Author: pat frederick

Happy National Colorado Day!

Trip Advisor recommends the following sites in Colorado if you’re traveling there!

Garden of the Gods

Jam-packed with dramatic rock formations, the Garden of the Gods is a prime spot for hiking amid beautiful scenery. Stop for a photo by the Steamboat Rock, then set out to trek the 21 miles of trails within the park. The 1.5-mile-long Perkins Central Garden Trail is wheelchair accessible and runs between all the major sights like the Kissing Camels. On your way back, grab a snack and shop for souvenirs at the gift shop. Located on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, the Garden of the Gods can be visited for free—parking included.

Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad and Museum

Hop aboard a coal-fired, steam-powered locomotive that travels along the same railroad tracks that miners, cowboys and the early settlers of the Old West used over a hundred years ago. The route winds in and out of canyons and past open wilderness affording great views. The price of a ticket also includes admission to the D&SNGRR Museum and the Silverton Freight Yard Museum.

Red Rocks Park & Amphitheatre

Naturally formed, open air Amphitheatre consists of two, three-hundred-foot monoliths serving as a “stage” for musical performances.

Denver Botanic Gardens

Spanning more than 24 acres, Denver Botanic Gardens at York Street presents a wide range of gardens and collections that illustrate an ever-widening diversity of plants from all corners of the world. Distinctive gardens define and celebrate our Western identity and a unique high altitude climate and geography. We are passionate about connecting people to plants through botanical beauty, education, art, events, conservation and sustainable living.

Pikes Peak

Welcome to Pikes Peak – America’s Mountain! The Pikes Peak Highway entrance is conveniently located 15 minutes west of Colorado Springs on Highway 24. The beauty of being so close to the city is that you can spend your time enjoying the mountain instead of getting to the mountains. Plan for your round trip journey to the summit to take 2-3 hours. The safe, scenic highway provides you the opportunity to enjoy Pikes Peak at your leisure. From the gateway at an elevation of 7,400 feet, you’ll encounter some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world as you wind your way through an alpine wonderland of scenic beauty, mountain reservoirs, beyond timberline, overtaking the clouds…All along the way to the 14,115 foot summit of America’s most famous mountain. Along the way, you’ll discover the North Slope Recreation Area, Crystal Reservoir Gift Shop, Historic Glen Cove Inn, and the Summit House. There are three lakes for fishing, picnic areas, hiking trails, and breathtaking views. Stop and watch one of our “Meet the Ranger” Interpretive Programs and learn about the history, myths, flora and fauna on the mountain. All offer visitor services and basic necessities to make your day both enjoyable and memorable.

SOURCE: TRIPADVISOR.COM

What Shall We Bake Today?

I found several interesting cookie recipes in my search for this month’s offerings and this one uses coconut!!

Coconut Cookies

Ingredients

1 ¼ cups all purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

½ cup butter – room temperature

½ cup brown sugar packed

½ cup sugar

1 egg – room temperature

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

1 ⅓ cups coconut flakes

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

 In a small mixing bowl add the flour, baking soda and salt. Mix and set aside.

In a separate medium bowl add the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Cream them together until smooth. Add the egg and vanilla. Beat until light and fluffy.

Add the flour mixture, a little at a time, until incorporated. Stir in the coconut.

Drop, 3 inches apart, onto ungreased cookie sheet. You can also line the cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Place the cookie sheet into the preheated oven and bake until lightly toasted, about 8-12 minutes. Move to a wire rack and cool.

ENJOY!

Connecticut State Tree: White Oak

The white oak tree (Quercus alba) is one of the continent’s predominant native hardwood tree species appearing throughout Eastern North America’s forests.

While it will not disappoint as a design feature, oaks are among the most valuable native trees we can plant. The white oak provides a habitat and food for countless species of wildlife. The white oak is the best tree to plant to attract butterflies and it supports hundreds of species of caterpillars. If you want to support pollinators and attract birds, planting white oaks will ensure that will happen. Besides being important for the environment, the tree makes barrels and ages various spirits such as bourbon, whiskey, and wines.

If you have the room and the time to commit—it can live 500 years—the white oak tree is a beautiful and invaluable addition to a landscape for its aesthetic value and role in the local ecosystem.

How to Identify White Oak Trees

White oaks are easy year-round by their height, rounded canopy, and big trunk. They are large trees that grow to 50 to 75 feet tall with rounded canopies. It has a large trunk, often 3 to 5 feet around. The tree’s bark is a light, scaley gray that flakes off in small pieces if picked.

The foliage of the white oak is very recognizable; it has simple, alternating, lobed leaves that are 5 to 9 inches long with rounded tips. In spring and summer, the leaves are dark green on the top with a white or pale green underside. In the fall, the leaves turn reddish brown and linger on the branches late into winter.

White Oak Tree Care

White oaks grow slowly while often living for centuries if planted in conditions that allow them to remain healthy. If you follow these few steps, you should have no issues starting your white oak’s long life in the right direction:

Plant your white oak tree in a location where it will receive full sun.

Provide your tree with soil that is acidic to neutral and well-draining.

Do not over-fertilize your white oak.

Water your newly planted oak often to establish a strong root system.

Weird Wednesdays: Randyland

This month’s weird house is Randyland, the happiest place in PA (Pittsburgh, specifically).

From: Uncoveringpa.com:

Stand outside of Randyland and you might think that it’s a quirky art project and a great way to fix up a once-dilapidated house. However, when I asked owner and creator Randy Gilson what Randyland was, he responded with a very simple answer: “Randyland is a giant heart of love.”

I pulled up to Randyland on a sunny September day. Even without my GPS telling me, I was able to instantly see Randyland from several blocks away.

Sitting on a street corner in a once-dilapidated area of Pittsburgh’s Northshore, Randyland looks like a cross between Sesame Street and the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.”

Gilson purchased the home now known as Randyland in 1995.

Dipping into his savings as a waiter, he purchased the home and began to clean it up. He had been working on cleaning up the neighborhood for almost 10 years at that point. Removing trash, setting up community gardens, and putting flowers in front of abandoned buildings got him in trouble with the police more than once, but his goal was always to make the neighborhood a better place to live.

Using his knack for recycling goods in unusual ways, Randy set to work creating the colorful Randyland.

Much of the decoration at Randyland is visible from the streets. The large three-story home at the corner of Arch and Jacksonia Streets is painted a bright yellow, with a variety of scenes painted around the home. 

Behind the home, another home is painted a pastel green with several window scenes painted on the outside.

The two entrances are covered with a variety of recycled items that have been repurposed to create a beautiful art piece. When the gates are opened, a slightly-less-than-lifesize cutout of Gilson greets visitors to Randyland.

Walking into the back gardens of Randyland feels like walking into someone’s home. Chairs and tables sit around the yard, and Gilson himself can often be found tending to his kingdom.

When I visited, Randy was high on a ladder painting the pergola in the center of Randyland.

Joining him was another painter who had the appearance of a serious French artist. I would only later find out that this assistant was a homeless man that Randy had hired even though he had never painted before. Despite this, Randy trained him and on several occasions called him, “The best painter I’ve ever had.”

Introducing myself, I made the pleasant mistake of asking Randy a simple question, “So, when did you start Randyland?” Forty-five minutes later, Randy finished answering my question, after telling me about Randyland, his life story, and his philosophy.

It took me just a few seconds, however, to realize that Randy was the embodiment of Randyland. Gilson had a tough life growing up but has turned his life into an expression of happiness and joy, just like the recycled items that he has made colorful.

Randy told me on several occasions that he isn’t a smart man, but the wisdom that he exudes makes it worth visiting. To separate Randyland from Randy really is quite impossible, and that’s what makes Randyland Pennsylvania’s happiest destination. There’s no doubt that after spending a few minutes talking to Randy and walking through his elaborately created domain, you too will experience the beauty and happiness that is Randyland.

SOURCE: UNCOVERINGPA.COM

The Origin of the INFERNAL Revenue Service

No, that’s not a misspelling…LOL.  Here’s, according to TRAC, the origin of the IRS—the agency we all hate.

From TRAC:

One of the first actions of any new nation is to collect taxes. This was true for the United States when in March of 1791, shortly after George Washington became president, the brand new Congress approved a law establishing a tariff system on selected imports and an internal excise tax on whiskey. In the next year, under the authority of that law, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton established the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue, the predecessor to what is today the Internal Revenue Service.

Washington’s tax shortly led to the new nation’s first serious tax protest movement — the Whiskey Rebellion of 1793-1795 that required the dispatch of a ragtag army of about 13,000 federalized state militiamen to suppress.

The Civil War, and the Union’s insatiable demand for revenue, led to the re-creation of the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue, that by 1863 included about 4,000 tax collectors. Federal tax collections soared — from $28.5 million the year before the war to more than $300 million towards its end. One measure helping swell the revenues was the establishment of the nation’s first income tax which was sufficiently complex that eight years after Lincoln’s assassination it was discovered that in 1864, the then-president had overpaid his taxes by $1,250.

The end of the civil war led to the end of that era’s income tax. But in 1894, under heavy political pressure from the populists, Congress approved a modest new income tax. The Supreme Court immediately declared the tax unconstitutional. But broad political pressure for a more muscular federal government led to the ratification of the constitution’s Sixteenth Amendment on February 13, 1913: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

The creation of the Office of the Commissioner of Revenue in 1862, followed in 1913 by the permanent establishment of the income tax, are two of the three legs that support today’s federal tax system. The third leg came in the middle of World War II when Congress approved a law requiring employees to withhold from salaries and wages the taxes owed by their employees.

Following the war, the IRS was engulfed in a massive corruption scandal that touched almost every level of the agency. After extensive Congressional hearings, the IRS underwent a basic re-organization while at the same time, installing what was then considered one of the most advanced computerized management systems in the world.

In the mid-1990s, the overall performance of the IRS — particularly the way it dealt with individual taxpayers — again became the subject of widespread public concern. The concern led to the formation of a special IRS study commission, a series of oversight hearing by the Senate Finance Committee and the passage by Congress of the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. This law authorized a major spending program to improve the agency’s computers.

Just as significant was a basic change in the IRS’s structure. For many decades, the agency had been divided into scores of different districts along geographical lines. Most taxpayers — individual, business, farm, corporation and tax exempt — were processed by the districts where they were located. The 1998 law called for the elimination of this basic geographical system and its replacement by four functional units. In theory, one unit would deal with wage and investment returns filed by individual taxpayers, a second with the returns of small businesses and the self-employed, a third with those of large and mid-sized businesses and the fourth with tax exempt organizations.

In May of 2003, the Senate confirmed the nomination of Mark W. Everson as the 46th commissioner of the IRS. Everson, a Texas business executive who had held several senior positions in the Reagan and Bush Administrations, took over from Charles O. Rossotti.

Reflecting in part the changes that had occurred in the nation’s economic and political situations, the initial vision of the two men about the role of IRS agency was quite different. Rossotti — appointed in the wake of a series of sharply critical Senate hearings and in a boom period when budget deficits were melting — had sought to lead the agency away from its heavy emphasis on enforcement to a more balanced policy where enforcement would be complemented with a systematic effort to make the IRS more hospitable to the taxpayer. The basic idea was that by if it was easier for taxpayers to meet their obligations, that voluntary compliance would significantly improve. Rossotti, however, also argued that enforcement must be an essential component of the government’s tax collection strategy. Just before his 2002 retirement, for example, he said the government would need a massive increase in new employees — 35,000 of them — just to pursue the tax cases it was aware of.

Neither Congress, the outgoing Clinton team nor the Bush Administration were prepared to seriously consider Rossotti’s warning. The dramatic decline in the nation’s economy and the resulting surge in federal budget deficits, however, was a looming reality that demanded some kind of response. (The billions of additional dollars required for homeland security and the war in Iraq may have further contributed to the pressures on the IRS).

So, almost from the first day of Everson’s five-year term, his official statements have reflected the belief that tougher enforcement was required to recover the “many billions of dollars of lost tax revenues.” “We are correcting our course and re-centering the agency,” he told an audience at the National Press Club on March 15, repeating earlier calls for action. The commissioner then outlined his priorities, starting with a a focused attack on the corporations and high income taxpayers who did not abide by the law.

As Everson’s first year in office drew to a close, however, neither the Bush Administration who had appointed him nor Congress had so far seen fit to provide the IRS the substantial boost in financial resources that many experts — in and out of the government — believe the IRS must receive to effectively and fairly enforce the nation.

SOURCE: TRAC

Baltimore Orioles

One of the most brilliantly colored songbirds in the east, flaming orange and black, sharing the heraldic colors of the coat of arms of 17th-century Lord Baltimore. Widespread east of the Great Plains, Baltimore Orioles are often very common in open woods and groves in summer. Their bag-shaped hanging nests, artfully woven of plant fibers, are familiar sights in the shade trees in towns. This bird was formerly considered to belong to the same species as the western Bullock’s Oriole, under the combined name of Northern Oriole.

Boldly marked black and orange adult male is unlike any other eastern bird. Female brown above, tinged orange below, with white wing-bars, variable black on head. On Great Plains, often interbreeds with Bullock’s Oriole, producing hybrids with intermediate pattern.

Habitat

Open woods, riverside groves, elms, shade trees. Breeds in deciduous or mixed woodland, generally in open woods or edges rather than interior of dense forest. May be common in trees in towns. Often favors elms. Winters mostly in the tropics around forest edge and semi-open country.

Feeding Behavior

Forages by searching for insects among foliage of trees and shrubs. Sometimes flies out to catch insects in midair. Visits flowers for nectar, and will come to sugar-water feeders; also will come to pieces of fruit put out at feeders.

Diet

Insects, berries, nectar. In summer feeds mostly on insects, especially caterpillars, including hairy types avoided by many birds; also eats beetles, grasshoppers, wasps, bugs, and others, plus spiders and snails. Eats many berries and sometimes cultivated fruit. Feeds on nectar and will take sugar-water.

Nesting

Male sings to defend nesting territory. In courtship, male faces female and stretches upright, then bows deeply with tail spread and wings partly open. Nest site is in tall deciduous tree, placed near end of slender drooping branch, usually 20-30′ above the ground but can be 6-60′ up or higher. Nest (built by female, sometimes with help from male) is a hanging pouch, with its rim firmly attached to a branch. Nest is tightly woven of plant fibers, strips of bark, grapevines, grass, yarn, string, Spanish moss, lined with fine grass, plant down, hair.

Happy National Nebraska Day!

Hopefully Filly can weigh in on these must-see Nebraska sites!

Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium

This world-class zoo is famous for its involvement with breeding endangered species from around the world.

Museum of American Speed

Great museum with an amazing collection of automotive history!

Old Market

Omaha preserves its historic place in time in this historic section of town where visitors can stroll along the cobbled streets and explore the many preserved buildings.

The Durham Museum

Beautiful architecture blends with memories of a time gone by at the historic Durham Museum. Opened in 1931, Union Station was built by Union Pacific Railroad as the showpiece to the city of its headquarters. Considered one of Omaha’s most unique treasures, and now an official National Historic Landmark, the station is one of the best examples of art deco architecture in the country. The Durham Museum offers unique, hands-on learning for people of all ages. Enjoy an extraordinary array of permanent exhibits including restored train cars, 1940’s storefronts, HO Model trains, numerous artifacts showing the history of the region and the Byron Reed collection, which includes some of the world’s rarest coins and documents. During your stay be sure to stop by the authentic soda fountain and enjoy a phosphate or malt.

Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge

We parked at Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Headquarters and accessed the bridge from the visitor center.

SOURCE: TRIPADVISOR

Connecticut State Motto: Qui Transtulit Sustinet

The motto “Qui Transtulit Sustinet,” (He Who Transplanted Still Sustains), has been associated with the various versions of the seal from the creation of the Saybrook Colony Seal. While the origin of the motto is uncertain, the late Charles J. Hoadly, a former State Librarian, suggested in an article entitled “The Public Seal of Connecticut,” which appeared in the 1889 edition of the Connecticut State Register and Manual, that we look to the 80th Psalm as a possible source. “Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the heathen, and planted it.” 

What Shall We Bake Today?

Even though St. Patty’s Day has passed, I found this cookie recipe in a nice pastel color.  How about green Pistachio Cookies?

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar

2 large eggs, room temperature

1 teaspoon almond extract

1 to 3 drops green food coloring

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 package (3.4 ounces) instant pistachio pudding mix

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup chopped pistachios or pecans

1/2 cup green colored sugar

Directions

In a large bowl, beat the butter, oil and confectioners’ sugar until blended (mixture will clump together). Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in extract and food coloring.

Combine the flour, pudding mix, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt; gradually add to creamed mixture. Stir in nuts. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour. Preheat oven to 375°.

Shape into 1-in. balls; roll in colored sugar. Place 2 in. apart on ungreased baking sheets. Bake for 7-9 minutes or until cookies are set. Cool for 1 minute before removing to wire racks. Store in an airtight container.

ENJOY!