Life goes on.

As I have mentioned already on Facebook, our good friend for many years, Jack Kolb, passed away this week.  Even though we knew he had been ailing, this came as a great shock.  We will be honoring him in several ways, in the near future.

Jack would have wanted us to continue with the things we normally do, so I'll do some blog entries once again.  (Incidentally, I am beginning to get lots of comments from readers in the United States.  I still continue to get comments from Asia on a regular basis.)

Welcome to the world, Luka Nebraska!

01.  The Rapture.

We're still waiting.

02.  Priorities.

Children selling lemonade near the current Golf Extravaganza were about to be fined for operating an unlicensed business.  When someone pointed out that local homeowners in the same area were renting their driveways to contestants for up to $500, the "lemonade stand prosecutors" relented and let the children continue, but to save face, they insisted that the kids move their stand a bit farther from the action.   (The kids plan to donate their proceeds to charity.)

03.  Church and State?

A lady arranged to conduct a class at a local senior center with the title:  "The Study of Man."  It was advertised, I'm told, to be a history class.  It was actually a Bible study class and was shut down for a short time, because it was felt that a religious session was inappropriate at a Government-run facility.  However, upon a closer reading of rules and regulations, it was deemed to be ok for the group to continue.   To my surprise, I have not seen any letters to the local newspaper about this issue.

04.  Church and School?

A member of the North Carolina Church of Body Modification has won a legal battle to wear a nose stud to a local High School.  The school folks decided to give in to the demands to avoid wasting money on a legal fight. 

What is this desire to mutilate oneself?  Members of my family also engage in this practise, and I really can't complain, because they are all nice persons.  If they do this to make themselves look different, I would say that in so doing, they now look like lots and lots of other people. 

I'm guilty as well, since I have a tatoo.  But my excuse was that I was drunk when I had it put on. 

I started shaving when I was eleven years old, and as a Freshman in High School, I grew sideburns.  Very few other kids were able to grow them.  A couple of years later, as the other kids began to shave, more and more sideburns showed up.  So, I shaved mine off.  You can see that I kept trying to be different. 

Also, for a while, members of one of my gangs wore suit jackets on Sundays.. without any shirts underneath. Sometimes we would knot ties around our necks as well.  Older folks would shake their heads and predict dire futures for us all.

05.  Police are still combing the area...

A thief in Texas stole thousands of dollars worth of human hair from a wiggery.   He concentrated on Remy hair, which comes from the heads of Indian women.  Other thieves, in Michigan and California,  are also targeting hair salons and hair accessory stores..

http://www.inhairco.com/


06.  Ya gotta eat your veggies, baby...

An article in the Social Security Alumni Association newsletter cites the need for fiber in the American diet.  They mention a UCLA study that found that normal-weight people eat about 33% more diettary fiber and 43% more complex carbohydrates than overweight people.  Americans need 25 to 30 grams of fiber per day to remain healthy.  Keep count of your fiber intake for a couple of days and see if you are eating enough.  Fiber is mainly found in vegetables, fruit, whole grains and nuts.

07.  Church and Military?

During a recent trip to the Gettysburg battlefield, we were directed to a large statue of a female figure with a long noisemaking trumpet pointed from the Confederate lines toward the Union lines.  The guide mentioned that this was supposed to represent Saint Barbara, who is the "saint of artillery"..   the statue was placed there by the State of  Louisiana. My  brother Joe probably knows about it, since he is a Civil War buff.

Check it out! Saint Barbara is blowing a vuvuzela at the Union troops!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40650647@N03/4669557091/




08.  Happy Talk..

North Korea conducted a happiness study and concluded that North Korea was the second happiest country in the world.  China was first.  Cuba was third.  The United States was dead last. 

09.  Happy Tom:

Bragging time.  We have already eaten 4 red cherry tomatoes grown on our back deck, and we have twenty or so green ones about to turn red.   We get all-day sun on the deck and have lots of pots and four "earthboxes" set up.  I'm more of a successful farmer here on a small deck than I was on my acre and a half "farmstead".   However, I am glad to see the results my daughter, Diane, is having on that piece of land.  Her flowers, especially, are spectacular.   She posts pictures of her flowers on facebook. Now, I will try to post a picture of one of my tomatoes here.

I Love Snow

The poet Shelley (you know, the Blythe Spirit guy) said:

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost.

I also love snow, but maybe not so much of it.

When I was in grammar school, I was required to memorize several poems. Unfortunately, I was only able to remember the first few lines of each, try as I might.

(The only feat of memorization that I accomplished was the books of the Bible, when I was in a Baptist Sunday School. However, when it came time to demonstrate my prowess, I got stage-fright and couldn't even start to talk.)

One of the bits of poem that I was able to memorize was from James Russell Lowell's poem:

The First Snow-Fall.

The snow had begun in the gloaming
And busily all the night,
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

The rest of the poem was kind of sad, so I was not eager to memorize it. This sadness surprized me, because Mr. Lowell was the only one of the famous Massachusetts 19th Century poets who normally did humorous and satirical work.

(By the way, Mr. Lowell was the author of the influential Biglow papers.. the first series of which lambasted the Mexican War.. the second series of which was concerned with the Civil War.)

I was interested in this word "gloaming" = dusk. I found that the word probably was derived from Middle English "gloming", from "glom" meaning "dusk". The words "gloom" and "gloomy" come from these roots.

Remember: "Roaming through the gloaming, with my sweetheart by my side." I think this was a line from a Scottish song popularized by Sir Harry Lauder.

Well, the TV announcer says that Eldersburg, Maryland has now received over 20" of snow today.. on top of the 28" they received a couple of days ago. (That's four feet of snow in one week, folks.. more than at Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.) Eldersburg is about 10 miles away from where we are.. and we probably have received as much as they have.

The 40 mph wind gusts are still heaping drifts around our house.. in addition, a Bobcat with a snow blower keeps going by and blowing snow all over the drifts.

Things like mailboxes and fire hydrants disappeared from sight long ago. The poor birds are flying around looking for food and we have cabin fever, but there is no way we could venture out in this blizzard.

The snow is supposed to stop in three hours, but the winds will keep it drifting until tomorrow morning when the sun will miraculously appear to warm us up a bit and melt all of the icicles.

If I were younger, I would now be out shoveling snow. I loved to do that, especially when I was a teenager. On a day after a big snow storm, I could sometimes make $10 shoveling people out. (Ten dollars was big money when I was a kid.)

Now, I live in a "continuing care community" and they don't advise any of us old dudes to shovel snow. At 3 AM this morning, I heard some Spanish, turned on my porch light, and discovered an older man shoveling my porch. He did a good job, but by 8 AM, we were snowed in again. A group of guys came by around ten AM and shoveled the porch again. The snow quickly piled up again and I guess they gave up because the porch snow is now shoulder-high. Maybe they'll come back in the early morning when the snow and blowing stops.

If I'm lucky, they will shovel out my driveway. However, there will still be six feet of snow on top of my car and I'll have to get that put somewhere. I am still young enough to be able to do physical things, but some of my neighbors are quite elderly. I hope they don't try to shovel anything because a heart is a terrible thing to lose.

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