4th of July Weekend Style. . .

Caught up outside (all day) yesterday after about two weeks of heavy rains, which prevented much in the way of yardwork. The lawn is finally bouncing back after several hasty, ragged wet cuts.

Today will see yours truly putting down new mulch among other things. And preparing our annual 4th of July dinner with a twist of Central North Carolina where my family hails from originally: pork BBQ, red slaw, and hush puppies. We also drink iced tea that has been steeped with mint from our back yard, sweetened of course.

The pork shoulder needs to cook over indirect heat on a grill outside for six hours or more, so it's an all day affair monitoring progress, feeding charcoal briquets to the glowing coals, and basting with an apple cider vinegar-course ground black pepper mix. I usually do this in and around other tasks like chopping and mixing the slaw along with yardwork outside.

Delicious food, but not kind to the waistline! So, we do this just a few times a summer and freeze some of the meat to enjoy an easy meal or two later once the weather cools in October and November.

Leftover red slaw, thanks to the white vinegar and salt, keeps very well in a glass jar for months in the back of the 'fridge. I still tease The Grand Duchess about some that we had to throw out in cleaning the kitchen before our move from Illinois to Michigan in June 2015.

Anyway, if rain does not throw a huge fly in the ointment, the screened back porch (and wood trim on the entire house) will be repainted/restained next week, and we can finally put our porch furniture outside for bug free evenings after dinners well into September. The joys of home maintenance.

-- Heinz-Ulrich

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Up North Style. . .

Bad Dad makes a friend. YMP and Bad Dad on the shores of Lake Michigan. Or was that Crystal Lake? The Grand Duchess takes a selfie in her kayak. How NOT to impress the girls sunning themselves along the river. YMP and Bad Dad kayaking on the Platte River headed toward Loon Lake. J ust back from a week in Northern Michigan in a charming and spacious house on the banks of the Betsie River outside of Thompsonville. A largely pleasant seven days despite some challenging episodes with the Young Master, who has picked up some very questionable habits and language from his friends in the 8th Grade during the school year just ended. But otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves and contemplated remaining for a few days longer since the house was available. In the end, we decided to return home as planned originally since neither my wife, nor I wanted to spend the remaining days chained to our computers in Zoom meetings from our vacation destination. I actually managed to leave the laptop and ip

Mid-June Thursday Style. . .

A nother pretty typical variation on the theme for late spring, summer, and very early fall. I'm a huge fan of Madras and have several such shirts in the seasonal rotation. Lightweight, exceedingly comfortable, and even dressy when pressed and tucked in, which is the usual way of things here at Totleigh in the Wold. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd still rather be skiing the trails in the upper half of "The Mitten" (of Michigan), in the Upper Peninsula, or Ontario. But summers ain't so bad either, and I'd look pretty funny walking around in cross-country ski attire during June. -- Heinz-Ulrich

A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode. However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific. I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and

Classic Style

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