Unblogable

  Thanks to my friends from Beltrami Island Forest, J&C S. I've been bloging more often lately. I awake each day with ideas buzzing around my head like mosquitoes on a damp morning. But these ideas are too random to grow into a blog, yet I hate to let them all pop in the ether.
 Thought 1: I'm going to be 69 in a few days. A nice rotund number. I was born in 1947 and when looking ahead as a kid to the new century, I realized I would be 53 in 2000; an age that seemed creepy and mummy-like. However I have skidded another 16 years beyond 53. I am still fairly nimble, though no warlord would ever recruit me as a child soldier.
  2: "What, me scared?" I'm not afraid of the government or the NSA, but I have opened a  separate, secret internet account for when I want to look up stuff about Islam or ISIS. I have dealt with the IRS and the Social Security Administration and have seen how one innocent mistake can lead to much gnashing of teeth. Kafka was on to something.
  3. "Blue is the color of my true love's hair, in the morning, when we rise..." I used to mix up the words of the old Donovan song, for a cheap laugh. But with blue hair commonplace, no one's laughing anymore. Now that people are tattooed and pierced and f-bombs are going off all over, how does a person stand out anymore. With politically incorrect rants,...or massacres in public places?

If Trash Could Talk

  Twenty-five years ago our family adopted a two mile stretch of State Highway 89 a mile north and south of where 89 intersects with County Road 8. The state put up a sign on either end of our stretch notifying the public of this fact. Some drivers threw less litter because of this sign and others threw more. The first year of cleaning was brutal. We were cleaning up fifty years of junk, but at least we had the three boys to help. The state gave us trash bags and florescent vests and when we were done, they sent a truck to pick up the harvest. There were several old tires and logs (which we kept for our stove), but most of the trash was beer cans and beer bottles and plastic pop bottles. It is illegal to have an open beer bottle in your car so I could understand all the empties in the ditch. The state of Mississippi allows drivers to drink and I wondered if their ditches were cleaner than ours.
  A few years after we started cleaning, the gas stations in Roseau opened mini fast food shops. Our ditches are about 15 minutes south of town, just the amount of time it takes to consume a pizza or a taco, and we started seeing Taco John and Pizza Hut packaging in the ditch. I could kind of empathize with the beer drinkers, but there is no open burrito law in Minnesota. I began to have hateful thoughts about the southbound "pigs" who thought it was ok to let fly their garbage in my ditch. I calmed myself by imagining the trash being sucked out of the car when the driver opened his window to dispel the smell of refried beans. He wanted to stop, but there was a probably a semi on his tail. The perpetrator would mentally chastise himself and vow to adopt a highway of his own, once he got out of treatment.
  Anyway, the boys grew up and moved away and now, once a year, Teresa and I (mostly Teresa) walk the ditches. The beer cans and beer bottles are still our greatest challenge. Why can't we be more like Mississippi?

The Final Countdown

About a year before I retired I went to timeanddate.com and plugged in my last day of work.

  Not a sign of someone giving 110% to his job.

The site calculated exactly how many hours, minutes and seconds to go until my celebratory

Bacon and eggs at Raven Global Hdqts. This was back in the day when my cholesterol was low.

I just now created my own  countdown till Teresa retires, but it’s in salads not seconds.

You see, the bane of my existence is having to make a salad every day for Teresa’s lunch.

Yes I love the girl, and yes it saves us a good $4.00 per day vs. a Subway salad.

But it’s a pain I tell you. And she keeps making little “suggestions,” like

“Couldn’t I have more lettuce?”, or “Couldn’t you make it not so same old same old?”

Who does she think I am? Julia Child?

I have bottles to recycle.

Ennaways, I have come up with the following salad countdown so I can see where I stand.

There are twenty-five weeks till Teresa retires on September 1.

I usually make four salads per week since most weeks she’ll have a pot luck at work one day

or will forget to bring her salad which I make her eat the next day.

So that totals one hundred salads till her celebratory eggs (1) and (turkey) bacon.

Based on the height of my salad containers (from Subway) that’s a stack 20.83 feet tall!

Or to put it in context, .0000222 of the distance between Stonington, Maine and Hull, Mass.

She gagged when I tried to jazz up her salad with Spam.

Oh well, I’ll survive. People are always telling me I sound like a guy with too much time on his hands.

  Easily, I say

iPhone as Thermometer

I was scared of Siri at first until I realized she’s just a bot.

She’s not going to tell the other Siris the stupid things I ask her.

That kind of set me free.

I use her mostly for setting the timer when I’m cooking.

(Tip: the only way to set seconds is to have Siri do it.)

She’s also good at opening apps and calling people

Though she sometimes mixes contacts up.

I recently started asking her for the temperature.

This was a couple of weeks ago during our last cold snap,

And she would say “Brrr, it’s minus one Fahrenheit.”

But she doesn’t say “brrr”, it’s more like “mrrrrh.”

As the temperature warmed she continued to shiver.

Even at 34 degree she was still at it.

She’s obviously not from Minnesota.

Yesterday it was 43, the warmest temp since last November.

Finally no mrrrrh.

It did not freeze last night for the first time in months.

But at 36 degrees just now, she was still going “mrrrrh.”

I could keep checking the local temperature until I narrow

It down to the exact degree when she either does or does not shiver

As much as a bot ever does shiver, or not.

To speed up the process
I asked her for the temperature in Anchorage.

"It's pretty cold, 34 degrees."

Vladivostok? "Pretty cold, 18 degrees."

South Pole? She wouldn't even tell me,

She just gave me a website with hourly readings.

She can be trying.

By the way, it was -68 degrees there.

Mrrrrh!

"Let's Go Hunting

   I was sitting in front of the courthouse one afternoon waiting for Teresa. On the cab of the pickup next to me was a decal of a leaping deer. Wreathed round the deer were the words, "Screw the Bitch, Let's Go Hunting." Now many a man has felt this sentiment and even acted upon it, paying the hell that came due, but I had never seen such a bold display of the unspeakable. I was curious to see this desperado, and sure enough, two young men came bounding down the courthouse steps, fresh from some process of marriage dissolution, no doubt.
  What could have gone wrong?
Perhaps he never was that into her;
The wedding just a reason to get drunk,
The fruits of marriage long since reaped.
Perhaps she thought she owned him,
A nut-job in her own right.
The court's behind him now.
He's got his buddy and his gun,
And the woods, his true mate.
She's better off without him.
Hope there were no kids.

Just Checking

People are criticized for always checking their email. But if you knew the mailman stopped at random times both day and night, wouldn't you be looking in the mailbox frequently to see if anything good had arrived? I know I do.

Killing time, till I die.

 I used to go to the café with my wife every Friday or Thursday morning before work. It’s an open, clamorous place, but the coffee and rolls are good and you get used to the noise. There is always a tableful of guys in the middle of the room and a smaller table of guys by the front window. The women tend to sit in the booths along the wall.  These same guys were always there, whether we went on Thursday or Friday. Some were having breakfast before work and others are retired.

  When I retired myself recently, I realized I needed a routine to keep from getting fat and lazy. First I decided to keep my weekly date at the café with Teresa even though it meant driving 16 miles to town. After coffee I go to the gym to work off my roll, then do my grocery shopping and any other town errands at hand.
  Sometimes we couldn’t go to the café on Thursday or Friday, so we would pick another weekday. This confirmed my suspicion that the guys came to the café five days a week. It was part of their routine, a sacred part of the day. So the workers would go off to their jobs, but what of the retirees? They had long hours ahead of them. Many of them had wives at home. Did they do a little housework, or was that already done. Maybe they watched mindless drivel on TV. Some did, no doubt. Perhaps they went to their workshops and took apart a small engine or stained the gun cabinet they were making. Perhaps they handled their guns. Perhaps they rearranged their collection of Playboys, chronologically this week, and next week, in order of playmate bodaciousness. 
  That’s a lot of ‘perhaps.’ Perhaps I should survey the guys to find out what they actually do, though I wonder if I’d get the truth. I could publish my own routine and that might liberate them to say what they really do. This survey will be anonymous of course.
  OK, I go to the café just like them. I only go once a week, but I’d go daily if I lived in town. On the other four weekdays days I get up with Teresa and we make the bed.  
  She’s pretty low maintenance in the morning. She dishes up her own cereal, then goes to the media room to catch the bad news for the day. This is my opportunity to memorize French words. My mind is receptive in the morning and if I put it off, I’ll never do it. I kiss Teresa goodby and cook my second cup of coffee. Instant coffee. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clean, easy, and tastes ok with heavy whipping cream. I go to the media room and listen to the news on the Français Facile program on Radio France International.  I listen once, then a second time while reading the text (in French, évidemment). Next, I make a third cup of coffee flavored cream. Back to the computer to watch a French in Action video. These are a series of fifty amusing boy-meets-Parisian-girl videos. 
  I make breakfast. Either steel-cut oats, or an egg. Time now for a hike in the woods. I usually bring a bow saw or a branch trimmer to do some trail maintenance. After a snowfall I wear snowshoes to pack the trail. In nicer weather I put the kayak in the small stream that runs through the woods.
After lunch I start thinking about supper. Teresa has requested one exotic supper per week and has folded over the corners of pages in diet magazines as suggestions. By now it’s time for my afternoon nap. I set the alarm for twenty minutes so I don’t overdo it. As the afternoon wears on, I’ll wash yesterday’s dishes, straighten up a bit. dust-bust some dead flies, check the bins of mouse poison in the cellar and refill as needed. 
  Teresa calls around seven.  She works late then goes to the gym. Now she’s on her way home.“What’s for supper?” she asks, and says either hmmm or good, based on my answer. 
 At home she chows down in the media room and watches some mindless drivel. I visit her from time to time to see if my favorite performer has been eliminated yet. At length the clock reads nine and I repair to my bed where some dense work of literature awaits. I doze and dream, mostly of hurrying to catch a plane I never board.