Inconvenient

            Wowzers!

Talk about inconvenient!

A tractor‑trailer hauling an excavator smacked into the overhead steel trusses of the Rainbow Bridge. I’m not even sure which part hit — whether the boom wasn’t lowered all the way or the top of the cab caught the steel — and those details may come out later. What we do know is that the bridge is now closed and may be closed for months! That changes everything for those of us on this side of the Susquehanna.

This bridge is our quick hop into Wyalusing, usually a round trip of about eight miles. With it shut down the next closest crossing turns that same trip into something closer to sixty miles.

Aye‑yi‑yi.

With gas prices being what they are, you practically need to take out a small loan just to buy groceries!

And it’s not just errands. Plenty of folks on this side of the river work at the kill plant just a few miles past Wyalusing — the biggest employer in our immediate area. Their commute just got a whole lot longer. People who work at Procter & Gamble, about twenty miles downriver, won’t be hit quite as hard, but even then they’ll have to take the mountain roads instead of cruising along US‑6.

Besides errands and work, the bridge closure affects the school, too. The school sits just across the river, and plenty of kids from this side are bused over the Rainbow Bridge every day. With the bridge shut down, those buses suddenly have no direct way across.

           The word going around — and I’m not sure how official this is — is that they may try to make temporary repairs so school buses can still get over the bridge for the rest of the school year. Then, once school lets out, they’d close it again for the summer to finish the real repairs. Hopefully it won’t take any longer than that, because families on this side of the Susquehanna depend on that crossing more than most people realize.

          We had an appointment for an inspection on our car this week. We go back to the dealership in Dickson City to have it done as well as oil changes and tire rotations. We would normally cross the bridge and take the highway.

          “Since we have to go the back way,” Mike started, “why don’t we go past the construction site and see how the new church is coming along?”

          Things like that are always fine by me. We allotted extra time to compensate for the slower, windier, mountain roads.

          Our first look at the bridge.

          As we get closer I can see them working on the far side.

          In all the pictures I’ve seen on the news, I’ve not seen any damage, and I heard the driver hit ten trusses before he got stopped. 

         

          Braintrim Baptist Church in Laceyville started building their new church more than a year ago. I only know what we see when we drive past, and from the looks of it, the work is moving slowly. We watched them do the dirt work last summer, and now it looks like they may have some building supplies staged at the site. It’s progress, just not fast progress.

I snapped a bunch of pictures along our back road detour and on the little side roads Mike took to get us to our car appointment.

          “Did you see the dinosaur?” Mike asked.

          “No. I was focused on the underpass.”

          To my surprise, Mike turned around! So you get to see the train bridge from both directions.

         “There it is,” I said spotting a dragon with a skeleton sitting on his shoulders.

          As we cruised past I see the dinosaur Mike was talking about. "Oh. you did say dinosaur, didn't you."

          The old barn silo is still standing. Since we gave up our Sam’s Club membership, we don’t go past it nearly as often.

          This blue house sits on a triangle where a road passes on both sides. I wonder what that’s like.

          One of our church peeps is getting married in late April. I lost my invitation so I messaged Nick. “Where’s the wedding?”

          “The Old Carter Barn at Lake Carey,” Nick said.

          Hmmm. He says that like I should know where it’s at? And I don’t. Without admitting my ignorance, I asked, “Can you give me the address for my GPS?”

          Nick gave me the address and now, since we were out and about, Mike wanted to do a drive by so we knew where it was. I punched in the address. 

          From the direction we were coming from, we had to wind all the way around this big lake. Most of the houses are built right near the road with the road separating it from the lake. I only took one picture and it’s of this carved seafarer holding a lantern aloft.

I did a little research on Lake Carey. It’s a 182‑acre natural glacial lake, which is wild to think about when you’re just driving past it. Back in the late 1800s it was a full‑blown summer playground. Hotels popped up, picnic groves filled with families, and they even had steamboats — real ones — with names like Marietta and Rosalind chugging people around the water. The Rosalind eventually sank into the mud.

There was an amusement area on the west shore at one point, too — Ferris wheel, carousel, dance pavilion, the whole works. That’s hard to picture now with all the houses lining the shore. And there were summer camps for the kids. One of them, Camp Pokanoket, even hosted a young Aaron Copland long before he became a famous composer.

           We saw the huge barn long before we got there. 

          And now I was curious about the history of this place.

The Old Carter Barn dates back to 1884, when it was built as part of a working dairy farm. In 1911, the owners added a large new section that doubled its size. By the 1950s, the Carter family had turned the property into a turkey farm, and when that closed in the 1970s, the barn sat unused for decades.

In 1998, playwright Douglas Carter Beane inherited the property. His family had owned it since the 1950s. Beane is well‑known in the theater world and has earned five Tony Award nominations for his work on Broadway. He and his husband, composer Lewis Flinn, decided the barn was worth saving. They spent five years restoring it — straightening the structure, repairing the beams, replacing floors and windows, fixing the roof, and clearing out decades of debris. They even floated a Victorian gazebo across Lake Carey to add to the property.

During the 2020–2021 pandemic, they finished the last major updates, adding electricity, lighting, and accessibility improvements. Today the Old Carter Barn is used for weddings, concerts, art shows, and community events, giving the old farm building a new purpose after more than a century.

 

I have another story for you but it doesn’t have any pictures to go with it. I think I’ll just add a few more road pictures then go on with my story.

Speaking of research...

          My old computer is an all-in-one. That just means there’s no separate tower. All the “guts” that make it computer are behind the screen so it’s all-in-one.

I occasionally use my old computer, and this week, while doing something—I don’t remember exactly what—the file explorer froze on me. It’s been an ongoing issue with that computer. Since I didn’t really need it anymore, I decided to copy everything I cared about to an external storage device and reset the computer back to factory settings. I asked Copilot, my artificial-intelligence buddy, how to do that. Since Copilot can make mistakes, I did my own research on the subject. When what I found matched what Copilot told me to do, I went ahead and erased everything, making it just like a brand spankin’ new computer. I even had to register it.

Then I remembered that at one time I had a storage space issue. The all-in-one has a separate area it calls D: drive that’s way bigger than my C: drive and it was empty. I wanted to remove the partition and make it one big space. Once again I asked Copilot how to do that. I started walking through the steps and I wasn’t seeing what Copilot said I should be seeing. I did a screenshot and showed it what I was seeing.

“In order to remove the partition and make it one big storage area,” Copilot said, “they have to be sitting side-by-side. Your D: drive is actually a completely separate physical disk, not a partition on the same drive.”

That means I couldn’t do it. But I can still save large files to it; I just have to do it manually like I used to do.

“What would’ve happened if you tried to do it anyway?” you ask.

If I would’ve tried to delete what I thought was “the partition,” I would actually have deleted the entire one terabyte physical drive, not just a slice of it. I’m so happy I didn’t just try to blunder through the instructions.

         

          I finished reading the story of Rebecca Mary by Annie Hamilton Donnell and I found out a couple of things about that that I didn’t know.

          First, even though it’s old, it’s not cotton paper. I don’t care. The pages are still thick and don’t warp when I paint watercolor on them.

          Second, it’s a children’s book. Again, I don’t care. It was a tender, sweet story written with more craft than you might expect from a book that old.

          I actually really loved the story. And since you probably won’t read it, I’ll tell you what I loved about it. I love that Rebecca Mary called her imaginary doll a soul doll. “She’s not a feel doll,” Rebecca Mary said. It took them a little bit to figure out what she meant.

          The ending carries a quiet emotional weight that sneaks up on you, and it made me teary‑eyed. Maybe that’s just because I’m an old lady, though.

 

          More road pictures.

         I didn’t see the puppies on the porch until I downloaded the photo.

            Turkeys!

          I thought you might like to know that we have new barns around here as well as the old ones.

          Babies! A sure sign of spring.

          We had a couple of really nice days this week. We hit seventy! Then this morning we woke up to nineteen!

          Sigh.

          The girls took advantage of the warmth to lay in the sun.

          Lastly, did you know that I’m not a big chocolate lover? If there are any other flavors besides chocolate, I’ll take them. Chocolate sits at the bottom of my list, and if it’s the only option, well... I’ll take it, but I won’t be thrilled about it.

I made chocolate no‑bake cookies for movie night last week. You can’t just take stuff without tasting it first, don’cha know. As I bit into one, I thought, I like these! And I wondered, Is it because they’re made with cocoa and not chocolate? Are they the same thing?

I told Miss Rosie that even though I’m not crazy about chocolate, I like these cookies.

“Maybe it’s because of the peanut butter in them,” she said.

I do like peanut butter.

         

          Let’s call this one done!

Back-to-Back

 

This week we had two different doctor’s appointments on back-to-back days. That’s more running than this homebody wants to do. Be that as it may, it was necessary.

“What’s going on?” I know you wanna know.

Our Tuesday appointment was to see Mike’s oncologist. We got some really good news. Mike has graduated. He’s reached the five-year cancer-free mark.

But now I’ve told you the outcome before I even told you about the trip up to Sayre.

“What’s to tell?” you ask.

We had snow the night before.

“The trees are so beautiful,” I said.

They really were. Driving down the road felt like going through a winter wonderland. The branches were covered from top to bottom in their finest winter white, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them as we went along.

I’d just said it — “The trees are so beautiful” — and then, like someone had turned off the snow machine, the trees ahead were mostly bare.

          All through Wysox and up through Towanda it was the same. Further on up 220, just before Milan, the snow covering the trees picked up again.

          All the white made it hard to spot the white tree the eagle’s nest is in. I did manage to spot it on the return trip and the next day. Either there’s no eagle in the nest or she’s lying with her head below the rim.

          I took pictures of this farm both coming and going. 

          From the Walmart parking lot, I could see a few spots where the clouds had decided to dump a little bonus snow.

          There’s a school right across from the hospital, and I’m forever comparing the old architecture to the new. The old building has character and detail, the newer addition is as plain-Jane as they come.

          I couldn’t figure out why I’d snapped this picture. There’s a truck and a yellow house. Then I see the guy standing on the corner, holding the leashes of three standard poodles. We had one when I was growing up. Sassy. One day we came home and found a big patch of hide missing from her side. Momma took her in the car, I thought to the vet, and came home without her. Sassy didn’t survive the trauma. I’m not sure what happened to her. One theory I heard was she might’ve been teasing the jackass and he got a hold of her.

“She was shot,” my handsome brother David told me. That was the other thing I heard.

          Door’s open.

          I took pictures on the way home from Mike’s appointments and I took pictures the next day, too. I’m going to lump them all together. But before I do that, let me tell you about his one-month checkup after his retinal detachment surgery.

          Dr. McClintic is very pleased and maybe a little surprised at how well Mike’s vision is coming back. They don’t usually see this much improvement until around three or four months post-surgery.

          “My church has been praying for me,” Mike told him.

          I was taken aback that he said that, and I have to admit, I was proud of him, too. He gave the glory to God.

        Wysox Narrows. You can almost make out the road through the trees at the base of the rocks.

          We stopped at the thrift store on the way home. I got both of these string art boards for a dollar. I had no idea what you do with string art boards but they had me at art. The nails have heads on them so I wasn’t sure how you would get string off or what you do with it once you got it off.

          Can it be used for wire? I wondered.

          A chat with Copilot gave me answers. You make your design in string and hang it up. When you’re tired of it, cut the string off and make another one.

          “String is cheap,” Copilot said.

          I am so not interested in doing that.

          I think I’ll hang it up and use it to hold my necklaces. The square one at least. The round one doesn’t look like it would work that well for it.

          Speaking of art...

          I bought a ruling pen to apply masking fluid to things I want to keep white in my watercolor paintings. I was so excited to try it. I dipped the pen and the first line worked well. After that, it didn’t work hardly at all.

          I cleaned it off and loaded it with watercolor paint. It worked great for making thin lines. At least I can still use it for that, I thought. So it wasn’t a complete waste of money. But why doesn’t it work for masking fluid when everyone raves about it? Do I need to clean it between dippings? I wondered.

          I went up to YouTube and watched a couple of tutorials and not once did they clean it between dippings in the masking fluid.

           Oh well, I thought, you get what you pay for.

I’d gotten two ruling pens for right around five something plus tax.

I went back to Amazon and ordered a single ruling pen for seven dollars. I also ordered the paper I needed to make the bridal shower invitations.

          When it arrived I noticed the corner was torn.

          I hope my ruling pen didn’t fall out, I thought.

          I opened the package, took out the paper, and felt around the inside for ruling pen. Just as I expected, it was gone.

          I went to Amazon and told them I didn’t get it.

          They promptly reordered a replacement.

          It wasn’t long after that that Mike asked me something about it. “You didn’t get the pen?”

          “Nope,” I said and got up. I took the envelope from the table, stuck my hand inside to prove it was empty when suddenly —

          “Here it is!” I was stupefied! “I thought it had fallen out.” I quickly canceled the replacement pen.

          I’m going to guess I’d gripped it under my hand as I held the envelope because I found it tight up against the side seam and not on the bottom where I expected to find it.

          I pulled the bride from where she waited, dipped the pen in the fluid, and once again, the first line was great! After that, not so great.

          “Maybe it’s you,” Mike said.

          I was beginning to think the very same thing.

          Then I did something I should’ve done to begin with. I asked Copilot what was going on.

          “The fluid thickens instantly on the blades. Your gap is probably set too narrow.”

          Aye-yi-yi!

          If I’d’ve asked AI first I could’ve saved seven bucks!

          I’m not going to say I’m such an idiot sometimes because you already know that.

          

          All y’all should make this soup that my friend Jody shared with me. It is sooo good! I love it. Mike? He doesn’t love it as much as I do. He’d rather have something else. So the last time I made it I had a serving and froze the rest in two-cup containers. I was nervous about freezing it because I don’t like potatoes once they’ve been frozen. But, as it turns out, the sweet potatoes in this recipe came out of the freezer just fine and I’m super duper glad for that because I really like this soup.

          I didn’t make it exactly like the recipe.

“Recipes are just guidelines,” declares my sister, the culinary wizard who can turn anything super yummy.

          Speaking of Phyllis...

          She told me about these Cashew Clusters from Aldi. They’re one of her favorites and I have to say, they’re pretty tasty. The nuts (cashews, almonds, pumpkin seeds) are nutritious as they contain healthy fats, protein, and minerals, but the clusters are held together with a sugary glaze. That’s what makes them so good.

 

Let’s call this one done!