Where did the month go? ….
Where did the month go? Here it is almost time to turn the calendar again. Just as we jump from one day to the next, it seems that’s the way with everything else. One sure sign that things are moving along is the little bright ray of sunlight now showing up on the living room floor. A sign that the sun is starting to drop and once again shining in the window.
Another sign is the sunset/sunrise time which is now at two minutes less a day, meaning about 15 minutes a week we are losing daylight.
I haven’t stopped at the Farmers Market yet this year, but just driving by tells me the growing season has been good. Right now I am eagerly watching for the melons to show up. Nothing like a vine ripened muskmelon.
Driving the countryside this week, I spotted a field of cut oats all nicely sitting in shocks out on 26 Road. I always thought there was never anything that compares to seeing a grain field full of shocks just waiting for the threshing machine.
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Last week I had kind of what is called a no service week. No phone service, no Internet service. Let me tell you it was a lonely time. Finally, Saturday morning a repairman showed up and this time it wasn’t like magic. He looked and looked and finally the phone was working. The Internet was another story and the solution was pretty simple once he replaced the modem, which really wasn’t that old. Anyway, things started working again and I keep holding my breath when I go to use it.
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For some reason I’m a bit late to be working on this column. Here it is Saturday and I’m still at it. It is a little tough trying to write and watch the weather channel on television. It is a bit alarming to see our old winter home, Port Aransas, Texas, in the news.
The camera in Port Aransas shows marker number 9. A very familiar spot, as up the sand dunes is the Island Retreat condo where we lived for a number of years. Later they moved the camera and our last condo, Sandcastle, came into view.
Some of the scenes from Corpus Christi are actually taken on Mustang Island and North Padre Island, both very familiar as we would drive by the beaches being shown.
I suppose it is just a coincident that in the mail today was a subscription renewal notice from the South Jetty newspaper published there. For the last three years they have been reporting on the recovery progress and the battles, at times, with FEMA from the last hurricane, three years ago.
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Another thing that took up some of my time this week was watching the Rachel Maddow news show on MSNBC. I don’t generally watch her as I don’t like her style of news reporting. She mostly talks and very seldom has a guest on to talk with. That evening was different. She did have a special guest which just happened to be Mary Trump, a niece of Donald Trump, our president. Judging from the effort made to not allow the book to be published alerted me to maybe there was something worth hearing.
As I have mentioned before, I never really had heard of him before his run for president. I guess I had heard about a television show where he was often heard to say, “You’re fired”, but that was it.
Suddenly he was a candidate for president along with a dozen or so other Republican candidates.
What surprised me about the interview by Rachel was a couple of the comments Mary made which were some of the same reasons I had picked to think he wasn’t the right person for the job.
One was the day he made fun of a handicapped reporter and it kind of made me think of our daughter Shelly. How would he react to her?
Next came the incident when he played down the role of a Gold Star family, saying they really hadn’t sacrificed anything. That immediately brought back memories of Christmas Eve, 1943, when my parents learned they were Gold Star parents when my brother Ernest was killed. How could anyone not show any empathy for them?
Then there is the story of him being required to pay out twenty-five million dollars to people who paid into the Trump University fund and was ordered to reimburse everyone who had paid.
The list goes on and on, like raising the national debt by over three trillion dollars.
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I’ve discovered some folks just can’t read. How else would you explain why they shop where they aren’t supposed to, since the virus attempts are being made to limit the contact people might have with one another.
Signs have been posted on the floor to help people stay six feet apart and WalMart has come up with a plan to have people all move in the same direction.
Only it doesn’t work that way. Their grocery aisles are clearly marked “shop this way” or “don’t shop here”. I have never made it through once that I haven’t met someone going the wrong way.
When all of this was coming to a head, WalMart was in the process of rearranging all their grocery items. I’m getting better. I can now make it through and pick up what I need as I go by.
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A reader from the Milwaukee area was questioning my being a Twins fan instead of a Brewer fan last week.
I tried to explain how my love of the Twins developed over the years and I have just held tight. I guess one reason is that it creates conversation. As I was watching the Brewers and Cubs play the other night, suddenly it all came to light.
Brewer players this year are wearing a big circle patch on their uniforms saying they are 50 years old. That circle caught my attention and finally I had to get up and go in my closet. There on a hanger was a shirt I had bought while attending a Twins game back in 2011. It was a 50year reminder saying the Twins had been around from 1961 to 2010.
I guess that pretty well explains why I still hang tight to the Twins. Besides, a picture of Hammerin’ Harmon Killebrew hangs over my desk as a constant reminder of all those glory years.
