Author Archives: Dick

Broke? Broke.

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HondaThat doesn’t look so bad, now, does it?

The weather was generally crappy (that’s a highly scientific, meteorological term) over the weekend. Drizzly. Gray. Cold. Dank. I couldn’t work on the porch.

Rufus says I probably could have; in fact, yesterday I did see two guys on ladders huddled under a waving plastic tarp trying to work on their porch, but there are limits. Nonetheless, I decided to do some work for a client instead. Good day to be in someone else’s heated house or office.

Drove Anne’s car in to town. Forgot my keys to the client’s office, a fact I discovered when I got there so I drove on to pick Anne up at a friend’s house. She was showing off her new shorty, fuschia, PTB cast.

My plan was to head back to North Puffin, drop herself off, start the pellet stove for her, and head back to St Albans.

Our mechanic says I hit a pothole or a rock on Church Road.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a lower ball joint shear off. BANG! It is loud and bumpy.

I thought I had hit a pothole and blown a tire. The car bucked, bounced down by the nose, but it skidded in pretty much a straight line. That was a small surprise, considering that the left wheel was pointed about due south and the right one about northwest. I was probably going only about 35 mph or so.

The City Police Department patrols the Town and a City cop was eastbound on that road, about 4-5 car lengths from me when it broke. He passed, gaping, and hooked a U-ie to come up behind me.

I told him I was pretty lucky he was there and pretty lucky I didn’t loop it into the field. In point of fact, what I didn’t tell him is that I figured he was pretty lucky I didn’t dive directly into him, head on. Maybe not, though. At low speeds, the one sideways sliding wheel acts as a brake instead of steering.

I called AAA. They dispatched Stone’s Texaco from East Fairfield rather than the local guys because the local guys never answer their phone. The Stone’s driver turned out to be Mr. Stone hisownself. Back in the day, he drove and sponsored a race car at Catamount Stadium and some of the other paved tracks around. Got out when it got to expensive.

It took him a while to get to me because he was already on a call at the other end of the county. He must have really booked to get to the Bay in under half an hour.

He took one look and turned around to drag the car on tail first. Wise move since it did pretty much no more damage. We took it to our regular mechanic where I grabbed a floor jack and we sort of gentled it off the flatbed. Coast it down until the wheel jammed against the fender. Jack up. Kick the wheel assembly back to sort of straight. Let it down to coast some more. Rinse. Repeat. The car needed only four iterations to slide off the truck.


Honda Front
Mr. Stone dropped me off at the top of the friend’s street because I wouldn’t let him try to wangle his flatbed down her narrow dirt road. It’s not more than a 1/4 mile walk.Number 1 Daughter picked us up there with the grandpuppies in tow. Lazarus is the smaller of the two, a Bernese Mountain Dog. Yogee is a Newfoundland Retriever who still doesn’t know how big he is. She calls him her special needs child. I told her she could step up in brain power to a Goldie next.The kids say having the car incident now was a good thing. See, normally Anne breaks this stuff when I’m in South Puffin.

Now I have to go do something fun like clean out a stove pipe.


Honda Side

Art Bras

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Today would have been my mother’s 92nd birthday. Mary Harper was an award winning artist, a tolerant housewife, and superlative mother. She died in 2002 after almost winning her fight with breast cancer.

Lexington, Kentucky-area quilters have been decorating bras in advance of Breast Cancer Awareness month which began on Saturday and continues through the month of October.

Breast cancer accounts for 16 percent of all cancer deaths among women nationwide; a woman’s risk for developing breast cancer in her lifetime is one in seven. A man’s risk is smaller but not tiny.

The Plum Creek Quilters Guild and the Lexington Regional Health Center will sponsor the Think Pink Cele-bra-tion next Thursday.

PCQG member Kathy Beck made themed art bras called “Cheer for the Cure” and “Snow Boobies.” Cancer survivor and member Linda Maloley made two art bras, “Flat Busted” and “Support Bra.” The quilters’ art bras will be modeled and auctioned to raise money for the Eppley Cancer Center.

90% of all diagnosed cases of breast cancer have no family history.

In other fund raisers, Art beCAUSE held its 9th annual Breast Cancer Foundation Gala at Westin Copley Place in Boston yesterday. Art beCAUSE is a foundation founded by an art gallery owner and breast cancer owner. Together, they decided together to use some of the profit from the art gallery to fund research.

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among Vermont women.

My mom studied fashion design at Spring Garden Institute after she earned a B.A.-English at Swarthmore. Once, when I was about 10, she covered one of her own brassieres with colorful fabric to form the top half of designer bikini. She would have made a bra for the Think Pink Cele-bra-tion. She did donate paintings to events like Art beCAUSE.

Art brings joy and can bring funding. And art projects like these help more than cancer survivors. You can do that in your own town.

Persembe Peeves

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Oh, swell.

The cost of health insurance this year rose more steeply than in previous years, outstripping wages and adding uncertainty about the pace of growing costs.

Early estimates of the COLA are around 1.2% for next year which obviously takes in the 30% increase in food costs this year on top of 110% increases from the prior two years when there was no COLA at all.

Look the Other Way

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Other than ShumpleCare, Gov. Peter Shumlin (D-VT) has been acting pretty much like a good Repuglican.

His $4.8 billion 2011 budget proposal slashed human services spending. Even the Vermont House Repuglican leader was pleased that the governor was “mostly sticking to not raising taxes and he is looking at ways to cut structural costs.”

In the wake of Irene, Gov. Shumlin eschewed the big government solutions, supporting and cheerleading community volunteers where they could help and building infrastructure where the government should. He even hired former top Repuglican aide Neale Lunderville as Irene-Czar.

And then he reminded us that he is a Big-D Demorat after all.

See, Demorats don’t believe in law. Oh, they believe in making law. But the law doesn’t apply to them unless it’s a “good” law.

Vermont state troopers made a routine traffic stop on I-89 about a week ago. In the stop they discovered that two migrant farm workers from Mexico were in the country illegally.

That’s an important distinction. The two migrant farm workers from Mexico had entered the country illegally.

Let me make that clear. The two migrant farm workers from Mexico had broken the law entering and staying in this country.

A decade or so ago, the U.S. Border Patrol, stretched thin, seconded Vermont police to that agency. In addition to enforcing all the law, Vermont police have the explicit duty to enforce customs and immigration laws. The driver of the car they stopped, a U.S. citizen, received a speeding ticket.

The staties turned the farm workers over to the Homeland Security. The Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project has branded the incident “racial profiling.” They ginned up a protest that included a human chain to block the Border Patrol vehicles from transferring the illegals to another facility for processing. Police arrested three protesters. I’m thinking they should have checked for green cards.

Reporter Stewart Ledbetter of WPTZ-TV interviewed Gov. Shumlin about the brouhaha. The governor said Vermont should “look the other way” when dealing with the illegal “guest workers” on Vermont farms. “We have always had a policy in Vermont where we kind of look the other way as much as we can.”

Gov. Shumlin said “look the other way” is Vermont policy on “undocumented” farm workers because the state dairy farms cannot survive without them.

Any end. Any means.

Apparently, I couldn’t buy any milk today unless it came from illegally squeezed teats.


“Every officer, whether judicial, executive, or military, in authority under this State, before entering upon the execution of office, shall take and subscribe the following oath or affirmation …” [Vermont Constitution]

Then Governor-elect Peter Shumlin’s big moment came when the Paul Rieber, Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, administered the oath of office:
Shumlin OathPaul Rieber: “I do solemnly swear … according to law.”
Peter Shumlin: “I do solemnly swear … according to law.”
R: “I solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution
S: “I solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution”
R: “Of the state of Vermont”
S: “Of the state of Vermont”
R: “And the Constitution of the United States”
S: “And the Constitution of the United States”
R: “So help me God”
S: “So help me God.”
R: “Congratulations, Governor.”

I need milk today, so I guess it is in my best interest that the Governor is a law-breaking Demorat.

UPDATE: November 4, 2011

Governor Peter Shumlin (D-VT) today announced his new “bias free” policing policy for Vermont State Police.

Vermont will commit no resources to prevent illegal immigration.

The new policy orders Vermont state troopers not try to identify people whose only suspected violation is that they are present in the United States without proper documentation; troopers clearly should investigate any suspected criminal activity.

crim·i·nal /ˈkrimənl/ Of or relating to a crime, a person who has committed a crime.

crime /krīm/ An action that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law.

I’m thinking the crime here is that the governor of a state has made as policy that the state will investigate any suspected criminal activity as long as they don’t investigate that criminal activity.