Recent Content by NY cat man

I don't know if I have a frivolous bone in my body, but if you want to talk extravagant, then a garage large enough that I can work without having to move everything off to the corners to make room.

Sometimes it does; depending on how much they eat.

We knew him quite well, as he was our landlord for 24 years prior to buying our house. We lived upstairs, while he and his (late) wife lived downstairs. He always told us that our rent paid the property taxes, which is why it was so relatively cheap. Because of his and his wife's health issues...

Michele and I went to a local steak house with her sister and sister's boyfriend, who just passed two weeks ago at age 87.

Speaking of birds, I was taking advantage of some sunshine to work in the back yard when I noticed a starling fluttering around the eave at a corner of the house. I got out a ladder to investigate, and found a gap where the guard didn't completely cover the gutter. Lifting it up, I found a nest...

You mean thistles? Every so often one will pop up here, and yeah, they can get big and nasty.

The latest on Grumpy, the local feral: After getting his food, both wet and dry, he's sleeping it off in the back flower bed.

All of our five current cats were street ferals that we socialized, then brought inside. One of them was, by the vet's estimation, about 4 years old when she made the transition; the rest were between 4 and 6 months old. None have been outside since, and in the case of the oldest, that is 12...

I don't put anything on our lawn. For weeds like dandelions, I have one of those tools for cutting the taproot and popping the plant out. Crabgrass I just yank out by the roots. We have a lot of clover, and the bees swarm all over it. In fact, when we had that warm spell, and the dwarf crocus...

My 'baby' sister. As the youngest of seven kids, she always was able to get away with things that would get any of the rest of us clobbered. As an adult, she got a very well-paying government job, and yet because of her extravagant spending ways, twice declared bankruptcy. What really did it...

One of our neighbors has a lawn service do hers, and she also has the lawn sprayed once a month. The downside is that I have noticed a significant dropoff in the number of butterflies since that was started. Whether the two are connected, I can't say for sure. I used to have lots of Monarchs and...

Way back when I was a kid- we're talking early '50s- our parents got an electric lawn mower. The housing was cast aluminum, and looked like a UFO from some sci-fi movie, and the cord weighed almost as much as I did. I don't remember how many patches of tape were on it from my older brother...

Prior to this mower, my exposure to cordless tools has been with a couple of Milwaukee 18 volt drill/drivers. The only difference between them is that one has a hammer drill feature for drilling concrete or stone, but the same battery works in both of them. My trimmer/edger/tiller/leaf blower...

When I was a kid, blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up at least twice- cowboy style- was the 'cool' look, but in the '50s and early '60s, cool was a relative thing.

I was perfectly fine with our gas mower- it's only four years old and runs well, but Michele is concerned that if something happens to me, she won't be able to operate it, especially the starting part. This one takes two 40 volt batteries, and on our small lot, it only drains one of them by...