As a youth...

...I grew up in a small town proximate to the Long Corner of Howard County. My father knew a guy who was a practical joker and one year said wag sent my father a post card saying that he was vacationing in Ellicott City. The gag being, of course, that no one would vacation there and it was not even 20 miles from where we lived.

This isn't the actual post card as this picture was taken sometime in the late '60s or early '70s. But it clearly illustrates the slope of the town, and what the place looked like in better days.

In the late 1980s I was looking to buy a house in Howard county and Ellicott City was one of the places I looked. Saw a couple of nice properties, but ultimately ended up moving to a planned community built by Rouse nearby.

Ellicott City has been on the news lately, I don't have access to broadcast television so I didn't see the actual news reports but I found some videos on YouTube. Here is what the place looks like now:

Link.

I just checked my front yard and while there is some water rushing through the ditch my cars are not being swept away. For that I am thankful.

This evening's sunset - it has stopped raining for the moment.

Not geographically correct but it is SRV.

M R Flars

So there I was passin' by Mayella's front yard and I saw her breakin' up a chifforobe, so I stopped to help her. Whist there I took pictures of her flars:

Editor's notes: Her name is not really Mayella, the piece of furniture was a dresser not a chifforobe, the word chifforobe is spelled variously with an "o", an "e" or an "a" as the sixth letter, said dresser was already busted up when I got there and I managed to salvage two corner columns and two claw feet from it which I delivered to a guy who uses found objects to make "art", and the rest of the dresser scraps along with a quarter ton of red oak caught fire nicely once drenched in gasoline.

I also burned up a big ol' mess of bamboo that I had cut down back in February. I figured that the fire would consume the combustibles then the rain would put it out before the whole neighborhood caught fire. So far, so good.

I saw a goldfinch in my backyard today - that is only the second one I have seen here in seven years. I like goldfinches which, along with bluebirds, I can identify with relative ease. Speaking of bluebirds there are now two eggs in my bluebird house, so mama bluebird is coming through in the clutch.

Mockingbirds winter-over here, so it's not unusual to see two thousand of them at once.

Writer's note: there is no editor.

Do not get caught.