OH, TO BE A KID OF SIXTY AGAIN!

VIEW OF THE APOSTLES  FROM THE BLUFF...

...AN ALMOST PERPENDICULAR HILLSIDE...

PLANTING ON THE STEEP SLOPE...

...NEWLY PLANTED FERNS WAIT TO BE MULCHED

Tuesday, 7:45 AM.  68 degrees F at the ferry dock, 65 on the back porch.  Wind W, calm with very light gusts.  The sky is overcast and cloudy and it looks like we will get some light rain later in the morning.  The humidity is 86% and the barometer is falling, now at 29.99".

  The planting job restoring a burned woodland bluff got underway yesterday, but despite a good effort, did not get finished, and that's where I am heading now.  We planted about 150 of 200 potted ferns and grasses, so a morning's work should wrap it up.  After the last potted plants are planted and mulched it can rain.

   The plants are all native and along with the native shrubs planted last fall should hold the burned, eroded hillside, and the cottage that sits at its top, in place.

    I can no longer climb the almost vertical bluff and can only direct the project from the top.  If I lost my footing I would roll a couple of hundred feet to the bottom and have to be peeled off an intervening rock or tree trunk. 

    Oh, to be a kid of sixty again! 

OFF THE CUFF
POOR OLD MILWAUKEE

   Milwaukee, my home town, is burning...again!  It seems like only yesterday, but it was almost a half-century ago, in 1967, that it burned the first time.  Joan and I were engaged and she lived in a downtown apartment.  When the riots started she was trapped in her apartment for days because there was a sniper on the roof of the building across the street.  The city was on lock down and businesses and stores were burned, the entire Third Ward pretty much destroyed. 

   The city eventually more or less recovered, but the good Old Milwaukee we knew in our youth, and where as children we could go anywhere by ourselves on bus and streetcar in safety, was gone forever, destroyed in senseless mayhem. 
   To see it happening all over again, in all its mindless rage and futility, is heart wrenching.  Reasons can be debated, and excuses given, but a mob is a mob, and will destroy generations of hard work and good will in an evening gone. This destructive, self-absorbed  and self-defeating nonsense must stop.

    Poor old Milwaukee.