The other morning I sat poolside for a while, basking in 89-degree warmth and watching a genuine lifeguard in a genuine lifeguard chair twirl a whistle on a red string. There was a Jimmy Buffet-like inflatable parrot to the left of me and a stack of those buoyant pool noodles to the right of me, and if it hadn't been for my corduroy jacket and wool sweater, I might have lost myself in a full-fledged fantasia of July.

I couldn't go out and find a new story because of this weather, so I will have to tell you an old one.

It isn't that Tim Gardner has nothing to do. He has a job at Walmart and a steady girlfriend. But the Lehighton man still finds time to knot thousands and thousands of rubber bands together and stretch them onto a rubber-band ball that weighs 400 pounds and lives in a museum on Staten Island, N.Y.

A couple of weeks ago, we stopped into Bergy's Mall, the general store in Lower Saucon Township where a lot of old Dutchy farmers and laborers sit around all day, talking much and spending little.

Your suburban correspondents have done a lot of indoor work lately, so on Tuesday we decided to poke around the countryside near Bangor and Pen Argyl.

At Bergy's Mall, which is not a mall but a venerable general store straight out of the Old-Timey America catalogue, you hear stories like this one, about a character named One-Eyed Dick:

Last week one of the blogs carried a story about 20 things that had become obsolete in the first decade of the 21st century.

If Mary and Joseph hadn't left town for census registration way back when, Nazareth would be this area's Christmas City, and the streets of the borough might be merrier than they are today.

This story falls into the category of "Kids who are smarter than you."

I was feeling full of Christmas cheer and absolutely alliterative, so I decided the best thing to do was combine these sentiments and write about the Legacy Oaks Luminaria Lighting.

Plenty of people find something to occupy them in retirement. Jack Sedovy, not entirely fulfilled by golf and thoroughly appalled by television, decided he would help arrest and reverse the coarsening of American culture.

Two weeks ago, the package arrived in the mail at Peter Thomas Stephens' home in South Whitehall Township. He knew what it held, but sadness and yearning crowded his heart anyway, as they always do when he thinks about his father.

You'll pardon, I hope, my unconscionable delay in reporting that Aaron Nikles of Bath is the heir apparent to the Guitar Hero world record.

I went looking for angry voters on Tuesday, but I didn't find any.

If I were a zombie, a skeleton or a ghost pirate, I'd want to spend the autumn months at David and Sarah Steinberg's house, because that's where all my friends would be — in spirit, at least.

Haiti is still suffering.

We've visited graveyards for this column before, but none like this. Behind L&T; Auto in East Allen Township, generations of Volkswagens stacked like firewood stretch into the distance, ripening for the harvest.

The rain was beginning to sweep sideways as we puttered along the streets of Easton, intending to head up Route 611 into the pretty countryside north of the city. The wipers couldn't keep up with the downpour and it was only getting darker, so we pulled into the parking lot of The Shad Den Bait & Tackle Shop, where the red neon "Open" sign above the front door beckoned like a lantern in the storm.

Richard and Patricia Dillman had every intention of opening their second Jenn's House in October or November.

Stephen Wright used to tell a joke about a man who had wooden legs but real feet, and for some reason I think of it every time I visit the Promenade Shops at Saucon Valley.

Virtually every day of this summer so far has been a perfect day for an Italian ice, or maybe a pina colada with a maraschino cherry on top. And while there is no shortage of places to get those things around here the quaintest one is on the sidewalk outside 1332 Easton Road in Hellertown.

These days, Bill Harr spends a lot of his time outside Sine's 5 & 10 Cent Store in Quakertown, offering cordial greetings to incoming customers and passers-by. He would prefer to be hard at work inside, but his sense of balance isn't what it used to be and his family won't let him do anything too demanding. So, being the owner, he has created this new job for himself: greeter, tale-teller and oral historian of his 98-year-old emporium of the past.

Mickey Pesesko might be the best bird-feeder maker in the Lehigh Valley. If you've never heard of him, that is by design. He does what he does not for the sake of sales but out of the love of carpentry, something he used to practice on a much grander scale — house building — but had to cut down to avian size when he developed a progressive lung ailment.

"Crate up!" Maggie Emmell told the dogs, and of course they ran right to their crates and settled in.

Up until the other day, travelers on Route 309 in Upper Saucon Township passed a billboard advising them that Mrs. Schafer's class hopes they recycle.

Dorothy Livingston, called Dottie, held a cotton-soft, purring bundle in her arms the other morning, and the moment was bittersweet. The kitten's name was Pebbles and she was adopting him for company, because her husband of 44 years, Robert, died on Father's Day, and the house is a little too quiet now.

When the Angel of the Roses disappeared from the National Centre for Padre Pio two years ago, people didn't just pray for the statue's return. They hit the streets to look for it.

On Valentine's Day five years ago, the telephone rang in Frank Calabrese's Nazareth home. When he answered it, the voice on the other end said "Doc?" And even though he hadn't seen the man behind the voice since leaving Vietnam in 1971, Calabrese knew right away it was his old company commander, Maj. George Lovelace.

Who knew? Hundreds of the nation's universities are served by student-run emergency management squads, on call to tend schoolmates who fall ill or break bones or need other sorts of help. And the top program in the country this year -- recognized as such by a national foundation -- is at DeSales University.

In Dublin's fair city -- borough, I mean -- you'd never know it was getting to be St. Patrick's Day, except for the green shamrock flashing on the digital sign outside the bank. Indeed it was actually a four-leafed clover, which isn't at all what St. Patrick used to explain the Trinity to the pagans, as it has a leaf too many. But the bankers weren't the first to make that mistake and won't be the last.

You can't hear it, of course, but this story is in four-part harmony.

Destiny is strange. Because a volcano erupted in Iceland, I ended up sitting in a Bushkill Township pizzeria across from Yane Yanev, a Bulgarian politician who told me his homeland is headed by a mobster and seems likely to slide back under complete Russian dominance unless the world starts paying attention.

Maybe there are better ways to spend a sunny Monday than in the company of dogs at a grassy park, but how much better could they be?

M o Callman's story is one of those cautionary tales about losing your temper.

They call themselves Mommies on the Run, an exact name if ever there was. Christine Burke, Dana Neuffer, Suzanne Moore and Jean Vincent have eight kids among them and have probably logged a few thousand miles on the rubber soles of their running shoes by now.

Now they call Finn Ostrowski the Flying Pierogi. He's not yet 3, so he doesn't quite get what it means, but he will come to understand that it's a funny variation on Olympic snowboarder Shaun White's already funny nickname, the Flying Tomato. And he will learn why White's gold-winning performance in Vancouver the other week made his mother's heart do a double McTwist 1260.

Their acreage is still smothered by snow, but in the greenhouse on Steve and Nicole Shelly's Upper Saucon Township farm, the tender beginnings of onions and flowers are starting to poke up out of the planting flats.

Ralph Young's record store exists firmly outside of time at the Quakertown Farmers Market, where he's survived for years in a business that's grown as frail and uncertain as, say, newspaper journalism, and would seem to have the same bleak future.

This winter has been a long and chilly exercise in conjugation: It snowed, it's snowing, it will snow.