Archery

Congratulations to my friend Joel, who on Election Day bagged an eight-point buck with a crossbow near his home in Cochranville. It was his first-ever success with a crossbow. The buck is already at the butcher's, and I have dibs on some of his wife's delicious venison lasagna.

A new restaurant to try

Two friends and I had an excellent dinner at the Taste of Puebla, a new Mexican restaurant in West Grove. The food was terrific and the service was quick and friendly. We devoured the chips with salsa verde, and then I had marvelous chicken fajitas. It was a perfect meal for a chilly, rainy evening. And we will definitely go back, because there were lots of other dishes we wanted to try.
You can see their menu at http://www.tasteofpuebla.com/. The restaurant is in a little strip shopping center at 304 E. Baltimore Pike.

Talkin' trash

I took my recycling over to the landfill today, a task I always enjoy. I can trace this back to my childhood summer vacations spent at a cabin on Lake Florence in the Poconos. It was a wholesome couple of weeks: swimming out to the float, catching sunfish and catfish, sailing and canoeing, hiking through the woods, outwitting the ancient soda machine under Cabin #9 and debating whether the giant snapping turtle was still alive. If it rained there were jigsaw puzzles and crosswords to do and books to read, but there was no television reception. (We were at the cabin when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and we still berate my father because we didn't get to watch this historic event.)
But the highlight was the weekly trip to the garbage dump in old Mr. Treat's ramshackle pickup. We kids would jump in the back, along with the trash from all the families around the lake, and head up the unpaved, rutted driveway out to the main road. If you were on one side of the truck you could catch a glimpse of the mysterious little spring-fed pool where Mr. Treat raised bait.
Such a adventure probably broke all kinds of safety rules and would never be permitted nowadays (get the helmets and hand sanitizer!), but we had a great time bouncing around as the truck hit potholes and lurched around corners.

To die for

It goes completely against the grain for me to lecture people about their choices in life. You can drive a Prius or a Hummer, plant your bulbs in rows or clumps, support the Eagles or the Steelers: that's up to you; I'm not going to get in your face about it. The sole exception is this: cigarette smoking.

The American Cancer Society is sponsoring its annual Great American Smokeout on Nov. 18, and if you smoke, I beg you, I implore you, to try quitting. The Cancer Society's website (www.cancer.org) offers a lot of resources to make it easier.
Tobacco causes almost 90% of all cases of lung cancer. If people didn't smoke, lung cancer would be rare, as opposed to being the leading cause of cancer death in Americans, both men and women. More people die of lung cancer than of colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined.

Why am I so vehement about this? Because a dear friend of mine was a smoker, and he died of lung cancer in 2005 at the age of 52. And a lot of people remember him and miss him.

Garden blues

Perhaps in the past few weeks you've noticed the striking tall blue flowers at Fairthorn on North Union Street in Kennett. Their Latin name is Aconitum napellus, but they are most commonly called monkshood (after the shape of each flower). As lovely as it is -- and as useful in the late autumn garden -- it also contains a toxic alkaloid called aconitine.
The plant is also known as wolfsbane, as Harry Potter fans with sharp memories may recall. In "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," Potions master Severus Snape uses the plant to brew a concoction that Defense Against the Dark Arts master Remus Lupin takes the week before he transforms into a werewolf during each full moon. By drinking the potion, Professor Lupin explains, "I keep my mind when I transform...I am able to curl up in my office, a harmless wolf, and wait for the moon to wane again."

As part of their witness

Whether you agree or disagree with their politics, the folks who live in our local Quaker retirement communities deserve a round of applause: they always turn out in droves for every election. Turnout on Nov. 2 was 74% both in Pennsbury's north-1 precinct (the polling place was at Crosslands) and in Kennett Township's precinct 3 (Kendal at Longwood). County-wide, the turnout was 52%, which is much higher than for the usual mid-term elections.

Deep pockets in Doe Run

Urban Outfitters founder Richard Hayne is continuing to build his elaborate greenhouse complex on what used to be Tony Young's property near Springdell. However, it seems that he started the work before getting all the necessary permits. West Marlborough Township zoning officials served him with a cease-and-desist order on Sept. 28 and fined him $500 for each day of work that was done before the permits were finally issued on Oct. 13.
Mr. Hayne's attorney is appealing the fines, claiming that the order was invalid because it was addressed to Mr. Hayne rather than the property's legal owner, Doe Run L.P.
For the record, Mr. Hayne ranks #773 on Forbes magazine's 2010 list of the world's billionaires, with net assets of $1.250 billion.

Peace

If the nastiness and incessant "spin" of the recent election left you yearning for intelligent and civil discourse, London Grove Friends Meeting is offering what promises to be an interesting evening on Saturday, Nov. 20: a discussion entitled "If War is not the Answer, What Is?" ("Victory," according to a bumper sticker I saw recently.)
Mark Bowden, the Oxford author who wrote "Black Hawk Down" and "Guests of the Ayatollah," will be joining Dan Seeger, general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, and Matt Southworth, campaigns program assistant for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, to wrestle with the question of whether traditional Quaker peace testimony is relevant today.
The program starts at 7:30 p.m. The meetinghouse is at Route 926 and Newark Road.