LETTER FROM AMERICA #9

Well Easter has come and gone. Over here it is not a long weekend, in fact as there is no holiday on Good Friday and Easter Monday does not exist, it was just another weekend. We had lunch on the Sunday at Jimmy’s with just the close family. There were twelve instead of the usual twenty five.

Weather? Well at the moment it is three paces forward and two back; yesterday was really lovely - we got to 76F, today (Sunday) it has dropped to 69F and tomorrow is forecast to be a wet and windy day with a maximum of 43F! But the it starts to get warmer and by next weekend it will be back up in the seventies. I was looking at the spring photographs from last year, things are happening about a week later this year. I suppose that’s because we had a below average winter. But it is starting now, most of the tree blossom came out yesterday and the grass has started growing again.

There are some signs that, just maybe, the recession is starting to ease, in fact several companies are actually showing profits and the exchange rate is now putting a few extra dollars into my pockets! The President is maintaining his popularity especially on the international front with his approaches to Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. Personally I think it is a much better approach than that of the previous Administration.

I caught the South east BBC News on line last night, I see the French are up to their old tricks again - nothing new there then!!

A word about the garden wildlife. We have a chipmunk in residence again, a rabbit who periodically comes by to eat Joanie’s flowers, a groundhog close by and who knows we may even have a black bear come down from the mountain to see what we are up to like last year (I think I told you about that incident) and of course the usual assortment of birds and squirrels. We have a sparrow building a nest under the awning over the downstairs bathroom window, I hope to get some pictures providing the fly screen does not get in the way. All the windows have these mesh screens except where we put air conditioning units (bedroom and my office). I have limited knowledge of insect life but some of the examples I have seen are nothing like anything in Britain. There are fireflies in the summer which provide a good spectacle and there is a continuous chirruping after dark from the many crickets, mostly across the road in the cemetery.

So we are looking forward to summer and hope it will be a good one. We are lucky here in not suffering the extremes of Nature - no tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes or brush fires as normally we have sufficient rain to prevent these. Having said that, we are below normal rainfall this year by about an inch or so.

Life in Pottsville goes on, nothing terribly exciting seems to happen here, but you may remember in my last letter I mentioned that two judges in Luzern County had been found guilty of corruption. Well now the FBI has uncovered corruption in the Education Department with the selling of teaching posts! Makes you wonder what else is going to crawl out of the woodwork!

Until next time.

BFN
H