By:
On:
In: On Nature
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

On our back dock at The Store, we keep, among other things, a rack housing the supply of wood that we have on hand for various carpentry needs throughout the year. And many years–not every year, but quite a few of them–a bird, usually a robin, will make a nest in my woodpile. This year was no different, and as soon as I saw her making the nest I started keeping tabs on things. By sheer accident of a couple of pallets nearby, I was able to actually get a good vantage point to track the progress of Mama’s eggs and,Down the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: On Buffalo and The 716
Tagged:
With: 3 Comments

One minor waterway that makes its way through the Buffalo region is Scajaquada Creek. It’s a small stream that rises somewhere in Lancaster, NY, and flows westward through Lancaster, Cheektowaga, and Buffalo before finally draining into the Niagara River near where I-190 and NY198 split. Owing to its urban nature and the fact that occasionally there are sewage overruns, it’s not the cleanest run of water around. And in Cheektowaga, the stream was actually diverted years ago into an underground culvert that’s about three miles long. It only emerges again in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. What’s it like inside thatDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: On Music
Tagged:
With: 1 Comment

With this new format on this site, I’m experimenting more with Featured Images and such to make the front page a bit easier to follow…but anyway, I don’t have a lot of time because we’re off in a few minutes to go see a REALLY BIG TRAIN. So in keeping with that, here is my favorite train song of all time. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: On Music
Tagged:
With: 0 Comments

As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely knownDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Meta
Tagged:

One last meta-post for now, though I obviously still have some tinkering under the hood to do. I especially want to get rid of the way “Share this post” shows up on the main page as if it’s part of the text of the post. That bugs me. Also, though I like the appearance of this WordPress theme, I still haven’t figured out how the widgets work, so currently I’m not sure how to fix my sidebar the way I want it. (One of my blogging quirks is that eventually I always come to not like my sidebar set-up.) I’mDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Meta
Tagged:

Well, here we are…after a week of writing multiple “test” posts, only a few of which actually made it to the site, we seem to be back up and running. At least, I think we are. We’ll find out in a minute after I finish typing this. And as I write this, I suddenly realize that I’m in the old WordPress editor. Where the hell are my Blocks? I like blocks! What’s going on here??? How do I get my blocks back? Anyone? Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Meta
Tagged:

Here’s another test. Yes, the site looks weird. Apparently there was a conflict in my old site theme with some of the WordPress plug-ins that I rely on, which caused all manner of hardship. The advice I received was to try a new theme and see if things work again…and here we are. I will not be staying on this theme, but I will be taking this unplanned opportunity to freshen up the look of this site. Meanwhile, we appear to be up and running again. Yay! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

By:
On:
In: Meta, Occasional Quizzes
Tagged: ,

EDIT: And now, individual post links don’t load, so you can only read what’s here on the main page. I am getting so close to killing this blog. Well, it looks like I can at least post again reliably, which is nice. I still have some back-end functionality stuff that is still not right, and I will be contacting my hosting service in the next couple of days to politely request that they give me a refund or discount since a malfunction on their end resulted in loss of functionality and a loss of actual data, which is not acceptable to me. I’m notDown the rabbit hole….