Duck Issues

I have a resentment against ducks and geese.  They settle in a place for the winter, now that the winters are warmer around here, and they leave stuff.  Months of stuff.  Sometimes year-round of stuff.  In Mt Vernon, Ohio there is a beautiful reflecting pool at the state hospital surrounded by a concrete sidewalk.  Guess why most people don’t go to the reflecting pool? 

Softball diamonds around here work the same way just as soon as a low spot and winter puddles develop.  Then when you rip and grade it with a tractor in the spring, it’s hard to breathe.  Also during rainstorms.  Makes me want to quit enjoying driving tractors. 

If I were King I would get a good Savage .22 with some long rifle ammunition and…….well.  It would be a lot more fun to shoot them out of the sky.  They’re flying along and  there’s a kind of spasm and then they drop straight down like rocks!  Trouble is they’re too damn greasy to eat.

Pigeons belong in this category too.  Besides having an IQ of 4 they try to nest on my upstairs front porch in the winter.  I do shoot them.  With a pellet gun.  Enough is enough!

No I won’t shoot your deer.  But I have to admit that venison is very tasty and very (low fat) healthy.  Especially makes totally awsome chili!  Yo Bambi!  Ta!

Older !

I am playing poker with a deck of insurance cards.  Having reached the magic age of almost-65 they are descending on me like rain.  Up until last month I had an Anthem medical card and an Anthem dental card.  Then I was told I had to sign up – again – with the government (how many times in my life have I done this for one reason or another?  If my file is thick imagine what the Mayor’s file looks like…) 

Now I have a Medicare card; a Humana medical card; a something-or-other eye care card and a dental card – still Anthem.  Oh, and a prescription card from some outfit called Express Scripts.  Almost enough to play a good game of Euchre with. 

In addition I have received at least twenty pounds of advertising from everybody from Gecko to AARP wanting me to sign up for their supplemental insurance programs.  While trying to convince me that all the cards that I now have certainly aren’t going to cover everything.  (They won’t.  That’s the nature of insurance recruitment, sales and deception.)

And I am getting ready to move.  A big life change for me, I’ve lived happily here for 16 years.  And I am going to live happily elsewhere with significantly less possessions and for about three hundred dollars less a month then where I am at now.  At a place on a lake where I can look down in the morning and watch the ducks shitting on the shore.  Sorry, I have a resentment against ducks.

The big change is that everybody in this place is fifty-seven or older.  Nobody is 21.  There are no young girls or guys.  I will hardly know how to behave (until one of those old gals invites me over for supper….).  My life is a lot older.  I don’t see this place as the last stop before I die and I intend to frolic happily there for a long time.

But time passes.  In spite of me.  I am corresponding with an elegant lady from my grade school days who is the same age as I am.  The last time I saw her was in 7^th grade and I think I was in love with her, until I was able to buy my next bag of marbles.  Attention is so fleeting!  Thinking back that far is almost going back to World War Two and I’m not sure all of my own kids know what that was exactly.  It truly does take my breath away, that was so long ago.

I take pills in the morning and walk around the block for exercise, instead of getting up at the crack of dawn and going to work to get trim and tanned and make money doing it.  If my warts and blemishes keep growing I will look someday like Franklin Roosevelt.

But I take life a day at a time.  Most of it has been rewarding.  Some of it was the pits.  It has all been interesting.  I am not guaranteed a tomorrow, could get hit by a bus.  But I have today and, creaky or not, I will frolic in the sun on my gimpy right leg for my todays until it’s time to shut it down.

And I have changed the color of this blog to Virginia Tobacco just because I can!  Ta!

Green !!

I had Fruit Flies.   I must have brought them home in a bunch of bananas and in two days they had taken over the place.  They are little and don’t make noise.  They sometimes try to get into your eyes or your nose.  I never saw them in any foodstuffs but they are so small I wouldn’t have known the difference.

in little circles they fly and then plunge dramatically into things that are not good for them.  Like hot coffee.  Or butter, where they get stuck and soaked.  Fortunately they LOVE flypaper.  Yes, that old-fashioned, sticky stuff, kind of brown.  Smells like 1950 vintage Watkins Beef Iron and Wine tonic.  I put some out one night knowing they would laugh at me in the small hours of the morning.  And by sunrise there were probably about 300 on the flypaper and almost none airborne.  It is just hard to find the flypaper, it is not Modern!  I got mine in a bazaar run by a couple Arabs and a Mexican girl.

Green?  But of course.  If you don’t know that word and the definition, you flunk high school and your SAT’s.  Sorry to be a Grinch but we’ve had green since Reagan was president.  And we had it before that in California and the Mother Earth News.  Back then it was called Ecologically Sound.  Then it was called Eco-friendly.  Like the Italian opera of the same sound.  Green is about creating new hierarchies of jobs for your relatives and friends, and new hierarchies of money for all those people to spend, including in their paychecks. 

Hell, we even have Green busses now racing all over the City spreading their very limited pollution in the streets.  We also have electric trolleys and have had for years and they are greener than green.  But painted yellow.  I always thought Green was about St. Patrick’s Day but I must have been mistaken.  Ta!

Journalism Frenzy

  Cast  I have quit watching TV except for old repeats of Are you Being Served which was made in England about the time I got married.  40 years ago.  This is new enough for me.  It just puzzles me that news stories that purport to be of great relevance disappear just as soon as something else interesting comes up on the horizon.  This is not something I learned in grade school.  Apparently continuity is a lost language today.   Let’s see, awhile back the Senate was divided into fighting factions and didn’t get anything done.  For a long time.  They still seemed to get their paychecks somehow.  Which is why I am not voting for any incumbents this time around.  Even a second-grader could do a better job than the respected Senators. Some of the new guys actually may be second-graders, intelligence doesn’t seem to be a requirement.  Then a renegade, terrorist, Major, psychologist in Texas shot up a bunch of soldiers and the senators went away.  An airplane crashed into an IRS building in Texas and the Major went away.  Then the oil well blew up and burned in the gulf and for weeks we were treated to subsurface pictures of oil gushing out of the broken valve.  The economy of the southern US was going to die, the fish and octopus population was going to glow in the dark and couldn’t be eaten.  And BP and a whole lot of others were making millions off the thing anyway.  Then the White House announced that things weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been, the well people pumped mud and recycled trash down the pipe and the well stopped running.  Now Al-Quaida has a new leader who lived in the US for some time and the well has virtually disappeared.   I have a song for all this and it may help you to understand why I spend time watching old reruns of Are You Being Served or not watching TV at all.  The link is somewhere in this blog.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpn_xu81ySo   Sex, love and rock and roll and somebody else can do the drugs and the booze.  But if it all doesn’t really matter, and disappears when something more interesting occurs, what’s wrong with that?  Ta!  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++