Randy | February 17, 2020
On the day I graduated from high school in 1975, my plans for postsecondary education were directed toward a career in Aerospace Engineering. It would be four years before I came to realize how the end of hostilities in a conflict half a world away had changed all that before it even left the […]
Randy | February 2, 2020
So here we stand, Goode Reader, at a point from which to reflect upon what happened to bring us here. For this to make any kind of sense demands that you must have first read each of the previous five episodes, so on the chance your first landing here is this article today, links to […]
Randy | January 20, 2020
“For this to be experienced I needed to be exactly where and when I was. So simple and yet so profound.” ~ Moments of Magick Welcome back Goode Reader, to this second chapter in my chronicles of camping trips spanning 20 odd years, some more odd than others, to Covey Island, Nova Scotia. The first […]
Randy | January 19, 2020
Covey Island is 108 acres of Crown land located in the mouth of Mahone Bay, north of the shire town of Lunenburg, at 44.421932N, 64.30451W. A history of the island from the earliest colonization of Lunenburg and its environs was compiled by Linda G. Layton and published by the Mahone Islands Conservation Association on 24 […]
Randy | December 31, 2019
On the Long Winter’s Night of 29 December 2017 I proclaimed this morale booster. The Fire Without and the Fire Within By LFM It’s only just started, but coming to pass Is a Winter as cold as a well digger’s ass. Yet it’s still not extreme if the truth’s to be told, For it used […]
Randy | December 28, 2019
A Long Winter’s Night is the perfect time for telling stories around the fire, and often those take a reflective bent on where things are, how they got here, and where they’re going in that handbasket. We’re doing that tonight to the chagrin of those younger members of the assemblage who suffer the stories of […]
Randy | December 27, 2019
Point of Vantage By LFM The higher that you climb a Tree, The thinner are the branches, And he who keeps ascending finds The slimmer grow his chances. Climbing Trees will teach a lad The need for solid roots, The virtues of a Trusty branch For questing hands and boots. A Tree will offer refuge […]
Randy | December 24, 2019
I have written here a number of times of Krampus, the dark side of the good cop, bad cop equation that is the reality of the visit from St. Nicholas, predominantly blamed on Austrian Christmas tradition. Most particularly, on this day in 2015, I presented A Krampus Carol, in which I said in part — […]
Randy | December 23, 2019
When I was growing up in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, long before the cultivation of Christmas Trees as agricultural operations had become a major industry, my Father had innumerable friends and customers who owned woodland we were granted freedom to harvest our annual Balsam Fir from. It was a big deal because my Father had high […]
Randy | December 22, 2019
Welcome back to the hearth Goode Reader, and this incarnation of A Long Winter’s Night. The Winter Solstice stole upon us at 12:19 Atlantic Time this morning and today offers 14 minutes short of 7 hours less daylight than at the occasion of the Summer Solstice in June. The bittersweet news is that it all gets […]