Mushroom Adventures

In the Jan. 26 "Wall Street Journal" there's an interesting story about home mushroom-growing kits, with photos of shiitakes, portobellos and other varieties. I scanned it eagerly, looking for the words "Kennett Square"...but alas, to no avail. There is, however, an amusing quote from the president of the American Mushroom Institute, Laura Phelps:
"If it gets kids eating mushrooms, then that's great...But you'd be better off economically going to the grocery store."
Kathi Lafferty told me that her Kennett Square shop, The Mushroom Cap, stocks several of the growing kits, and she said that one of the people mentioned in the story, Donald Simoni, sold his kits at the Mushroom Festival a few years back.

Got milk?

I was unloading my groceries Saturday afternoon when I realized that the gallon of milk I'd just purchased was nowhere to be found. I checked the car trunk. No luck. I knew I hadn't left it in the grocery cart. The only answer was that I'd left it at the busy checkout counter.
So I drove back, went to customer service and, sure enough, there was my milk. They checked my receipt and I was on my way. The kind employee, Joanne, said it happens all the time, and usually people don't even come back and retrieve their groceries.
"Maybe they just don't notice," she said, looked baffled.

On the market

I'm curious what's going to happen to the 11-acre parcel of land directly across Street Road (Route 926) from the New Bolton Center in East Marlborough. According to the agent's sign, it's zoned "RB" for residential use (I remembered the "RB" all the way home by thinking of a Reuben sandwich).

Time Warp

The other day some friends and I, all of whom grew up in the Delaware Valley, were reminiscing about television in the 1970s, and we started talking about Dr. Shock. Remember him? He was this mad-scientist character who hosted the Saturday-afternoon horror movies on Channel 17. He'd introduce the terrible movie, shriek a couple of times and then perform magic tricks and goofy skits during intermission. (His real name was Joe Zawislak, and he hailed from Manayunk.)
The real highlight of "Scream-In," though, was the advertising. The low-budget local commercials were completely cheesy, and to this day I remember them.
The ones for a local transmission shop featured a brassy, heavily-made-up woman with a beehive hairdo: "The boss's wife for Atlantic Transmission," she'd announce in a nails-on-chalkboard South Philly accent.
"Do you feel trapped by high repair costs?" she'd ask, lowering onto a toy car the kind of plastic basket that onion rings come in at a diner.
And then there was the narrator on the plastic slipcovers ad, who pronounced "beautiful" as "bee-you-dee-full."
Our trip down memory lane led to Dr. Demento and Stella the Man-Eater from Manayunk, but I'll save them for another blog entry.

Main Line plus

The January issue of "Main Line Today" magazine features a fascinating story with some great old photos about big local storms over the past 100 years of so -- and many of them seem to have occurred out our way here in Chester County, like a huge windstorm that hit Ercildoun.
The magazine seems to have an elastic definition of the "Main Line." I always thought it ended at Paoli, just like the old Paoli Local, but apparently not. Perhaps now it's just a State of Mind.

Heaps of fun

I'm all plowed out here from that two-stage snowstorm on Jan. 26-27, and the roads were fine this afternoon (Jan. 27) except for (surprisingly) one stretch of Route 82 north of Ercildoun, and (no surprise) White Horse Road west of Route 41. We didn't lose electric power, but my parents in Chadds Ford did, for 15 hours, after a tree fell on the lines. It was down to 56 degrees in their house before my mother phoned me, jubilantly, to announce that the lights and heat were back on.
And my extremely hardy young friend Amy, who lives out toward Oxford, lost power for 18 hours during the storm. She posted the following on Facebook:
"No power. Dad's still out plowing, going on hour 13. Hope he comes home to help us get out to some place with heat and water. Until then, creek water on shop woodstove will do. Haha!"
Also, I was very disappointed to hear that we had "thundersnow," which is thunder and lightning during a snowstorm. How on earth could I have slept through something so exciting?

Tasty tasty

"Pizza or Chinese?" I texted my sister-in-law before the Steelers-Jets game.
Chinese, we decided, and she called in our order to the China Garden restaurant in the Marlborough Square shopping center on Route 1 (the center where Genuardi's and Floga Bistro are).
The take-out food, which the four of us ate on trays in front of the giant TV, was delicious, with just the right amount of spiciness. I had a full plate of sesame chicken and broccoli with rice and remarked that it was a perfectly sized portion.
My sister-in-law laughed and said there was plenty more: it wasn't even half of what was in the container. Eventually I got three full meals out of a single order!
You can see their menu at their website, http://www.chinagardenpa.com/. The restaurant seemed to be doing a good business on a football playoff Sunday.
Oh, and GO STEELERS in the Super Bowl!

Outta here

People seem to be vacating our part of the world at a rapid pace, much like the exodus to Maine in the summer. My parents are heading to Florida as they do each winter for a well-deserved month in the sun. Various other locals are on vacation in Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and another is taking a training course in Houston.
And my photographer friend Paul, who usually hangs out in Iceland, Norway and Alaska, managed to score a timely assignment in the Caribbean and has been sending back ravishing photos of minimally clad people frolicing on the beaches of the Dominican Republic and St. Maarten:

"I'm on the last day in the Caribbean, notably unimpressed with Aruba's charms. Bonaire was my favorite by far. Didn't have enough time in Curacao to know for sure. Lovely beaches and great architecture in the old town, plus huge Venezuelan refinery belching smoke and flames. Really, it's a win-win."

Cold cold cold

This is the fourth day of single-digit temperatures, but I much prefer the invigorating cold to those awful, enervating heat waves. I drink iced coffee year-round, and I never mind putting ice packs on sore muscles. In the cold, you can always put on a hat or another layer of clothing, and it's kind of exciting to watch the car's thermometer drop steadily -- how low will it go? (Down to 5 so far.)
"Stay warm," friends say to each other, and somehow that's so much cozier than "Stay cool!"
Shoveling the driveway was a great cardio workout and a satisfying break from work, but I was a little surprised to see a jogger run by yesterday morning. And a family member in Minnesota told me he biked to work the other day despite the 28-below weather. Now that's a little extreme!
Of course, I don't have to go outside unless I want to, unlike people with snow to plow, farms to run and animals to tend. My friend Susan, who has horses and chickens at her Newlin Township farm, said her horses have little icicles on their nose and chin hairs from their frozen breath, and the bucket of 60-degree water for her chickens is actually steaming as she hauls it on her wagon to the chicken coop.
Not surprisingly, she much, much prefers the summer.
(The photos show Susan's horses, Danny and Diesel, enjoying a snowy breakfast, and the chicken coop.)

Winter malady

When I was a cub reporter, if our editor's kid developed a sniffle, the next morning we'd be assigned to do a story about the epidemic that was hitting the town. We'd have to call the hospital PR woman, and she'd call back on deadline with an innocuous quote from some agreeable MD -- and oh! by the way, did we know that the hospital's ER waiting times had dropped, and didn't we want to do a story about the medical society's upcoming gala?
But I really think something has been going around town this past week. Several very hardy and noncomplaining souls, all grown-ups, have been hit, and hit hard -- to the point of actually missing work and visiting a doctor. Pounding headaches, acute gastrointestinal distress and sore throats seem to be the presenting, and persistent, symptoms.

Fair Queen

Congratulations to Claire Werkiser, a senior at Unionville High School, who was crowned the 2011 Pennsylvania State Fair Queen in Hershey on Saturday, Jan. 22! Claire, the 2010 Unionville Community Fair Queen, represented our fair at the state-wide pageant.