End of (Dog) Days

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I have survived a week that I am quickly coming to know as “My Week as a Country Song.” It isn’t a Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks, or Kenny Chesney country song. No it was a Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, or Conway Twitty country song kind of a week. 

It started with sitting in the Indianapolis International Airport listening to gate attendants tell me and my work mates that the part to get the landing gear to retract was on its way and as soon as it arrived they would get a mechanic from a rival airline to come over on a Sunday night and replace it out of the goodness of their heart. So “no the flight isn’t cancelled it is just delayed,” was the refrain of this country ballad. “We expect to get you on your way at 5:00. No wait; 6:00, Ah let’s make that 7:00. So please don’t leave the airport or reschedule your flight.” Finally, at 8:00 the harried counter person says, “it looks like the flight is cancelled. We can get you on a 5:45 flight in the morning.” To which I responded, “I know that you did not make up the lies and may even have thought that you were doing your job but does your soul die just a little bit every time you have to treat people like you have this evening?”

So my alarm went off at 2:45. I sat bolt upright in bed and got up to get on a plane for a one day business trip to South Carolina with a return flight that evening at 6:00 p.m.  Mission accomplished. The people of South Carolina were delightful. We learned a lot. It was even pretty good to see how well the members of our work team came together and dealt with a certain amount of adversity and didn’t add to the drama.

Tuesday arrived, and as I was heading out the door for work, Henry our old Jack Russel Terrier lurched up out of his dog bed. Lurching is not his usual method for rising and shining so I was concerned. I watched him for a few moments and decided that his stiff gait was not the usual I am 13 years old and “I am a bit stiff” kind of a gait. The lovely Miss Beverly and I had a consultation and she had the time to get him into the vet for a checkup. We feared that it was bad, but I was out the door heading for work. Ten miles from home, Bev calls and says it is very bad. “Henry can’t move and appears to be in a great deal of pain.”

Turning the car around, I headed home to comfort Bev and help make difficult decisions about Henry. We knew that he had not been feeling well lately. But this was decidedly worse. I got home and he was in bad bad shape. He could not walk. He was in bad pain. Bev was comforting him wrapped in a blanket on the kitchen floor. It was time.

I have always had trouble with a dog’s end of times issues. I am a farm boy at heart and we would never have taken our dogs to the vet to be put down. Not because we were cheap but because they were our dogs and our responsibility. Yet, I have grown up in a world where there is pet insurance, pet insulin, doggy daycare, and a host of other enhancements to a dogs life. Shoot when I was growing up, dog movies were about dying dogs now they are about reincarnated dogs saving our lives. Times have changed.

I cannot speak for anyone else when I write this. I have followed the evolved world’s view on dog care and have asked the vet to end some of our dog’s days. A few years ago we had a vet end Millie’s suffering. I have never been at peace with that decision. I know that to end a pet’s life in a veterinary office is the only way many people could get through the traumatic emotions due to the end of a family member’s existence. I get it.

For me, that one time left a gap, a hole that can’t be filled. He took her back to a room and then she was gone. I don’t know how it works now but back then she was suddenly a biohazard and was disposed of properly. 

Since Millie, we have always taken matters into our own hands and put our severely injured or dying dogs down. From time to time, we have had dogs who showed the lovely Miss Beverly and I the kindness of leaving unannounced. One day they were here. That evening they were not. Our farm is in a rough and tumble neighborhood. The coyotes sing every time a train passes a quarter mile to the South. Recently, Lucy and Henry’s brother, Hugo left that way. While there wasn’t much closure, I always thought that they left on the hunt, hackles raised and  ready to do some damage. I was good with that. That wasn’t going to be the case for Henry.

On Tuesday, I turned the car around and rushed home. I found the lovely Miss Beverly on the kitchen floor comforting Henry. There was no doubt; Henry was in pain and would not survive for another day. The wheels of death roll on a specific path. Things have to be done. The gun has to be retrieved from the barn. The bullet from a hidden spot in a closet. The shovel is pulled from the garage and a hole dug. Make it deep. Make it wide. I put it out in the rhubarb patch so there will be some good memories each late May eating pie. We gently carried Henry wrapped in a blanket to the backyard. I stop breathing at this moment. I dread the moment. I know what has to be done. The longer it takes the more Henry suffers. It is a hard calculus. In the end, you have to step up to your friend, look him in the eye and end the pain while knowing that you are ending his life.

For that I am sorry. For that I am sad. I still walk to the kitchen each evening before bed to make sure he is shut up in the mud room. I have checked his water and food bowl each morning this week, and to be honest I could use a pretty good belly rub about now. Those things aren’t going to happen any longer, but I do look forward to that slice of strawberry-rhubarb.

Take care.

Roger

Scared to Death

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I must admit that my hands are a bit shaky. I had quite the Halloween fright. It is hard to believe that we have passed Thanksgiving. But let’s face it. Thanksgiving was so early this year that I barely had time to recover from my Halloween ordeal. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving. It is over now and it is off to the next faze of the holiday season which I fondly call; Newthankschristgivemasday. It is a quiet Sunday morning. The lovely Miss Beverly has graciously made me smokies and eggs with one piece of heavy bread. What is heavy bread you ask? Well you will just have to keep wondering and hope that someday we will let you live with us and teach you the heavy bread secret handshake.

Oh don’t be sad. If you were here, you would have to smell my garlic infused fingers. I know that it is too late plant garlic. But what could I do? With Aug-toner temps being so high. It would have germinated the garlic. It’s green sprouts would have emerged and been frozen in Jan-peril.  Yes, you would be able to dream about pans of lasagna, and tubs of humus, but it would stink to high heaven. That is one thing that reading on the internet deprives one. If you were here and we were having a story telling conversation, you would be able to smell the garlic oils left on my hands after going out and getting  15 ft of garlic in the ground in hopes that the 50 degree weather forecasted this week will be enough to promote healthy root growth and not so much to promote sprouting. We shall see. That sitting around the table, telling and listening to stories, the lingering evidentiary aroma of a task well done, adds so much to the social discourse that is lost with social media. However, don’t even start to think that I am inviting all one million of you over for smokies and eggs for a story. 

All of that being said, I hope that my words can convey the terror that I felt while trying to change a tire at 8:00 p.m. along I69 during a heavy rain. Hopefully, you will not need to see my wild eyed gesticulating, or see me throw my glasses from my face while demonstrating one of the more frightening moments to get the flavor of the fear that I experienced that evening.

Bev and I were out celebrating our foster son’s good grades at Golden Corral. I know that some of you foodies out there are frightened by that sentence. Don’t be such a snob. Where else can you go and get gummy bears to sprinkle over your ice cream sundae? Pure goodness. And there is so much of everything. It is what J.D. wanted. “What J.D. wants”, has been in short supply as he learns to live under different management. We rolled out of Golden Corral and ran through the wind and the rain to the car. We jumped in the car and headed out for the 12 mile trek home. Just as I pulled on interstate, the low tire light lit up. 

That yellow light blazed on my dash and my adrenaline spiked. First, I hoped that the stupid sensor was malfunctioning like it had for nearly a year before I had it fixed. Crap! That’s right. I had it fixed. Plan B: maybe it was just signifying the regular loss of air that all tires undergo. Pump up the tire once a year and the light goes out and there is no problem. I would just drive the eight miles to the next exit, pull into a gas station and check it out. I would be relieved when looking at the tire and seeing that it might be a little low but drivable. I would pull into our nice garage and pump up the tire and be good for another 12 months. Crap! I don’t remember ever having to pump up the tire every once in a while before. That is the other car; the one with the 8 year old rims that may have a bit of pitting around the rim. Sure I have to pump it up every three months but never this car.

Well I wasn’t going to get out on the interstate to check. So, I pushed the gas down harder and and started doing mental gymnastics. If a car leaves St Louis and drives 70 mph toward Indianapolis 231 miles away and another car leaves Indianapolis and drives 100 mph, will the second car lose control if the tire suddenly goes flat? It turns out that at 70 mph you will make it about 6 miles before the telltale shaking will tell you that your story problem is over, and you did not make it to the safe haven exit number 25, and it feels like it is the driver’s side rear that is going down. Congratulations, you get to get up close and personal to oncoming traffic.

Like an Indy 500 crew going over the wall in the final laps of the race, the lovely Miss Beverly and I hop out of the car, open the hatchback and start digging for tires, jacks, and lug wrenches. The lovely Miss Beverly was a great help. She did a great job standing at the back of the car and shining the flash light around the corner at my work area.  During the next five minutes, I had three thoughts that kept passing through my mind in an eternal loop. First, how far will my body fly if someone drifted off the road and hit me at 70 mph? Second, it’s okay if I get hit but I am going to be really sad if the lovely Miss Beverly or the two children in the car get hit. Third, did you know that it has been scientifically proven that the hour between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. is one of the 24 most texting-while-driving hours.

Then at the 5:03 minute mark, things got really exciting. I was just starting to tighten the lug nuts and exhausting my curing thesaurus when a truck came by so close and fast that it blew my glasses off of my face. Yes, BLEW MY GLASSES OF MY FACE!  And let me tell you, Roget’s was able to publish a new edition of curses. Thankfully my glasses landed in a crack between my coat and the car. I recovered, put my glasses back on, turned to page two of the new edition and really started tightening lug nuts. During this frenzied two minutes, two more thoughts ran through my mind. First, Bill Cosby (back when he was funny and a closeted abuser) had a bit that told a story about his mother always telling him to put on clean underwear because you didn’t want to have dirty underwear in the hospital. At this point, he looked at the audience and said, “we all know that clean underwear don’t matter. If you are in an accident, first you are going to say it and then your’e going to do it. It doesn’t matter how clean your underwear were.” My underwear were in great danger of being soiled.

Second, I thought why do people want me to watch the Walking Dead or a hundred other horror films. I don’t like them. They scare me, and at that moment along I 69, at 8:00 p.m. in the dark and the rain, fixing a flat tire 3 feet away from cars going 70 mph with the drivers texting and a foot and a half way from some S.O.B. in a semi, I received my lifetime supply of scared s#*%$t-less.

Take care.

Roger.

All Sweetness and Light

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my keyboard trying to come to terms with being beatified. No one more was more surprised than I. My sect is not big on saintly things. I had no aspirations to sainthood but there I was earning my wings like Clarance in “It's a Wonderful Life.”

 I learned of my spiritual promotion on the way home from work the other night. I was in the process of stealing (no the irony isn’t lost on me) several copies of Branches from the self service paper dispenser at work. Branches is a small freebie newspaper published semi monthly here in Indianapolis. Based on their advertising, I am assuming that their target audience is New Age believers. With that kind of spiritual pedigree, I am assuming that they have the expertise to make judgements about the hierarchical ranking of spiritual beings. 

So yes, I was taking several papers from the dispenser to shred up to feed to my worm farm that I keep in the garage. They do yeomen’s work chewing up our compost. I take the newspapers and grind them up into bite size nuggets. This balances out the carbon-nitrogen levels that make my worms very happy. I figure that the stealing is actually a good thing. At least, I justify that stealing in this case is a good thing. Everyone is helped all around. Branches can charge a higher ad rate to “Classes at New Age People” because the readership is so high. The paper’s aren’t ending up in the landfill. And the worms benefit from the karmic bs. It is a win win win.

Right there on the front of the July - August 2017 edition, are a bunch of bee keepers with angel wings. I never studied iconography in school but even I could get the picture with their graphical representations. Beekeepers are doing the Lord’s work. I am a beekeeper. Therefore, I am doing the Lord’s work; hence the spiritual promotion. No one was more surprised that I. I went to work that morning, a worker bee in my cubicle, can came out a beekeeping angel. Who knew?

Actually, I am not much of a beekeeper. I have an expensive hobby that involves keeping boxes with frames of wax foundation. Some bees hang out and do what they do. I know that there are beekeepers out there who are in their hives every other week from April through September. They are searching for the queen, treating for parasitic mites, and naming all of the new larvae. They know every time that pesticides are being sprayed in a four county radius. They are harvesting honey after the spring flow and the fall flow (if there is enough nectar). There are even beekeepers who make hard candy to put in the hive to help the bees get through the winter. These people are keeping bees. I just happen to know where some bees hang out.

These are all important tasks. They make the hive stronger and less prone to sudden hive collapse. That is a good thing. The fewer hives that collapse the more bees we will have. And since flowers are horrible at unaided sex, the more bees that we have the more flower sex there is and hence more fruits and vegetables. Some predict that the world order is threatened by the factors that contribute to sudden hive collapse. Beekeepers by their actions help or single handedly prevent civilization’s collapse. You deserve those wings buddy. Saving the world through flower sex is certainly more important than what that chump Clarence did by massaging the space time continuum while Jimmy Stewart got his head right. Let the bells ring I say.

I have a theory about why the bees are having trouble. Bees forage for pollen in a three mile radius from the hive. That is a lot of space to cover with those little tiny wings. Who watched bees for long enough to figure that out? And how did the researcher know that one bee flew that far? What if you were watching a bee and he flew close to another bee that was whose hive was a mile and a half away. The researcher got confused which bee they were supposed to be watching and switched their focus mid flight so that bees really only fly a mile and a half. I know difficult right. But I digress. So bees can supposedly forage up to 3 miles away for pollen. There should be plenty of pollen by any standard to keep a hive flourishing with in a circle that large.

But wouldn’t it be better if the pollen were closer? What would happen if we let the dandelions take over our yards and the bees only had to fly 7 feet to get pollen instead of three miles? The same principle applies in our every day lives. Let’s say you had an option of keeping your refrigerator in your kitchen or in Aunt Betty’s kitchen 3 miles away. Sure you could get in the car or on your bike and navigate the three miles for the sandwich fixings. You could survive on that. But would you get all fat and sassy that way. Heck no! You would get your sandwich made, get it back to the house, sit down at the table, say a little prayer and then cuss because you forgot to put any mayo on your roast beef sandwich. 

Are you going to get up from the table and get all of the way over to Aunt Betty’s house for a little dab of mayo? NO! No mayo is going to make you skinnier. And forget about a mid-evening ice-cream sundae.  You aren’t going to get fat and happy doing that. No you are going to be skinny and puny and won’t have much energy for that birds and the bees thing. In short, if your refrigerator is kept three miles away your hive is going to collapse. So I get out there and plant as many high pollen plants that I can. I encourage that first flush of dandelions in the spring and keep planting buckwheat until 3 weeks before frost in the fall. We have mint plants, sunflowers, white clover through out the front yard. Yes, Sharritt Farms is a fat bee paradise. We have “caution o-bee-se in the area” signs posted all around the farm. Sharritt bees have it good.

Am I doing the Lord’s work? I have my doubts. It is important to not read too much into all of the little things we do that just happens help a little bit. I think the world suffers because we beatify the little things; things that just have to be done. It probably started with participation trophies in little league. Yeah, we need to get in there, do our best, play hard, and pay attention. We have to do that for the health of the team and for that matter for our own enjoyment. But that doesn’t make us a star. Bee keeping doesn’t make me a saint. It doesn’t even make me a good person.

It just makes me a guy who loves a little honey in his tea.

Take care.

Roger

Gore your own Ox

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. This is a blog that was supposed to occur about 4 weeks ago. It was to proclaim my recovery from attendance at the Indiana State Fair. It was to be a pull the pin on the grenade and let er rip kind of blog. I had outrage. I had indignation. I was aggrieved, exasperated and piqued. It was going to be a doozy. However, it was eclipsed by the astrophysical equivalent of shadow puppets. 

So here I am a nearly a month after the fact, sitting down to write about the state fair and I must admit that I have lost some of my steam. 

I had not attended the great Indiana State Fair in several years. During my formative, it had provided an annual milestone for the Sharritt's. No matter, how much work needed to be done on the farm, dad would load up the family and we would head for the fair. We were poor back then. So this would have been the budget for our day at the fair.

Car parking $5.00

Admission $5.00 “You kids will be okay in the trunk now shut up and stop kicking the lid.”

Tractor tram ride $$2.50: ride from the machinery field to the hog barn.

Lunch $10.00 Toasted cheese sandwich and shake.

Saltwater taffy $2.00.

Grand total $24.50; Leaving $0.50 in our entertainment budget for August and September.

Yes, the Indiana State Fair was a celebration of Hoosier Agriculture. We would roam the equipment field and the antique machinery field. We would watch the thresher machine demonstration with dad regaling us with stories of his time with a threshing crew. It was quick juxtaposition the year when we wandered from the threshing demonstration to a combine that had a cab large enough to hold the entire family. I do not know which company used the small house model for combine cabs, but it never caught on. The extraverted farmer niche just wasn’t big enough to sustain their model. 

We would wonder over to the Bobcat booth where we would marvel at the 5 foot deep hole that they could dig in a couple of hours, and rue the moment when we realized that the door to the cow stall that had to be forked out by hand was too small to allow the passage of this wonderful piece of labor saving technology. Oh how we would dream about how fast the foot and a half of cow poop could be hauled if that door were six inches wider when cleaning those stalls every spring and fall. With each fork full of aromatic bedding, we would curse our ancestors for not being visionaries when building that cow stall and we would covet a Bobcat every summer at the fair.

Yes, we would marvel at the size of the world’s largest boar, but only after a mid afternoon lunch at the Dairy barn; toasted cheese and strawberry shake. There might be some sniggering between the cousins as we vainly tried to cover up our perceived inadequacies when in the presence of such an example of scrotal superiority as we left the swine barn. We would marvel at the Clydesdales and groan with boredom as we made our way through the dairy barn. After milking 65 cows twice a day for years, the dairy barn held no interest. We had literally seen it all when it came to dairy cows.

I know that you are thinking “Roger this is nostalgia not outrage.” You are correct. But if you are a long time reader of “You Said What, Roger?”, you would remember that I have had a hate hate relationship with 4-H, and Lord knows the State Fair is the Super Bowl of 4-H. However, I must admit that 4-H baggage isn’t what I wanted to rant about. I had an enjoyable time at the fair that afternoon and evening in early August. 

It was a different experience for me. After years of boycotting the Indiana State Fair celebrating hot tubs and whirlpools we returned this year. Bev and I have once again listened to the call of the end of the driveway. Read my blog from September 12 of last year if you need some context. This kiddo who is living with us came ready made with 4 friends. They had never been to the fair. So we loaded into the car and went to the fair.

These are city kids. Their fair experience had to be much different than my old fair experience. In ten years of attending the fair, I never once made it to the midway. Remember the fair budget from above; not much wiggle room. Things are different now. We pay the 15 year old boys money for working in the garden and getting things ready for our son’s wedding earlier in the year. They hit the midway with the disposable income that only working teens living at home have. That money was not going to burn a hole in their pocket. 

At this point, you might expect some ranting and raving. However, I quickly slipped into catatonia. As the lovely Miss Beverly pointed out, “we live such contemplative lives that all of this noise and blinking lights is just too much for us.” Too much it was. I quickly found a bench and sat down with Bev. We told the urchins that they had to check in with us every 15 minutes, and we just sat there slowly rocking back and forth hoping that it would all end soon. If I ever become a state legislator, I am going to force the following change on the Indiana State Fair. They have to have more benches to sit down on and so contemplative can wait while the end of the world approaches.

But I am not even going to rant about that. Although, I could rant a little bit about sitting 150 ft from a game when the operator needed a thesaurus. For two hours, we listened to her say “every winner gets their choice.” She never once wandered off script to “any prize you want”, or “take any prize” or “the choice is yours.” I don’t know what stopped her from saying “shoot me now, I can’t take it any more!”

I was okay with that. The kids had fun. It was a new experience for them. They showed the proper amount of awe for 15 year old boys while looking at the world’s largest boar. I only chortled a little when they said that they didn’t want to take their strawberry shake and toasted cheese sandwich with us while we walked through the dairy barn because “they didn’t like the smell.” I wish that I still had a picture of my father in poop stained t-shirts that weren’t completely covered by a full length rubber apron that we wore while milking cows. Oh well, I guess that it isn’t all bad that the youth of America don’t know how their food is produced.

SO ROGER WHAT WERE YOU GOING TO RANT ABOUT? Take it easy. I was going to rant about an Indianapolis Star article the following day by a Ruth Servens. She was doing an in depth analysis of State Fair Finances. She found that the State Fair doesn’t get as much money from mid-way rides as surrounding state fairs do. It appears that the fair board leaves $ on the table in order to receive a guaranteed income year after year. Bad for us when attendance is up 19% like this year but good for us when it is down 16% like last year. And in the middle of the article was this little gem about the $2.4 million annual subsidy the state fair receives annually; “at roughly $2.4 million a year, it's a tiny portion of Indiana's $31 billion two-year budget, but it's money that can't be spent on other underfunded services.”

Yeah, underfunded services like the $713,000,000 stadium for the colts to pay in, or the $44,000,000 that the pacers have received over the past 4 years. Give me a break. 

Indiana Agriculture generates $44 billion in revenue in direct agricultural sales and ancillary economic activity a year. $2.5 million is too much to spend in celebrating that. The agricultural impact to local services if felt even greater in Indiana. As property taxpayers, I know that my farm pay 10 times more in taxes than my neighbor does. Yet, both households only put one family through the local schools. We both go to the same library and fund one municipal pool. We both help pay for one county court.  Yes, farmers are getting too much of a good thing.

You and Ms. Servens may believe that the state taxpayer has no business celebrating the accomplishments of a free market enterprise. She may be correct and if she is then let the colts build their own underfunded barn to pay in. Or let the pacers find someplace else to make up for their $4 million annual short fall. 

But I bet that Ms. Servens employer disagrees with that plan. The howl that would go up from the pages of the Star would drown out that carnival barker if a legislator had the temerity to suggest that the colts and pacers pay their own way. There would be 25 references to “Naptown” in describing the downtown environment if those two teams went away. Plus, and correct me if I am wrong but the state  has roughly half a billion in its rainy day fund and last year ran about a $50 million surplus. So by definition in a representative democracy, nothing was underfunded.

It just gripes me to no end when uninformed people go about casting stones insisting that world line up the way that they believe it should. It especially galls me when they blithely try to determine whose ox should be gored and whose should be spared.

Take care.

Roger

Lessons of Astrophysics

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. For all of those who readily accepted the media’s tales of doom and gloom, who hovered around loved ones, exhausting themselves in an effort to keep them safe, there was nothing special about the eclipse that will make you blind. The opportunity for retinal burn exists every day. It was just as dangerous on Sunday. It was just as dangerous on Tuesday. It will be just as dangerous all 2416 days until the next solar eclipse in the US.  To which, I am happy to say that the Sharritt Air BnB is now taking reservations. Yes, we are pleased to say that SharrittLand is in the direct path of totality. We, once again, will be left totally in the dark. We will not guarantee that the cloud cover will allow you to see the eclipse. However, we do have good internet connection so you will be able to see it on the HDTV that we will purchase with the funds you so graciously provide.

 It is sad that someone probably did not believe all of the warnings about the brightness of the sun and stared at it and consequently destroyed their eye sight. We are all somewhere on the bell curve. A few people went into the basement and covered their heads and a few said “we don’t need no stinking glasses.” The rest of us to one degree or another took precautions and enjoyed the eclipse and kept our eye sight. I personally, was probably the only person and my large office building carrying a welding mask into work. I could not get it jammed into my back pack. Thankfully, I was able to evade security long enough to get inside. 

I remember an eclipse from my childhood. In school, the  “Weekly Reader” was our town crier. Oh, those were the halcyon days of print media. The scions of the Hearst Media Conglomerate were bringing up another generation of newspaper readers. The Weekly Reader warned us that we could go blind staring at the sun during the eclipse and a few weeks later, a follow up “I told you so” appeared; reporting on a girl whose sight had returned after losing it looking at the eclipse. Bible Belt miracle? The regenerative power of the human body? Hoax? Hysteria? Who knows? It made great Weekly Reader fodder.

Getting back to the over reaction in some circles to the possibility of injury from the solar eclipse. Some schools kept their children inside during the eclipse to protect them. Some even kept them after regular school hours because ironically that pesky sun doesn’t get on board with daylight savings time. If the sun had believed in DST the eclipse would have been over by the end of school and the sun would have lost its super natural ability to make you blind only during an eclipse.

Why do we give the eclipse super natural powers? It is an interesting phenomena. It happens so seldom that to some appears to be random, to others it appears to be super natural; a sign of the end times. But it isn’t random; it isn’t super natural; it isn’t prophetic at all. It is just physics; actually astrophysics. But you get my meaning. When you have the sun doing its thing over and over again without any concern for the earth (we are not the center of the universe), and you have the moon doing its thing over and over again with concern for the earth (we are the center of it’s universe), things from time to time line up. So the eclipse wasn't random. If it were, we wouldn’t be able to sell you space at SharrittLand AirBnB in 2024. We know that it is going to happen.

We also know that the sun’s intensity doesn’t increase retinal burning levels during an eclipse. The sun has been emitting photons at nearly the same intensity for about 4.6 billion years. Those photons go screaming out in all directions and a tiny percentage manage to hit us. They warm our cats in windowsills on cold winter mornings. They trigger complex chemical reactions in plant cells taking carbon dioxide and releasing the carbon emitting oxygen for us to respire and hook a carbon back on to it. That reaction does a lot of other things like making your sweet corn sweet but I don’t have time to teach you all of the things you should have learned along time ago. Those photons react with your skin and manufacture vitamin D, which does something important like help you absorb calcium and phosphorus. Once again kids pay attention in school.

So yes, the sun is a good thing. But beware children, it will still do you great harm. It isn’t out to get you. It is just out there emitting photons. It's intensity allows all of those good things to happen. The intensity for the good things will also blind you if you look at it.

So remember. Kids keep your heads down, and nature isn’t out to kill you. It just seems that way.

Take Care.

Roger

Winner of the 2017 Limerick Costest

Dear Blog Reader and Limerick Writers.

Yes siree it is that time again. Each year at the end of July the lovely Miss Beverly in recognition of Doyle Hoover’s (her father) birthday, calls together the tribe an others in the limerick challenge. Doyle was a dairy farmer by calling and a limerick writer because farming didn’t fill every moment of his waking hours. Actually, have you ever milked 40 cows two times a day for 40 years? I haven’t either. But I did a stint (evenings only) for 5 years from seventh grade until I made my escape after high school. That two hours (or 4 hours 2x a day) every day leaves one with an internal dialog that takes years of counseling to make go away. Doyle turned his internal dialog to good by working on limericks that he would share. Some he shared with everyone. These G and PG versions were cute and delivered with a grin and twinkle in the eye. The bawdier versions were delivered with a twinkle and impish grin from ear to ear.

Limerick isn’t only about a short five line story with rhyme. It is a slave to cadence: AABBA if you read the text books. And the words have to fit together with a certain rhythm. I was working on a limerick exhorting more participants last Saturday night. I had the 9 syllable first line but it would not work. The rhythm was all wrong. It wouldn’t work until I found another 9 syllables to fit the correct rhythm. I think that dairy farming uniquely trains a person for writing limerick. Not only are you in a barn with no one to talk to for 4 hours a day, freed to let your mind wander, you are in this environment surrounded by machinery that counts out a beat with the cadence of a militant metronome. The machine is called a pulsator. It is complicated and and explanation will not get us closer to the announcement of our winner this evening. Just know that listening to it day after day you would know all there is to know about meter and rhythm.

So Doyle was unambiguously trained to write and enjoy limericks. He knew that they were not only created for his own enjoyment but for the enjoyment of others. It is a shame that we didn’t know enough to write them down or tape them for posterity. We can only shine a dim candle on his craft by whole heartedly throwing our oar in the water and giving it our best shot. Next year’s theme cliches?

And best shot it was. Thank you everyone for your efforts in this year’s. Over 40 limericks were submitted, and you did great. But this is a contest. No participation trophies here. (Or is that participation pie) There was a log jam at the top, and in the end one did rise to the top like cream in Doyle's bulk tank.

This year’s theme “animals” provided fertile ground for these budding bards. In judging them, I was struck by how many of us had our worlds expanded because our parents didn’t participate in “fixing” our animals. It seemed like our cats were particularly reproductive. Fat cats becoming thin in bedrooms and out at the barn. There were super pigs, and an animal called a squabbit. I must say when a practicing pharmacist starts writing about squabbits it may be time to step away from the dispenser. I'm just saying. There were surprised and dying ground hogs, and grand champion steers. Dogs were well represented from Iowa to a drool covered frisbee catching, tree climbing Busy and one who likes getting stuck on a retaining wall. While some pigs saved free falling damsels in distress others were my personal heros named bacon and sausage. Who knows? They maybe frozen in aisle B.

Enough of the drum roll of suspense, let’s get down to it.

Honorable Mention;

Danielle Grandholm

Watching Busy climb trees like a fool

Was fun to do after school

That dog loved to fly

Up that tree really high

To catch the frisbee smothered in drool

Cindy Pyle

Sam Ting was my favorite cat

One summer she became quite fat

I took her upstairs

Both parents unawares 

On a towel in a box she sat.

So after hours did loom

I worried about my doom

I confessed to my dad

But he never got mad

Yes, her kittens were born in my room

Lyn Ellis

We once had some pigs that were pets

Can we keep them daddy? Oh let’s

We knew what they were

By their new monikers

Sausage and Bacon, you bet.

Stephen Warner

From all around these parts

We’re bombarded with cow farts

The methane does rise

And the poor ozone dies

So we all bake in the sun like tarts.

Joyce Young

Being hauled where gloved hands would pluck her

That sly hen evaded the trucker

Dad gave her a lift

Fine eggs she did gift

And to that rig she clucked, “I’m free, sucker.”

Jim Rogers

In a lifestyle that’s suited to me.

I haul animals in my truck you see.

In boxes galore,

I deliver to the store.

You will find them in frozen aisle B.

Bill Hoover

On my Oliver Tractor, I was dishing.

Fat groundhog didn’t know he was risking

Heavy crescent wrench in hand

Babe Ruth swing I did land.

Home run or Dead varsity it’s a WIN thing.

Congratulations to all of the honorable mentions. You did great. Keep practicing and working on it. You were so close. Maybe next year will be your year.

As I wrote earlier, there are no participation awards. There is only one pie eater here.

Congratulations Stephen Warner

On the course, I golf is a squabbit

The cross of a squirrel and rabbit.

I try but I fail

To grab his red tail.

But I never quite seem to nab it.

Steve, like I said, if you are seeing squabbits you may want to step away from the pill dispenser. Great story, funny, structure and rhyme. Good work.

Until next year, when the lovely Miss Beverly puts out the call for your finest limericks . . .

Take care

Roger

Oh the Possibilities

Dearest Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Although I am recovering. I know what you are saying. “That Roger he’s always recovering in his blog. Just get over it. Life isn’t that hard.” Your’e right. I embellish. I make up things. Life isn’t that hard. But you would read it if everything is fine. Nobody wants to read stories or watch TV shows about vacation days leisurely passing by, getting up at noon, sitting by the pool, reading books, going out to eat with the lovely Miss Beverly, binge watching three episodes of the Walking Dead only to go to bed and wake up on day two of vacation and start it all over again. Even when we watched Seinfeld all of those years, we didn’t want the show to be about carefree, easy breezy days. Seinfeld a show about nothing, They didn’t do the things that we did. No they killed off their fiancées with toxic wedding invitation glue. They were not being served soup by a soup Nazi, They even celebrated festivis instead of Christmas, because we don’t want to watch people do the same things that we are doing.

So yes, I am still recovering. In fact, the last blog was being composed in the middle of the chaos that I am currently letting ebb away. It was the week of Ben and Lisa’s wedding. I am sure that she will some day become known as the lovely Miss Lisa. However, that is Ben’s blog to write in another place and time should he decide that is what he wants to do. 

Yes, when I wrote five weeks ago, the Sharritt household was slipping into the chaos of wedding week. The wedding was to be a blessed affair and along the way there were ten acres of parking lot and wedding meadow to cut, a humongous tent to set up, several pizzas to eat, make up to apply, table cloths to press, (I pointed out to the lovely Miss Beverly, that yes there would come a time when that commercial cloths press with the rolling hot presses would have come in handy. But instead we left our $5 investment to rust in a farm field in Northwest Indiana where it would do us no good some 30 years later), and my favorite, the traditional rehearsal day sports extravaganza where we all gather around the bride and groom playing risky sports on uneven ground daring the fates to give the bride or groom a twisted ankle or black eye. When it finally works those will be very special wedding pictures. We’ve come close. We did have an aunt who fractured her arm for one wedding. We will keep trying.

There is a beautiful 200 year old oak tree that is on the farm tucked away in a small valley. By all rights, it should have been logged out 80 years ago. The family that owned the farm before selling it to my grandfather, logged all of the good timber before the sale. They left about 15 old oaks that were hollow and not fit for lumber. Those old trees have fallen through out the years; returning to the dust from which they sprang. In some strange over sight they left this one. Maybe it was too young at 120 years old. I have no idea. But the tree has stood through 60 years of cows pasturing under it. Idly whiling away the hot summer days under its 100 ft spread; patiently stomping a foot and twitching their tails to disturb the latest biting fly. If their constant pressure caused damaging compaction around its roots, the tree does not appear to be showing any negative effects. It still stands.

I am not sure because two events do not make trend. However, two is the only sample size available to us currently. Any how, the children of the lovely Miss Beverly like to be married under this tree. The intervening 20 years of no cattle had left a classic example of forest succession. The meadow was full of honey locust trees. I know what you are thinking “ah how beautiful and natural, trees that are named after honey.” This is a blatant example of an arborist’s false advertising. Honey locusts if properly named, would be called #@#@# thorn trees. So four years ago, we donned our leather gloves and work boots and cleared out about an acre and a half under this giant oak and had a wedding.

The entrepreneurial Sharritt’s had visions of event planning grandeur. Who wouldn’t want to get married under a two hundred year old oak tree surrounded by nature’s beauty? Indeed, we did have some interest from a few brides who could see the beautiful possibilities. Unfortunately, they were always accompanied by their mothers who could not get past the possibilities of rain, mosquitoes, and 90 degree heat with 95% humidity. So we have set those plans aside and given our money making schemes a rest. In spite of that, last fall Ben and Lisa said that they would like to get married under the tree next July. And just like in Brigadoon, a vision started to emerge. The first step in forest succession is a stand of golden rod killing all of the grass. So last September the weeds were whacked and grass seed was sown. There were a few thorn trees that needed attacking and this spring a regular rotation of mowing the meadow, the wedding parking lot and the reception parking lot: 10 acres in all. No wonder the old farm management loved having cows doing the work for them.

In the picture, you can see the Friday morning picture of the big tree, all the chairs and the wedding arch. You

can’t see is the 3 inch thunderstorm on the horizon at 6:00 pm. That evening. You can’t see the excellent storm water system that the neighboring little town has installed. It is excellent because it dumps all of that water on our farm and it meanders its way to Fall Creek . . . right through the middle of all of those chairs. 

On wedding day, at 7:30 in the morning, I walked down to the wedding meadow and discovered the 4 inch deep stream of water running right through the seating area. I hope that the guests remembered to bring their wellies. High heels were definitely out of the accessory possibilities. 

What do you do with 4 inches of water and 9 hours before the wedding? You bail. You grab a friend, 2 pumps, and build a dam as it enters the meadow and pump the surface water away. After an hour, you realize that two pumps are not enough and grab a shovel, walk 20 yards into the woods and put skills that you acquired in kindergarten to work. You dig a 200 yard trench around the wedding meadow, diverting the water away from the place where 200 well dressed people will be sitting in four hours. Then you go to where the water is leaving and you dig another trench draining the residual water away from the sitting area.

Don’t worry. We moved the chairs a little bit, and no one lost a shoe in the mud. The wedding went off without a hitch. It was a beautiful day. I sit down in my front row seat, looked at my step counting watch and realized that I had logged 20,000 steps and I hadn’t started dancing.

The Kozak's, Low’s and Sharritt’s are blessed to have children that see the wonderful possibilities in life. Children who see the beauty and majesty of a 200 year old tree spread out over the meadow. Children who can discount the risks to get to the benefits. Children who know it may be 90 degrees on July 8 but that meadow will be a beautiful place to get married. Children who know that bad things will happen. Children who know that gulley washers happen. Children who know that challenges can be worked through, addressed and overcome. Children who know that there are shovels for that.  Actually, we are blessed to have young adults who can stay in the moment and recognize the struggle is part of the beautiful journey.

Lisa and Ben may your ditch digging be as blessed as your I dos.

Take care

Roger