bestmediablog

Well, not really a snow storm, but we are forecasted to get some snow tonight and over the next few days. (We even got a little last night.) Last week had some gorgeous days: Thursday got into the 60s! Not bad for Kansas City in January. But this weekend — when I had both days free — it’s dropped back down into the 20s for the highs. If the good weather had held, it would have been an obligatory Roundrock trip weekend, but it didn’t happen.

The photo above is not from my forest but from my back yard in suburbia several weeks ago.

There are at least two places in Missouri called Monkey Mountain. One is near St. Joseph and is a Missouri Department of Conservation area. The place was so named by early settlers because the bluffs there were said to be too steep even for monkeys to climb. Maybe so, but apparently the area is favored by Bigfoot. The second is a park and preserve just east of Kansas City. When the kids were little we took them there one Saturday and got terribly lost (on a simple, three-mile loop trail). This area earned its name, supposedly, from a troop of circus monkeys that had escaped and lived a short while on the mountain. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there’s at least one Monkey Mountain in your state too.

The deadline for the next Festival of the Trees is this coming Friday, January 30. Send your links to Ash at mail (at) treeblog (dot) co (dot) uk. Be sure to put Festival of the Trees or FOTT in the subject line. Or you can use the handy online submission form.

We’re always looking for hosts. It’s a great way to find new blogs and attract more traffic to your own blog. Just let me or Dave know when you think you might like to have a go. We’ll give you all the help you need.

Have you ever gone to a friend’s place for a party, expecting lively conversation and getting caught up on the details of everyone’s life and interests, only to find that the party is actually a sales pitch for some product? It’s like when you go to a website, but first you’re given an ad you have to watch before you can get to the content. Yeah, I hate that too.

Queequeg continues to turn our home life routines upside down, but he’s actually about as ideal as you could expect from a puppy. He’s catching on to paper training quickly, he now comes when he’s called (mostly), and he’s grown quite adept at untying my shoelaces. Little darling!

What’s Pablo reading now? I’ve picked up a slim volume of George Orwell’s essays called Why I Write. The title piece is, I believe, a discussion of Orwell’s own motivation to write. Later pieces discuss the ways political language is used to make lies sound truthful. I finally finished Modern Chivalry, and I have to say I didn’t enjoy it much, despite it being a lost classic of American literature.

Missouri calendar:

• Squirrels bear spring litters through March.