Month: July 2021

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 51

While mowing the lawn this afternoon, I saw some furry thing go rolling across the front porch, then get its legs underneath itself and go running towards the house. It took me a moment to realize that it was small rabbit, definitely younger, that was running towards a small amount of shelter under the window of the front of our house. I moved towards it to get a better look, figuring it was scared from the lawn mower, when I saw another small rabbit doing the same thing about four feet away. I took a picture of the sight, send it via text to the entire Boss family, and went back to mowing. No sooner had I started mowing, then two other small rabbits came running out from under the mower. Unbeknownst to me, I had mowed over their burrow. While one of the second two rabbits escaped to somewhere I could not find them, the other stood frozen with its ears drawn all the way back so they were touching each other behind its head where it remained for several minutes. I felt really bad about the situation and I still do – the two rabbits that I saw first are huddled against one another in the corner a full three hours after this happened. I feel like a complete asshole.

I mentioned in RST 48 that Ms. Boss purchase squirrel-proof bird feeders for my birthday. I must now revise that remark. A couple of months after I posted that, a particularly clever squirrel managed to find a way to climb the shepherd’s hook, hold on with his back legs, and get seeds from the feeder. Not satisfied with that, he graduated to hanging of the feeder with his back legs, then basically doing a sit up to grab seeds out of the feeder. Impressed, we began to start calling him Tom Cruise (as an aside, he must have killer abs). Soon enough he brought ‘assistants’ who worked towards maximum ‘seed haul”. I bought a hummingbird feeder to attract a hummingbird I’ve seen flying around the area, they knocked that over and started drinking out of that. This week, however, was the final straw. Not one, but two of my bird feeders have gone missing. We’ve not had storms this week, that isn’t the answer. I’m blaming Tom Cruise and company. Ms. Boss, who shares my disdain for squirrels, decided to take matters in her own hands. She covered the two shepherds hooks with spray olive oil. As we speak, I see them out there scheming to get up the pole. They’ve made several aborted attempts and made one nearly successful jump from a nearby tree. The battle is not yet over.

Haiku 47 talks about a mother cardinal who decided to make a nest in a small real Christmas tree on our front porch right outside the window. We waited for the two eggs to hatch – rejoicing when the one egg hatched and lamenting when she shoved the egg that didn’t hatch out of the nest. Over and over, we watched mother and father taking their turns feeding the young, gaping mouth. Ms. Boss just happened to be watching out the window as baby took their first flight and captured a video of their second. She, and by extension we, were fortunate, because we never knowingly saw baby again. We wish them well.

Shortly after baby cardinal’s departure, we returned home find an old, torn soccer ball moving oddly, almost like a jumping bean. Soon enough, a birds head – probably a sparrow – comes poking out of a hole in the side. They no sooner make it out, then another head appears. Their departure from this strangest of nests was followed by a third. Just when I thought it was over, the ball keeps moving – a fourth bird that could not get out. While I know these things generally work themselves out, I couldn’t help but change the shape of the hole slightly to ease their exit. We spent the next hour watching the new family try and try their new wings in an effort to get over our privacy fence with mama bird standing watch nearby. Eventually all four made it over, never to be seen again.

I’m back at work five days a week now. While in some ways it feels good occupationally to return to work, I miss so many things about being home. Ms. Boss, obviously, tops the list, but I miss my back yard ‘coworkers’ as well. Birds, deer, chipmunks, rabbits, foxes… and, yes… even Tom Cruise – I miss them all. It was good to catch up with all of them today.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 50

Now that I’m back to driving into work every morning, I find myself with at least ninety minutes of time on my hands that needs to be filled with… something. It used to be NPR all the time, but I got a little tired of it just before I started working from home and switched to podcasts. Now the podcasts I’ve been listing to lately have become tedious, so I pivoted to audiobooks. I chose Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as my starting point as a number of the books I have read have pointed back to that one. I’m still plowing through the academic discussion that makes up the second part of the book, but the first half where he talks about the psychology of surviving the concentration camp is one of the more impactful things that I have ever heard. While I’ve always known about the Holocaust generally, thinking about the impact to a whole race of people is not nearly devastating as reading one man’s detailed account about his story of survival. I’m contemplating listening to Elie Weisel’s Night next or possibly pivoting to a similar expense in the form of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s.

I vacillated between reading and not through my entire life. I can read to distraction when I enjoy a book, but often struggle to get through those that I don’t. I would often pass over tremendously interesting books because I knew they would get me in trouble in favor of drier tomes that I didn’t mind putting down. Another part of the problem here is that I have a personal hang up over reading more than one book at a time. When I get stuck in a space where I can’t get into a book and move forward, I’m usually stuck for a good long time. Such is the case right now.

When I was young, I used to get a World Almanac every year. It contained over a thousand pages of facts and figures and trivial items. I read it cover to cover, every year and often reread random pages as time went on. I kept all the versions on a bookshelf in my room like trophies. Reading them, I crammed my head full of knowledge because you never knew when I’d need it. As might imagine, I absolutely crushed all-comers in Trivial Pursuit. These days, you don’t have to – you carry your cell phone everywhere you go. In some ways, this make me sad.

I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne when I was a junior in high school. To tell the truth, I just had to look up the entry on Wikipedia to remember just exactly how the plot went, but I vividly remember how the book made me feel at the time. Discovering the notion that a man of the cloth was fallible became the first sizable crack in my naïveté.

I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve even started several. I rush headlong into the project and write thirty or so pages before it all falls apart. Steven Pressfield calls this ‘the Resistance’ (note the big ‘R’). My hard drive is littered with the abandoned husks of failed attempts. It’s a miracle that this blog gets posted at times. Fortunately, the entries are short enough that my ‘Sesame Street’ attention span can occasionally make it through one.

I enjoy cookbooks. This shouldn’t be surprising to someone who loves to cook almost as much as I love to eat (and I do love to eat). The cookbooks I like, however, are a bit strange. I love old compilations that people used to throw together at a church or women’s groups or similar entities. Give me a spiralbound cookbook from a Methodist church and I will read it from cover to cover and be greatly entertained while doing so. They always contain interesting recipes, things thrown together that speak of the culture of the group. I can imagine potluck dish after potluck dish coming out of these books. Perhaps the king (or perhaps ‘queen’ would be the better choice of word here) of all cookbooks of this genre is More-with-Less by Doris Janzen Longacre. This Mennonite cookbook, given to me used by my roommate from college, contains not only recipes obtained from congregations all over the world, but practical advice on how to stretch your food budget as much as possible. It did its fair share in getting the Boss family through some very lean times. A quick search of Amazon shows that I have an older version of the book. Newer versions apparently have more pictures, less wisdom, and content skewed towards modern tastes. I’ll keep my tried and true version, thank you.