Concert at Memorial Church Harvard Sunday 2/16/14 6:00pm

From Matthew Hall comes word of a lovely concert this weekend, the first weekend of School Vacation week here in MA.  That’s important for those of you who, like us, work in the service industry.

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The dual basket idea worked, apparently

When we decided to put a second basket on top of the upright freezer as a cat bed, we had hoped that eventually the cats would be able to use them at the same time.  And so they have.

Yesterday, as I was finally finishing up the major kitchen cleaning and reorganization project I mentioned earlier, I put out the jar that holds cat treat and stocked it.  That got someone’s attention.

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Today in Equality

With the opening of the Sochi Olympic games on Friday there are all sorts of things going on right now to remind us that the world is full of both hateful bigots (I’m looking at you, Putin) and wonderful people (Canada, Scotland, that would be you.)

This is what has popped up in the latter category in my various news feeds today.  Enjoy.

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Today is Four Chaplains Day

On February 3rd, 1943, a small convoy named SG-19 was making its way across the Atlantic to Greenland from New York.  It consisted of the United States Army Transport Dorchester and two smaller merchant vessels, the SS Lutz and the SS Biscaya, escorted by three Coast Guard cutters: Tampa, Escanaba and Comanche.  Somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland at about 12:55 AM that morning, a German submarine torpedoed the Dorchester, knocking out her power as well as opening up her hull to the sea.  Below decks were hundreds of young American servicemen, many of them on their first ocean voyage.  They had been instructed to leave their life preservers on in case of attack, but the heat of the ship’s boilers and engines led many of them to take the jackets off.  And with the loss of power they were all suddenly in the dark.

Among the personnel on board were four Army Chaplains, all First Lieutenants: George Fox (a Methodist);  Alexander Goode (Reform-Rabbi); Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed);  and John Washington (a Roman Catholic priest).  The four had become fast friends at the Army Chaplains School on the Harvard University campus, right here in Cambridge.

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Mild winter day

Today has not been beautiful per se, but it has been quite mild.  The temperature reached about 50 degrees today, mild enough that I started a project that needed to be done outside.  We have some old cat litter bins that I have cleaned out and cleaned up for using as storage containers in the kitchen.  But obviously we don’t want them looking like old cat litter bins, so I got some of the spray paint that sticks to plastic.  A nice navy blue that would match our kitchen seemed like a good choice, and so I waited for a day with decent weather so I could spray.  Today seemed like the day.  So I painted and then set everything out on newspaper in the back yard to dry.

Then it started to rain.  The forecast said there was a 20% chance, and I guess the roll of the dice was just so.  I hope the paint job isn’t totally ruined.

-Geoff