I revamped the Long Branch Mosaics site today. Same content – I just changed the way it was organized and changed some text. It’s more of an all-over approach than the blog theme I was previously using.
Tuffy P and I started making mosaics over a decade ago, initially to enhance our own home. At some point along the way we started getting requests for commissions. Now we do all kinds of mosaic work including some large and complex projects. I hope you enjoy the new site.
The weatherman has called for a night and day of rain around here beginning at around midnight. Let’s see if we can wish that storm away. Here’s Jim Kweskin and Meredith Axelrod performing Blue Skies.
This song was written by Irving Berlin in 1926 and it keeps on giving.
The second story in my new Work suite of stories is now up. It’s called Art Job.
Tuffy P and I were just out walking the partners. I don’t know exactly what we were talking about as we got back to the house but it had to do with strong women, and from somewhere deep in her memory banks, Tuffy P came out with a snippet of lyrics….from a tune we were both familiar with back in the 80s. When we got in I checked the YouTube – because the YouTube contains just about everything, and sure enough it was there.
Here’s Phranc live from 1986, performing Amazons.
It’s not every day I share fife and drum music around this joint. I was thinking about this tune though and when I surfed around the YouTube looking for versions of it, this one stood out.
What a beautiful spring day, the kind of day you want to put the top down and go cruisin’ down the highway. Since we don’t have a convertible, Tuffy P started doing some garden clean-up, while I installed a rain-water collector out back.
We decided to move the grizzly (this is the first grizzly….we made another one recently, which is in Paris Ontario) to the front yard this year. It makes sense with the canoe garden, and explains why the paddlers have abandoned their canoe. 
It still looks a little stark out front but we’re going to see peonies and hostas and various other plants come up around the bear and in the canoe.
The Amanita chipbowlius mushrooms have come up already. 
I spotted a group of them out front, It looks like two different chipbowlius species.
It’s been a hard winter for cowboy Tom but he and his trusty horse are off to the spring round-up. 
Sgt. Renfrew is guarding the imagination station. He has his eye on the rare Yerex white spider which has taken up residence.
The birds have been enjoying their suet. When that is gone, we’d like to fill that cage with a poem – we’re on the look-out for someone who would like to create a waterproof poem for the back garden.
Here’s some Robert Gordon and Link Wray for a Saturday morning…
The Way I Walk
You don’t hear a lot of rock ‘n’ roll these days, do you?
I remember buying my copy of their second record, Fresh Fish Special. That was in the late 70s when records were made of vinyl and we kept them in stacked up milk crates. Red Hot. Dangerous.
For the guitar pickers out there….here’s Pat Donohue
I grew up in a fishing family. I never thought much about it. It was just what we did, and since my big brother and my dad loved to do it, I loved it too. I remember the first day my father took me to a trout stream and let me fish with my own rod. I caught a brook trout and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. In my mind it was huge. I think that trip with my dad and that trout sealed my love of rivers and respect for nature for my whole life. Many years later, I figured out where that little stream was by pinning together bits and pieces of my memory. I went back there of course. I’m sure I found the same spot on the same little stream where I caught my first trout. Looking at the stream all those years later, my first trout must have been all of 9 inches, if that – but it was a giant to me.
Our old photo albums are full of pictures like this one, of various family members with a brace of trout. I’ve been exchanging emails about this photo with my brother. I thought it was me at first but then I thought maybe it was him. He’s not certain if it is either of us, but I’m pretty sure it is. Neither of us know where we were, who took the photo or what stream the trout came from. Back in those days we caught trout for the table, and these would have made a fine meal.
It looks like a fly rod in the photo, but I’d bet dollars to donuts the trout were caught on worms. Although my father could cast a fly rod and I often saw him use one, he liked to use it for worm fishing. In his heart he was an unrepentant bank-napping bait plonker and a good one too. I loved fishing with him more than anything, and if my brother was there too, even better.
UPDATE: My sister confirmed it’s me in the photo, and she thinks it’s possible she was the photographer, but none of us know where those fine trout were caught. I was born in 1960 so it was taken sometime in the mid-60s.
Now that I’ve completed the 17 short-short stories which make up the serial I call The Lazy Allen Stories, I’ve decided to continue to write really short stories.
The new stories – called Work – will share neither a group of characters nor a story-line. All of them, though, will have something to do with working for a living.
I should make it clear that these are works of fiction and not stories about any actual jobs I’ve worked nor any actual humans I might have worked with.
The first of these stories is called Another Blue Monday. I hope you enjoy it.
27th Street 