About this Website
I made this Web site for fun in 2003 to mark our 20th anniversary in this nice house on Pommel Drive. As manager of a large public Web site I feel compelled to remark that every snippet of this site was coded by yours truly, either by hand or (lately) using my own licensed copy of Dreamweaver on my own time and equipment. The only other software I've used (not counting Notepad) is PaintShop Pro, also my own licensed copy.
Ground rules are like this: Nothing serious, nothing personal, nothing weighty. No complaining. Nothing off-color. No bashing, not anything or anyone. No politics or religion. No angst, no stream of consciousness (no "hmmmm"s). No psychoanalysis. Nothing work-related. No cause, no agenda. (Except one: get that screen off your chimney!) No raison d’etre. No current events, and no real culture.
What does this leave? Nature (but no real science). Observation (non-personal, non-serious, non-judgmental, and non-professional). And memories (good ones). More specifically:
I write about the birds I see in my yard every day and, to a lesser extent, birds I've seen in more than 20 years of amateur birdwatching.
The dogs have their own section. I do understand how dull it is to read about how cute other people’s pets are. Some people know how to pull that off, but I know I can't. I have therefore contented myself with novella-length stories of their lives, plainly titled so you'll know what you're getting into.
I also write chance encounters that we have with other animals because we let our yard run wild and then spend a lot of time in it.
I write about plants, mostly those growing in my yard. This includes a lot of flowers. I am flower-mad. As a gardener I refuse to exercise restraint. But I am no match for Mother Nature: my yard is beautiful in spite of me. I start a lot of things and let them be. Or not.
Then there’s food. I call them dishes rather than recipes. That's a warning: I don’t measure very carefully, and never make the same thing the same way twice.
In the historypages you will not find genealogy or anything from a book. I have just transcribed a lot of old papers and things I remember being told.
I have dipped into my journals. I am a life-long non-daily diarist, but vast portions of my writings violate the ground rules above. The journals from our trips meet my self-imposed Web standards, however, so these I have included as travelogs to go with the slideshows.
Finally, there are lots and lots of pictures. I like pictures. I have tried to keep the file size down, but there are so many of them that you could not possibly enjoy this site without high-speed Internet access. Pictures are old and new, scanned and digital, and I have freely altered them in Paintshop when I wanted to.
On the other hand, there are not many pictures of people. I think pictures of people are generally boring. I like pictures of landscapes, places, animals, things, and people engaged in events rather than posing for cameras. You’ll find few pictures of me. That’s because few good pictures have ever been taken of me, and I am not about to post the bad ones!
I try to design with 800 by 600 in mind, but why don’t you switch to 1024 by 768. Everything looks better that way (not just Pommelhouse). If you normally set your resolution higher than that, then just you wait. You’ll get old, too, someday.
Comments? Contact me!
