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Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting

A drought is a terrible thing.

It said it’s going to rain on TV.

Great! Now we’ll have a drought and a wet TV.

Driving by Bruce’s drive

I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. It was a great way to start the day. I was awake. I poured milk on my breakfast cereal (called breakfast food during my adolescent years), but it didn’t make a sound. It wasn’t broken, it was oatmeal. Later in the day, my wife and I attended a church soup and pie, which was a glorious gastronomic event. We sat next to a couple of good eaters. One had once suffered whiplash while eating spaghetti. The pie portion required a tough decision—should cherry or pecan pie provide the floor for my whipped cream?

The weather in October can be Oddtober weather. Biting insects stay in touch—multi-colored Asian lady beetles and minute pirate bugs (often called no-see-ums). Interestingly, both insects are predators of soybean aphids. One lady beetle found my keyboard. I released it outside. It was a first-time offender. On a warm, sunny day, I ran a  gauntlet of biting insects. The next day, the cool weather calmed them.

We played a game of slowpitch softball on a day forever ago. The game allowed 10 players on defense. In this game, we had four outfielders—Reid, Donnie, Marty and Chuck. A line drive hit by the opposing team’s batter found its way to the outfield. One outfielder was my brother-in-law. I won’t identify him by name in order to protect the guilty. The batter got a triple. The triple is called the most exciting play in baseball. This triple in softball wasn’t that exciting. My brother-in-law got a nice jump on the ball and would have held the runner to less than a triple if my in-law hadn’t had to go back and retrieve the hat that had blown off his head. Hat first, softball second. We won the game, but if the player of the game received a coveted Twinkie, my brother-in-law wouldn’t have collected that golden sponge cake of excellence.

I’ve learned

My wife’s extra-sensitive toothpaste doesn’t like it when she uses another brand of toothpaste.

Bad rainbows are sent to prism to give them time to reflect. If they’ve had a colorful past, they are given light sentences.

Crocs don’t make alligator shoes.

When you clean a vacuum cleaner, you become a vacuum cleaner.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but nobody knows where that place is.

It’s a fine country. You can go wherever you want without even having to use your turn signals.

Nature notes

White-throated sparrows, whistlers extraordinaire, have joined the flickers in gleaning the ground for foodstuffs. The omnivorous bird is a short-distance migrant that winters in the southeast, northeast and lower midwest and as far west as Arizona and the Pacific Coast. The major breeding range of this species in Minnesota is in the northeastern and north-central parts.

The majority of songbirds migrate at night. These include warblers, sparrows, orioles, flycatchers, thrushes and cuckoos. Most are denizens of woods and other sheltered habitats and aren’t agile fliers. They use those dense habitats to avoid bird predators. Migration at night has its advantages. Birds don’t have to worry about falcon or hawk attacks. The air is usually less turbulent than during the day and it’s cooler at night. A migrating bird produces excess heat that needs to be released. Most of the heat is lost from their featherless legs. The colder the air temperature, the quicker that heat can be lost. Some species of birds migrate during the day. These include hummingbirds, pelicans, hawks, falcons, swifts and swallows. These birds are strong fliers. The larger birds take advantage of thermals that develop during the day. Swifts and swallows feed on the wing during the day as they migrate. Common nighthawks migrate both day and night, but the largest flights occur within two hours of sunset, with the highest numbers at dusk. They will detour to chase flying insects, swooping erratically on deep wing beats. It resembles the flight of a bat and the nighthawks can produce a booming sound from their wings as they pull up from a dive. This is the reason nighthawks are sometimes called “bullbats.”

Thanks for

stopping by

“It’s not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even—or rather, especially—when we’d prefer not to be.”—Josh Radnor.