Guest Column
As September kicks off (high school football is back!), we are still enjoying the long daylight of summer, 13 hours on the 1st, but will lose more than two minutes of light each day as our tilted orbit moves us steadily into fall’s growing darkness. Fall begins at 3:21 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the 22nd, the Fall Equinox, the moment when our nearby star is directly over our planet’s equator. Read more
Remember folding paper maps? I suppose in the age of GPS, most of us don’t think of them, and if we do, it’s to recall just what a pain they could be. Unless you pulled off the road, they were impossible for the driver to use. If your shotgun partner was your navigator, he’d take up most of the front seat unfolding a map. Then he’d have to partially refold it to highlight just that part of the country you really needed to see. And of course, he’d have to shake it out to full size to begin refolding it. It wouldn’t take many openings and closings before it would begin to tear along the creases, and that would create new problems. Read more
Although the official 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics are over, medals are just now being awarded in the Schupp household for their personal Olympic competitions. Without further ado, below are the categories and results. Read more
Television commercials make rustic tent camping look like such fun. The weather is picture perfect. The adults are smiling. Children are laughing while toasting marshmallows on sticks and making s’mores. Everyone is decked out in fashionable outdoor clothing. And the tent and all camping gear is brand-new and top quality. By the time the commercial concludes, you just want to pack up the car and hit the road. Time to take the whole family to one of those picturesque locations and commune with the great outdoors! Read more
Television commercials make rustic tent camping look like such fun. The weather is picture perfect. The adults are smiling. Children are laughing while toasting marshmallows on sticks and making s’mores. Everyone is decked out in fashionable outdoor clothing. And the tent and all camping gear is brand-new and top quality. By the time the commercial concludes, you just want to pack up the car and hit the road. Time to take the whole family to one of those picturesque locations and commune with the great outdoors! Read more
August marks the 10th anniversary of an Earth event that changed our quiet Louisa world suddenly and dramatically. Everyone here remembers exactly where they were at 1:51 p.m. on August 23, 2011 as a magnitude 5.8 earthquake, literally, rocked that world. The quake, felt by tens of millions of people up and down the entire Eastern Seaboard, is now known as the Mineral earthquake and while the aftershocks have, mostly, subsided, the memories have not. Read more
Some summer I am going to take a REAL vacation, where I laze about and read and travel and do nothing more strenuous than feed the dog and mow the grass. I might not even plant a garden. I haven’t had a summer like that since I was a very small child. Between the home garden and the farmwork and Daddy’s sawmill and working on neighbors’ farms, there were no summers off. Read more
My ancestors – Scotch-Irish farmers on one side, Scottish-English border country Jacobites on the other – reached Central Virginia about 250 years ago, and here I am, still not that far from my birthplace. A couple of years back, I spat in a tube and had my saliva tested for DNA, and the results pretty much bore out the family anecdotal history: heavy on the UK, some northern European and Viking genes as one might expect – but there was some news. Read more
While the summer solstice was the longest day of the year, July begins with only three minutes’ less daylight and still a serious need for shade and/or sunscreen. By the time August arrives there will be 39 less minutes of daylight but still, deep into summer, not something anyone is really noticing. Read more
My family was recently reminiscing about past family gatherings when my dear grandmother was still with us. She loved bringing dessert as her contribution, and 95 percent of the time, that meant pie. Mouthwateringly delicious pie! Over time, we fondly nicknamed her desserts “Grandma Pie.” She would blush and say they were nothing special, but to us they were her legacy. Read more