Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

I love honey-roasted cashews, but I buy them only on special occasions.

Like your birthday and Christmas?

No, whenever I can afford them.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor, named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me, such as: I remember a wonderful teacher, Tom Smith, saying the secret to finding job satisfaction was being able to drive west to a job in the morning and drive east to go home. Apparently, avoiding driving into the sun made a great difference in career fulfillment. I walked past the Wrigley Building in Chicago recently, but I was unable to do it while chewing gum at the same time. Downtown Chicago is a nice place to walk, but a slow place to drive. A friend, Dave Olerud of Alaska, told me that he’d driven from Haines, Alaska, to Haines Junction in the Yukon. That’s about a 300-mile round trip. In about 100 miles of that journey, he’d met three cars, give or take. Mostly cream puffs, I’d expect. I was in Napa, California, at that time. I drove roads in the Sacramento and San Francisco area. I met more than 100 cars every three minutes on the big highways. Gertrude Stein wrote, “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” Gertrude must have been driving in Alaska when she penned that. If you live in Haines and want to go to Walmart, it’s a 5-hour drive to Whitehorse, Yukon, or a 4 1/2-hour ferry ride to Juneau.

This and that

A survey from Deezer found that we stop listening to new music by age 30. Our music tanks become full.

WalletHub drew upon research findings to determine which factors are linked to a person’s overall well-being and satisfaction with life. To determine where Americans exhibit the best combination of these factors, they examined states across 31 key metrics, ranging from depression rate to sports participation rate to income growth. Hawaii emerged as the happiest state. Minnesota was third and Iowa eighth.

U.S. News & World Report determined its Best States rankings by using 77 metrics across eight categories: Healthcare, education, economy, opportunity, infrastructure, crime, fiscal stability and quality of life. Iowa ranked as the top state with Minnesota second.

I don’t drink coffee (I tried, but failed in my attempt to become a java juicer) nor have I ever read one of Lee Child’s 22 Jack Reacher novels. Child drinks 20 to 30 cups of coffee per day and one of his books sells every nine seconds.

I was in North Dakota, then in Chicago and Los Angeles. Chicago has about three times the population of North Dakota and Los Angeles has five times NoDak’s number of residents. The inhabitants of North Dakota seem to fit better, certainly more comfortably.

Farmers make up less than two percent of this country’s population.

That’s lower than the six percent, according to a poll, that believe the moon landings were faked.

And in local news

After 25 years of tireless efforts, tire salesman is fired from Tiger’s Tires.

What looked like a giant gumball machine outside the bank proved to be an ATM for dummies.

DNR asks people to stop releasing animal crackers into the wild.

New beauty shop, The Big Bangs Theory, opens.

Minister passes collection plate at the start of church so he knows how good the sermon should be.

A B & B & B opens. The Bed, Breakfast and Bathroom replaced The Nap and a Shower.

Nature notes

Monarchs usually lay a single egg on a plant, often on the bottom of a leaf near the top of the plant. It’s difficult to tell how many eggs a female lays during her life, but the average is probably from 100 to 300. The eggs hatch about four days after they are laid. The last eggs are generally laid in July and August. Some adults move south in late July and August. Caterpillars of the last brood typically appear by the middle of August. They pupate by the end of August. In September, adults of the year’s last generation of monarchs begin congregating in large numbers on the foliage of trees and shrubs. By the end of October they have left the state in a mass migration to their winter grounds. The butterflies typically arrive in Mexico in November. Monarch butterflies arrive in Minnesota around mid-May each year to start the process once more.

Thank you

To everyone who showed up for my talk at Sweet Reads in Austin. What a wonderful bookstore.

Meeting adjourned

Never let your hate be stronger than your love. Be kind.