For sale

Former Unionville schoolteacher Helen Martin is selling her three-story brick apartment house at Street Road and Newark Road in the village of London Grove, West Marlborough. Asking price for the seven-unit building, which sits on less than an acre, is $574,900. Holly Gross of Prudential Fox Roach has the listing.

Coffee at Landhope

The weather can't make up its mind today. One minute it's pouring; the next it's sunny.
I was having coffee with a friend at the picnic tables outside Landhope when the skies simply opened up. Even though we leaned back and flattened ourselves against the outside wall of the store, we still got splashed. Two guys eating lunch retreated to their truck, but not before joining in our conversation about my troublesome car.
"Get a Chevy," was their advice.
My friend countered with her perennial recommendation that I should buy a Ford pickup like hers.
Maybe it's just my good fortune, but I've never met a mean person while eating outside at Landhope. Everyone seems to be in the mood for a chat about this or that, or just gives a cordial greeting.

An honest man

I found myself de facto hostess at a social event the other night, so I decided to make the best of it and started chatting with a guest I didn't know. He said he'd run into awful traffic on his way to the event from his gym.
Aha! Conversational gold! As something of an athlete myself, I felt on solid ground here.
"So was today an upper body day or a lower body day, or did you do cardio?" I asked.
He gave me a sheepish look.
"Actually, I sat in the parking lot and made phone calls," he confessed.
I liked him so much for his frankness that I'm afraid I neglected my small-talk and mingling duties and spent most of the evening talking to him.

Gas lines

The scene at the gas pumps at the Giant supermarket in New Garden on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 8, reminded me of the gas lines in the 1970s. For a while back then, because of the fuel shortage, you could buy gas only on certain days, based on whether you had an odd or even last digit on your license plate (this was before the days of vanity plates). Oct. 8 was the last day in Giant's promotion period that you could use your discount points from the supermarket at the pumps, and everybody, including me, was taking advantage of it.
The next Giant bonus-point promotion is, believe it or not, a free Thanksgiving turkey.

Bulbs

I noticed a display of those indoor amaryllis bulbs for forcing in the grocery store on Monday but decided that before I bought new ones, I'd check the pots from last year that I had stashed in the darkness of the laundry room over the summer. Sure enough, green sprouts had appeared on two of the three, so I brought them out into the light and watered them. (And a few days later the third one started to sprout!)
I'm a big fan of these boxed bulbs, and I find that the ones you can buy at the supermarket or home improvement store do just fine. They're inexpensive ($6.99 on sale) and foolproof, and it's exciting to watch them grow so quickly right in your living room. And the giant red or red-and-white flowers are beautiful.

Silly

A super-sized thank you to Jimmy John's for improving my morning.
It's never a good sign when a red icon appears on your dashboard depicting a car up on a lift. I made an 8:30 a.m. appointment at my car dealership on Route 202 and stayed in the right lane all the way, constantly worrying that at any moment my car was going to seize up and would need to be towed the rest of the way.
Plus it was raining.
Plus it was rush hour.
Plus a key stretch of Route 926 was closed.
By the time I got to the Route 1/202 crossroads I was already 10 minutes late. Ahead of me a tractor-trailer used up the entire left-turn light to make his turn.
And then I saw the Jimmy John's billboard: "People who run behind cars get exhausted."
I laughed out loud, my irritation vanished and I remembered that any problem you can solve by throwing money at it really isn't a problem.

Ms. Tally-ho regrets

Well, somebody sure thinks I have deep pockets and am eager to fork over my cash. Recently I've been getting cordial invitations to various political fundraisers, starting -- STARTING! -- at $100 a pop. The only one that even slightly tempted me was an Oct. 27 cocktail party at a Willistown farm "featuring a cooking demonstration and entertainment" by a former White House chef. But at $150 per person or $250 a couple, I'm going to pass.

Fall of the House of Young

It's the end of an infamous chapter in Unionville's history: most of Tony Young's mansion in Springdell has been torn down.
The home of the convicted swindler was bought by Richard Hayne, the billionaire founder of the Urban Outfitters empire, who added it to the former Thouron property that he owns just across Thouron Road. Mr. Hayne has been building quite a compound at the site and has told the township that he wants to replace the former Young mansion with a personal fitness center for himself and his wife.
So on Monday, Oct. 10, I got home from the grocery store at about 2:30 p.m. and spotted the news of the demolition on Facebook. Without even putting away my milk and lettuce, I got back in the car and raced over there (once a journalist, always a journalist...). One of Mr. Hayne's workers very kindly showed me where I could park safely.
What a spectacle! The amazingly skilled demolition guy used his giant excavator with surgical precision, knocking down one cinder block at a time when he needed to and then ripping out a bay window in one fell swoop. When he reached a piece of copper flashing, he removed it with the excavator's jaws like he was tweezing a stray eyebrow and then dropped it into a separate Dumpster for salvage.
A lot of the interior of the house, including the mantelpieces and window glass, had already been removed (I imagine a fair amount of the beautiful interior details were sold to recover funds), and it was strange to see a built-in third-storey cupboard and a staircase open to the sky.
Meanwhile some landscaping guys were using muscle power, and crowbars, to dig out the cobblestones that had edged Tony's driveway.
Tony now has far more humble digs: he is serving his 210-month sentence 756 miles away, in the Federal Correctional Institution at Jesup in southeast Georgia.