This morning, I'm working on book reviews for my mid-month Library Journal reference short-takes column. I'm six down and two to go for this month's batch.
This past weekend, we've begun the process of making our annual garden. Michael turned over the soil with the Kubota, and it's lying in beautiful black mounds in the back. Two weekends in a row before that, we emptied manure out the bed of his brother's truck. (Um, poo, sadly, is not something I can haul in my SUV, despite its rather capacious interior space. Heh. Yeah. Poo doesn't hose out of carpet all that well.)
When we get back from Easter, we'll be tilling and thinking about planting. I say thinking because in the "holler" here, we are at least 10 days behind other areas in the region, when it comes to the growing season. We can get damaging frost as late as mid-May.
Speaking of hollers, please check out this blogger: Hillbilly Savants. Interesting stuff, and a window onto what's going on in Appalachia.
We, by comparison, are in the northern panhandle: that delightful six-mile wide strip of WV lying between Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio. And honestly, even though I have a WV Driver's License, and we pay WV taxes, people "down hoopie" as my mother-in-law says (translation: any location past Wheeling) do not consider us true West Virginians. We are about as close to Yankees as it gets. We, in Weirton, are a suburb of Pittsburgh. (And yes, you read that correctly. They call us Yankees. I know, I know. The civil war thing. *shrugging* It doesn't make sense to me either, but there it is.)*
*I'm not originally from WV, but from central PA...very near a little place called Dover. Sound familiar? Yes, that Dover. I didn't go to Dover School District. But thanks in part to that landmark battle, I got the idea for "Evolution" in American Soma.
Now, back to work here.....
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