When I first bought my house 20 years ago, I scampered up and down the ladder onto the roof as frequently as needed to clean the gutters. One day I narrowly avoided a serious accident that made me realize I needed to get off the roof forever.
My mom, Helen Lucille Cadore Maher, was a hoot. She didn't intend to be funny, which made her even funnier. And from early on in her life she tended to say what she thought, without first running it through her logic or etiquette filters.
You've decided to adopt a cat--congratulations! Cats are wonderful companions, and they have a wide range of personalities, so it's not hard to find one who's just right for you. To do that, though, you have to ask yourself a few questions to identify what you really want in your feline friend.
When I was growing up, we did Thanksgiving the hard way. No store-bought pies, no Stove Top stuffing, and certainly no restaurants. Nope, we did a lot of it from scratch, though I'm sure both of my grandmothers, who did their cooking in the first half of the 20th century, would have thought we had...
I am a country gardener. I live several miles from town on the high plains, in an area where there's no such thing as a fenced yard. Sixty-foot ponderosa pines grow thickly on and around my property. Wildlife abounds--black bears, white-tailed deer, coyotes, foxes, squirrels, rabbits. Oh, and...