We can tell here in north central Connecticut that we are coming up on spring because it’s time to take the bird feeders down. If we don’t do it, someone else will. In this case, it’s our latest neighborhood denizen, a circa-325-pound, male black bear that, for obvious reasons, we are calling Claude. With warming temperatures of late before the latest chill we figured the bears would be back. They have become increasingly common visitors to our yard and to our area since we first started taking notice of them 15 years ago. Far from encouraging them, we do everything we can to avoid tempting them, which is why we keep our garbage pail stored in the garage until we put it out at the last minute. I had a premonition of things to come Monday morning when I found the pail up top by the street on its side and partially emptied. The wind had been howling, and it’s possible a gust blew it over. But now I’m pretty sure it was the work of our newest incarnation of “Ursus americanus.” We had already taken to bringing in the bird feeder at night; its location just outside our kitchen,...Read more

About half the country is under some sort of extreme winter weather advisory. That includes lots of places where the slightest snow fall or ice sheet produces panic and highway pile ups because folks are simply not accustomed to dealing with such cold and their rear-wheel drive cars are not well-equipped to handle the slick conditions. Here in northern Connecticut we are used to the snow and the ice, which is why lots of people here have Subarus with front-wheel drive and a four-wheel drive option. Our two, with 105,000 and 208,000 miles respectively, have seen their share of storms. With any luck we will hang on to them until they reach the quarter-million mile mark, at which point we’ll consider replacing the worn one. We have a long downhill driveway, 170 feet from the road and sloped at about a steady seven percent. When it ices up or gets snowed in it’s usually easy to negotiate in our cars once we have been dug out by our regular snow plow service. But there is a lot of unevenness to the surface, a condition that is getting worse as freeze-thaw cycles have caused it to buckle over the years. As...Read more