pond, we would hear someone shout, “Here come the Alex­anders”. Then the leader, usually Big Walt, would “Crack the whip” and the last one in line, usually Evelyn, and two or three others would go sprawling on the ice.

As I take my daily walks, I notice that there are no people on the streets, walking. I travel a mile or a mile and half without meet­ing a single person. Occasionally I will meet another older per­son walking home from Erdmans Super Market with a sack of groceries. But it is a rare occasion when I meet someone. They are all in their cars. If they are out at all, and certainly they have for­gotten how to walk.

* More interesting information here at the Virtual Ice Skates Museum, including the history of ice skates.

An apology to my doppelganger*.

Christmas with Shorter Half’s family took place today. The adult siblings draw names for a gift exchange, SH’s mother buys for everyone, the cousins get to squirrel around, we graze on food that is generally verboten the rest of the year, and those of legal age drink Mimosas. Everyone is encouraged to keep their Amazon gift list up-to- date to simply things, and the sequence of events is fairly predictable.

This year the first round of gifts was handed out, and I had from my mother-in-law what clearly looked like a CD. I was intrigued as there were no CDs on my list, but it turned out to be the new one from Coldplay. She asked what I thought. I said I’d probably really enjoy it. We both looked puzzled.

The second round of gifts was making the circuit, and SH’s little sister was bouncing up and down on the sofa telling me how much she loved the gift I was about to open. It was a set of measuring cups shaped like a set of nested matryoshka dolls. My mother-in-law said something about them being from my Amazon list. I said I’d never seen either the CD or the measuring cups before in my life.

Yes. My Christmas presents came off the list of another Nancy R., which we all found hilarious. And then it occurred to me that this other Nancy R. might actually be monitoring her list and wondering why nobody ever gave her the CD or the measuring cups or the Harry Potter movie that had been purchased.  And so I offer my humble apologies to the other Nancy R. I’m sorry if you’re feeling shortchanged. But I’m also really, really glad that my MIL didn’t find the Nancy R. that wanted the 3 lbs. of diatomaceous earth and the bedbug-proof pillowcases.

* It was pointed out to me that it was much more likely that I was the doppelganger.