Good news: the Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette is for sale at the Mighty Minn Mart and other places in Loonfoot Falls. No problems with our production.
The servers, on the other hand - that's another matter.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
Plastic Deer, Yes: Gated Communities, No
For the most part, I like living in Loonfoot Falls. The air is clean, the people are friendly, and mosquitoes aren't a problem after the first few killing frosts.
I suppose this exposes my rural naïveté, but it hadn't occurred to me until this week that Loonfoot Falls lacks one vital facet of contemporary culture.
We have not one single gated community.
Unless you count places like Fisk Implement. They've had a sturdy fence and a mildly paranoid alarm system ever since someone stole a harrow, back in 1996. Nobody lives there, apart from the occasional gopher: so it's not really a "community."
We don't have all that many fences of any sort in town. Much less walled-off neighborhoods where everybody inside is glad that they're not outside. I'm not sure if that says more for our values: or our desire to avoid having to mow near a fence.
It's not like we're some homogenized classless utopia. Houses around West 9th and Waterview Lane, or around Milldam Park, tend to be bigger than the ones on Siding Street. More expensive, anyway.
Some of the Waterview Lane places put on a nice show around Christmas time. The rest of the year, though, their yards are pretty plain. Nicely mowed, of course. Very trim.
Some of the folks who live on Siding Street don't wait for some holiday to embellish their lawns. Artificial deer are fairly popular. So is that sort of wind sculpture that looks like a duck flapping its wings.
I suppose this exposes my rural naïveté, but it hadn't occurred to me until this week that Loonfoot Falls lacks one vital facet of contemporary culture.
We have not one single gated community.
Unless you count places like Fisk Implement. They've had a sturdy fence and a mildly paranoid alarm system ever since someone stole a harrow, back in 1996. Nobody lives there, apart from the occasional gopher: so it's not really a "community."
We don't have all that many fences of any sort in town. Much less walled-off neighborhoods where everybody inside is glad that they're not outside. I'm not sure if that says more for our values: or our desire to avoid having to mow near a fence.
It's not like we're some homogenized classless utopia. Houses around West 9th and Waterview Lane, or around Milldam Park, tend to be bigger than the ones on Siding Street. More expensive, anyway.
Some of the Waterview Lane places put on a nice show around Christmas time. The rest of the year, though, their yards are pretty plain. Nicely mowed, of course. Very trim.
Some of the folks who live on Siding Street don't wait for some holiday to embellish their lawns. Artificial deer are fairly popular. So is that sort of wind sculpture that looks like a duck flapping its wings.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Impossible! But That's What I Saw
I haven't been to a Halloween party since I was a kid, but I still enjoy the holiday. Partly because of the decorations some folks in town put up, like inflatable spiders.
This week's wind storm left Loonfoot Falls alone, apart from a few downed trees: and radically rearranged inflatable Halloween displays.
The spider that had graced a neighborhood roof is missing: it may be in another county by now. A sort of pint-size pirate ship with a skeleton (literally) crew from the 'spider house' yard found anchorage at their mailbox.
I shouldn't joke, I suppose. Quite a few folks in this part of the state didn't have power for hours: a definitely unfunny situation with temperatures below freezing.
Then there was my experience Tuesday afternoon, on my way home from work. There was a brisk west wind: around 45 miles an hour, the radio said, with gusts to 60.
The neighborhood roof spider had already disappeared when I turned down the street where I live, the inflated skeleton crew were moshing at the mailbox, and somebody's garbage can sprinted past my car on the passenger side.
Just then somebody shot past me on the left and jumped onto the windshield. I was hitting the brakes when the lunatic jumped off, disappeared, and slapped the roof.
Sure: people can't do that. But that's what my eyes and ears were telling me.
I'd stopped the car by then: just in time for somebody's inflatable Dracula to whip back over the windshield.
This week's wind storm left Loonfoot Falls alone, apart from a few downed trees: and radically rearranged inflatable Halloween displays.
The spider that had graced a neighborhood roof is missing: it may be in another county by now. A sort of pint-size pirate ship with a skeleton (literally) crew from the 'spider house' yard found anchorage at their mailbox.
I shouldn't joke, I suppose. Quite a few folks in this part of the state didn't have power for hours: a definitely unfunny situation with temperatures below freezing.
Then there was my experience Tuesday afternoon, on my way home from work. There was a brisk west wind: around 45 miles an hour, the radio said, with gusts to 60.
The neighborhood roof spider had already disappeared when I turned down the street where I live, the inflated skeleton crew were moshing at the mailbox, and somebody's garbage can sprinted past my car on the passenger side.
Just then somebody shot past me on the left and jumped onto the windshield. I was hitting the brakes when the lunatic jumped off, disappeared, and slapped the roof.
Sure: people can't do that. But that's what my eyes and ears were telling me.
I'd stopped the car by then: just in time for somebody's inflatable Dracula to whip back over the windshield.
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