Greetings, Quotaholics:

I've written before about how I spent most of my summers with my grandparents.

They were a fairly typical farm family of the time. Having survived the depression, they were quite frugal and still did things the way they had always done them. My grandfather plowed their large garden with his brother-in-law's mule. They raised almost all the food they ate. They were out in the garden by daybreak, then the afternoon was spent canning all the produce they had picked that morning.

Once every couple of weeks was wash day when they did all the laundry. There were big racks that held two big wash tubs and the old wringer style washer went in the middle. The two tubs held the rinse water.

As each load was finished with the hand rinse and final run through the wringer, they were hauled out to the clothesline to be hung up to dry.

One of my fondest memories was running up and down between the lines smelling the wonderful clean smell of the still damp clothes, sheets and towels.

That night you got to get in bed with a fresh set of sheets and pillowcases still smelling of the fresh air.

Even when my grandmother was in her 90's and had a new washer and dryer, she was likely to dry things out on the line. It was what she was accustomed to, and I'm sure she preferred the fresh smell.

Nowadays dryers are the norm but with all the talk about energy conservation, some people are electing to bypass the dryer and hang clothes out to dry. This is one of the easiest ways to save a considerable amount of energy since dryers, especially electric ones, consume a lot of energy. As a matter of fact, electric dryers are third behind refrigerators and air conditioners in energy consumption.

Having experienced the smell of air dried clothes, many become converts and prefer the freshness over the smell of hot air dried.

But did you know that some people consider the sight of clothes drying in the sun to be a sign of poverty? Some consider it a blight on the neighborhood? Some areas ban the practice?

I didn't until I read an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. "`They're unsightly by most people's standards,' said Jeanne Bridgforth, a Realtor with Long & Foster in Richmond. `It gives an atmosphere of decline. You don't sense you're in a well-heeled neighborhood when you see people hanging their laundry out to dry.'

"The clothesline issue is being wrung out nationwide in legislatures, community associations and online. A group called Right2Dry is urging the Obama family to hang their clothes on the White House lawn to promote line drying."

"During the last Virginia General Assembly session, Sen. Linda T. Puller, D-Fairfax, introduced a bill that would have prohibited Northern Virginia community associations from restricting the use of "wind energy drying devices" -- i.e., clotheslines."

"The bill, which would have gone into effect next Wednesday, would not have been retroactive but would have applied only to new covenants. It passed the Senate 40-0 but died in the House of Delegates 60-40."

"This month, similar legislation became law in Vermont. Clothesline bills are in various stages of debate in about a dozen other states."

It seems so odd to me that something that was such a wonderful part of my childhood needs legislation passed in order to allow people to do it today. My wife has been wanting me to put up a clothesline for her to dry sheets on and it never occurred to me to check if it's allowed in our neighborhood.

Do you know if clotheslines are allowed where you live? Did you ever have one? Do you remember sleeping on sheets dried outside? Would you consider going back to hanging clothes on a line?

Do you feel that clotheslines are an eyesore? Would you oppose allowing their use in your neighborhood?

Nostalgically,

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"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." - Ernest Benn


"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." - Robert Frost

Speak right up!

Seasoning

It seems there is a seasoning effect on plant life. No, I'm not describing the growth of new foliage on trees & shrubs in the spring. Neither am I referring to the new growth of perennial flowers as they send out new shoots from once frozen ground. I am talking about how flowers and flowering plants seem to display their colors in groups.

Except for annuals which display a variety of colors throughout the growing season, perennial flowers seem to flower in color groups. The red tulips and others seem to want to follow the blues & purples of the hyacinths in color wheel blending. White comes in an array of shades in a myriad of species as spring flows into summer. Yellow then brightens summer in lilies and flowering bushes of many kinds. As summer wanes into autumn, reds reappear with a side-order of white.

It may be a regional thing. There are some species of plants that are very colorful that are limited to tropical areas. Placing them in our region is tantamount to buying very expensive annuals, or we must fill our house as temperatures drop. Although not a flowering plant, the "elephant ear" is quite striking & must be dug up and the tubers stored in a safe place over winter. Tropicals sometimes need the same attention. As we grow older, it seems our time is more & more limited, so we don't want to have to go to such an effort.

Or, it may be a selection thing. We had to select plants for our garden that would grow around black walnut trees. Although the black walnut trees are now all gone, their effect lasts for many years. A conservative estimate of 5 years is the common answer when the question is posed to professionals. Naturally, we were quite limited in the plants we could put in our garden. When we moved in, there was a black walnut tree every 10 feet. It was primeval when we bought the house.

Whatever the reason, our garden seems to be seasoned. As it matures it becomes more apparent. Young plants didn't flower much. Transplants seemed to be traumatized by the move & showed their anger by refusing to flower. Now, those that survived are flowering well. Bushes are bushy. Flowers are proliferous. Vines are exploding. Ground covers are filling in nicely. Each, in it's own way, provides color to the overall as most have some form of flower. As this came about, the plants with similar colored flowers are blooming together in a choreographed dance of color across our garden.

Here's your quiz:
Mary, Mary, how does your garden grow? You can answer too, Jill, Sue, John, Bob & the rest of you.
In your area, do you find similar colors are blooming at the same time?
Are you limited by climate or circumstance in what may grow in your garden?

Seasoning - Not What You Put On Your Grilled Entree
Cliff (the High-Tech Redneck who doesn't rate a fancy 'signature pic')

Skeeter got on a roll and saved me on that line!  While we're visiting countries, try this one.

Next opening line...
There once was a man from Peru...

Hints:  Here's a great new rhyming/composition tool.  http://www.writerhymes.com/
There's also a great rhyming dictionary at http://www.rhymezone.com/
Limerick rules.  http://freespace.virgin.net/merrick.sheldon/limerickrules.htm 

Submit Opening Line
Submit Limerick

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Re:  Driving Fine(s)

Be careful, Patti! You're starting to sound like me when you attack the traffic fine system.

It has been my contention for a very long time that the system is set up as a revenue-producer. It masquerades as, and gains public acceptance because people are duped into believing that it is safety-oriented, but safety was never the object. It's money.

If safety were the object at red-light intersections, they'd flash the green and yellow together one second before it switched to yellow, and flash the yellow one second before it switched to red. They'd also leave a quarter-second delay while the lights in both directions remained red before one switched to green.

If they did all that and THEN still had a safety issue and installed cameras, I'd be the first to agree, but they don't. They go straight for the cash cow, the cameras, and then charge the kid $415 for the violation using the same kind of thousandths of a second timing they use for Olympic downhill skiiers.

When I was writing RGQ I offered several pieces in which one particular link was mentioned. That link is http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html, and if anyone hasn't read it, I strongly suggest that you do.

It essentially shows the results of government experiments that were done by raising or lowering speed limits on a given stretch of road. What they found was that lowering the limits doesn't change the behavior of drivers. People tend to drive in a manner in which they feel safe, in which they're protecting their own lives and property (their car), and not by the posted limit. When they raised the limits, it didn't change driver behavior either, because most of them remained driving at the speed they had been driving all along.

If there were a 100 mph (160 kph) limit on the road, would you drive that fast? Most would not, and would settle in at the speed that they feel safe and comfortable, around 75 mph (120 kph). This is easily provable by looking to Germany where there are no speed limits. You still find the vast majority of the drivers going no faster than they go here.

The recommendation of the report linked, a study funded by the Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, is to do away with artificially low speed limits that make virtually every single driver on the road a violator, and instead use the actual traffic patterns to decide what the drivers think is safe. You measure the speeds that are being driven, and set the limit at the 85th percentile speed average. That's the official recommendation of an official U.S. Government study.

The problem with this approach is that without violators you have no tickets and no fines.

Pick your favorite freeway/highway drive and imagine that the speed limit were actually set at the rate that traffic normally moves through instead of the arbitrarily low number it's set at now (you know...the one almost no one observes). You'd be driving the same as you are now, yet you'd not be in violation of any law. What a novel idea!

While the focus of Patti's piece was the additional fees and the charging of violators for contesting a ticket, it touches on a far larger issue, that of rules that are set to create violators and fines instead being enacted to enhance safety. Without those rules there would be far fewer people in the system required to pay fines in the first place.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. It's about money, not safety. - Bruce



Re:  Cliff and Hair

Does anybody else really care that at age 60 I still have a full head of hair, (plus a full beard) except for a bit more curve in my hairline? It is medium-fine, dark brown with some grey. If I had my druthers, I'd choose a woman with long, full hair, but barely notice if that's not part of the package. At one time, people used to offer me advice on how to get my hair to grow faster by cutting off the split ends. None of these people had longer hair than mine, so I just nodded pleasantly. My advice on hair care is just this: Two shampoos plus one conditioner equals one shampoo. (and the one is faster, cheaper, and much healthier.) I have always bought shampoo by price, and only regretted it once, on a dollar special. - Bob of the North



I absolutely refuse to color my hair. Again. Ever. I used to color it when I was much younger and my grey hairs were so few I named them. I had a spiral perm to the middle of my back. But now it is un-permed and uncolored, slightly wavy and down to my waist. My hair is a good medium thickness, not fine but not coarse. It is dark brown with a few grey hairs scattered here and there. Mostly they are on the right side of my head, the very beginnings of a baby "skunk streak" around my right temple in a few years.

I like my grey hair. I'm getting a kick out of the aging process. Can't believe I survived my wild youth and feel as though the grey hair is like a badge of honor or something. Plus I like driving people crazy, like my aunt who can't believe I don't already color my hair. I used to find long hair on men attractive, but not any more. At least for men my age...like...ewww. For the most part it looks creepy. Plus, I've found many men with long hair to be either full of themselves or in dire need of a makeover. I'm not into bald men, but do prefer a man with a very short haircut. Was engaged once to a Marine. He looked so sexy in his dress uniform with his hair "high and tight." I think thats how it was called.

My neighbor, a retired pilot, is a tiny little woman of 85 years with beautiful silver hair down to below her shoulders. I like it when she wears her Star Trek pin to church. It sometimes "accidentally" goes off during services and makes noises. I told her don't ever cut her hair or it will make her look like an old lady. She liked that. - GrammieSammie



I dye my hair blue. I like men with facial hair, not fond of furry bodies, not particular about head hair on men. I wasn't going to answer this, but I didn't want to fail your quiz. I told my mother, that if I was going to be a blue haired old lady, then it was going to be really blue. I never do anything half ways. - L&K, herm



I am one of the lucky ones and have a full head of hair although it is mostly gray and a drab light brown, once it was a full shock of what my father called toe headed. (flaxen haired)

I use nothing on my hair except shampoo and a bit of conditioner.

My favorite Lady is completely hairless with the exception of the thick raven locks on her head, and insists that I be that way for her when we are to be together, always a challenge but great fun.

Have you ever noticed that the hair in your nose is connected to your eyes, pull one out and see if it doesn't make your eyes water!! - BB on the left coast



1. Not as much as I used to have- I fear being a bald old lady
2. Fine
3. Yes
4. Head hair doesn't matter- 1st love was bald as an egg, husband of 30 years still has hair. Frankly, I look for beards. did I pass? - kelly b



Re:  Kirsten and ERs

My son, who is now 18 years old, had an ER streak going for a while. His first trip was when he was 4 and decided to squish his pinkie finger between 2 rocks, That was 4 stitches.

Fast forward 6-7 years, and we found out that the little rubber snubber on the bottom for the main pole on a pogo stik is not optional equipment, as the rubber piece keeps the pogo rider from face-planting on a slick carport floor. That trip to the ER netted about 12 stitches above the right eye, a broken nose, bloodied lips, and a concussion.This ER visit included 2 CAT scans and a neck X-Ray to rule out and spinal damage, and luckily, besides looking like Rocky Balboa at the end of a fight, he was okay, just very sore with a swollen shut eye.

The next trip was for a swallowed bee that had crawled inside his soda pop as he and a friend were rollerblading in his friend's driveway. We almost called off that trip until his windpipe started swelling shut, so off we went. Once again, luckily, he made a full recovery.

The last(hopefully) trip was from a unicycle accident. It seems that another young man in my son's Boy Scout troop began riding one, and my son had to have one, and he quickly mastered the regular sized unit. The braver he got, the bigger the unicycle he wanted, as one outfit offers what the refer to as the "Giraffe", which has a seat five feet off the ground. Once again, concussion, cat scan, black and blue everywhere, and luckily a full recovery. It was during this Hospital trip that we began chatting with the ER tech that was working on our boy, and we related everything I just told you all, and as we were leaving , he waved us goodbye and said,"See ya'll next week". That was four years ago, and he's now been driving accident free for 2 years, ( crosses fingers here) made Eagle Scout in 2007, and is off to College this fall. I can look back on all that now and get a laugh, but at the time, I assure you, it wasn't very funny. Guess it could've been worse. - Kevin In Texas



Re:  Religious TV Show

Regarding the Turkish television show;
A priest, a rabbi, an imam and a monk walk into a bar... ten atheists begin cheering and high-fiving one another… it was a CROW bar! - Bruce in Colorado Springs



Re:  12:34:56 7/8/9

I was out geocaching. There was a particularly challenging one. It was published at one of the highest discovery diffulty ratings. I can't swear I found it at that moment. I was in a tree, holding on with one arm as I held the container in one hand and was signing the log with the other. My watch was on the other side of the tree than my face. But when I got back down out of that tree, it was 12:39. I began the climb at 12:27. - Cliff (the High-Tech Redneck)

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