Seen around Nanticoke

I spent Saturday night at my new house this past weekend. Parking is at a premium over there, as about 1/3 to 1/2 of all parking spaces have disappeared due to the snow. In the interest of maintaining peace with the neighbors, getting in some exercise, and maybe getting some photos on the return trip, I walked over at about 8:00 Saturday night.

The walk was interesting. Most of the sidewalks had been shoveled along my route, but not all, and I sometimes had to swing out into the street. Not everyone had dug through the snowplow-built piles at the crosswalks, so even if the sidewalks were clear, sometimes getting across the street required some mountaineering skill.

I stayed over Saturday night into Sunday. I did my weekly maintenance tasks (dump and refill the furnace, clean out the chimney cleanout) and changed over the decorations from Valentine's Day to St. Patrick's Day. Then it was time to hike back across town to get ready to take my mom to an Englebert Humperdinck concert in Wilkes-Barre. (My sister was supposed to come in to see the show with her, but my mom asked her not to because of the iffy highway situation and occasional snow squalls throughout the day; coming up earlier was impossible because the highways leading to the area were closed until Saturday afternoon. Englebert put on quite a show, though I was a little disappointed that he did not sing "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize", which I just learned is the title of my favorite song by him, a song that came out the year that I was born.)
As I left the house I took this picture of the hill in front of my house. This is the hill that a group of teenage girls didn't go sledding down on Wednesday night. This is also the hill that I watched a motorcyclist roll down to collide with a car that blew through a STOP sign at the intersection just past the two cars in the foreground on the right.
This building used to be a barber shop. Even though it was closed decades ago, the barber pole - a nifty illuminated rotating cylinder with multicolored stripes mounted inside another clear cylinder - stayed up until relatively recently. One of my earliest memories of snow was going for a walk with my father and sister and brother in the middle of a snowstorm. We walked past the barbershop, where there were drifts up above my head. I remember falling down in the snow there - I might have been four or five years old - and I was terrified that I would be left behind. I wasn't. (The building in the distance used to be a local tavern, or "Beer Garden." That was another landmark on that walk.)
Here is the house that burned a few weeks ago. Note the tree with no needles - this is the tree that I watched burn from my front window. The wooden supports holding up the front porch were in place before the fire - this is what gave the place the appearance of being a work in progress.

So there you go. A few more images from Nanticoke, and a few illustrations of incidents described here.

(Note: as I write this there is another fire burning in town, a pizza place about four blocks from my new house. I hope this is another accidental fire and not a case of arson.)