the migratory habits of butterflies sometimes go awry

Thinking Out Loud

When you're a kid, you spend most of your time peering into the future, mostly because there's not much past to recall.  When you get really old, a lot of your time is spent looking  back, remembering what was because what's much too near at hand is often nothing we want to contemplate too deeply.  It catches us all, eventually,  and I think by then we  have sorted out what memories we will keep for comfort food, and which we will ignore, deny, or forget entirely.

But somewhere in the middle I think a lot of us begin to look back at what our childhood was like, and our parents, relatives, and friends,  and wonder how much of that shaped us directly, gave us a gentle shove in a particular direction, seemed to have no influence at all--or became something that we learned to work around or tunnel away from, in order to survive. 

Many people spend a lot of time denying the past,  pretending it doesnt matter, when in fact it's all we have of who we were.  How we reacted to it, from the inside, often has a great influence over the rest of our lives.   And equally interesting,  as we mature,  our point of view changes--we become, often, more dispassionate about things, and now and then have some pretty heavy insights into not what our parents did to  or for or about us,  but why.

The why is the key.  And denying that childhood, that base we all stand on,  is denying that we ever had one, sort of.  And sometimes it says, if it didnt matter, then I don't, either.  I think it's the key to everything, to us, and to how we deal with our own kids and grandkids.  It matters, if only to us.

I love new appliance day

My old  washer died two weeks ago, or rather it began to breathe funny, and make a clickclickclick sound around the agitator.  So I did my famous appliance hunt, which mostly means walk in, find the cheapest one, and work my way up from there to the one I really want.
Two days ago I went back and the new one wagged its little stubby tail and looked as wan-but-expectant as any puppy in a pet store--the clerk knew, I could see him approaching from one side.  Can I help you, he asked.(sly devil, he already knew I was hooked). Why yes, I answered, pointing.  That one. And it was. 

Of Mice and Men and Microsoft

We've been running Avast (the cheap guy version) anti-virus for several  years, since Norton got so big it couldnt fit through the doors.  Worked well,  but now they want us to download the new spiffy version, 5.0.   I tried it and it just about ate my computer.  No thanks, I said.  so for the last few months they've been hitting me with reminders, daily, much the way Norton did. Nag, nag, nag. 
My cynical elf suggests that the free version is deliberately made buggy, and the pay to use version runs very well indeed.  But I don't want to invest 29 bucks to find out for sure.

So.  The mister suggested I get, heaven help us, MSN.  The downside is, you have to accept alllllll the security downloads Ive been avoiding for the past three years.  All of'em.  If you refuse the honor, they won't let you run MSN Anti virus stuff.  If you decide to let 'em in,  and then delete, everyone of them requires a restart.  They gotcha.  No one wants to restart their computer 200 times in a day.

sulk.

119K miles later...

Today it goes to Honda heaven. Its been sitting in the back field (the limbo for dead cars, trucks, and assorted motorized things) for 8 years, and we are finally parting with it.  Found some  pennies in there on the dash, that had cupped apparently from the heat over the years.  They look a bit like tiddly winks now.

Gonna miss it, in a strange way, but mostly for what it was, not for what it is now, which is a hunk o junk full of acorns and mouse nests...

Of the Written Word

added in a new member to the "Written Word" list,
http://www.bachelorsdegree.org/2010/11/11/50-best-poetry-books-for-kids/

which while being a bit ad-heavy for my taste does a really nice job with the list, enumerating the strengths of each book on the list itself.  So it's not just a rip and read group of titles.  Some of them I remember fondly, some I had forgotten about, and some make me wish I had a grandchild to read them to.

when good dogs die...

they'll remember this and find us

something to cling to at 7 AM

You look out the window and think, wow it's dark, there must be something wrong with the clock
and then it sweeps over you that it's nearly November and the clock is your reality check.
It really is 7 AM here in Yankee land, and it really is that dark.

However, in seven weeks, give or take (so Im fudging a little. So sue me) the days will be getting longer again. And once we hit the high double hurdle of Christmas and New Year's,  the slide into winter, true winter begins, and the days are still getting longer. 

Book stuff, good and ugly

Just picked up a copy of WS Merwin's "The Shadow of Sirius"  and it blew me away.  an odd thing, though;  I got through the first five or six very lyrical pieces, and had to stop.  Since then I've been carrying it around like a partially opened treasure, almost afraid to keep going.  It's become my Linus blanket of books.  I need it near me, but not to read. Not yet. 

The ugly is Barnes and Noble, a fairly sturdy candidate in the book chains for their attention to poetry--it's been six months or so since I was there last, and the poetry section which once stretched half the length of the store, now stretches three long bookcases, head  high.  No one bothers any longer to keep the books in order, and if you want, say, Kooser, you start at the first book and hunt until you find one. If any.   By next year, I said to the clerk, there won't be any.  He nodded and said, by next year, if that happens, I'm gone.

I think we're seeing a dark ages coming, one store at a time.  I always wondered what it would be like to be at the edge of a new Dark Age,  and it's not much fun.  It's all coming unglued, faster and faster.  Perhaps the computer will be our monks, our scribes,  storing information until such time as people can remember how to read again, how to turn the damn things on, how to use that information.  Im glad in a strange way to have seen that terribly sinster dark edge,  but even gladder I won't be around to watch what happens. 

argh

Snow. Not a lot, lasted maybe ten minutes, but no matter how I tried to pretend it was pollen, (really BIG pollen) or hail...

(heading off to sulk under a warm blanket)

October picture

Almost home

the new bookstore

In the mall in Concord a new bookstore finally opened--however, it's Border's and they have a very limited range of books available.  It almost amounts to censorship but im not entirely sure who is censoring what or why...Im giving them the benefit of the doubt right now, because they havent been there long;  very few shelves in the open spaces, for one thing.  Lots of self help books, history, biography.  No Robert Parker, John P. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, John Irving or Terry Pratchett. Very few women-as-detective series.  And incredibly, Jane Eyre has been relegated to the mystery/detective shelf.  No poetry, not even Shakespeare or Frost. 
It comes across as a Nicholas Sparks/Oprah type store, easy reads,  nothing too difficult.  If you are over 7 you are labeled an indepent reader, even if you are  now reading the final Harry Potter.

This Independent Reader fwowed up and left.

Radio Memories

I am listening to a recording by Tom Rush, "Circle Game".  Hearing this I am once again 19, it's late, really late at night,  and WBZ in Boston is on the radio.  Dick Summer has the late night slot, and he has the privilege of playing whatever he wants.  Most records in those days, the mid sixties, were 3 minutes long, more or less.  This one was endless, and he said, you'll hardly notice how long it is.  He was right.
He introduced us to Tom Rush, Phil Ochs, and Jim Croce and a lot of other music that was just outisde the rim of what passed for "popular".   

Late night radio was amazing, back then.  Every night from 10 to 11 Jean Shepherd would hold forth from WOR in NY, only available on AM, and I was willing to endure the fade in fade out static,  just to hear him.  He played bizarre music,  expounded on everything from car dealers to tornadoes. He was never dull.  He also told the story then that eventually became "A Christmas Memory", now shown every Christmas, with Himself doing the narration. 

Radio was live, and the disc jockeys were more than rip and read music players. They talked about the records, did background, and talked to each other.  Not long ago I happened across Dick Summer's blog, in which he reminisces about those very days.  So it wasnt magic just for me.  That makes it even more special.

Today I am an Old Person

I have just officially become a medicare recipient,  subject to the whims and vagaries of Social Security, from now until they decide what to do with the body, hopefully years down the road.  It's a bit unsettling.

No fawn should be this new this late in the year.  She just stood almost in front of the car when I was coming home today, staring at me. We figure she was born maybe a month ago, and fawns like this worry me.  They keep coming later and later, as if this particular grouping has a slightly longer cycle which pushes the fawns to be born later and later.

And amazingly they do manage to survive the winter. I don't really know how, but they do.

When she started to move away I tooted the horn at her, give her a bit of fear of humans to chew on.

well it HAS been awhile

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
But being about as predictable as baby chicks in a hailstorm, hurricanes can do strange things, both weather-wise and human wise;  people respond in  different ways:  one group hunkers down after cleaning the store shelves of candles (which they never use),  radio batteries, toilet paper, and beer;  another gets ready to party hearty all night long or go surfing, regardless of what cooler heads are suggesting,  one set bundles in the car heading for the beach to "watch the waves come in", and the rest of us just bring in the lawn furniture and hope the roof holds up.

Now I know why my front lawn is so green

These 11 wild turkeys have been around all summer. They have been carefully tended by two females, and not one of the eleven was lost.  Baby turkeys are as near the bottom of the food chain as you can get, and its not unusual for a mother turkey to lose an entire clutch of 12-16 babies in a season.  I suspect the two hen turkeys were sisters from one of last year's broods, and I am strangely proud of them for protecting these guys all summer, from coyotes, foxes, fisher cats, and anything else that eats turkeylets. 

This seems to be their first day on their own, without the two mothers watching over them.   The fields were mowed yesterday, and they've been scouring it steadily ever since, gleaning, gleaning...

Harvesting Moonlight

Slowly, with care so as not to break
its spirit

Storage can be a problem
unless you have a field large enough
to hold it all

Any wild thing will tell you
let it run free, trust it will return
at the right time and for the right reasons

Watching from the edge of the woods
rising over the trees at last
only a little to the right
of where you left it the month before

Odds and Ends

Finally, rain. The neighbor who takes our hay every year came to mow, yesterday; and today, racing the rain, he gathered it into windrows, baled it,and loaded it onto our flatbed all in about five hours. Just minutes, literally, before the rain started for real, he came back with his pickup and got the last half dozen or so bales left behind.

Which is why we do not grow or sell hay for sale, why we do not raise vegetables or fruit commercially, or any of the other things folks seem surprised we do not do with 'all that land'. I simply do not have the emotional stamina any longer to watch thunderheads gathering on the day we mow the field, or watch a late May frost wipe out an entire year's harvest. I do however
admire those people who do, and seem to thrive on it in some way.

But it did rain at last and is raining now. I hope it rains for a week.

Still no rain

Words of one syllable department: in the local paper last night I read that in some areas of the country they are advising people to put out barrels to catch rainwater until the drought is over.

Read that sentence very very carefully.