I'm not kidding when I say that time gets away from me. I try to post something here every day, but I'll look at the dates, and I've skipped a day. Maybe that's a good thing, because it shows I do have a life outside of MyBloggers.

I was going through one of my father's desks - the one in the back garage - and came across a pocket calendar he used in 1988. This was two years after my mother died, but he had a girlfriend who lived 90 minutes away, and he saw her on weekends. It was astounding to see how busy he was - almost every day he had some meeting or activity in town. At that time he was involved in developing the family farm, building spec houses and trying to sell them. It doesn't look like it was going too well, because a lot of his time was spent mowing the weeds on the empty lots and around the houses that weren't selling.

I don't know a lot about those houses, but recall thinking that the one I saw had the ugliest brick I'd ever seen - something about the speckled look of the color combination. I wouldn't have bought that house because there's nothing you can do about ugly brick except paint it, and then it loses all the low-maintenance aspect that made brick an attractive option in the first place. There are lot of ugly brick houses in our area, built around the same time - late 80s - and I'm sure the brick came from the same yard, some colorblind fool who thought it looked perky or something, and it ended up looking naive and red neck.



It doesn't look so bad in this picture because it's in the shade.