From “The Golden Age Lantern,” newsletter of Senior Citizens of Ashland Co., Inc., February 2001, Volume 27, Issue 2. Credit to whomever wrote this, was not given.
SENIOR SENTIMENTS
A very weird thing has happened. A strange old lady has moved into my house. I have no idea who she is, where she came from, or how she got in. I certainly did not invite her. All I know is that one day, she wasn’t there, and the next day, she was.
She is a clever old lady, and manages to keep out of sight for the most part, but whenever I pass a mirror, I catch a glimpse of her. And whenever I look in the mirror to check my appearance, there she is, hogging the whole thing, completely obliterating my gorgeous face and body. This is very rude. I have tried screaming at her, but she just screams back.
If she insists on hanging around, the least she could do is offer to pay part of the rent, but no. Every once in awhile, I find a dollar bill stuck in a coat pocket, or some loose change under a sofa cushion, but it is not nearly enough.
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I think she is stealing money from me. I go to the ATM and withdraw $100, and a few days later, it’s all gone. I certainly don’t spend money that fast, so I can only conclude the old lady is pilfering from me.
You’d think she would spend some of that money to buy wrinkle cream. Lord knows she needs it. And money isn’t the only thing I think she is stealing. Food seems to disappear at an alarming rate -- especially the good stuff like ice cream, cookies, and candy. I can’t seem to keep that stuff in stock anymore. She must have a real sweet tooth, but she’d better watch it, because she is really packing on the pounds. I suspect she realizes this and to make herself feel better, she is tampering with my scale to make me think I am putting on weight, too.
For an old lady, she is quite childish. She likes to play nasty games, like going into my closets when I’m not home and altering my clothes so they don’t fit. And she messes with my files and papers so I can’t find anything. This is particularly annoying since I am extremely neat and organized. She also fiddles with my VCR so it does not record what I have carefully and correctly programmed.
She has found other imaginative ways to annoy me. She gets into my mail, newspapers and magazines before I do, and blurs the print so I can’t read it. And she has done something really sinister to the volume controls on my TV, radio and telephone. Now, all I hear are mumbles and whispers.
She has done other things -- like make my stairs steeper, my vacuum cleaner heavier and all my knobs and faucets harder to turn. She even made my bed higher so that getting into and out of it is a real challenge. Lately, she had been fooling with my groceries before I put them away, applying glue to the lids, making it almost impossible for me to open the jars. Is this any way to repay my hospitality?
She has taken the fun out of shopping for clothes. When I try something on, she stands in front of the dressing room mirror and monopolizes it. She looks totally ridiculous in some of those outfits, plus she keeps me from seeing how great they look on me.
Just when I thought she couldn’t get any meaner, she proved me wrong. She came along when I went to get my picture taken for my driver’s license and just as the camera shutter clicked, she jumped in front of me! No one is going to believe that the picture of that old lady is me.
Found this in the Hart Scrapbook
A New Kind of Cow
A little boy seeing an elephant for the first time, shouted:
"O pop, look at the big cow with her horns in her mouth eating hay with her tail."
Also from the Hart Scrapbook was this clipping:
Origin of the Dollar
"Dollar" appeared first in an English dictionary in 1745. It is a borrowed word, being the German "thaler." The coins issued by the mint in Joachimsthal were called "Joachimathalers." When other mints were established, the "Joachims" was dropped, and the coins were called simply "thalers."
The follar was adopted by Congress as the unit of our currency on Aug. 5, 1785. It was to contain 375.64 grains of pure silver: but when the mint was established in 1792, the requirement was reduced to 371.25 grains of pure silver. The coinage of dollars began in 1794.
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Farm and Household - Maple Sugar Making
(From the "Ohio Farmer," a farm periodical, February, 1870)
The great secret of sugar making is in being prepared when the season opens; so contriving the operations of manufacture as to make them the least laborious; to care for the preservation
of the forest, and save all the sap that is taken from the trees.
There is probably no greater source of loss in sugar making than the waste of sap, and the waste usually comes from leaky store troughs, neglect, carelessness in gathering, and small buckets.
How often does the farmer find, when going to the woods, "everything running over!" How long they have been doing so is not known, and therefore no correct estimate of loss can be made. But we can determine with some accuracy the loss attending the use of small vessels.
We will suppose that in one half of the camp tin pans, jars or troughs are used which will hold but six quarts each, and in the remaining half buckets which will hold 16 quarts each. Now, when the gathering has been neglected until the larger buckets are full, which will ordinarily occur several times in a season, here has been a waste of 10 quarters at each of the trees having the small vessels, and, supposing that number to be 200, there has been a lost of 2,000 quarters, or 500 gallons of sap, which, at a safe calculation, would have made 125 pounds of sugar.
A number of years ago we knew a man who was particularly noted for the amount of maple sugar he made every season per tree, so much that it was asserted that he could get more sugar out of creek water than the others could out of sap. When this man was asked for the secret of his success, he replied, "I save all the sap."
Our friend, Randy Diefendorf, once wrote me with this little tidbit: "In the old days they used to say a picture of a person left in a closet or drawer, if not good looking, would keep the moths away."
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