By Gary Wamsley
Berthoud Recorder

This week is a potpourri of ideas. I noticed that some of you might have lost quarters in the newspaper vending machine at the post office. The machine is in good working order, but someone is taking the instruction “2 quarters” a bit too liberally and trying to put them both in at the same time. One at a time works fine, two at a time jams up the internal coin slot. I may have to change the sign and add some more instructional text. If you have lost money in the machine, stop by the office and we will make restitution.

I sometimes like to have a cup of hot tea on a cold evening such as the ones we are starting to have. While I do enjoy several of the varieties of tea, I am quite satisfied with plain old Orange Pekoe and Pekoe. I recently went to the cupboard to get a tea bag and discovered that we had no pekoe. Not that we were out of tea, mind you. No, there were 32 packages of tea in the cupboard. They had names like White Peach, Lemon Mist and Lemon Bliss, Tropic of Strawberry, Pineapple Ginger and Vanilla Maple. This proliferation of tea seems to be the doing of local tea company Celestial Seasonings. I believe it is a marketing ploy to sell more tea. It certainly worked at my house. There must be several hundred tea bags on our shelves and many of the packages have never been opened. I think they have been there for several years. I will probably never partake of any of them. I was quite happy with the four or five kinds of traditional English teas to which I had become accustomed and find this cornucopia of herb teas to be nonsense. It may be necessary for me to make a small area for my own collection of no-nonsense teas.

In the “why didn’t somebody think of this before” department is a new Web site designed to help deal with the neighborhood barking dog problem. One only needs to look at the local police report to see that barking dogs are a relatively common and annoying occurrence. The Web site is the idea of PetSafe®, which the press release describes as an industry leader in the management of pet behavior: offering pet training, containment, safety and lifestyle product solutions. According to the information I received, the site allows a neighbor concerned about excessive and disruptive barking to choose to send an anonymous e-mail or pre-written postcard with a friendly, humorous or serious tone to the beloved barker’s people. Along with the note, senders can opt to include professionally written tips on controlling nuisance barking and a coupon for a product from the company’s line of bark solution training products.

If you have a barking dog problem but don’t want to cause neighbor problems, you might want to try this. The Web site is www.StopMyNeighborsDog.com. Good luck.

That’s it for this week. I’ll see you around town.