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

Thinking Outside the Box

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. This week, I am recovering from a 100 mile bike ride through northeastern Indiana. It is interesting country; very flat and for this 100 miles very windy. What’s the deal with that? It has been a very windy June. I must admit during the middle of the crushing 25 miles into a 15 mph wind I longed for those heady No-Zone action days; those days when the wind dies, the flags go limp, and the smog hangs in the valley obscuring the tree line to the west. I may not be able to breathe but its better than riding into a 15 mph wind.

The ride is up in Adam’s county. I know it hardly seems fair that Eve wouldn’t have a county also. But its Adam’s county. I don’t name them. I just report on the names that they happen to have. This is the second time that I have ridden this ride. It is called the Flat Fifty. Yes, it is ironic when I wear a T-shirt proclaiming that I rode in the Flat fifty; especially as the word flat goes up and over the bulge of my gut. I should probably stick with the Hilly Hundred shirts. At least there will be no false advertising.

Wind aside, I do love this ride. It is farm country. It is also Amish country. It appears that horses hooves and buggies do not put much wear and tear on the roads. So the roads are very nice. I was a bit disappointed with this ride however. Three years ago when I rode, several entrepreneurial Amish youth sold cookies. This time I was prepared and took extra money and alas no Amish youth selling cookies. I managed.

It appears that Saturday afternoon is mow the lawn time in Amish land. It does take some time to get used to seeing a riding mower in Amish country. Imagine going out to the garage and getting out the Clydesdale and hooking up to the sickle bar mower and riding it around the yard. If you have ever used a sickle bar mower, you would know that it had to be very sharp to cut an inch off of 3 inch grass. But they did a good job; nice and smooth. It also appeared that Saturday afternoon was some sort of social affair in Amish country. Buggy after buggy was loaded down with the family with one lap holding a covered dish.

What does one do with 100 miles of open road and no sugar cookies? One contemplates. What does one contemplate? Well, I contemplate binge watching streamed TV shows. I must admit that I know very little about the topic. I have no time to binge watch. I can’t even find the time to write this blog let alone watch 100 hours of a same show all in a row. So as you can guess, I do not hold up my end of the conversation around the work water cooler. I try to explain that I don’t feel like I have the time to watch that much TV. I mean. I am 55 years old. I have 5 or 6 hobbies. If I don’t stay focused, I will have several half finished projects that my children will have to sell or burn even if I live to 150 years old. No I don’t have time to binge watch.

The lovely Miss Beverly does have a few guilty TV pleasures. The show du jour is the Walking Dead. I would explain but you know what it is. If you don’t, go stand by the water cooler at work for a few days. I do not like it. I think that I made it through one episode. That was just enough to seed my contemplation for 100 miles. I tried to tell myself that I do not like it because I am too good to enjoy a dystopian tale. But who am I kidding. I am right there for Mad Max, Zombieland (although I still think that killing Bill Murray is one of the most disturbing scenes in movie history) and the Terminator. Even my religion of choice follows an apocalyptic prophet who was sure that the end times were near. Following his lead, the movers and shakers of the cause produced four or five rapture videos to scare me out of the necking row at church camp through the pearly gates. No I am comfortable with the apocalypse. But I am very uncomfortable with The Walking Dead.

That paragraph took about 50 miles to suss out. Why don’t I like The Walking Dead? It hit me a few days later as the family was gathering together for my son Ben’s wedding. The lovely Miss Beverly isn’t the only one in our family who likes The Walking Dead. J.D., our foster kiddo is a big fan, Grace, our daughter, doesn’t like it but is addicted. With this much commonality, we had a lot to talk about. I had decided that if I were in a zombie infested apocalypse that I would want a samurai sword; light weight and long enough that you can sever that brain stem with little muss or fuss. You never have to reload it and you don’t have to worry about foraging for more ammo. I don’t think you can underestimate the length of the sword as a definite advantage. How many extras have been accidentally bitten doing their killing up close and personal? No, it is much better to keep those teeth far away. 

This brings up another question. What is the infection vector for zombie virus? You can take a bath in zombie guts without getting all glassy eyed and stiff legged but a nip on the leg and you are zombie man walking. I do not get it.

Anyhow, it was during this scintillating conversation that I figured it out. I figured out why I do not like The Walking Dead. It should be easy for these people to identify the most pressing problem of the day. The world is full of dead men walking who want to make you dead men walking. They need to be killed or is that rekilled. That is the bad news. The good news is they have almost no skills. They cannot run, jump, climb, or throw. While they have opposable thumbs they don’t appear to be able to grasp a tool to utilize to their advantage. They just shamble along hoping that a human falls over in front of them so that they can rip out the bloody parts. As a foe, they are pretty underwhelming. The only thing that they have going for them is their vast superiority in numbers. You can’t walk anywhere without some stiff legged jerk wandering up on your picnic trying to rip your throat out.

Why aren’t these people trying to kill all of the zombies? That is the crux of why I don’t like The Walking Dead. No one is focused on the real problem. Kill all of the zombies. Have we lost our industrial know how to the extent that we can’t kill zombies on a vast scale? Have we lost that can do attitude that got us to the moon, won world war 2 or found a way to fill and tie off 50 water balloons in about 30 seconds. For those trying to decide on which camp to join in the upcoming zombie infestation, I have a few ideas that you may want to use to make yourself useful.

If I found myself in a zombie dystopia, I would go to Kings Island. Those queues would be perfect. Drape the area off on three sides and set up a combine at the exit with a strobe light at the throat of the header. Turn on the lights and fire up the combine. Keep the head up about shoulder high and watch them walk into the combine. It would be just like a dandelion flower popping fest on steroids. “Mamma had a baby and its head . . .” The lovely miss Beverly is concerned that the zombies would gum up the inside of the combine. It is a fair concern. That many zombie guts would mess up your bearings and axles in a hurry. As an alternative, I suggest using a detasseler. No a detasseler has nothing to do with messing up a shriner’s parade. A detasseler is a machine with spinning blades about head height. They are used to remove the tassel, the male part of the corn, when trying to hybridize corn seed. Sure there would be a few of the vertically challenged who got through but for that there is the samurai sword. What happens when the pile of zombies is so high that alive zombies can’t get through? Easy, just put up a sign that says this ride temporarily closed for maintenance. Move your light and machine to a different ride and start up. While all of the zombies wonder off over there, get your bulldozer in there and clean up the mess and reset your trap. If you weren’t tied to the mid-west, you could go to central Florida and then have the advantage of directing the zombies by an app that told them what rides lines were the shortest.

So what does an urban dweller do with little access to high end farm implements. Don’t fear. You have come to the right blog solution. It is a bit of an indirect route to the brain stem but it will work also. Go to any ramp on the interstate system in your town, get a truck load of bottles and glass, break them from edge to edge the length of the bridge or ramp and put a strobe light in the middle. The zombies will proceed to grind themselves down until they reach their brain stems and then poof their little brain stemless skulls will be sitting in the middle waiting for you to clean up the mess with your bulldozer.

You also have plenty of sky scrapers in the big city. Simply lure them up the stairwell and set a strobe light a little over the edge. They will wonder right up there and topple over. You could probably get two birds with one stone by placing the “exit” directly above the entrance to the building. Just think how gratifying it will be when a 300 lbs zombie splats five skinny zombies down on the ground. I do think that I would direct the “exit” away from the entrance. You don’t want to block the entrance before you used up all of your terminal velocity.

And once you have the zombie threat eliminated? Well you would have more free time to stay inside and watch The Game of Thrones.

Take care.

Roger

Finding a Good Book

Dear Blog Reader 

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I know that I have not posted for a while. That is not the same as I have not written for a while. Around Easter, I started a blog about a complicated subject. I worked it and reworked it and in the end it was not publishable. The work was not a total loss. I got it written about. When a topic climbs into the idea hopper, it has to be the next topic written about. There is no cutting in line. I noodle it around until it is completed. It is one of my basic coping skills to keep me sane. And it works for me. So now I am just like Prince (the purple one). I have a vault of unpublished work to be released posthumously. All the better to increase the value of my estate, and give my children something to fight about at a future date.

There is a paragraph from that other blog that I wanted to share. On Easter morning 2017, I believe that I saw a first in my 54 years. We were getting around, putting on our Easter suits. I had rifled through the easter baskets and traded (swapped) all of the licorice jelly beans for any other kind in the lovely Miss Beverly's basket. Then, I witnessed my very first rainbow to the west. We seldom have the edge of rain move in with the sun low enough in the sky to the east to project the light spectrum someplace over Carmel. I suppose Jim Brainard figured out a way to spend enough money to get it done. It is a bit ironic that Jim, the Carmel mayor, would have "brain" in his name. (A little local humor. I apologize to all of my French fans for the lack of shared context. But there are some central Indiana folks who just blew cereal milk out their nose.)

Rainbows are a bit sneaky like that. They are one of nature's phenomena that help convince us that we are the center of the universe. When I said that the rainbow was somewhere to the West, I meant that it was west of me. I am the pivot point. All of the hundreds of eastern rainbow were simply east of me. For rainbows, I am the center of the universe and all rainbows get their relative positioning base on my center of the universe perspective. Is it any wonder that I never find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? I am simply chasing something conjured up with me as the pivot point for the entire universe. While being the center of the universe is an easy place for my mind to visit, it usually means that the rest of me is rarely doing something that is conducive to actually earning a pot of gold.

I mentioned that I had worked on a blog for several weeks without a successful completion. During this time, another idea was crawling into the hopper. The idea of recommending a book that I was reading to all of my readers in the You Said What Roger? Fan base. I suppose that from the center of the universe I was sure that Amazon would suddenly have a run on this book and not have the cash flow to buy Whole Foods. There is a lot of pressure at the center of the universe. So I am not going to give you the low down on this great little book that I have not only read once but have read multiple times and I simply love.

No, I don’t think that I am going to send hordes of reading barbarians to the storehouses of Amazon. I am reticent because reading a book and finding it incredibly enjoyable is a very personal activity. That is something that the lovely Miss Beverly and I had to learn in our marriage. I would recommend a book and she would barely get through one chapter before setting it aside never releasing the spine glue from the death grip it had on the unturned pages. She would recommend a book to me and it too would go unread. Finally we learned that sharing books is not the same as sharing a life. We do find books that we both like. We even find some that we both like with a great passion. However, mostly I go to the murder aisle and she plumbs the wells of authors who beautifully describe the mysteries of life.

Ten years ago, I stopped organic farming and took a normal job that paid me for my labors every two weeks and provided the opportunity to pursue hobbies like writing a blog. It is a normal job. However the commute was not normal. For 10 years, I have spent two hours a day driving back and forth to work. Books are the only thing that have made this daily trip bearable. Ten hours of listening a week for ten years has made it not only bearable but enjoyable also. Ten hours a week for ten years is a lot of books. Plus, bike riding hours have had stories whispered in my ears through blue tooth also. So I have had the opportunity to listen to lots of books. Mr. Carnegie through his foresight and philanthropy and the ability to compartmentalize his life between union busting and establishing libraries, has provided me with the opportunity to listen to an nearly unlimited supply listening materials.

Some people would say that I have not been reading books for the past 10 years. I have been listening to books for 10 years. You will get no argument from me. I listen to the credits at the end of a book and from time to time the publisher thanks me for being a audiobook reader. Equating listening and reading is playing fast and loose with language. (Yes, I do see the irony.) I don’t mind admitting that reading takes much more concentration and focus than listening. I can listen to all of my mystery novels and describe the plot faithfully at the end. I cannot read a non-fiction book. My mind wanders and I get through a paragraph and think that was important but I did not catch it. I could never teach myself brain surgery by listening to books on tape. I am sure that would get the pre-frontal cortex confused with the brain stem. It seems to me that you don’t want any parts left over when reassembling a brain.

Yes, you readers are superior to us listeners. However, there is one little trick that I as a listener can do that a reader can’t. I can relisten to a book and have memories of the physical space that I was in when I listened the first time. I have three or four authors who have created a story or a character that speaks to me so strongly that I listen to it a second time (maybe one or two authors that I would listen to the third time.) I was doing a revisit this past weekend and I was able to relive five days of bike riding from last year’s summer vacation. It was a week of riding through the back roads of norther Indiana. So, as John pulled his gun to clear the room, I was mowing the yard and turning left down a small hill on a tree lined road. I stopped pedaling and coasting along took a drink from my backpack. That is when listening to a book brings me intense joy and a mental juxtaposition that has never happened to me when reading.

So who are those three or four authors? I made a mistake of answering the favorite question a long time ago. The interviewer wanted to know what my favorite book was. I blurted out The Great Gatsby. It wasn’t my favorite book. It was the most recent book that I had read for a college class. So I was able to stand up to her withering cross examination. I was able to remember the meaning of the stupid red light off the end of the pier. I answered her questions but I don’t think that I convinced her that it was my favorite book. It was a passionless discourse on the technical points of a book filled with characters that had no connection to my life. It was a good review for the test I was to have the next week but it conveyed no passion that would translate into a job.

The favorite books that I would share with you are all ones that are favorite for very familial reasons. The lovely Miss Beverly and I believed Barbara Bush when she told us to read to our children. So we read. We read the Lorax, Good Night Moon.  We read the Trilogy of the Rings while Ben and Grace were very young. I have no idea what we were thinking. Grace recently shared that she had never read the trilogy and can’t remember a single plot line from the books.  It all ended someplace in the middle of Harry Potter. These are all fine books and we spent hours together reading and listening. Yet the time together was better than the books themselves. Although, I still wonder how Tolkien kept us following the band of rescuers following the orcs that had captured Peregrine and Meridoc mile after mile across that stupid plain. I still wonder how I got across without skipping a few thousand pages.

My favorite book? The greatest of all time? I decline to answer. I think that “favorite book” has more to do with the frequency of your internal tuning fork. The things that make you tick. I have had books that make me cry. I love books that describe courage in dire testing. In fact if you are driving through southern Madison County at 5:00 a.m and I am listening to one of those tests on a bike ride you will hear me sobbing and gasping for breath.  I also enjoy listening about people who enjoy themselves and who they are becoming. 

The author who wrote the book that I was listening to for the second time last week, wrote in his foreword “The book, in time, found its people.”

So get out there. Expose yourself to books that are looking for their people. See which ones vibrate your inner tuning fork. When you find the ones that cause you to sob at 5:00 a.m on a dark country road, you know that you have a candidate. But for goodness sakes, don’t go telling everybody. You don’t want to spoil the finding for everyone else.

Take care 

Roger

Well that's your opinion

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. It was a bit touch and go these past few weeks; what with the attack of Daylight Savings Time. I woke up on that Monday morning hearing that I was 25% more likely to die from a heart attack. Just as my heart started to get over the shock, I had to dodge all of the sleepy drivers that were causing daylight savings Armageddon on the roads. Thankfully, I made it through the 99% chance of fender benders. Getting to work, I was depressed. This too was predicted with the 11% increase in depression caused by DST. Thankfully, it should pass within 10 weeks; when we will be well on the way to falling back and returning to the proper way of things. I found out all of these things via my local newspaper and other outlets that I peruse on my way to be an informed citizen.

In the mean time, I will continue to chase day break on my bike with 4 weeks of dawn and 1 week of a sliver of ole sol around my birthday in June. As I contemplated this man-made plague of locusts, I was struck by the messenger of these glad tidings of bad news. I have to shake my head sometimes. The news was in full throat on daylight savings time weekend. Doom and gloom was everywhere.

As I thought back, I remembered when they were the heralds of our salvation. "The economy will be spurred ahead by DST. We will have more time to spend playing catch in the yard with our children. We will be able to mow the lawn after work during the week. This will free up time on the weekend and allow us to spend more time at the beach relaxing." All of these were written and spread freely in the media. With these new revelations, I suppose that they should have provided the caveat "if you live until the weekend."

As a Hoosier living at the center of the universe, I had an even more unique perspective as we held out for years as the forces of heart disease, bad driving, and depression assailed us yearly with missives about how confusing it was for people to come to meetings in Indiana because we held our ground and didn't change our clocks two times a year. We continually heard how difficult it was for airlines to program their computers for the one Hoosier exception and keep the  planes from falling from the sky. This strikes me as odd when you consider that computers will someday revolt, take over and . . . wait for it . . . cause planes to fall from the sky.

But I digress. This isn't another tome describing my dislike of DST. That is well documented. It is a tome about the madness of the media. How can you advocate for one thing and then once sated whine and complain about all of the things you just got? Through the years there have been gallons of ink spilled over DST and now gallons more are being spilled on the opposing view. For goodness sake, save the indigo people.

I don't know if it is fake news. It does strike me that it is news written by people with the emotional maturity of two year olds. I suppose that I should be more charitable and say that once actions are taken other voices join the discourse and the zigzagging back and forth brings us to a fuller picture. However, we don't view the media as made up of multiple voices. We bemoan the idea that the other side is lurking out there. Politicians of all stripes deny the legitimacy of the media of the other side. Oh for goodness sake, don't get all huffy and tell me that your candidate has never done that. That the left is pure as the wind driven snow, or the right's poop doesn't stink with regards to this issue is patently false. It would take me about three minutes to provide documented examples of "vast right wing conspiracies" or examples of "fake news."

I do think that all news is self-serving. As I have been ruminating on this topic for the past three weeks, my memories have been taken back to September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of that tragic week, I was watching the McLaughlin Group. It was a weekly syndicated news panel on PBS. It featured two liberal and two conservative journalists to discuss the issues of the day. That week one of the topics was what should be done with the terrorists who did not make it on the plane that day. To a person; liberal and conservative alike agreed that they should be tortured so that any information that would save innocent lives in the future could be gathered. The methods varied. Some wanted to repeal anti torture directives and do the work ourselves. Others wanted to farm the dirty work out to other less enlightened cultures who were not as squeamish about torture. The point is everyone agreed. Everyone was pulling out their pliers, car batteries, and water boards preparing to get their pound of flesh.

Yet their fervor waned. The cry for blood subsided and soon several of them sang a different tune. They went back to serving their own agenda and started whining and complaining about the very things they advocated for in the first place or started blindly assenting to torture that had gone too far.

What are we to do? It seems that we should stop listening to the news. It should be recognized for what it is; a group of elitists telling us what we need to know from their perspective. What would happen if we stopped listening and started talking to one another; weighing the words and perspectives, challenging and testing, pulling apart and rebuilding.

It strikes me that we wouldn't be any worse off. Plus, I might not still be looking for that hour of sleep.

Take care.

Roger

An ounce of Prevention

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I hope that you did not succumb to the intense pressure of last week to the warm and balmy February temperatures. I saw some of you slipping out to the park in shirt sleeves. Some of you even let your children out  to play in the grass and on playgrounds around central Indiana. I wrote this paragraph three weeks ago. Pretty funny considering the weather roller coaster we have been on since.

Science really has encouraged us to slip the axioms that have built civilizations through out the millennia. "Ten pounds of coat prevention until May 15th is worth 100 lbs of mustard poultice cure until your fever breaks and Lassie runs to get Doc Johnson." No, now we treat our foolishness with a round of Z pack and a couple of aspirin.

Case in point; I recently changed jobs and moved from having an office to working in a cube. This is fine. I am office style agnostic. I can adjust. I have a white noise machine (quickly purchased after listening to a heated phone debate about whose familial responsibility it was to pick up rat poison on the way home. TMI!) However, in these closer quarters, I have noticed that this lack of basic respect for the laws that govern the application and removal of flannel sheets has permeated the office space in which I work.

One person in our block of cubes sounds like they escaped from a TB ward. They are obviously a 300 Egyptian cotton thread count person. They felt the warm temperatures of the last week of February; took off the flannels because it was "too hot" (think whiney voice.) They probably exacerbated their exposure and went outside without a hat as the temps broached the 70 degree mark. Obviously, they paid the price for their transgressions and came down sick. Sure it felt warm but the calendar still reads FeBRRRRRRRRRuary. The Romans knew how to name their months. Put a little reminder in there that February is cold, leave the flannel sheets on Octavius, and for goodness sake stay away from the Egyptian cotton until June and stay away from hot Egyptian queens - always.

As I said, I wrote that first paragraph three weeks ago. Since then we have had two more rounds of freezing weather and yesterday we were experiencing a french toast event (get your milk, bread, and eggs and hunker down.) You're sad about your magnolia trees getting frozen; all of their beautiful white blooms blackened by a few days of freezing weather. Please do not be surprised by this people. Magnolia trees were put in zone 5 for the specific purpose to remind us what happens when we get too exuberant about a few days of good weather before Memorial Day.

With magnolia trees the average is about one spectacular white and pink blossomed year in three. They get out there and really show off once every three years; them with all their fancy blooms in early March and it works out. The home owner is the envy of the neighborhood. Their magnolia in fabulous bloom providing the perfect backdrop for the yard of the month sign.  We are the same. We will get out there in all of our glory. You sport your bare heads and naked arms. Some of you will even wear shorts and start working on a little bit of a tan and everything will work out perfectly for you. You won't catch a cold. You won't expose your coworkers to the green viral miasma as it floats above your cubicle.

You will be fine every once in a while. Then we have a year like 2017. Sixty-eight degrees and get out the wife beater and head for the beach only to be faced with not one but three cold snaps. Cold snaps that makes old Mr. Groundhog look like the smartest varmit on the back 40. Cold snaps that will send you running home getting the flannels out of the linen closet quietly trying to sneak them back on before the laws of nature kick in and you are laid low with that stuffy red nose, and viral hack slowly turning itself into bronchitis.

It is sad. We are so ready for warm weather. We suffer from our lack of vitamin D. We need to uncover our arms and sweat a little. It isn't as sad as say in New England where they are paying for early spring-itis and the fact that they are home to the Patriots. So it could be worse.

Go ahead, repent. Get the flannels back out we still have 60 days before they can be safely put away. And what will you do if it warms up a little bit? Just open the window but stay hunkered down under those flannels.

Take care

Roger