A tribute to our fire chief

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postaday2012

Tomorrow evening, the Blandford Historical Society will be presenting our fire chief with a plaque commemorating his forty years of service as the Blandford fire chief. Our fire department is a volunteer fire fighting service that also serves as our EMT/Ambulance service. As fire chief, it was his responsibility to have all his volunteers properly trained, outfitted and rotated in shifts to ensure that our fire department was in keeping with the state’s codes and regulations; no small feat considering his teeny, tiny budget that he got from the town. He has spent years keeping the fire department running and fully staffed by writing grants and doing it so well that he has been able to get those grants awarded to the Blandford fire department. Those grants have supplied Blandford with several fire trucks, fire fighter turn out gear and other necessary equipment.

My contribution to tomorrow’s Historical Society program will be homemade cookies, I even received requests from the board. Our fearless leader asked for oatmeal raisin and our dear family friend Mr. Robbins asked for chocolate chip. My baby girl volunteered to make her to-die-for chocolate chip cookies. I am not exaggerating in the least, when I call her chocolate chip cookies to-die-for, they just are. I have never, in my entire career of eating cookies, eaten a cookie as delicious as the ones that she makes. They are chock full of different chocolate chips and they are neither too sweet nor too greasy. They melt in your mouth, everything melts, the chips and the cookie, that is how moist they are. She grabs them out of the oven at precisely the right moment when they have just achieved the state of being cooked. I on the other hand will be, for the first time, be making oatmeal raisin cookies. When my daughter started her baking experiments, she had stumbled upon an old cookbook that I had from who knows where, ironically it’s called “The Old-Fashioned Baking Book” and that is where she found her cookie recipe. I flipped through the cookbook today and I found Grandma’s oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. So tomorrow I will be elbow deep in old-fashioned oats, butter and brown sugar, with a sprinkling of raisins. Our kitchen is going to smell heavenly tomorrow, the aromas of warm butter, sugar and chocolate will be swirling around the house driving the dogs crazy. I can’t wait, hopefully the cookies find their way out to the Historical Society and not into my belly.

coffee, a wake up call?

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postaday2012

Do you need coffee to wake up in the morning?

March 21, 2012 by Laurieanichols

Sunday morning coffee

I don’t know if coffee actually wakes me up in the morning because I can drink coffee right before going to sleep and it doesn’t prevent me from sleeping. It is a wonderful part of my morning routine, I drink at least 3 cups of coffee with my breakfast while I do my morning reading and writing. I love my coffee black and no sugar.

The Republican’s Social-Darwinist Budget Plan

Where do Paul Ryan and the rest of his gang get their facts to support their claim that too many people CHOOSE to rely on government help. Have they ever tried to subsist on government help? Note that I wrote subsist and not “live”. It has been documented over and over again how the wages of the average earner have stagnated since the late 1970’s while the cost of living has substantially increased especially in the realms of education and medical treatment. The majority of food stamp recipients are the lower class white families in rural areas who also receive medicaid, many of them are hard working but unfortunately they are working hard at either several part-time jobs with no benefits or full-time jobs without benefits at minimum wage, a whopping 7.25 an hour. The GOP with their budget aims of picking and choosing which economic class wins and loses would condemn the less fortunate to even more misery and the wealthiest to more gains and lest I forget those military contractors who would be celebrating more riches if this GOP economic blueprint ever came into being.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

New Hampshire Republican Proposes Amendment Banning Left-Handed People From Marrying

I wonder how many people believe this amendment to be a serious one. I am enjoying the tongue in cheek response to the GOP’s serious infringement of women’s reproductive freedoms. Often comedy such as satire, brings the ridiculousness of the opposition’s position more clearly in focus without making the debate ugly. I know that politics, historically in the country have often been acrimonious, but what worries me is that when one thinks that after the civil rights movement, a fight that was bitterly fought in the 60’s, would have enlightened us, we see a resurgence of exclusionary rhetoric and it is nastier and more virulent than before. The hatred against the “other” whichever group it is, is clouding up our public discourse. Normally I would say that any discourse is good and necessary to air any grievances; but the racism, bigotry and prejudice rampant amongst these far right groups doesn’t serve us any good as a country as a whole.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost