Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: Shaggy Manes

Ay yi yi! What a ride the last two days have been! Now it's late in the afternoon on Saturday and I'm just sitting down to visit with you.

"What's going on, Peg?" you ask.

Years and years ago, about a hundred of them by now, I bought a ton of eBooks. 32,000 Classic Books and it came on two discs. Two discs worth of data isn't that much, is it? I downloaded them onto my computer and browsed the books. I was looking for C. S. Lewis books or maybe something by A. W. Tozer. In the children's file, I found a few books with my mother's name including Dorothy's Mystical Adventures in Oz, and a series of Patty books. Patty At Home, Patty in Paris, Patty Blossom, and Patty's Suitors. I scroll down a little further and see Peggy in Her Blue Frock, Peggy at School, Peggy Stewart Navy Girl. I didn't know there were children's books with my namesake. In another section I found a poem called Peg of Limavaddy. It talks about a traveling guy who stops at an inn and the serving girl is Peg, the pretty hussy. I laughed. He's so taken with her he spills his beer down his pantaloons. He goes on to regale us with her attributes. Lovely Peg, smile like an angel, laughter sweet and clear. Slim waist, comfortable bodice, bare arms, pretty ankles. And he'll dream of her until his dying day. One line I found especially descriptive and appropriate for this time of year:

Through the crashing woods, autumn brawld and bluster'd, tossing round about, leaves the hue of mustard.

It's been just that here the last few days.

That night, I did something I haven't done in a couple of months. I shut the lid of my computer without shutting it down first. I used to do that all the time, then a couple of months ago my computer didn't like it and I had a hard time getting it to work right. I think I wrote about that struggle. Since then I've been leaving my computer open at night and letting it go to sleep. Well, it wouldn't sleep the other night and I didn't want to leave the screen on all night. Surely it's worked out its problems by now, I thought and shut the lid. The next day nothing on my computer was working. It'd keep freezing. Between Mike and me I bet we rebooted it a dozen times, did several defrags and scans, ran problem checkers, and installed updates. By Saturday afternoon everything was working except Google. I searched on my iPad and found out that Google takes a lot of memory and won't work if your memory's full. I didn't check mine. I just deleted all the books, rebooted, and Google still wouldn't work. I went into my programs thinking I could update or fix it but it wasn't an option. Then I thought I'd try a different browser but without Google, how was I going to get on the internet? I looked around on my computer and found Firefox. It must've been there since the first day I bought my computer — thank goodness! I launched it and it works just fine. I figure Google must be corrupted so I deleted it. Now I'm back in business! I'm late getting started but ever so thankful.

Guess what I found!

Shaggy Manes!

This is an easy mushroom to identify and there are no poisonous look-alikes. You will never see this mushroom in the stores for two reasons. First, it's very delicate. They won't even stand the weight of too many on top of each other. Second, it's in the Inky Cap family. Within a matter of hours you'll have nothing left but a pile of ink.

I took my mushrooms home and turned them into a little bit of soup. It was really good! I couldn't wait to find more so I could make more soup.

The next day I found three more and turned them into soup as well.
Mike wouldn't even try it.

I found a late-blooming Buttercup.

My Bittersweet is so pretty.

We've had a couple of really nice days. I hooked Ginger up and took her for a walk down along the creek.

I found a couple more late-blooming wildflowers.

Chickweed.

Daisy Fleabane.

A chair in the woods.

The creek was pretty.

I left the creek, walked through the woods, and ended up on our little dirt road, just down from the Robinson's house.

Maybe there'll be some Lotus flower seeds, I thought and headed up to the Robinson's pond. I did not see one single Lotus pod but I did surprise a Great Blue Heron. He stood still long enough for me to get several shots of him before he took flight.

The Robinson's barn.

Fall colors.

A storm brewing over our mountain home.

Mike had an appointment in Towanda early last week. On the way, we pass this new building, and we're currently having a debate.

"I bet they're going to put brick up there," is my guess.

"I think it's going to be windows," Mike says.

"Windows?!" I asked incredulously. "Why would they put windows on the floor?"

"It's higher up than you think."

I'm like, "Okay. Whatever!" Time will tell which of us is right.

Going past a car lot in Wysox I see this. Why, oh why!, would you even put something like this on your truck? What is he thinking!

On the way home, Mike pulled off the road and let me walk around the falling down motel units, at least I think that's what they used to be. I got to see the back and look inside.

I started to feed the birds for the winter again. I try to remember to bring my feeder in at night, otherwise the coons will unhook it and drop it to the ground. I've lost a couple of feeders that way. I looked out the other morning and see I forgot to bring it in. I could see it wasn't hanging any more but stuck on the side of the branch. What in the world, I wondered. Upon investigation, I discovered the coon had gone to drop it and the cable tie caught the screw on the way down. So there it hung.

We got two more of our Rhododendrons wrapped in burlap this week. They're right on the edge of the yard. I took the weed side while Mike took the grass side and we passed the roll of burlap back and forth. When I had a minute I looked up through the trees.

"Is that a fence post?" Mike asked.

The bank is our dust barrier between us and the road so we let it do its own thing, like overgrow with weeds. And it's home to junk that's lived there since before we bought the place.

Mike pointed it out and I walked over to check it out. "It is! And it still has a sign on it." I grabbed the end of the post, pulled the sign from his grave, and passed it out to Mike. I wonder what else is buried under the years of leaf litter — but not bad enough to go looking for it.

We put two vents in our eaves. Up until now, the space has been sealed and it causes us a condensation problem. Mike is hoping that venting it will take care of that.

Mike trimmed out the back of my stove (it needed a couple of more boards then the old one had) — and I decorated for Christmas! Actually, the lights have lived there all year, I just hung 'em back up when Mike was done and plugged 'em in for you.

Here are a couple more pictures for you.

Our pond is full and the Bradford Pears are turning red.

We had so much rain so fast the Susquehanna left its bed. Several roads in our area were closed for either flooding or mudslides. The winds were fierce and thousands of people in our area were without power. We were lucky and didn't lose ours here.

My handsome brother David in Texas has been experiencing a lot of flooding lately too. He saw minnows swimming in the street. And he gets trash floating into his yard. He gets really stressed out not knowing how high the water's going to get and it did get up into the garage. After that it went down so he's good right now.

A patch of sun on the hillside.

Miss Rosie gave me a fabulous gift!

Earlier in the year, I asked if she'd take a slab of wood from one of the trees we had cut down and paint something on it for my birthday or Christmas gift. Her studio is unheated so she has to plan ahead for that kind of stuff.

Well, this week she gave it to me and I'm ecstatic! It's reversible and I absolutely love it. Miss Rosie is so talented!

Friday was our turn to clean the church and by 'our' I mean the Kipps and me. On the way to the church, I spotted a whole bunch of Shaggy Manes.

"Can we stop on the way home?" I asked Lamar since he was our driver.

"Sure."

"Mike won't even try it. Would you like to try it, Miss Rosie?" I asked.

"I like mushrooms." She paused for just the briefest of a second. "Sure. I'd give it a try."

We cleaned the church and on the way home Lamar stopped for me. I didn't pick them all. You need some to go back to seed. When Lamar pulled out onto the road there was an awful dragging scrapping noise.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Probably a branch," Lamar answered. "I'll pull over when we turn off onto Woods Road."

We didn't have to put up with the noise for long because it wasn't far and when he stopped I jumped out and pulled the branch from the undercarriage and showed it to him. "BOY! For such a little branch he was certainly making a lot of noise!" I said when I jumped back in.

I turned my booty into soup and took a little down to Miss Rosie — and she liked it!

Later, in the early evening, I went looking for my cell phone. "It's gotta be here someplace," I told Mike and he called my phone while I ran around the house listening for it to ring. "I know I had it in the Kipps' car when we went to clean the church," I told Mike. "Maybe it fell out there. Or, we made two stops on the way home. One for mushrooms and one just as we turned onto Woods Road so I could pull a branch out from under Lamar's car."

I called Lamar, "Could you please check your car for my cell phone?" I asked.

"Sure. Hang on. I'll go check," he said. I heard a door open and close. "Here. Talk to Gene while I'm gone."

I'm guessing he set the phone down on the back porch so he wouldn't be out of range of the base and Gene Wilder is their outside cat with crazy hair.

"No. It's not there. Did Gene talk to you?"

"Nope. He did not."

I remembered that you can get on the internet and ping the location of your phone. I did that. It found Mike's phone but wouldn't find mine. You can even send a signal to your phone that will sound for five minutes and will sound even if your phone's on mute. I did that too. But still couldn't find my phone.

"If it's beside the road," I told Mike, "maybe someone ran it over."

We didn't jump in the Jeep and go looking for my phone because it was Friday night, exercise night, and Miss Rosie and I would be leaving for class soon. I'd look for it then. And I hate to admit it but when Lamar brought Rosie up so she could ride with me to class, I checked the back seat of his car for myself. Lamar was right. It wasn't there. We stopped at the end of Woods Road near where I'd pulled the branch out and Rosie used her cell to call mine. We couldn't hear it. We did the same thing where I'd gotten out to hunt mushrooms. We couldn't hear it ring there either. And it wasn't at the church.

"We can call when we leave here," my beautiful Jody suggested, "and we might see the screen light up in the dark."

We stopped at the mushroom place, no phone. Miss Rosie and I get down on Woods Road, she calls my phone and I see it glowing there beside the road! Yay! It worked. I have a protective case on my phone so even if it was run over, it was fine.

My hopes of getting a new computer and a new phone all on the same day were dashed to pieces! I'm not sad about it though.

One more thing before I update you on the bridge work this week.

The humaditaty err humidity level is such in my house that my envelopes sealed themselves.

Stick it in the freezer for several hours, the internet said. Slid an opener under the flap and it'll open right up, it said.

I tried it. I left my envelope in the freezer all day. The internet lied to me.

The bridge.

When the weather was nice, Mike and I had things to do. When it was bad we didn't want to sit there. Besides, a few times everyone was too busy to talk to us. But here's what I know.

We heard a chainsaw running one day so we went to investigate. Duane was in the bucket of the track hoe and was cutting branches.

"I bet it's so they can get the crane back down to the bridge," Mike speculated.

There's so little room on this side of the bridge that the crane is sitting outside the work zone just a little way up the road.

When Duane came down to help Dawson clear the just-cut branches from the road, he confirmed that was the reason.

"We can lower the boom," Duane said, "but the branches get caught on the gantry." That's the back part that holds the other end of the cables.

One day we saw they had put rails up around the center part of the bridge.

"It's to put in the diaphragm," Duane told us.

"Diaphragm?" I questioned.

"It ties all the beams together," he explained.

We got lucky one afternoon because Brian was there and he came to talk with us.

"The diaphragm is there to keep the beams from spreading, but by the time you pour the deck on there and it's tied to the rebar, how could they ever spread?" Mike asked.

"It shouldn't. The deck steel is tied to the diaphragm steel and the diaphragm steel is tied, and the bars come out of the pile caps. Everything is tied together. This design is called Integral Abutment. And this bridge is made so the whole thing moves together. That's why we build a lot of these. This design has been around... maybe ten years. It's cheap and it's quick," Brian explained

There are three diaphragms on this bridge. One on each end and the center one.

The side walls are called parapets. There's going to be a drip notch to keep the water from going down to the beams. Deck pans is slang for SIP forms (Stay In Place forms).

"What's the strip for that Fuzzy's putting on?" I asked.

"It's a chamfer strip. See, any exposed edge has to have a chamfer strip on it. We can't have any ninety-degree edges. They don't want that because it's a weak spot. Where if you chamfer it it's a little stronger, looks nicer, and isn't as apt to chip."

Gary, in the picture with Fuzzy, is putting grease on the bolts so they can take them back out of the concrete.
We sat there talking with Brian for quite a while as we watched the guys work. Fuzzy came along and made marks all down the form then Joe came along with a template and drilled holes.

"What's Joe drilling holes for?" I wanted to know.