A day to make Goldilocks happy

ECHOES FROM THE LOAFERS’ CLUB MEETING

You bought a used electric car?

 

I did.

 

How do you like the car?

 

The vehicle is great, but coiling the 350 miles of extension cord is a pain.

 

DRIVING BY BRUCE’S DRIVE

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. I was at an important (they are all important) meeting where the air conditioning was producing gale-force winds. I think sweet-sounding wind chimes should be installed on the towering wind turbines.

 

Fogust is what Bay Area locals call the foggy, cloudy, hazy conditions that occur each day in August. Weather folklore says the number of foggy mornings in a Midwestern August predicts the number of snowfalls the coming winter will have. The traditional method of counting the fogs was by dropping beans into a jar.

 

Traffic was light. I waved at the other driver. I grew up alongside a seldom-traveled gravel road. Much of the traffic was made up of the rural mail carrier, school bus and the creamery’s milk truck. I was going to join the school’s debate team, but I was talked out of it. I argued with the farm’s guinea hens instead. They were superb watchdogs. If anything or anybody showed up, the guineas sounded the alarm vigorously. The females made a “buckwheat” call. A group of guinea fowl is a confusion.

 

RUTHLESS PUMPKIN SPICE HAS REPLACED IT

Spiced apple rings were red and served in our school cafeteria. Even though it provided minerals and nutrients to build the brain cells needed to show my work in math class, it was phased out in favor of fresh fruit. I’m a big fan of the spiced apple industry.

 

BOOKING IT

I volunteered at a Friends of the Library book sale. Great fun. Several people asked me what I was reading. I had put “The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans on a library hold in January. There were 324 people ahead of me. I got the book in July. I enjoyed the clever epistolary. Each letter was a piece of an intriguing jigsaw puzzle of a novel. It didn’t take me 6 months to read it. It was worth the wait.

 

I’VE LEARNED

“Companion” comes from the Latin “ companionem,” with the roots “com,” meaning “with or together,” and “panis,” meaning “bread.” A companion is someone you'd break bread with.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found the most common jobs in this country are: 1. Retail salespersons. 2. Home health and personal care aides. 3. General and operations managers. 4. Fast food and counter workers. 5. Cashiers.

 

BAD JOKES DEPARTMENT

A man buying underwear asked, "Are these boxers satin?" to which the clerk replied, "No, they're brand new."

 

My physics professor was face down on his desk crying before class. I put my hand on his shoulder and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter?” He looked up at me and said, “Anything that has mass and takes up space.”

 

NATURE NOTES

It was a day that would have made Goldilocks happy. It was just right. It was a rare morning—no wind, no rain and no vehicle noise. I heard the whoosh of bird wings beating the air. I looked up to see a flock of Franklin’s gulls headed south. The flock stretched far, with every gull appearing to be striving to pass the gull on each side. It was a V trying to become a straight line. Named for the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, the graceful flyers are notably smaller than ring-billed gulls and the nonbreeding adults sport a patchy black to gray hoods, black legs and feet, and black bills with red tips. They forage in agricultural fields, pastures, landfills and on the surface of water. They follow tractors to feed on earthworms, grubs, beetles and grasshoppers dislodged by farm implements.

 

A red-winged blackbird male stopped at a feeder for a snack. His is a polygynous species, with males having many females as mates–up to 15. In some populations, 90% of territorial males have more than one female nesting. He isn’t a supreme ruler because up to half the nestlings in his territory might have been sired by another male.

 

White sweet clover and yellow sweet clover are similar in appearance, growing 3 to 6 feet high. They’re biennial herbaceous plants in the legume family. Yellow sweet clover has yellow flowers, is usually the shorter of the two, and blooms earlier than white sweet clover. White sweet clover (I’ll bet you’ve already guessed this) has white flowers. Sweet clovers are fragrant and reproduce by seed with plants producing thousands of seeds, which can remain viable for 40 years.

 

MEETING ADJOURNED

“Kind hearts are the gardens, Kind thoughts are the roots, Kind words are the flowers, Kind deeds are the fruits.” —Kirby Larson