Good morning or good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation and across the world. It is just past 6:00 a.m. in "The City."

The current temperature is 46° under cloudy skies. Today's high is forecast to reach 51°, under mostly-cloudy-skies. The sun will rise today @ 8:00 a.m. and set later @ 6:59 p.m.

A Small Craft Advisory is in effect until 8:00 p.m. tonight. There is also another Frost Advisory in effect for parts of West Michigan that are considerably east of GH, from now until 8:00 p.m. tomorrow. If you are west of US 131, cover your plants or be prepared to lose them!

I had a great day in the kitchen yesterday. I made another batch of Mary's favorite, vegan Italian meatballs and another vegan pepperoni. This time, I avoided over-kneading the pepperoni mixture and so while the result is still chewy, it is not too tough. It tastes like animal-based pepperoni, except that no animals had to die in the process.

I was up yesterday when  the early-morning train run passed by. It was a short passage, as only MMRR EMD GP-38-2 locomotive #2025 passed by dead-heading south @ 8:15 a.m. Later in the day, @ 12:30 p.m., that same locomotive passed by heading north, towing 12 CHCs, two DBTCs, and four DWTCs, one with a black stripe around its mid-section, similar to the one shown below. I have to assume that the stripe is another version of anti-corrosive paint.

A modeled version courtesy of the Atlas Model Co.™

Elsewhere in the news, Mary walked to her volunteer job at the library to begin work on a project that will culminate with the complete addition into an electronic database of all the columns written by the late Clarence "Tad" Poel, who served as the Editorial Page Editor for many years before he began to write his daily column, entitled Focus on People for the Grand Haven Tribune. 

Mr. Poel was born in Grand Rapids, MI at the Salvation Army Hospital and was adopted as an infant by Wm. and Marie Poel of GH. He graduated from Grand Haven High School in 1937, worked for GM for several years in Grand Rapids, until he was drafted into the US Army after WWII and served in the Pacific theater as a company clerk. According to one of his sons, that's where he learned to type, sending letters home to his mother and those letters got him his first job in journalism at the Tribune. Mr. Poel passed away at age 91 after a writing career that spanned 65 years! 

Mary is enjoying her trip down "Memory Lane" as she learns more about our adopted home of Grand Haven and about how things and prices have changed over the years that spanned the columns of Mr. Poel from the 1970s until his retirement.

Today, I have plans to continue my painting hobby, play with the girls more, do some wood-working in the man-cave, and perhaps accomplish some reading before we go to the chiropractor this afternoon. 

When I was downstairs earlier, I noticed that Mary has once again resumed to work on cross-stitching my new kitchen apron, perhaps inspired by the arrival of a new catalog that is chock-full of various Christmas themed stitching projects. 

I am going to put off until tomorrow the yard-work that I have planned so that things get a chance to dry out a bit. Ciao.