Wending my way to Ellenburg , I run into an old friend, Sgt. Martin (or whatever you call the border guys). He sports Elvis-styled sideburns and a gun. Yikes. You know I stop, not because I’m an Elvis fan. We meet on a regular basis–either on Rt. 11 of 190.    Fortunately, Sgt. Elvis isn’t interested …[ read more ]

Picture stolen from Kimberly Connel      I peeled my eyes opened. Eight a.m. on a Saturday. Forget the fact that my weeks have six Saturdays and one Sunday, my brain had been trained and  Saturday is sleep-in, lazy sacrosanct. However every Saturday we members of North Country Habitat for Humanity banded together to work on …[ read more ]

Image by jimmywayne via Flickr      Malone, NY, I do love thee…but have you learned the tyranny of the quick fix? We look for easy ways out of problems and so we bring in prisons. Oh the economy will revive.     Nope. Just brought in prison families and lots of convicts who clog the judicial system.     We …[ read more ]

                           Image via Wikipedia      Pompeii existed over two thousand years ago as a prosperous town. People loved and fought, bought and bartered, reared their families and planned for the future. Until Mount Vesuvius had other things to say. Within twenty-four hours the angry volcano annihilated their world.     Ash preserved the torment of the humans who had lived …[ read more ]

Image via Wikipedia      Everyone loves a good scandal, so how do we create one? We are all familiar with Dutch Shultz, but gangsters like him are either in short supply or unwanted in our communities–unless we stuff them in the prisons that decorate our outskirts of our lovely villages.      In 1815 we discovered a …[ read more ]