Thankful Sunday--January 31, 2016

I am thankful for Buzzr TV.

A few months ago, we started to get Buzzr TV which is a channel that plays only old game shows. It's good for some mindless fun from time to time whether it is a trip down memory lane with Monty Hall and The Price is Right or watching new-to-me shows* like I've Got a Secret and What's My Line.

I find it particularly interesting to see how the old game shows worked with chalkboards and cardboard signs. No flashing lights or music for drama--just game playing. And some good playing at that. This channel also plays the original commercials that aired with the game shows. After watching several, it seems to me that commercials from 50 years ago were more about convincing you that they had a good product than entertaining you like today. For example, one was a man shaving the fuzz off a peach with a Remington razor.  No sports heroes or funny lines--just a man shaving a peach. And when he was done, I was convinced that a Remmington razor could give a close, gentle shave.

All and all, I feel like I'm watching a piece of cultural history when I watch these old shows. That was especially evident yesterday when I saw an episode of I've Got a Secret that introduced Velcro to most of the country for the first time.** The contestant's secret was that she could walk on the ceiling. She demonstrated this by hanging upside down with only the help of Velcro. She appeared with a space technology engineer who was using Velcro to develop things for astronauts.

So all my life, I've heard about Velcro and the space program and yesterday I saw how most of the country learned about this. It was really cool. And for Buzzr TV letting me see this bit of our history, I am thankful.

*I have heard of these shows, but have not seen most of them before.

**Original air date was January 1, 1962.

But wait, there's more:
Contrary to popular belief, NASA did not develop Velcro. It was developed in 1948 by Swiss engineer, George de Mestral. He patented it in 1955. However, NASA did develop many uses for it in the space program and helped popularize it. Velcro first became commercially available in the late 1950's.

Hungry Birds

During the recent snowfall and afterwards, we have had almost constant visitors to our bird feeders. When snow is not covering the ground, the usual pattern is to see a flurry of activity for a short period followed by longer periods of inactivity. The snow cover changed that. I didn't see anything exotic, but over the last couple of days I have seen most of the common backyard birds that visit my feeder in the winter.

Below are pictures of those visitors. There are more pictures than I usually include, but this is the place I'm recording what I saw. Also, the quality of some of the pictures may be less than desired, but those darn birds don't always hold still while I get the camera.

There were usually multiple birds at the feeder at any one time.

Dark-eyed Junco (These birds were everywhere.)

Mourning Dove

White-breasted nuthatch

White breasted Nuthatch (This is a more typical view than the fluffed out bird above. Lighting makes a big difference in the colors, doesn't it? First one is in the snow and the second picture is in the sun.)

Crows

House Finch

Red Bellied Woodpecker

Carolina Wren

Downy Woodpecker

Goldfinch

Female Cardinal and Dark eyed Junco

Male Cardinal

Black-capped Chickadee

Blue Jay

White Throated Sparrow

Tufted Titmouse

Hawk (Ward saw it fly into this distant tree otherwise, it's hard to tell what it is.)

Cowbird and juncos

The Day After the Storm

Today we woke up to clear skies and crisp air after Blizzard Jonas dumped over two feet of snow on us Friday and Saturday. It was time to emerge from the house and try to dig out. By afternoon we could get our car out if we had to in case of emergency. That was the goal. We're lucky that the farmer at the end of the street brought out his front end loader and helped.

Here are a few pictures from today. Unfortunately, it's hard to get an idea of deep the snow really is. But it was deep. For us, anyway. Another time I will show you many of the birds that visited us during the storm.

One of the lucky things about the storm was that the wind blew most of the snow off the tree limbs. Before the storm, they predicted the wind would blow down snow-laden limbs on lines and cause power outages. However there were very few outages in this area associated with the storm. You can see the oak tree in front of house is mostly bare.

Here's Ward shoveling the first pathway down the driveway. 

Luckily, our neighbor came to clear his mother's driveway with his front end loader. Her driveway is directly across the street from ours. In the process of trying to find places to put the snow from her house, he cleared some of our driveway, too. Yea!

I took a walk in the neighborhood to see if I could make it out to the main road. I made it and found the main road mostly wet. Our street went from barely passable to seeing blacktop like in this picture. However, the small side streets hadn't been touched. I think our neighbor cleared what had been done. 

Late afternoon, the blue skies got some high clouds.

The backyard remains largely untouched at this point. I'm not sure where the deer rode out the storm.

Thankful Sunday--January 24, 2016

I am thankful for a snow day.

As most of you know we had a big snow storm here yesterday.  We haven't done exact measurements, but it looks like we got about 2 1/2 feet at our house. Luckily, we kept electricity the whole time, so we had the perfect snow day. We were warm inside and had a good show outside to watch with the falling snow and visiting birds.

Also, the fact that we couldn't go out put us in a different frame of mind. We did some clean up that we never seemed to get to. We cleaned out three drawers, two baskets, and one cabinet. We found a couple of things we had forgotten about and found a couple of things we couldn't identify.

Today is dig out day. Right now the temperatures are in the teens and wind is still blowing. But the snow has stopped. And for the break the snow day brought to us yesterday, I am thankful.

And so it begins

A cardinal and nuthatch at the beginning of the snow.

For the past week, our area has been preoccupied with the predicted blizzard for this weekend. The news has been full of ever changing weather forecasts predicting 2-3 feet of snow and high winds. Warnings have been issued to expect power outages. The store shelves are empty and gas stations are out of gas. Schools and business closed early today in anticipation of the impending snow.

Ward and I have done the necessary preparations. We have the mandatory toilet paper and milk, and I baked bread today because the store was out when I went on Wednesday. We have water set aside to drink and flush the toilet in case we lose electricity. (When we lose power, our well pump no longer works and we have no water.) The flash lights have batteries and we have gas for the generator. We have a few good books and puzzles.

And as predicted, this afternoon, the snow began. It is supposed to last until Sunday morning with the winds picking up tonight. Now we are in the fun part of the storm--the beginning where we are watching the quiet white flakes cover up the grays and browns of winter with no urgency to go anywhere or do anything. I hope it continues this way. But if I believe the predictions, we may not be so lucky. Stay tuned.

A Second Look--January 20, 2016

Well, the big excitement this week was that the hanging wire on the bird feeder broke sending the feeder to the ground and spilling a lot of seed. This made the squirrels very happy. Even the deer have shown up for a snack or two.

Ward said that it's not an easy fix, so it may be some time before it is repaired. In the meantime, we've hung up another feeder that we had in the garage. I got the feeder from someone who no longer used it and I was going to sand and paint some of the rusty places it had. However, our first real snow of the season is coming on Friday and we want the birds to be able to find something to eat. So, we hung the new-to-us feeder. They seemed to be adapting to it just fine.

Here are a few things I saw this week

 during a Second Look.

The squirrel found the downed feeder right away.

He was still quite happy with the sunflower seed left when the feeder was picked up. We decided to leave the seed where it was. (You may notice some snow in the squirrels tail. We ended up with a dusting that day.)

The deer have been by a few times for a sunflower seed snack.

The birds seem to like the different feeder. Here a tufted titmouse and black-capped chickadee are visiting.

Our regular downy woodpecker visitors were joined this week by a red-bellied woodpecker.

The dark-eyed juncos like to stay a little closer to the ground. They are rarely seen on the hanging feeders.

Flocks of crows (otherwise know as murders) visit the yard a couple times a day now. They've been doing this for about a week.

Thankful Sunday--January 17, 2016

These are the books Kimmy and I read yesterday.

I am thankful for the library.

Kimmy, a special needs teenager who lives next door, visits me most days so we can read together. She loves the actual process of reading out loud more than listening to a story, so that has evolved into she reads a page and then I read a page. While her reading has improved, she has not progressed beyond the beginning reading stage and that limits our choice of books.  

Kimmy has a very good memory and remembers most of the books we have read. She doesn't like to repeat a book, so that limits our choices further. That is where the library comes in. While we have read hundreds of books together from there, there are still hundreds (thousands?) to go. And for that I am thankful.

Lottery Fever Lingers

As you know, the Lottery Fever that had been gripping the country lately has been cured. Meaning that someone finally won. Actually three someones each won over a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000!!!). Now just a few days later after the drawing, people have quickly moved on. Back to reality and dealing with the same amount of money they had yesterday.

However, thoughts about the lottery are lingering with me. Like many others, Ward and I had a conversation about what we would do if we suddenly came into a large amount of money. It seemed like a silly exercise, but it was interesting all the same.

We started with the big picture and moved inward. First, we said that we would give most of the money away. Now if truth be told, we wanted to do this as much as to avoid the hassle of everyone wanting something from us as doing a good deed. But if we were going to  give it away, how would we do it? I saw an interesting show once that interviewed some very rich people about philanthropy. They said donating money to good causes was much harder than it looked. First there was no end to the people that would like a slice of your pie and everyone believed their cause was the most worthy. Second, they wanted to give their money to people who would actually spend it well and not have a large overhead in their organization. That took a lot of work to figure out.

Gates Foundation

So we decided that maybe we'd give a large amount to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Many of the issues they support such as improving the health of children around the world, we were in agreement with. And they certainly knew how to deal with large amounts of money. (Of course, we'd have to check into the statistics of how well run their organization was.)

Next we made the circle a little closer and thought about other people we'd like to help. One was providing dental care for people in Appalachia. We talked about the grants we'd give to understand and implement a program for this. We also wanted to help rural libraries. Another idea was to provide scholarships for needy kids to get tutoring. After discussing a few more things such as new camping equipment for the local Boy Scout troop, we moved on.

Then we narrowed our circle more and talked about the extended family. Luckily, most of our relatives are in pretty good shape and don't need much. Maybe a little fun money would go their way or maybe a family vacation. The exception to this was to make sure our elderly relatives had all the money they need to get the best care.

Now down to our immediate family. We want our kids to find their own way, so we wouldn't be giving Wally and Theo much. Maybe some help with health insurance and or a low interest loan to set up a business that has been mentioned. Maybe there would be a trust for them that they could access in a decade or two.

Swedish Chef

Then finally ourselves. We'd keep enough of the money that the interest on it would provide us with our current standard of living. Well, maybe a little better. A personal chef and tailor sounded pretty good.  And Ward would build the workshop he has always wanted and I'd have some professional landscaping done on the yard. We'd also keep enough to pay for good health insurance so we could take early retirement if we wanted.

Not very exciting discussion, was it?  Especially since a billion dollars was involved. But the reason that this conversation is lingering with me is the very fact that is was not exciting. There's not much on this list that is beyond our ability to do now if we put our minds to it and do some creative thinking.

So we didn't win the lottery, but I'm glad there was lottery fever which prompted our "what if" conversation. Unknowingly, our talk gave Ward and I a chance to revisit our priorities. So, we're off now to start our lists and do some creative thinking.

Did you have a Lottery Fever discussion? Did you have fun imagining some exotic things you'd do with the money or were you more down to earth?