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......Piccalilli Pie: The Mystery Plant
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2011/07/mystery-plant.html
Tuesday, July 19, 2011. Seeing as this chilly, wet summer of ours, marked by leaden skies and head colds, is not exactly inspiring the garden to flourish or the gardener to hoe/weed/plant/dig/mulch, I figured I'd finally get around to a story I meant to write about last year: the case of the Mystery Plant. Then I got a little concerned. This thing just kept growing taller and more vigorous looking, putting me in mind of Audrey from "Little Shop of Horrors." So I did what anybody would do when fac...Well,...
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......Piccalilli Pie: Tuesday, April 28, 2015
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015_04_28_archive.html
Tuesday, April 28, 2015. Training Horses, Now and Then. Let me make it clear from the start that I am not talking about me. Training horses. Now, then, or ever. I am not a horse trainer, nor do I play one on TV. I just read a lot about horses, and watch the Resident Teen as she rides and works with horses, and admire the trainers who've worked with her and her horse. They are part of a series called "Professor Beery's Illustrated Course in Horse Training." A quick Googling on the topic doesn't provid...
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......Piccalilli Pie: Friday, March 27, 2015
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015_03_27_archive.html
Friday, March 27, 2015. Plum-Blossom Snowfall, Then Spring. While friends and relatives back east were being pummeled by snow, we were enduring a deluge of plum-blossom petals drifting to the ground. And that was before Spring officially arrived last weekend. It was supposed to pour both days, but Saturday proved to be bright and warm, and so we were able to get out in the garden and start prepping it for the growing season. Barrels filled with soil in the sunny side yard. At night we can hear the spring...
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......Piccalilli Pie: Tuesday, May 19, 2015
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015_05_19_archive.html
Tuesday, May 19, 2015. Soft Spring Evenings with "Apricot Sky" by Ruby Ferguson. In the early 1970s my uncle delivered a stack of books to me. He'd picked them up on a trip to Ireland and assumed, quite rightly, that his horse-crazy niece would love a series of books about a girl her age who acquires first one pony, then a second, and tumbles into a series of misadventures with them. More biographical information can be found here. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to find these books, at least not in a Pacif...
piccalillipie.com
......Piccalilli Pie: Training Horses, Now and Then
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015/04/training-horses-now-and-then.html
Tuesday, April 28, 2015. Training Horses, Now and Then. Let me make it clear from the start that I am not talking about me. Training horses. Now, then, or ever. I am not a horse trainer, nor do I play one on TV. I just read a lot about horses, and watch the Resident Teen as she rides and works with horses, and admire the trainers who've worked with her and her horse. They are part of a series called "Professor Beery's Illustrated Course in Horse Training." A quick Googling on the topic doesn't provid...
piccalillipie.com
......Piccalilli Pie: Thursday, June 18, 2015
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015_06_18_archive.html
Thursday, June 18, 2015. The Fifth Father's Day. My dad was never without a stack of books to read. He consumed a steady supply of books about history, mathematics, and airplanes (he was an aerodynamics engineer) and also would fasten on to subjects that he'd pursue for months on end. Among the last ones were the Peloponnesian war and the building of the Panama Canal. We didn't want to ask them point-blank if they just wanted boxes and boxes of books, so I set out to catalog the entire collection and gat...
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......Piccalilli Pie: Soft Spring Evenings with "Apricot Sky" by Ruby Ferguson
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015/05/apricot-sky-by-ruby-ferguson-pony-free.html
Tuesday, May 19, 2015. Soft Spring Evenings with "Apricot Sky" by Ruby Ferguson. In the early 1970s my uncle delivered a stack of books to me. He'd picked them up on a trip to Ireland and assumed, quite rightly, that his horse-crazy niece would love a series of books about a girl her age who acquires first one pony, then a second, and tumbles into a series of misadventures with them. More biographical information can be found here. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to find these books, at least not in a Pacif...
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......Piccalilli Pie: Friday, March 20, 2015
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015_03_20_archive.html
Friday, March 20, 2015. Odd Things People Say to Writers. Even pre-Internet, cats. (Image courtesy Graphics Fairy). A few weeks ago a humor piece. About what it'd be like if strangers spoke to everybody the way they often speak to writers was making the rounds, eliciting chuckles, sighs, and rueful self-recognition along the way. It made me think of some of the odd things people have said to me over the years as I've pursued my freelance-writing career. Scene: college cafeteria, freshman year. Hands pape...
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......Piccalilli Pie: Boy Howdy, Plum Pandowdy!
http://www.piccalillipie.com/2015/07/boy-howdy-plum-pandowdy.html
Thursday, July 23, 2015. Boy Howdy, Plum Pandowdy! It's been so hot around here that one of our fans finally conked out from exhaustion and was replaced with three new ones. The Pacific Northwest spent June and July smashing high-temperature records (13 days with temperatures of 80 degrees or warmer in June.8 days of 85 in June.plenty of 90 days.new record high recorded in Walla Walla on June 28 of 113 degrees.that sort of thing). For one thing, our tree's branches are up very high, and we don't have the...