These boxes contain pieces of very light melamine foam*. (I assume this is the same melamine that the Chinese were using to fool the protein tests for baby formula. This form is way different, however.)

The brand name stuff always seems pretty darned pricey to me, so I gladly nab a box of the house-brand.

Anyway, with a few drops of water these foam blocks will remove finger sludge from your keyboard (yes, your laptop will look “like new”), soap film from your shower glass, marks from painted baseboards, and the like. Without marring the surface. Like magic!

So, if you didn’t know about what a marvelous cleaning helper melamine foam is, now you do!

* Apparently, it’s a formaldehyde-melamine-sodium bisulfite copolymer. Say that three times, fast!

Here in Atlanta we’ve moved on from the red-heart holiday, and now we’re feeling the effects of purple-green-gold bead holiday.

We made a mid-day erranding run, and in Tar-zhay we saw they’d made a huge sparkly-clean space in the seasonal area, I assume where the piles of summer merchandise will be organized.

So, I guess there’s confirmation that the bulbs I see up here and there around the neighborhood are harbingers of the (almost immediate) future….

Mysteriously, the color wheel came to mind the other day. I thought of it again when I saw this house.

I particularly like the mailbox….

Weather is not climate. We can have (and expect) weird weather, which does not relate to climate change.

Just so’s ya know, when you hear the blather broadcast by the media or read some internet sources….

Today’s weather, well, sunny and cold—although some meteorologists predicted we’d get more snow. I’m just as glad we had sun and no daytime precip.

Only in the shade (below magnolias, behind buildings), and going fast—that’s the extent of the snow today. A weather change is swooping in from the west, and in the next twenty-four hours, I expect all of these remaining bits will be liquified….

Great fun to walk the neighborhood as the sun burns through the snowfall and the breezes knock clumps of white off branches and utility lines…. How much of the snow will have disappeared by nightfall?

By mid-afternoon, we could see the weather change, and the big fluffy flakes began to fall. The ground stayed warm enough that we made it to the Big Eighty-Four celebration, up in Buckhead. And home again, after. We played taxi, glad to have our 4×4, and especially glad that most people avoided driving.

* This is a peach tree, BTW….

I call this tooth day because we both went to the dentist and got our semi-annual cleaning. I’m sparkly!

This mouthful, however, is from the side of a specimen in the DNR lab on Sapelo—it’s an alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).

Ah, thanks WikiPee—I see “alligator” is a corruption of the Spanish “el lagarto,” or the lizard (which in Colonial times seems to have been a general critter category; I have heard variations of lagarto applied to several creatures in Mexico).

We saw this scene at the mainland Sapelo ferry dock north of Darien GA last weekend. The last bit of the sign reads “Anything the Captain deems too large or dangerous.” These items were unloaded with the passengers who got off before we got on. They include an anvil, a propane tank, and a blacksmith’s forge.

Clearly, this Captain doesn’t use the same yardstick as the TSA.

I forgot to mention that when we were out on Sapelo Island over the weekend, we saw an orange tree. Isn’t the Spanish moss artistic?

If you really feel like reading, this is where I was on Saturday (Ashantilly Plantation, north of Darien) and Sunday (Sapelo Island, east of Darien).