Tag: humor

Sweethearts on a February Stroll

Yesterday, we went out for a walk because it was a pretty nice day for February. All the snow was pretty much gone. We saw a hawk who also saw us. We approached the tree it was perched in very slowly. It tolerated our attention until we got too close for comfort—and flapped off in a huff.

It was a nice enough day to walk all the way out to the Sitting Man and beyond. Others were out taking in the sun as well. It’s good to do simple things; things like walking in the sun, drinking iced coffee, eating zucchini bread, waving at UFOs.

You know how it is.

Civil or Uncivil Bird Society

We caught sight of several birds engaged in the usual interactions with each other and their prey (in the case of the hawk). Call it civil or uncivil society, it’s natural no matter how you see it.

I’m going to call it a Red-tailed Hawk that caught a gray squirrel and had a tough time managing to eat it or even carry it up a tree.

We saw a male Cardinal nip a sparrow who was dining a little too close to him on a tree. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it was a White-throated Sparrow.

We a Black-capped Chickadee flitting around and a couple of wild turkeys trudging through the snow. The turkeys seemed to be almost encouraging each other at times.

Music Credit for video:

Call to Adventure – Comedy by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1300022

Artist: http://incompetech.com/

Sugar Pea Pod Prep

This is a follow up to the pea pod disaster I wrote about the other day. Recall they were inedible because they were tough and stringy.

We found a YouTube on the web showing how to remove the stems that sounded promising. After removing them, we tried eating them raw. We couldn’t do it. In fact, that little mound of what looks like chewed pea pod on the counter in the YouTube we made is exactly that.

We tried steaming them after removing the stems (or maybe it was boiling). I don’t think it matters. We still thought they were inedible. Maybe we’ll try the frozen variety.

Any advice?

Smoked Turkey Soup vs Blizzard!

January is National Soup Month and Sena made a smoked turkey soup in honor of the occasion. This is the counterbalance to the winter storm and blizzard warnings this month.

This morning we shoveled—and shoveled—and shoveled. It was the Sisyphean labor all over again, only this time with Winter Storm Gerri.

And then we went back out in the afternoon into the arctic dimension and shoveled some more. We could have just stayed out there until the blizzard warning took effect. As it was, we were out for an hour and a half, about to quit—and the city plow roared by and scraped a wall of snow boulders plug in our driveway. We had to stay out for an extra half hour. Thank you.

Anyway, during our morning break from shoveling, we got “near genius” level on a quiz about soups. Our answers were lucky guesses. How about a couple of turkey jokes?

Q: What’s the most musical part of a turkey? A: The drumstick.

Q: Why did the turkey refuse dessert? A: He was stuffed.

Soup wins! We were not so stuffed we couldn’t have cherry cobbler for dessert.

Soup’s on!

Iowa Winter Storms One Two Punch January 2024!

I just got the update on what I think is Winter Storm Gerri. The National Weather Service has now upgraded this catastrophe in our area to a Blizzard Warning.

Iowa is getting a one, two punch from winter storms Finn and Gerri.  We hardly got a break from Finn’s left hook before Gerri’s right cross connected.

This morning we scraped off less than an inch of new snow that fell last night. We might get from 8-12 inches of new snow. Wind gusts could be up to 50 mph with dangerous wind chills over the next several days. The party gets started late tonight.

If you want to drive anywhere, I suggest a Big Wheel race around your living room.

Winter Storm Finn Defines A Sisyphean Ordeal

Okay, we got about 14 inches of snow from Winter Storm Finn, but that doesn’t begin to convey the human meaning of it.

I’m going to call digging out from all that snow a Sisyphean labor. You don’t hear that term much, but it means a chore that never seems to end while you’re doing it. The short story about Sisyphus comes from Greek mythology.

Sisyphus was the king of Corinth. Just to be clear, it generally doesn’t snow in Corinth. One day, King Sisyphus saw a splendid, mighty eagle carrying a beautiful maiden to a nearby island (where it also does not snow). A river god named Asopus told him that his daughter had been abducted, but not by extraterrestrials. Sisyphus suspected Zeus, who had never seen a snow shovel, if you can imagine that. Like a fool, Sisyphus asked Zeus to help him find her. Because Zeus hated nosy mortals who aren’t supposed to know what the boss god is up to, he banished Sisyphus to Hades where he had to roll a giant rock uphill which always rolled back downhill (Hamilton, Edith. 1942. Mythology. New York: Little Brown and Company).

Anybody who knows what it’s like to try to shovel walks and driveways during a horizontal snowstorm knows that for every shovelful of snow you remove, twice that amount refills the space you empty almost immediately. You’d have to stay out in the snowstorm forever to keep up. It’s the definition of a Sisyphean labor.

And that’s why Sena and I left about a third of our driveway uncleared last night because we were exhausted. We’d been out in that storm shoveling all day since early morning. We ached everywhere and didn’t have much to show for it.

This morning we were up early again, anticipating trying to clear the driveway and again shovel all the walks, the curb ramp, the trees and whatnot.

The driveway had been cleared, probably sometime during the night, by a good Samaritan we’ll probably never know for sure. We could tell by the telltale friction wheel tracks, and the perfectly circular mark of the machine’s turning radius. A path to our curbside mailbox had also been cleared.

We are grateful. The only big job left was to clear the curb ramp, across which was a hip high mountain range of snow left by the city plow. It was also blocked by a large pickup truck. The driver must have seen us and he hurried over from where he was working with a crew building a house. He was more than happy to move it—although I was not so happy when I found out how hard we had to work to clear the curb ramp. If you start from the top, the snow spreads out over the mountain. If you start from the bottom, the snow from the top falls down. I would call that Sisyphean labor.

Anyway, we’re waiting for the next disaster, which I think the meteorologists are calling Winter Storm Gerri. They’re promising 4 inches of new snow by Friday. It almost sounds like light duty.

Winter Storm Finn and the One-Eyed Snowball Juggler!

Holy horizontal, heavy, wet, driving snow. At least you could make great snowballs for juggling! I got up around 4 in the morning to shovel. Sena came out a little later and we took shifts a couple of times. I still had to run back out again in the mid-afternoon to clear away what’s probably going to turn out to be better than a foot of snow.

The plows plugged our driveways whenever they felt like it. But we took a break so I could make the best snowballs ever and juggled them. I wore a balaclava which got all twisted on my head so that I ended up able to see out of just my right eye—the one I had surgery on for a torn retina.

I don’t know how I saw well enough to juggle.

Snow Removal in Iowa City

Iowa City has web pages for the rules on snow removal by the city plows and by residents.

You can see the pdf of the map for residential street priorities for snow removal.

Shoveling snow or using a heavy snow blower can be hazardous to your health. There is guidance from the National Safety Council about how to remove snow. On the other hand, there are definite rules about clearing snow from your sidewalk.

There are no rules against juggling snowballs that I know of.

The Intergalactic Angle on Your Point of View

I finally watched the movie “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” the other night. It was released in 2005 and based on Douglas Adams’ book of the same title. In fact, he co-wrote the screenplay. A lot of it was not in the book. I thought a couple of scenes were noteworthy and pretty funny. I made connections to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. annual observance, which is this month.

One of them was the Point of View Gun. It’s probably unfortunate that the main prop was a gun, but hey, it was a ray gun. It didn’t kill anyone and in fact, it caused the person “shot” with it to be able to understand the perspective of another person. It was just temporary, but for a short while it enabled persons or extraterrestrials to understand another’s point of view. It was designed by the Intergalactic Consortium of Angry Housewives to influence their husbands to understand them better.

One of Dr. Martin Luther King’s main points was how important it is to try to understand and validate someone else’s point of view.

One drawback of the Point of View gun (besides the obvious associations with gun violence) was that the effect was specific to whoever was using it. So, when the ultra-maladjusted robot Marvin mowed down a gang of Vogons (hideous and cruel extraterrestrial bureaucrats who destroyed Earth in order to make room for an intergalactic bypass), they all collapsed from depression.

The other scene I thought was funny was the Vogon planet’s slap-happy encounter between the heroes and the creatures shaped like spatulas that popped out of the ground and smacked anyone in the face who had an idea.

I didn’t think the movie was nearly as good as Adams’ book. But I wonder if you could cross the spatula creatures with the Point of View gun that would take the perspective-taking power of the gun and give it to the spatula creatures who would slap you silly whenever you failed to even try to understand another’s point of view. I could use that kind of a slap sometimes.

It’s remarkable the connections you could make between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Plate!

I was listening to the Big Mo Blues Show last night on KCCK radio, 88.3 on your FM dial. I didn’t hear him mention his favorite cook, May Ree. She cooks hand-battered catfish; it’s better because it’s battered. Often, he’ll add a little to the legend, like where you can find May Ree’s establishment where you can buy her hand-battered catfish, which is filled with nitrates, cooked to perfection with manic delight, and which you can pair with any one of three flavors of moonshine, including the famous Classic Clear.

I don’t know whether Classic Clear has fruity, nutty, or extraterrestrial notes. You’ll have to try to find her joint, which is somewhere at the intersection of a highway and a street the name of which I can never recall. The story gets a new variation every now and then. May Ree has many facets to her character.

May Ree actually reminds me of the head cook at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas. Back in the 1970s, I was a student there for a while. The head cook in the college cafeteria was Miss Mack. I don’t think you could say she cooked anything with manic delight. In fact, some of us were regular visitors who rushed with manic delight to Church’s Chicken because the H-TC cafeteria didn’t always serve what you’d call top of the line fare.

I guess Church’s want to call themselves Church’s Texas Chicken these days, mainly because they got the business started in San Antonio. Back in the day, Church’s Texas Chicken was a five-minute walk from the college. I checked a map recently, and now there isn’t a joint within an hour’s walk.

Anyway, I was a fairly frequent customer to Church’s Texas Chicken. You didn’t have a whole lot of choices about what to select. In fact, I don’t recall that there was a selection, per se. What you saw was what you got.

Sometimes, certain students were pretty frank about what they thought of Miss Mack’s cooking. One day, a guy who was fed up, in a manner of speaking, of course, held up his plate so that it was vertical, and weirdly, none of the food slid off. It just stuck there, like it was sort of a sculpture of a meal.

And then he called out loudly to everyone else in the cafeteria (not that there were many people there) as if he were offering to give to anyone there:

“Plate!” (no takers). “Plate!” (still no takers). “Plate!” (students just ignored him, but started making funny looks at their own plates).

I don’t remember what happened, but I think he just left his plate on the table and departed. I doubt Miss Mack was there. I was ambivalent about the whole deal. I liked Miss Mack, as did a lot of other students. She was kind and always had a bright smile for us.

Maybe he made a run to Church’s Texas Chicken. Funny, I didn’t see him there.