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I needed a haircut. In fact, it has been nearly five months, I’m starting to look like I did in the 70’s (at least from the ears up – I can only dream about the remainder), and I still need a haircut. But I am NOT getting it done at Walmart: the thieves of just about every honest business in small-town America. The old Italian gentleman who cut my hair the first few times I came up here has arthritis too painful to continue working. He really didn’t want to retire, but eventually the decay of old age forces us all out to pasture.

Yes, I’m at it again. On Tuesday I began working in the garden. We already had a couple of garden beds, perhaps about 380 square feet, and I built a third alongside the garage and filled it with topsoil. The first time I’ve ever gardened in my life, being raised in the city. So on my first day of gardening I broke the handle on a pitchfork, and also broke a large rake. Now the rake was all plastic with a long wooden handle, and I guess that I had put a little too much pressure on it and the whole thing snapped off just above the tines.

My father began undergoing treatment for stage four colon cancer after he was diagnosed last May. It had already taken several months of weakness and weight loss to get him to go to a doctor at all, and then only after much pleading from my mother. He hated going to doctors, hated being sick and weak, hated having to take pills, and especially hated having the colostomy which he had to undergo. But reluctantly he did it, and only at all for the sake of his wife and his adult children.

I was shoveling snow the other day, and thinking about how my younger brother and I made all sorts of money on snow days as boys in Jersey City in the early-to-mid 1970’s, by shoveling snow for older people and local businesses. Back then we used an old steel coal shovel which my father had for years, and also an old steel snow shovel with a big scoop. Those shovels were heavy, but they could move a lot more snow than today’s cheap, light plastic shovels can. They could also break through the ice, even heavy ice, without much trouble.

This is my new blog, and now I am one in 100 million other idiots who think that they can write something significant enough that other people should be reading it, as if that isn’t a waste of time. This blog may just sit here and collect dust, or I may just vent on it from time to time. In any event, there probably won’t be anything so significant here that you should be wasting your time reading it! So go away! Go do something productive!