Blog de Puree

Sunday stated innocently enough. After I hearty breakfast, we went to Lowe’s. When we left Lowe’s, our car was weighed down with two plastic shelving systems, shutters to replace the broken blinds in the bathroom and thin plastic threshold strips to be used in the mudroom.
Once we arrived home from the market, my day consisted [...]

In today’s modern online world, buzzwords and acronyms abound. The military no longer rules the roost for great euphemisms, slang and odd letter designations.
A quick search of the ‘Net will bring up great terms such as life-hacking, crowd-sourcing and erg-blogging. These terms evoke activities of the participant in a unique genre of interest. Here are [...]

Spoiler alert! Do not continue to read this post if you have not finished reading the final Harry Potter book!
Spoiler alert! Do not continue to read this post if you have not finished reading the final Harry Potter book!
Spoiler alert! Do not continue to read this post if you have not finished reading the final [...]

Randye and I were up late this past Saturday night viewing the Perseid meteor shower. Even though this yearly astronomical event peaks on Sunday night, weather forecasts are predicting cloudiness and thunderstorms in our area, so we decided to catch it a day earlier. And boy, was it worth it!
For a prime viewing location, we [...]

Not one to pass up a salty good story involving local nautical history, I want to share this news item about Graham McKay, a 1997 Amesbury High School graduate.
The Newburyport Daily News reports that McKay, studying marine archaeology at the University of Bristol, England, is investigating the ruins of a ship that is half submerged [...]

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I do have opinions. One of those being that humanity needs to be more sensitive to its surroundings. We have a long way to go before we achieve a symbiosis with the planet, as every other species on Earth seems to have done. It’s pretty sad, really.
Two recent [...]

Two months after making my original order for 25 boxwood shrubs with Lowes, they finally arrived. It was the wrong cultivar and size, but as it is August, with the growing season closing fast and the fact that this variety is still evergreen in our particular zone, I threw up my hands and bought them [...]

Saturday was a busy day on the home improvement front. Randye and I feverishly worked on a myriad of small projects that needed our attention. Here’s the list:

Install a final shelf in master bedroom closet. With some of the scrap wood left from the closet refurb a few weeks back, we crafted supports and a [...]

Dude, email is so out!
Well it is according to today’s generation of Internet teens. Young under-twenty entrepreneurs who were interviewed for a recent article on CNET, said email is better suited for business purposes or communicating with older generations.
Small consolation for those of us who use email on a daily basis, and whose gnarled and [...]

It was the summer of 1998 when I first heard of Harry Potter. I was 27.
I was sitting in my car in the parking area for the Cygnet Rowing club in Newton waiting for my rowing partner one sunny Saturday morning, when an NPR radio journalist was giving his take on the Potter universe with [...]