Mrs. Teabody Greets the Day

Setting down into green perfection When my head hit the pillow at 8:30 P.M. on our first night of a two-week vacation in Ireland, I knew I would have no trouble sleeping. After all, our group had been in active transit since 2:00 P.M. United States time on the day before and aside from snatches of semi-sleep aboard the plane I had been awake more than twenty-four hours. All seven of us had. Mon Dieu! It was a twenty-four hours that had gone smoothly: a nearly five-hour luxurious van ride from home in south central PA with Unique Limousine to JFK, a drop-your-bags curbside and head straight for security—TSA approved arrival! – which went as cleanly as a hot knife through butter; follow this with a perfect supper of a gorgeous Cobb salad and glass o’ Pinot at Blue Smoke and an almost flawless Delta flight which terminated in a problem-free Shannon arrival. Painless. Bags full to bulging and spirits high, we sailed into the arrivals hall only to be greeted by our handsome and affab...

A friend, a foe, a gift, a beau, a journey to go... Outside of the Christmas season, nothing can stir the fires of anticipation and imagination as much as a journey. My uncle was fond of saying most folks possess a tumbleweed gene that looks at the whole world as somewhere else to be. Yes, I also have friends and family members who assert they plan never to fly again (or ever!), that they “didn't leave anything over there”, that anyone who ventures off their street is just asking for trouble. Point taken. And understood. However, Mrs. Teabody's friends and associates seem to be mostly of the tumbleweed variety, the kind who look at the next horizon and wonder what adventure awaits. Through their travels this year alone in the safety of the TYF tearoom, Mrs. Teabody has visited her favorite cities, London and Paris, the longed-for Amsterdam, the glories of far-flung China, riotous India, onion-domed St. Petersburg, other-worldly Iceland. Through the stories and ph...

Bee's Knees, Mango Twister, Vodka Cobbler Busy schedules and varied pursuits often find even the best of friends scrambling to spend quality time together so it's no surprise that a once-a-year outing for a trio of loosely-knit friends – all food-fondies -- ended up in a new-for-us restaurant. Tuesday evening took us to Family Meal, an odd and misleading appendage for a very trendy joint. Want to find it? Drive to Hagerstown's Valley Mall on Halfway Boulevard and hang a right on the circuit road—the one toward Macy's and the theatres. As soon as you see Toys-R-Us, heads up, and there it is tucked away in a corner-- all low slung and brandy new with ample parking. It's cool inside, clean and minamalist and we were quickly led to a booth, food-menued and bar-menued by a peppy youngster and no sooner were small squatty water glasses in place than our attractive and friendly “Ali Layne” dropped by. “Give us two minutes and we'll order drinks,” we said perusing t...

A detail from Robert Thom's painting depicting Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” in the 1932 World Series, is part of the Hall of Fame’s collection of artwork. B-325.76A (National Baseball Hall of Fame) Good Morning from Chez Teabody where  all the Sunday morning chores have been  attended to prior to breakfast at 8 at the Teabodys' favorite local breakfast club, FOVA/VFW.  The VFW donates  thousands of dollars every single month to worthwhile projects affecting folks who live here in Fulton County. They do awesome work. The employees who work there are just terrific and treat us like family. The food is wonderful. On our way to breakfast, we soaked up all the glory that is the brand new, huge-and-not-a-penny-spared-anywhere Dollar Store. This project has been a clinic of sorts for any would-be, "dream large" entrepreneur. It's not enough to properly lay a foundation, to erect a massive building with admirable speed and precision, to establish attractive boundarie...

Every August  there comes a moment that lets us know that summer has entered its final phase and it's time to do everything we have back-burnered quickly before it's too late: wear that sundress, eat that fresh tomato, plan lunch with working friends before school starts, see the ocean and get some sand between our toes. Even though this will be the SIXTH August I haven't had to deal with the queasy gut that comes with the start of a new school year, there will probably never come an August that I don't recall a phone call out of the blue in August 1976 that changed my life forever. I was living solo in a tiny apartment in Carlisle -- working one full-time job and two part-time jobs, loving life and having a good time. It was the Bicentennial of 'merica and a year that  had its share of ups and downs just like this year is having forty years later. Stick with me and I'll show you EXACTLY how much August 1976 and August 2016 have in common. In 1976 the Tall ...

Choose language Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Cebuano Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Nyanja Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Scottish Gaelic Serbian Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Western Frisian Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu Yesterday was a bad day at Chez Teabody...

Home, Sweet Home Welcome to Chez Teabody. More than sixteen years ago we moved into the Aqua-colored cabin in the Meadow Grounds that forms the foundation of Chez Teabody. It was tiny, uninsulated, garish in color and inconvenient. We moved in and made it our home. Months passed happily with us paying rent and gradually making little improvements. In November of 2001 our landlord passed away unexpectedly and almost immediately we had a choice to make: stay (and buy!) or go. A few intense weeks of house hunting followed as we looked at homes in Mercersburg, Welsh Run and environs finding a halfway mark between our jobs. None of these visits proved satisfactory. Then one day I woke up and looked at the view I'd looked at every morning since we'd moved here - - the sun rising over Tuscarora Mountain - - and it dawned on me that I really didn't want to leave. As tenuous as my new roots were I was planted and thriving. “I want to buy this house,” I said. Mr. Tea...