THIS OH-SO-THIN LAYER OF ICE THAT I SO PRECARIOUSLY NOW WALK

 DARK SNOW-LADEN CLOUDS OVER LAKE HURON AT GODERICH'S ROTARY COVE

Another cold grey day but hey, its January in southern Ontario, Canada.  Having more 'paperwork' stuff to do in Goderich I loaded up the Pheebs and off we went with a few snow flurries in the air.  Coffee to go at McDonalds, down to the harbor, 'snap-snap' went the camera, and back up the hill into town to attend to the paperwork stuff.  The Subaru was in both Kelly's and my name and in order to get the auto insurance info adjusted I first had to go to 'Service Ontario' and have the car ownership changed showing me as the sole owner of the car.  Expecting a line-up, imagine my surprise and delight when I walked in and went straightaway to the counter.  Yes it's true...small miracles can happen.  The nice lady there had everything wrapped up in less than ten minutes.  With the new amended ownership in hand, I drove a couple blocks to our Auto/Home Insurance place whereupon another nice lady did all the necessary insurance paperwork and sent me on my way.  A stop at Walmart for some celery and a green banana and Pheebs and I headed for home.  Roads were semi-snow-covered with a bit of ground drifting, but no problem.

  ON NARROWER SECONDARY ROADS I ALWAYS PULL OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND STOP WHEN I SEE A SNOWPLOW COMING....IT MAKES IT MUCH EASIER ON THE SNOWPLOW DRIVERS' ALREADY FRAZZLED NERVES

 THE SPRUCEGLEN AND THE TIM S DOOL ARE TIED UP STERN TO STERN IN GODERICH'S HARBOR FOR THE WINTER

 THE SUPERSTRUCTURE OF THE ALGOMA INTREPID CAN BE SEEN BEHIND THE BEACH HOUSE AT ST. CHRISTOPHERS BEACH

 ALWAYS NICE TO SEE A SPLASH OF COLOR ALONG THE WAY

I had not clicked on our 'online' bank account since last week's bank nightmare and the reason I hadn't was simply that I was afraid to click on the site and be confronted with another white security sign again meaning I was locked out of the site.  I would then be head first into another screaming nightmare situation.  Well, knowing I had to take the plunge sooner or later I steeled my nerves as best I could and 'click'.  An immediate big sigh of relief when no white screen security issue popped up.  But there was that darn 'verification code' thing again and that is what had started the nightmare off last week when I didn't know how to find that code on the iPhone.  However, luck was on my side when I remembered a lady at the bank last week showing me where to find that code number.  In fact, I already had the iPhone turned on and the page open where it should land.  And, land it did and I was nervously able to punch the right numbers in using my computer's keyboard.  'Walla' there was the open bank account for me to see.  If I would have had tears they would have been tears of joy, unlike last week's tears of utter frustration.  Now, this 80-year-old is not naive enough to think that everything will be honky dory and clear sailing from here because my wise old 80 year old self with its decades of experience knows for certain that it will not!!  But, at least for today, I was able to take one small baby step forward on this oh-so-thin layer of ice that I so precariously now walk.

 A WEE BIT OF GROUND DRIFTING ON THE WAY HOME

 IT'S NOT OFTEN ONE SEES A TRAIN CROSSING PORTERS HILL ROAD

 THE SNOW-COVERED ROADS WERE SANDED AND SALTED

 THE ROAD LOOKS LIKE A MERE TRAIL THROUGH THE FOREST

A Blast From Our Past:)) Fifteen years ago on January 8th while boondocked near Borrego Springs, California we decided to head out in the direction of San Diego for a morning hike (we always did our hikes in the morning) at a place called Mountain Canyon Campground 40 miles short of San Diego.  By the end of the day, one of us had an injury....and it wasn't me.  Mountain Palm Canyon Hike

Al's Music Box:)) Puttin' On The Ritz by Taco is a song written by Irving Berlin. He wrote it in May 1927 and first published it on December 2, 1929.  In 1982, singer Taco released a synth-pop cover version of "Puttin' On the Ritz" as a single from his album After Eight, released in Europe on Polydor and by RCA in the US. The single was a global hit, reaching No. 1 on Cash Box as well as No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making Irving Berlin, then 95, the oldest ever living songwriter to have one of his compositions enter the top ten.  It was certified gold by the RIAA for selling over one million copies.  It was Taco's only hit in the United States. This version of the song was ranked No. 53 in VH1's 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the 80s.

GROANER'S CORNER:(( A man was driving down the road. He passed a traffic camera and saw it flash.  Astounded that he had been caught speeding when he was under the speed limit, he turned around and, going even slower, he passed by the camera.  Again, he saw it flash. He couldn't believe it! So he turned and, going at a snail's pace, he passed the camera.  AGAIN, he saw the camera flash. He guessed it must have a fault, and home he went.  Four weeks later he received 3 traffic fines in the mail, all for not wearing a seatbelt.

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Q. Did you hear about the new sushi bar that caters exclusively to lawyers?

A. It's called, Sosumi.

- I saw an Apple store get robbed.  I was an iWitness

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An old man goes to the Wizard to ask him if he can remove a "Curse" he has been living with for the last 40 years.  The Wizard says "maybe, but you will have to tell me the exact words that were used to put the curse on you."  The old man says without hesitation "'I now pronounce you man and wife'".

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A little boy was attending his first wedding. After the service, his cousin asked him, "How many women can a man marry?"  "Sixteen," the boy responded.  His cousin was amazed that he knew the answer so quickly. "How do you know that?"  "Easy," the little boy said.
"All you have to do is add it up like the Preacher said: 4 better, 4 worse, 4 richer, 4 poorer."

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Al's Doggy World

Meanings::

Kellys Corner

IN DOUGLAS ARIZON'S HISTORIC GADSDEN HOTEL

 A MORNING WATER BREAK IN THE SONORAN DESERT NEAR HICKIWAN TRAILS RV PARK IN WHY, ARIZONA

IN UTAH'S ARCHES NATIONAL PARK ON ONE OF OUR MANY ROCK SCRAMBLES

Al's Art Gallery

A LITTLE GNOME PASSING THROUGH IN THE NIGHT

BAYFIELD'S PIERS ARE BEGINNING TO ICE OVER

With our thermometer registering only 16F it was so tempting to just stay in our warm and cozy house.  Why go out in that cold if one does not need to do so.  Good question I thought, so of course out the door Pheebs and I went and headed off into Bayfield.  I was surprised to see patches of blue sky overhead.  It was a routine drive down around the beach and harbor area then up through the village back to the highway, made a left turn, and headed north out of town.  Hadn't seen Richard and Gayle for a bit so I popped into their place for nearly an hour for a little chin wag.  Pheebs too but her's was more of a tail wag.  They're hanging in there like the rest of us at this age and stage of life.  We were back home before noon and if yesterday was a productive day, today was the opposite. Yesterday's enthusiastic motivation had got up and left.  Probably a little Gnome passing through in the night snatched it away from me.  Since Kelly's passing nearly a month ago I have not opened my Kindle book once and read anything.  Until today, that is as I snuggled deep into my sunroom recliner.  The last time I had opened my Kindle was sitting at Kelly's bedside two days before she passed away.  I sat quietly reading that morning as she slept.  Today, I sat quietly reading until I slept.

DID YOU NOTICE THE LADY IN WHITE?

 THE LADY IN WHITE WALKS OUT ALONG THE SOUTH PIER

 ICE FORMATIONS ALONG THE SIDE OF THE SOUTH PIER

 THE DEEP  ICY BLUE COLD WATERS OF LAKE HURON MAY SOON BE COVERED IN ICE AND SNOW FOR AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE

Based on the 'Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program, I haven't posted my 'Blogger's Anonymous' 12-step program for a while.  I wrote this back on January 15th of 2011.  ‘Bloggers Anonymous’

Step One:  "We admitted we were powerless over Blogging - that our free time has become unmanageable."

Step Two:  "Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to a simpler time before computers."

Step Three:  "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of our Spouses as we understand them."

Step Four:  "Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our Blogger thoughts & Blog archives."

Step Five:   "Admitted to our Spouses, to ourselves, & to another Blogger person the exact nature of our blogging woes."

Step Six:  "Were entirely ready to have our Spouse remove all nasty posts from our Blogs."

Step Seven:  "Humbly asked Her/Him to remove our shortcomings, our spell checkers, & our publish buttons"

Step Eight:  "Made a list of all fellow Bloggers we had commented to, and became willing to make amends to them all."

Step Nine:  "Made direct amends to such Bloggers wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them, their Blogs, or their Blog followers ."

Step Ten:  "Continued to take personal written inventory and when we were wrong promptly didn't blog about it."

Step Eleven:  "Sought through humbleness and fear to improve our conscious contact with our Spouse as we understood Her/Him, begging only for knowledge of Her/His will for us and maybe our keyboards back to carry that out."

Step Twelve:  "Having had a Blogger's awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to all fellow Bloggers, and to practice these principles in all our restructured Blogging affairs."    10-4!!

Hi, my names AL & I am a Blogger:))

 THE BAYFIELD RIVER IS RE-FREEZING AGAIN

A Blast From Our Past:)) I stumbled across a post I had written back on March 5th, 2016.  We were in the midst of trying to sell our Congress Arizona house at the time.  When we found this property and house, everything was a wreck and nobody had lived there for a while.  Over the next four years, we worked hard at transforming both the inside and outside of that house.  Right off the bat, I  busied myself outside cleaning up the big mess.  All around the house were weeds, long grass, and large patches of hard-packed sandy gravel.  It didn't take me long to do battle with that grass and gravel and get my shovel into the ground.   In this Blast From the Past post, photos show a small section of our big front yard.  What you see in these photos was not what we saw when we decided to buy the house.  Everything you see in the photos with the exception of a couple patches of Prickly Pear Cactus, the Mesquite trees, and two Agaves, I planted myself.  Some of the cactus plants we bought, others were donated by friends and neighbors, and others we dragged home by Kelly and I from the desert.  Being a 'pathway' guy you can see the curvy pathways I laid out.  You will see one photo with a lot of stones edging a cactus bed and every one of those stones Kelly and I carried home from our morning walks in the open desert only a block from our house.  Many mornings we'd have our pockets loaded with stones.  Here's that post...... I Planted Most All The Cactus Myself.  And, when dealing with cactus plants, one always carries a tweezer in one's pocket to pull out the unavoidable cactus thorns embedded in one's hands and fingers.  Many prickly ouchies.

 A COUPLE OF ROADSIDE CHAIRS FOR WEARY WINTER WALKERS TO SIT DOWN UPON FOR A REST

Al's Music Box:)) Diamond Life is the debut studio album by the English band Sade, released in the United Kingdom on 16 July 1984 by Epic Records and in the United States on 27 February 1985 by Portrait Records. After studying fashion design, and later modelling, Sade Adu began backup-singing with British band Pride. During this time Adu and three of the original members of "Pride"—Paul Anthony Cook, Paul Denman and Stuart Matthewman—left the group to form their own band called Sade. After various demos and performances, Sade received interest from record labels and signed to Epic.  Recording for the album began in 1983 at Power Plant Studios in London and took six weeks to complete. The album's content was written by the group Sade and the production was handled by Robin Millar. Fifteen songs were recorded. The album contained a variety of musical elements including soul, jazz and sophisti-pop, mostly with love lyrics. The album spawned four singles, including "Your Love is King and " and "Smooth Operator".  Diamond Life received widespread acclaim from music critics and it was also a commercial success, winning the 1985 Brit Award for Best British Album. The album has been certified multi-platinum in both the UK and America. Diamond Life sold over 10 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the top-selling debut recordings of the era and the best-selling debut album by a British female vocalist, a record that stood for 24 years.  Producer Robin Millar met the band in 1983, and the band members had never worked in a professional studio and only had demos and recordings from the BBC studios and EMI publishing studios. Millar booked a week's worth of studio time and noted that the limitations of recording before computers had an impact upon the sound. "We used a real piano and a Fender Rhodes piano, painstakingly synching them up." They recorded 15 songs, all written by Adu and members of the group, except "Smooth Operator" written exclusively by Adu and Ray St. John.  In a contemporary review, Stephen Holden of The New York Times said Diamond Life "eschews the synthesizers that dominate British pop to make music that resembles a cross between the rock-jazz of Steely Dan and the West Indian-flavored folk-pop of Joan Armatrading. Smoldering Brazilian rhythms blend with terse pop-soul melodies and jazzy harmonies to create a sultry, timeless nightclub ambiance." Rolling Stone called it soul music with "self-possessed sophistication", and described Sade's vocal as "thick and rich".

GROANER'S CORNER:(( The 76-year-old woman walked down the hallway of Clearview Addictions Clinic, searching for the right department. She passed signs for the "Heroin Addiction Department (HAD)," the "Smoking Addiction Department (SAD)" and the "Bingo Addiction Department (BAD)." Then she spotted the department she was looking for: "Facebook Addiction Department (FAD)."  It was the busiest department in the clinic, with about three dozen people filling the waiting room, most of them staring blankly into their Blackberries and iPhones. A middle-aged man with unkempt hair was pacing the room, muttering,"I need to milk my cows. I need to milk my cows."  A twenty-something man was prone on the floor, his face buried in his hands, while a curly-haired woman comforted him.  "Don't worry. It'll be all right."  "I just don't understand it. I thought my update was LOL-worthy, but none of my friends even clicked the 'like' button."  "How long has it been?"  "Almost five minutes. That's like five months in the real world."  The 76-year-old woman waited until her name was called, then followed the receptionist into the office of Alfred Zulu, Facebook Addiction Counselor.  "Please have a seat, Edna," he said with a warm smile. "And tell me how it all started."  "Well, it's all my grandson's fault. He sent me an invitation to join Facebook. I had never heard of Facebook before, but I thought it was something for me, because I usually have my face in a book."  "How soon were you hooked?"  "Faster than you can say 'create a profile.' I found myself on Facebook at least eight times each day -- and more times at night. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night to check it, just in case there was an update from one of my new friends in India . My husband didn't like that. He said that friendship is a precious thing and should never be outsourced."  "What do you like most about Facebook?"  "It makes me feel like I have a life. In the real world, I have only five or six friends, but on Facebook, I have 674. I'm even friends with Juan Carlos Montoya."  "Who's he?"  "I don't know, but he's got 4,000 friends, so he must be famous."  "Facebook has helped you make some connections, I see."  "Oh yes. I've even connected with some of the gals from high school -- I still call them 'gals.' I hadn't heard from some of them in ages, so it was exciting to look at their profiles and figure out who's retired, who's still working, and who's had some work done. I love browsing their photos and reading their updates. I know where they've been on vacation, which movies they've watched, and whether they hang their toilet paper over or under. I've also been playing a game with some of them."  "Let me guess. Farmville?"  "No, Mafia Wars. I'm a Hitman. No one messes with Edna."  "Wouldn't you rather meet some of your friends in person?"  "No, not really. It's so much easier on Facebook. We don't need to gussy ourselves up. We don't need to take baths or wear perfume or use mouthwash. That's the best thing about Facebook -- you can't smell anyone. Everyone is attractive, because everyone has picked a good profile pic. One of the gals is using a profile pic that was taken, I'm pretty certain, during the Eisenhower Administration. "  "What pic are you using?"  "Well, I spent five hours searching for a profile pic, but couldn't find one I really liked. So I decided to visit the local beauty salon."  To make yourself look prettier?"  "No, to take a pic of one of the young ladies there. That's what I'm using."  "Didn't your friends notice that you look different?"  "Some of them did, but I just told them I've been doing lots of yoga."  "When did you realize that your Facebooking might be a problem?"  "I realized it last Sunday night, when I was on Facebook and saw a message on my wall from my husband: He said,'I moved out of the house five days ago. Just thought you should know.'"  "What did you do?"  "What else? I unfriended him of course!"

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Al's Doggy World

Meanings::

Kellys Corner

 IN HER MOM'S KITCHEN IN SPENCERPORT, NEW YORK

 STARGAZING ON A COLD DESERT NIGHT AT THE HICKIWAN TRAILS RV PARK IN WHY, ARIZONA

 MORNING WALK WITH PHEEBS AND CORA ON DARBY WELL ROAD WEST OF AJO ARIZONA

Al's Art Gallery