The Blog

One of the things that I love about hardware stores are “magic boxes”. You may ask, “What are magic boxes?” Well, to me they are the little drawer boxes found in hardware stores that contain all the “little bits and bob’s” of miscellaneous hardware that you might need for a given project. Now, we’ve always

Well, congratulations to those of you that follow this blog and to myself of course. This is the 200th installment of this missive so far. It all started when my wife Mary Anne suggested that in these modern times that the store needed a bigger online presence. We had set up a website, but websites

Now that I’m all caught up on our many travels, it’s almost Halloween, and it’s time for some seasonal new products here at the store. These items all fit in with the change of the seasons from warm to cool, and the chores associated with them. The first one is probably a little late for

I’m about finished with stories about our vacation on Deal Island, but I figured that there were a few more things that I could cover before we go on. While Deal Island is very small, there are a couple (at least) unique things about it. They are crabbing, skipjacks and the cemeteries. As I mentioned

It’s now time to continue with our story about Mary Anne’s and my vacation to Maryland. Once we finally made it unscathed to our cottage on Deal Island, things settled down more into our basic vacation mode. We slept in the next morning (as late as the dogs would allow, about 6am) and then made

I haven’t written anything in awhile, we’ve been pretty busy and took some time off to go out of town. Mary Anne, my wife, occasionally gets sudden urges to go on a trip and in August she started emailing me vacation property listings. They were all for cottages on islands on the East coast. I

This week I don’t have any adventures to write about (nothing went wrong?), so I think I’ll cover some new products we have here at the store. The first item is a great, heavy duty, version of a standard work torch. Our regular torches all mount directly to the top of the tank, but this

This week is a little different in that I’m writing about an event that I didn’t even attend. I was involved in a tangential kind of way, but more about that later. This is actually one of my wife Mary Anne’s stories, but she doesn’t have a blog so I will have to write it

When I state around the hardware store, “ The Power Show is coming up this weekend!”. Everyone knows what I’m talking about. In more normal circles, though, I’d probably get some blank stares. In an effort to remedy this sad state of affairs, this week I’ll give you more of an in-depth overview of what

Well, last weekend was certainly very busy. Not only was it the annual Antique Power Show in Burton (more on that later), my sister Linda and her family came up to visit from Maryland. The last time that they came up we took them tubing on Lake Erie from our cottage at Fairport Harbor. Of