CHANGING COLORS

Until a couple days ago, the dominant color around here was white. The last storm  dumped about a foot of snow and added to what was still on the ground from a very snowy February.

But then the sun came out and it warmed up to way above-normal daytime temps and suddenly the only white left was in small patches that looked like torn bedsheets scattered across the fields. Now there is no one dominant color, but a mosaic of olive, tan and ochre. 

The tag end of winter is an ugly, seemingly dead time. The snow might be gone, but the green shoots of spring aren't here yet. It's a time of waiting.

It's also the time when you discover that yes, your dog was busy in the yard over the last couple months and you can clearly see there was a pattern to her busyness. Looks more like a minefield out there than a yard. 

The visuals aren't the only bad thing about this time of year. It's also mud season. When the dog comes in after patrolling the property she looks like she's been in a pigsty. Real pain in the ass to have to clean her up every time she needs to go piss, but that's March and early April around here.

STARLING WARS

The last few days we've been inundated with starlings. Huge fifty, sixty bird flocks of them crawling all over our bird feeders. Reminds me of a hot dog someone dropped on the ground at a picnic, all covered with ants.

I guess it's not surprising given that we just had another foot of snow dumped on us. It's hard for any bird to find something to eat. And it's not like I'd begrudge starlings a meal--everybody's gotta eat.

No, my objection to starlings is the way they completely overwhelm the feeders so no other birds can eat and the fact they throw all the bird seed on the ground. They can empty your feeders in a matter of minutes if you let them. And that's my money they're throwing into the snow.

So now the starling wars have been joined. I dragged my brand new Red Ryder BB gun out of the basement, filled it with BBs and parked it next to the patio doors. All morning today I've been keeping an eagle eye on things and when the starlings swarm the feeders, I pop the door open and let loose a shot or two.

I'll say this for them, they're persistent as all get out. They employ a system to sneak in the moment your attention flags. Most sit in high trees a couple hundred feet from the house and watch. When the coast seems clear, they send in a handful of scouts to attack the feeders. If there's no counterattack, the entire mass of them glom onto every feeder at once. Sometimes there are three or four of them hanging from the same suet feeder simultaneously. Amazing.

Then I remember to check, open the door and either shoot at them or simply yell, and the game starts all over again.

The blue jays, cardinals and chickadees seem to grasp what's happening and some of them won't even fly away when I counterattack. Of course the starlings are smart enough to figure out that if some birds are still there, there may not be any real danger, so they're returning to the feeders more quickly than they did when I first began my maneuvers. This could get old real fast. 

On a related note, I saw some birds here today I shouldn't be seeing yet. An eastern towhee came to the feeders about 11 this morning, something that has never happened before. What a towhee is doing in this part of Ohio at this time of year is something I can't fathom. I also saw a red-wing blackbird. You could barely make out his epaulets, which won't brighten until breeding season. They're generally harbingers of spring, but the forecast here is for snow, snow and more snow.

Also saw a yellow-shafted flicker this morning, which is a first. Strange day here, but with this much snow cover it makes sense. Birds that would never come to feeders have little option.

NB: Just discovered another way to scare the starlings real well. Plugged my iPhone into the external speakers I have for it and played the call of a Cooper's hawk and a great horned owl. Seems to put some fear into them for a little while.

THE TROUBLE WITH SARAH

Watched part of Sarah Palin's speech at the Tea Party convention last night. I'll probably go back and watch all of it today.

What I did see was just okay, not much more. I really don't enjoy listening to her speak for a number of reasons. The timbre of her voice grates on my nerves like fingernails on a blackboard. She needs to work with a voice coach to lower her voice a bit and make it less tinny. It's doable if you--like a professional singer--push the air out using your diaphragm.

She also needs to learn pace and rhythm. She steps on her best lines way too often by rushing on instead of pausing to let the applause come. Not hard to learn that either. A speaker knows which lines will draw applause, so they need to let the thing breathe so the applause can fill those natural spots.

I'd say she also needs to get a first-rate speechwriter, because her grammar and construction are often awkward and difficult to follow. She's very good with one-liners, especially those aimed at Obama. When she let's those fly she always pauses for the applause. So if she's a smart enough speaker to do that, she can also learn to pause for other lines that are likely to draw an audience response.

At times last night she sounded as if she were in a hurry to finish and get out of town. Slow down, girl, let it breathe. Give people time to process the words and respond.

She also needs to re-think some of her stock phrases and stories. When she talks about how she fought the oil companies on behalf of the people of Alaska you'd almost think she was a socialist. Alaska is unique among the states because its constitution, unlike those of the other 49 states--or 56 if you're Obama--gives ownership of all its natural resources to the people of Alaska. When they pump a barrel of oil out of the North Slope, Alaskans don't just get a severance tax or a wellhead tax on that barrel--they actually own it.

The Alaska setup is very nearly socialist, but that's how they chose to do it and it really is up to each state how they handle their natural resources. But few people understand the Alaskan deal, so for her to keep using that story makes little sense.

Most of my criticism of Sarah Palin has more to do with style than with substance. Too much of her style furthers the leftist meme that she's stupid, which she is clearly not. If, for instance, Fred Thompson--clearly the greatest public speaker in America--delivered her speech, it would sound completely different and would have a completely different impact on the audience.

Now she's never going to have Fred's golden pipes or his southerner's natural storytelling ability. But she can and must work harder at her craft if she wants to have a bigger impact.

Unlike Fred, though, she does have looks. When her hair's pinned up and she's wearing her glasses, she is every teenage boy's fantasy of the mousy librarian who turns into the vivacious vamp when she lets her hair down.

On another note, the Tea Party organizers did themselves and the movement no favors by handing the podium to a birther. Makes the whole movement look like a bunch of wackos and kooks. 

The Tea Party movement is so diverse, there are only a limited number of issues upon which most people agree. They need to stick to spending, debt, taxes and economic and political liberties. Once they get into the weeds of social issues there is little consensus. There's little common ground between the libertarians or libertarian-leaning folks and the religious right on any social issues. This reality is patently obvious--or should be to anyone with a little political astuteness--so they should at all costs stay away from the issues that could easily tear the movement apart.

I don't have a particular problem with the organizers of this convention charging $550 or whatever it was to attend. It costs a lot of dough to put on an event like this and if you're not filthy rich or have the backing of a national political party to defray the costs, you have to charge people to come. The bigger question is whether the movement needs leaders or central organization. The beauty of the Tea Party movement was its lack of centralized control and leadership. Perhaps, though, it does take centralized control and leadership if you're going to take the next step from the street corner protest to the election of candidates who share your values. We shall see....

WE ALL OWE YOU A DEBT OF GRATITUDE

As I noted earlier this week, I don't make a practice out of writing about politics here. I generally save that kind of stuff for Twitter and Facebook. But as Emerson so aptly put it, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I want to take a moment to thank the thousands of Tea Party/9-12 patriots in Massachusetts and elsewhere who worked their asses off to elect Scott Brown on Tuesday. You sent a message to both political parties and to the chattering classes who prop them up.

You showed a level of political maturity few of the pundits thought you would ever have. You threw your weight behind an imperfect candidate because the timing was right and because he at least stood for some of your first principles.

Let's not kid ourselves, Scott Brown might be a Republican, but he's from Massachusetts. Stick the same guy in Texas and he doesn't look quite so good, does he? (Although next to Kay Barely a Republican it's hard to say).

The point is, the pundits were all convinced you were only interested in running ideologically-pure candidates, perhaps on your own party ticket. They thought you were a bunch of unsophisticated rubes who only wanted to be spoilers and little else.

You showed the Inside the Beltway crowd they--as usual--didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Those folks are just as blinkered as the politicians who live in that cozy little Washington cocoon. Neither of them has a clue as to what real people in the real America are thinking.

What nobody seems to get is this really is a revolt of the middle class against the elites who control the political and economic systems and have run the country into the ditch. I suppose you could call it a populist revolt, but I hesitate to use that word because of all the negative baggage it brings with it, conjuring up images of "Sockless Jerry" Simpson, Tom Watson and William Jennings Bryan.

This is not a revolt of the "Know Nothings" like we saw 150 years ago. Not even close. Sure, there are know nothing elements there, but there are in every mass movement, including the two political parties.

This thing that has come to be called the Tea Party Movement is largely an uprising by the people who do the work, pay the taxes, raise the children and just want to get on with life without the government picking their pockets and being a nagging nanny. Their motto might well be simply "Leave us the fuck alone." (Although some would be too polite to use the F-word).

I also want to take a moment to thank all the Ohio patriots who showed up Friday in Elyria on a truly crappy day to protest against the Community Organizer-in-Chief. You knew you were gonna get wet, you knew they'd put you far away from the where the high and mighty would see you and you knew the mainstream media would largely pretend you didn't even exist.

But you put on your rain gear and brought your homemade signs and you let your voices be heard as Americans have always done when the government got too onerous. We all owe you a debt of gratitude because you spoke for the silent majority which is silent no longer.

DOWNSIDE OF THE JANUARY THAW

The thermometer has been above freezing for more than a week now and it's supposed to stay this way until at least Tuesday. Sunday it's supposed to be nearly 50º.

There is a downside to all this January thaw, however. It turns the countryside into mud. That includes all of our acreage that is the domain of a fat black Lab whose main job in life is to patrol the property every day to save us from rampaging rabbits and field mice. When there's mud, she's in it.

Last night we were taking the garbage cans up to the road about 10 and the dig decided it was time to dig for mice. By the time we discovered what she was up to she'd dug a nice trench in the mud and both front feet were caked with mire so thick she had a tough time walking. Nose was muddy, too, as was the top of her head.

Since she's an inside dog, that means extra work for somebody. Well, somebody other than moi.

Every trip outside now means a dog clean-up afterwards. Gets old very fast.

Thankfully we haven't had any hard, soaking rains, so while the top few inches of the ground is thawed and muddy, there's still freeze in it farther down. So the sump pump hasn't been running non-stop like it often does in the spring when the ground is thawing out completely. It'll kick on now and then, but not very frequently.

The respite from the snow and cold has been nice, though, so I'm not complaining.

THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER'S OLDSMOBILE

I generally don't write too much about politics here--save that for Twitter and Facebook. But tonight's blockbuster win by Scott Brown in Massachusetts made me think about something I need to get off my chest.

I want to say something about how politics in America have changed, perhaps forever, and what that means to each of us.

This has always been a two-party political system. No one designed it that way, it just developed more or less organically. In fact, in the beginning there were no political parties. Washington didn't belong to a party because there weren't any for him to belong to (he probably wouldn't have joined in any case because he thought they were dangerous).

At any rate, as the system developed there were almost never more than two major parties at the national level. Parties were born, some died--the Whigs--and others were born out of the ashes of the dead parties--the GOP. But pretty much the only third parties that ever went anywhere were the Populists and the Bull Moosers.

The third parties sprang up whenever there were serious issues not being addressed by the two major parties, but eventually, many of their issues were co-opted by one of the big boys.

There was never a huge difference between the two parties because the American polity has always been centrist, moving slightly left or right of center as conditions changed or one party screwed things up. By in large they agreed on about 70% or so of issues and differed on the rest, but there was a comity between them that was largely honored. Nobody was out to break the other guy's rice bowl.

You can make a pretty compelling case that this all began to change with the advent of the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, but there were plenty of periods when the country became rather quiescent and ideology was largely shelved--the 50s of Eisenhower being the best example.

This is a long way of getting to my real point: that comity, that sense of shared Americanism is gone. As wacko left as George McGovern was, he was still not that far out of the mainstream. His progeny, however, are another story altogether.

The Alinskyites now in power--thanks in no small part to George Soros and his billions--do not share many traditional American values. For them it's all about power and they'll use any means necessary to get it and keep it. They want to turn us into a socialist paradise--France or Germany writ large.

There is no Democratic party like our fathers and grandfathers knew. All the moderates and conservatives are gone, replaced by far-left wackos largely from California, New York and Wisconsin. There is no comity with these people, no grand bargain to be struck. These are people with a Soros agenda who will say and do anything to fundamentally transform us into their version of Europe.

So it serves no one's purpose on the Republican side to negotiate with these people or to make nice with them. These are not nice people and hold fundamentally un-American views. We must beat them down and kick them while they're down and stomp on them like you would a poisonous snake--which is what they are.

We really do need new GOP leadership in the Senate especially. These guys have been around far too long in this most exclusive of clubs where comity once ruled the day. We don't need nice guys representing us in the Senate, we need streetfighters who know how to slash and burn. Jim DeMint gets it, Mitch McConnell does not. One has to go and the other needs to step up.

The House leadership is in much better shape. There are a lot of young Turks there who really do get it and have the intellectual firepower to make a case for our kind of government: small, limited and low-spending.

The bottom line here, folks, is you have to choose sides. There's no more sitting on the fence feigning independence. You have to make a choice: do you want to keep the American we've largely had for the last 230 years or do you want some socialist utopia? It's that simple.

We are at one of those watershed moments in history. Either we get back to our roots as a free, capitalist country with limited government or we slide into the oblivion of welfare statism.

It's your choice American. Shit or get off the pot.

DID I JUST CHEER A JETS WIN?

Yeah, I think I did. You always have to root for the underdog unless the overdog happens to be your team, but THE JETS???

I've hated the Jets since they beat the Colts 16-7 in Super Bowl III, January 12, 1969. I lived about 25 miles from Baltimore--yeah, for those of you too young to know better, the Colts used to play in Baltimore before they skulked out of town in the middle of the night for Indianapolis.

The Colts were my team, as were the Orioles. The Colts were our boys, the hometown Bubbas who played there and lived there and shed blood, sweat and tears for us Baltimorons. Well, almost Baltimorons. How about Marylanders?

The Jets were led by hirsute loudmouth Joe Willie Namath--Broadway Joe--who wore girly white shoes and ran his mouth. He guaranteed a win against the Colts for his team and for the AFL, which was still a separate, independent league.

The Colts were heavy, almost prohibitive favorites. They were expected to beat the Jets even worse than the Packers had beaten the Chiefs and Raiders in Super Bowls I and II, which weren't actually called the Super Bowl at the time they were played.

Didn't happen. The Colts played like they'd taken the Jets for granted and they didn't score until the 4th quarter, when the game had already been pretty much decided.

So what was I doing rooting for the Jets today? Well, for one thing, there's not much point in holding a candle for a team that screwed its hometown and sneaked away to Indianoplace. They might as well have turned the horseshoes on their helmets upside down and let all their luck run out, because they were dead to us Baltimorons.

The Jets were also the underdogs, the Wild Card team that wasn't even supposed to be there. So unless you were from SoCal, there was no reason to root for the Chargers. Besides, I never, ever root for California teams. How can you cheer for guys who live in sunny, warm climes when we're shivering and asshole deep in snow? I'm not sure California should any longer be part of this country.

So let's all cheer for a Jets-Vikings Super Bowl. Two teams from crappy climates. Well, okay, the Vikings do play in a wimpy dome, but their fans have to slog through deep snow and bone-chilling temperatures to watch them play.

Truthfully, I don't give a rat's ass who plays in the Super Bowl. The Colts cured me of the NFL disease. The only football I'm interested in anymore is college. No matter how bad things get, they won't ever move Penn State from State College or Ohio State from Columbus.

WHAT WOULD 5TH GRADE BE LIKE TODAY?

In the autumn of 1963 I began the fifth grade at Hampstead Elementary School in Hampstead, Maryland. We'd moved to Hampstead from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a couple of months before.

It was not a move I was happy about. In fact, I was very, very unhappy. Most kids are if they're ripped away from their friends and lives when they're 10 years old. But it's never up to the kids, is it? Frankly, it shouldn't be, but no kid would ever understand that.

But I digress. The 5th grade teacher at Hampstead Elementary was the formidable Mrs. Bankert. And man, was she formidable. Built like a fireplug, about a million years old--the kind of woman who didn't suffer fools gladly. You knew if you fucked with her she'd slap you silly. We called her "Battleship" Bankert. I can't remember her real name, something like Rita or Roberta or Matilda or something equally ancient. She wore navy blue or black dresses well below the knee and heavy black shoes that I swear to God she had to button up every morning.

Mrs. Bankert was not a native Marylander. If memory serves, she was from Wisconsin. But boy did she have the zeal of the recent convert. She ate, slept and breathed Maryland. And she pounded every Maryland fact into our hard little heads. I haven't lived in Maryland for 40 years but I can still name all 23 counties thanks to Battleship.

The fifth grade is--or was then--the year when you learned your local history. So even though I was born in Pennsylvania and lived about half my life there, I know next to nothing about its history beyond Billy Penn. But boy, do I know Maryland history. I can sing the first verse of "Maryland, My Maryland," tell you more than you'd ever want to know about Charles Carroll of Carrolton and Lord Baltimore. I've visited the crypt of John Paul Jones in the Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis and the home of Francis Scott Key, "Terra Rubra," outside Taneytown.

But just learning facts and figures about her beloved adopted home wasn't nearly enough for Mrs. Bankert. If you were going to be a real Marylander, you had to taste and eat it. Guess where this is going?

Every year Battleship sent her poor henpecked husband to the Lexington Market in downtown Baltimore on an errand of exquisite cruelty. Back he'd dutifully come with a bushel of oysters, still cold and briny from the Chesapeake Bay. And, yep, she made each and every student eat a raw oyster.

There was no cocktail sauce, no Saltine crackers in this little tableau. No way. This was the taste of Maryland, straight up.

As you might imagine, things often got a bit gnarly. Kids were gacking and hacking on raw oysters and there was always at least one kid--usually a girl--who would puke all over the floor in the cafeteria, where this annual Bacchanalia took place.

Can you imagine the uproar and outrage that would ensue if a 5th grade teacher made her kids eat raw oysters today? The ACLU would be on it like stink on shit. Lawsuits and protests would follow in short order. The teacher would be burned in effigy if not in person.

Truth be told, no teacher today would be dopey enough to try something like that. They know they're in the classroom to do three things: 1. Keep order  2. Keep kids from killing or maiming each other  3. Teach kids to pass proficiency tests. Today's teachers spend so much time on teaching to the tests they'd never dare take the time to actually give kids a taste of life.

Remember field trips? Not allowed anymore. Shit, Mrs. Bankert bussed us all over Maryland. We made an all-day trip to Annapolis to visit the General Assembly and the Naval Academy. I remember parts of it like it happened yesterday.

We stopped at Sandy Point so the kids and adults--more the adults--could pee. Some of us walked down to the water where a couple of old black guys were fishing. One of them got all excited when he started reeling in his line and something was pulling hard on the other end. We laughed our asses off when he pulled in a rubber boot.

I remember we went into a little shanty of a hamburger stand and there was a slot machine near the counter. Slots were all over the state in gas stations and dives--they lasted until 1968. Bobby Harriman got in trouble when he put money in it.

I remember parts of the Naval Academy, especially the crypt of John Paul Jones under the chapel and Bancroft Hall, the largest dormitory in the world. I think we walked all over the campus that day.

Then we went to the state capitol and toured that. J. Millard Tawes was the governor, but I don't recall if we met him. We did see the legislative chambers. The House of Delegates was pretty impressive, but the Senate chamber was tiny and sort of dull.

I have a theory about teachers like old Battleship Bankert. I don't know if research would validate it, but it makes sense to me. Here goes:

In the 40s, 50s and early 60s, most elementary teachers were women. And they were smart women. Many were the best and brightest of their generation. They became teachers because there were few other employment opportunities open to college-educated women. (Actually, there weren't even many college-educated women.) They were also dedicated to their craft. They didn't have teaching licenses--what's that all about?--and they didn't have to pass state tests or background checks. They just showed up every day and worked their asses off and taught us knuckleheads what we needed to know to be informed citizens. And yes, some of them whacked us when we deserved it.

Today, the dolts of nearly every university are found in the colleges of education. That has been proven statistically and I've seen the numbers. I think it's one reason why the quality of education has declined so dramatically over the last four decades. Add in way-too-powerful teachers' unions and way too many parents who don't give a shit and you end up with the current mess. I think it's really as simple as that.

I tried my hardest to fail in the fifth grade. Somehow my pretzel-logic brain figured if I did, we'd move back to Harrisburg. Yeah, wow, that's pretty twisted. Sort of like voting for Obama to teach Bush a lesson.

But Mrs. Bankert made it her mission to force me to succeed, even if it meant taking me to the woodshed once a day and calling in my folks once a week. I don't recall her every whacking me, but her tongue was so sharp I almost wish she had. She was a fierce and relentless foe of sloth and stupidity.

She's long dead now, so I'll never be able to thank her for what she did for me. Sadly, that's how it usually goes in life, doesn't it?

DO WE REALLY NEED NEWSPAPERS?

I read two papers every day: Wall Street Journal and Elyria Chronicle-Telegram.

I cancel the C-T a couple times every year when I get pissed off at them for their slavish devotion to higher taxes, Democrats and unions. Then I waver and start getting it again so I have some small idea of what's going on in the county. And I miss the comics.

Not sure what I'll do when the Journal subscription expires. It's an expensive paper, but I sure do love it's op-ed pages. It's also the best place to go if you care about business and the economy. I'll probably re-up, although I may just cancel all my newspapers.

But I was thinking last night about what life would be like without a daily newspaper. I've read one for maybe 35 years. What would I do on the crapper in the morning? Do my thing and get on with it? That ain't the guy way. Women spend as little time on the throne as they can, but guys know you have to have something to read and books just don't get it. Has to be a paper or a mag.

And don't even think about surfing the web on your iPhone. That's okay when you're out of the house, but on the crapper? No way.

So those of us who grew up with newspapers pretty much need to stick with them, even if we get most of our info from the 'Net these days. Just not the same experience. There's something about the feel of a newspaper, about the smell of the ink, the combination of comics and crosswords. Those of us of a certain age and inclination are just wedded to this ancient technology. First thing we do when we get off the plane somewhere is buy the local rag. Much of the news makes no sense to us, but that doesn't matter. When you go somewhere new you buy a paper.

Most newspapers are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for any number of reasons, but if you learned the newspaper habit at an early age it's not something you want to give up no matter how tech-savvy you are. They may be the buggy whip makers of the 21st century, but they still serve a useful purpose. Plus, you can't wrap fish in a computer.

STARLINGS

Surviving a heart attack at 38 and a quintuple CABG on my 39th birthday altered my life in many ways. Things that had once seemed so important suddenly weren't so important anymore. Simply being alive was now something not to be taken for granted. I can't claim I've lived every day since as though it might be my last, but I do count each new day I'm given as a blessing.

I've adopted a live and let live approach to many things--not to liberals, gun-grabbers and Democrats, mind you. But if something isn't impinging directly on my life, I tend to let it go.

Living in the country has also reinforced that approach. Things are just different out here and you soon learn to drop your suburban ways. We get more weeds, more bugs--more critters of all kinds. And I'm fine with that now, except when they try to get in the house. There I draw the line.

Last summer I found a groundhog trying to get under the deck, which is a definite no-no. They want to live way out in the back or in the ditch, fine, have a ball. But you are not going to tunnel under the deck and the house.

So I sic'ed the dog on it, but she didn't see it until it was already on the move and it ran under the diesel tank behind the barn. The dog couldn't get in and it couldn't get out, which would have been fine, except that this dog is more a Labrador terrier than a Labrador retriever. She wouldn't walk away and let it be, she parked herself at one side of the tank and guarded it, which meant it wouldn't leave on its own. It squatted there hissing and spitting.

By now it was clear this Mexican standoff wasn't going to end well for one of us and I surely wasn't going to let it attack me or the dog. So I went in the house and got the wife's little .17 HMR revolver and shot it in the head.

I wasn't necessarily happy about the result, but I think the conclusion was more or less pre-ordained once I'd seen it under the deck. The dog wasn't happy with the result either. She sniffed the carcass and guarded it briefly, but she wasn't terribly interested in something that didn't run.

Which brings me to starlings. I hate starlings. They're ugly, non-native birds that always come in big flocks and drive my songbirds away from the feeders. There was a time when I'd have gotten the BB gun out to drive them off.

The starlings were here today, but I didn't bother them. There were only a handful, instead of the usual horde, so they weren't the nuisance they generally are. They were hanging on the suet feeders for a long time, but there weren't enough of them to decimate the food.

So today was a live and let live day and I'm glad it was. Starlings don't hurt me in any way and everybody has to eat, so I went on about my business and they went on about theirs. Most of the time that's the way it should be.

DON'T LOOK NOW...

There's a big yellow ball in the sky and I can actually see some blue up there. I don't want to say this too loudly, but the sun is out and the sky is partially blue.

Wow, I was afraid neither existed anymore. Might even have some snow melting today. Wouldn't that be a nice January bonus?

The forecast says it will be partly sunny tomorrow, so maybe it just came a day early. It also says the thermometer will rise above freezing starting next Wednesday. January thaw? Don't hold your breath.

But I've learned in this life to take each day for what it is. When I wake up in the morning and do a quick inventory and confirm that, yes, I am alive another day, I thank God for another blessing. Tomorrow will come, and with a little luck, I'll get to see it. But I know for certain here and now that I have been given another day.

CARDINALS IN THE SNOW

I heard a rumor today we might could see the sun on Sunday. I don't believe it for a second. It's gonna snow every day from now until April.

Don't laugh. We've had something like 12 or 13 straight days with at least some frozen precip. I'm pretty sure it has snowed every day this year.

There are some consolations, though. There may be nothing quite so visually dramatic as a male cardinal against the snow.

When the world is sunny and green, the cardinals seem to lose some of their brightness. It's probably less them than their surroundings and the light. I don't know if their feathers actually change hue during the year--perhaps they do.

When it's snowy, though, they stand out like the blinking red lights atop a television tower. You know, the ones that are supposed to let airplanes know there's danger ahead.

For much of the winter we see the cardinals at the feeder only rarely, mostly dawn and dusk. Not now. Today there have been as many as 6 pairs at the feeders at the same time. There were 4 males in a little oak tree at once and they looked like Christmas ornaments.

Beauty and joy are there, sometimes you just have to look for them.

WHY THE FIXATION WITH AIRPLANES?

This crotch bomber episode makes me wonder why Al Qaeda has such a fixation on airplanes. Okay, to give them their due, they did pull off quite a coup on 9/11 using planes as guided missiles. Sure got everybody's attention. But if they want to tie us in knots there are surely better, easier ways to do it.

The Mumbai attacks, for instance. Talk about terrorizing a population. Most people don't fly or don't fly often. Every person lives a life that includes going to work, driving, walking, eating out--all the trivialities of our daily existence. How terrorizing is it when you feel you can't do any of those things?

I understand Al Qaeda's desire to get the biggest bang for their buck, no pun intended, but I wonder if they're really more interested in PR and their image in the jihadi world than they are in truly terrorizing this country.

If I were in charge of Al Qaeda, here's what I'd be doing: attacking soft targets like malls, schools, factories, etc. You know they have sleeper cells here, as do Hamas and Hizballah. I'd activate my sleepers and send them out in small teams of one or two men to attack soft targets with automatic weapons, grenades and C-4. And I'd do it serially rather than simultaneously.

On Monday I'd hit a mall in Bangor, Maine; Tuesday a school in Salem, Oregon, etc. I'd keep the attacks up for at least a week. Then I'd sit back and laugh at the panic.

Can you imagine what this country would be like after a week of attacks on civilian targets from one end of the country to the other? I'm not sure chaos would be too strong a word.

In terms of terrorizing a population it would be an exquisite tactic. But AQ won't do it because it doesn't make a big enough splash for them in the jihadi world. We're probably lucky because they're so full of themselves and so eager to burnish their image in the wacko world.

OSAGE ORANGES & RECURRING NIGHTMARES

I was surprised to see a few Osage oranges still clinging to the trees I pass most days on my dog walk. They're all shriveled up and brown now, but they haven't fallen to the ground.

I wonder if that means they're duds, because there's no way they can scatter their seeds hanging on the tree. Or maybe it's just one of those things that happen for no apparent reason. Most of the pods drop, but some don't--or at least not until they're all dried up and useless.

I love Osage orange trees and wish I had a windbreak of them. They're exceedingly sturdy trees that can survive just about any conditions. In the old, old days--before the invention of barbed wire--farmers used to plant them for fencerows because their short, stout thorns kept cattle and horses where they were supposed to be. "Horse high, bull strong and hog tight" is how they were described. But they had to be aggressively pruned to keep the growth bushy and the thorns down where they'd do some good. Otherwise they'd grow just like any other trees and the thorns would soon be up above the heads of the animals they were supposed to deter.

Plains Indians supposedly loved them because their wood made great bows, better even than yew trees. They allegedly ate the fruit, but that's highly unlikely. The seeds are edible, but they're in the every core of the oranges and difficult to get at.

Old people say they repel spiders, but the young 'uns laugh at that. But like a lot of folk wisdom, there is a kernel of truth in it. The Osage oranges emit a chemical that spiders find disagreeable. There's at least one company that makes a spider repellant spray that contains the same chemical. It's not toxic to us or the spiders.

A couple of years ago I decided to I wanted some for the house, garage and barn, so on one of our walks I strapped on my big external frame pack and broke forty or fifty yards of trail up to where the trees are. I jammed as many as I could into the pack--forget the final count, but I think it was somewhere between thirty and forty--and headed back to the truck.

Damn things were a lot heavier than I thought they'd be and I slipped just as I was getting ready to jump a ditch and fell down. I was like Randy in A Christmas Story when he fell in the snow--I couldn't get up. Somehow I managed to get the pack off, get to my knees, then get the pack back on.

That was the longest half mile back to the truck. I was wet, muddy and sore, but I had my spider repellers.

When I walk by in the fall and see the trees covered in bright-lime balls I get the urge to take some home, but then I remember the fiasco with the backpack and just walk on by.

###

Woke up this morning out of a nightmare--the TV news producer's nightmare all over again. This time I was in Kentucky, working for a woman who looked amazingly like Jane Horrocks, the English actress who starred in the BBC series The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which I had just finished watching last week.

As in every one of my other TV news producer nightmares, I was told at the last minute that I had to produce a newscast on a day when I was not supposed to be producing. Let me tell you, producing a TV news show is nightmare enough, but getting thrown into it unsuspecting is way beyond the pale.

I haven't produced a newscast in more than twenty years, but I swear I have one of these nightmares at least a couple times a month. Other people have nightmares about tests they forgot to study for--I haven't had one of those since...well, since before I started producing newscasts in the early 80s.

###

It's snowing again--hard. It's a storm this time and it's gonna dump 3-6 inches on us between now and Friday morning. Then the lake-effect snow machine is gonna fire up again and we could get another  6 inches. This isn't a nightmare, it's a daily assault.

Sucks to be us.

FORGET WHAT I SAID BEFORE

I am going to complain about this lake-effect snow business. I've had enough. No sooner do I get it cleaned off the driveway than it's dumped all over it again.

The forecast has snow in it for at least the next seven days. Yeah, that's a week. And it's snowed every day since New Year's day.

Okay, there's some places in the snowbelt that already have 3 feet on the ground, but that's their bad luck. It's the price they pay for living on the east side.

I say enough already.

ODDS 'N ENDS AND ODD THOUGHTS

The Lake Erie snow machine keeps pumping in the white stuff. You can barely tell I cleared the driveway yesterday. But I've vowed not to complain. I heard this morning they have 29 inches on the ground in Chagrin Falls, so the 6 or 8 inches we have is nothing to complain about. Could be a lot worse. God only knows what it's like in Chardon or Ashtabula.

I've just started reading Edwin Way Teale's third book on the seasons, Autumn Across America, and once again I am amazed at how astute the guy was. His observations aren't necessarily huge startling discoveries, but they are wonderful little insights into how the world works and sometimes why.

In one of the early chapters Teale puts on swim fins and mask and takes us under the shallow waters of Shinnecock Bay on Long Island to look at eelgrass. Sort of an odd choice of habitat to observe in a book about fall, but there's a method to his seeming madness, for he's interested not just in slimy seaweed, but the web of life that's connected to this seemingly unimportant plant.

Teale tells how a mysterious catastrophe brought death to the eelgrass on both sides of the Atlantic and altered life both in the water and on the shore.

In late 1930 eelgrass began dying off along the Atlantic coast. By the summer of 1931 it was dying all the way from North Carolina to Cape Cod. The following year the mysterious epidemic spread north to Canada and also devastated eelgrass beds in England, Holland and France. By 1933 less than one percent of the eelgrass along the east coast, from Labrador to Beaufort, North Carolina, was still alive.

The first casualty was the brant, whose diet once consisted almost exclusively of eelgrass. When 90% of their food disappeared, so nearly did the brant. Their numbers shrank so alarmingly the government declared a year-round closed season along the eastern seaboard.

Next came the scallops, which live largely in eelgrass beds. When they disappeared, so did a lot of the shellfish industry. Then came companies that used eelgrass for soundproofing and furniture stuffing: they went out of business because their raw material was no longer available.

The list goes on and on, but the point is the same: a seemingly mundane plant that most of us at the beach would see as more bane than boon was a key link in the chain of life. When it died off, the repercussions were felt far from the shallow bays of our eastern seaboard.

But not all of Teale's observations are so earth-shattering. The four pages he devotes to the simple scallop are just fun. Did you know scallops have eyes? Came as a shock to me, too. Do you know they can swim through the water backwards and forwards like a jet propelled flying saucer? I assumed they sat on the bottom like other clams, relatively inert. Hardly. They've even been observed migrating in great hordes when they're young.

I don't know about you, but I love picking up these little nuggets of knowledge. Do they change my life? Probably not, but I think if you have any curiosity about the world around you it's just fun to know these sorts of things.

LIVING WITH A GREAT LAKE

People who live in other parts of the country--hell, people who live in other parts of Ohio--have no notion of what our Great Lakes are really about. They have no sense of their size, scale and influence.

When you tell people in central Pennsylvania you live about 15 miles from the shore of Lake Erie, they say, oh, that's nice, and move on to other things. They hear lake and they think it's something just a bit bigger than a pond, which is, after all, the definition of a lake.

Their eyes get big when you tell them you can't see land from the middle of Lake Erie, that the Great Lakes are 20% of the world's fresh surface water, 90% of the country's. The coup de grace is when you tell 'em if we pulled the plug on the Great Lakes, the entire Lower 48 would be under nearly 10 feet of water. That kinda gets and keeps their attention.

English is the most descriptive and precise language in the world, yet it does not have a word that accurately describes the Great Lakes.

Ocean would not be appropriate because by definition it is both vast and salt water. The vast pretty much applies, but not the salt part. We do have tides--seiche--like the oceans, but they're strictly wind-driven. They can be impressive on Lake Erie under the right conditions, but we don't have any Bay of Fundy sort of rise and fall.

I'm thinking about the Great Lakes today because we're having another bout of lake-effect snow in Lorain County. It's not unheard of here, but it's far more rare than on the east side of Cleveland in Ohio's snowbelt, where lake-effect pushes the yearly snowfall total upwards of the 120" mark (for those of you at home, that's 10 feet).

Anytime the wind is out of the north or slightly NNW, we get hit. The snowbelt gets slammed from nearly any compass point from WNW to NNE. Technically, we're in the secondary snowbelt.

So that part of living next to Lake Erie kinda sucks, but there are good points. The growing season is longer here than most areas at this latitude, thanks to the lake. Drive around the southern shore of Lake Erie and you'll see numerous vineyards and fruit orchards, even a dozen miles inland.

We also get our drinking water from Lake Erie, so no drought of any length has any impact on our water supply. That's one of the reasons why these Federal laws requiring low-flow showerheads and crappy little toilets make no rational sense. Beyond the fact that the Federal government has no business meddling in these areas, there's no way we can ever run out of fresh water here so why do we have to live under the same rules as people in Arizona? If ever there were an issue that should be solely the purview of state and local government, this is one of them.

The mere existence of Lake Erie also provides us with terrific birdwatching opportunities a couple times a year. During the spring and autumn migrations, millions of birds have to cross the lake. Where most of them cross, the shortest hop is 35 miles of open water. So they pile up along the Ohio shoreline in the spring to feed and rest before making the hop over the lake.

The best place to see up to 300 species of birds is the Magee Marsh Wildlife Refuge, between Toledo and Port Clinton. The state built a boardwalk through the marsh there and if you hit it at the right time, the warblers and other birds are literally dripping from the trees. Many of them are surprisingly tame and you'll probably never get a better up close and personal look at them.

I guess you have to take the bad with the good, but when I was out clearing 5 inches of bad off the driveway today, I wasn't nearly so willing. Now that I've thought about it in the warmth of my home, I guess I can live with it.

One footnote, the Cooper's hawk was back again today, this time sitting big and bold in the oak tree above the suet feeders. Managed to get the camera on him this time, but couldn't get proper focus. I hate all this modern technology. Why do I need the camera to focus for me when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself? I haven't even bothered to pop the memory card to check it, because I know the shots will be out of focus. I need to get the manual out again, I suppose. I never had to use a manual the size of the OED to get good pix with my 35mm SLRs.

EVERYBODY'S GOTTA EAT

The Cooper's hawk was here this morning, sitting in the maple tree above the feeders. He comes in close every few days it seems, hungrily eyeing the little birds we attract with seeds and suet.

We admire raptors from afar but are repelled when we see them kill other creatures and eat them. But like it or not, that's the order of things and everybody's gotta eat.

It's hardly the same as somebody's stupid house cat that kills songbirds just for the hell of it. The cat is well-fed in the house and has no need to kill, because most of the time it won't eat its prey anyway. A barn cat is a different story. It pretty much has to kill its dinner or starve.

I have to laugh at all the granola eaters who think nature is some benign, benevolent Eden where all creatures great and small smile at each other and get along. Nature is tooth, claw and fang, ladies and gentlemen. Eat or be eaten. Predator or prey. What the hell do you think food chains are all about?

I'm not sure which birds Mr. Cooper's hawk prefers, but I'm okay with whatever he needs to survive. I just hope he's partial to doves. We have more than enough of them around and they're some of the dumbest birds I've ever seen.

PHEASANT ALERT

When you live in the country you're liable to see just about any wild critter on your property. We've had deer, possums, rabbits, field mice, hawks and a grebe. That's in addition to somewhere between twenty and thirty species of birds.

But one thing you seldom see in the Ohio countryside anymore is a pheasant. Northern Ohio used to have great pheasant hunting with a large wild population of birds. That all changed when the farmers tore out hedgerows and plowed up every acre of land they could possibly plant. When Earl Butz told them to plant fencerow to fencerow, that's just what they did.

That pretty much signed the death warrant for a wild pheasant population. You still see the occasional bird, but most of them are pen-raised birds the state has put out for hunters or escapees from a pheasant farm.

Today my son yelled out he saw a pheasant in the weeds between our property and the next one to the west. I looked and looked and saw nothing. Then I spotted a cock bird scooting out of the weed patch into the bamboo, where he disappeared.

We never saw him again, so I'm guessing he moved on, but you never know. There are plenty of good places for him to hide between the bamboo and the ditch. Big pine trees and a lot of weed that I stopped mowing last year. Be kinda cool if he came into the bird feeders. Probably never happen, but you never know.

Hope he was a wild bird and not an escapee. In either case, it was good to see a pheasant somewhere other than in the bead of my shotgun.

TECHBOY? NOT SO MUCH, REALLY

I admit to being a bit of a gadget geek. I like technology and I like the latest and greatest gear. Hell, I had a computer in 1982. What a piece of crap that thing was: Timex Sinclair 1000 with a whopping 4K of memory. Of course I had the optional memory expander that took it to a screaming 16K.

No monitor, of course, you hooked it up to a TV and it output a B&W picture. No hard drive, either. You'd write these little Basic programs and accidentally jiggle the power cord and lose all your work. You could save your programs onto a cassette tape using your portable cassette player. Then you had to load them into the computer whenever you wanted to use them. It had a chiclet keyboard that was a nightmare to use. All in all it was a lame excuse for a computer.

I think my second computer was an Amiga 500, which for its time was an amazing little piece of technology. It was the first personal computer capable of pre-emptive multi-tasking. In the beginning it also lacked a hard drive, but it did have a great display. It was a pioneering computer in terms of graphics. It had a set of graphics chips that handled all the display stuff and left the CPU to do the number crunching it was designed to do.

I've had all the gizmos and gadgets over the years. But there were some things I skipped or ignored. I never had one of those early cell phones that were the size and weight of a brick. First cell I had was a little Motorola, I think. I've had so many since about 1995 it's hard to remember.

It's funny, though, how I can't seem to get used to using some aspects of technology. Every day when I get dressed, two things are part of my ensemble: a shoulder holster holding my Glock 31 and my iPhone. That iPhone is always in my pocket from the beginning of the day until the end. But I can't tell you how many times I have not thought to pull it out of my pocket and use the camera to capture something cool I've seen.

Granted, the camera on the iPhone sucks. It doesn't have the resolution of a lot of cell cameras and it won't zoom (until tonight when I bought Camera Genius from the AppStore). Doesn't have a flash, either, but that's sort of incidental. Hi-res and zoom are much more important.

Last week on two occasions I saw a barred owl that was close enough to capture on video. Did I whip out my phone and snap it? Nope, sure didn't. Frankly, I didn't even think about trying.

So what does that say about my tech prowess? I'm not sure. Having the technology but not using it could be a sign of a crypto-Luddite outlook. Well, maybe not. Could just mean my brain hasn't been trained to think that way yet. The kids take pictures of everything--including themselves with little or nothing on--and send them to everybody. I just don't think of my phone as a camera. Mostly I just use it as a phone, even though I have about 30 apps on it, most of which I've never used.

Maybe I'm just a tech-savvy Luddite.

NATURE AND CHANGE

Great column in today's Wall Street Journal by a retired biology prof about how the entire global warming construct is fundamentally flawed because it assumes nature is in a steady state, almost static, when in fact it is constantly changing in ways we cannot foresee.


He tells the story of canoeing around Isle Royale one evening and watching a bull moose display what could only be called puzzling, bizarre behavior. It took him years to realize the moose was an apt metaphor for the true character of nature:

Most of the major forecasting tools used in global-warming research, including the global climate models (known as general circulation models of the atmosphere) and those used to forecast possible ecological effects of global warming, paint a picture of nature more like a Hudson River School still-life than like the moose that kicked at the shore. These forecasting methods assume that nature undisturbed by people is in a steady state, that there is a balance of nature, and that warnings the climate is at a tipping point mean that the system is about to lose its balance.

In fact, however, nature has never been constant. It is always changing, and life on Earth has evolved and adapted to those changes. Indeed many species, if not most, require change to persist. So there is something fundamentally wrong in most approaches to forecasting what might happen if the climate warms. The paradigm is wrong and has to change. But such fundamental change in human ideas never comes easily, and it is often resisted by those whose careers have been based on the old way of thinking. In addition, the general circulation models are such complex computer programs, and have been developed over so many years, that a fundamental change in the entire way of thinking about climate dynamics and its ecological implications is all the more difficult.


Anyone who has spent much time in the woods and fields would know he's right. The only thing constant about nature is change. Yes, there are patterns you can discern, but just when you think you have it all figured out, nature throws you a curve you never saw coming.

Here's one I saw myself and actually managed to capture:

Yes, that is in fact a groundhog in a tree. Groundhogs aren't supposed to climb trees, but don't tell them that. This one climbed a tree because my dog chased it and it couldn't make it back to one of its holes. It probably wasn't in any danger from my Lab--she's more into eating baby rabbits and mice than tackling something this large--but the groundhog didn't know that. So even though he's supposed to be a completely terrestrial creature, this groundhog got airborne because he had to.

I've never read about tree-climbing groundhogs before, but people who hunt or otherwise spend a lot of time in the woods will tell you it's not a freak accident. Animals--like nature in general--adapt to changing circumstances. Isn't that what evolution is all about? Adaptation?

But you don't really need groundhogs in trees to know there's much about nature that's beyond our ken. Just study the tiny hummingbird if you want to be humbled.

MORE BACKYARD BIRD NEWS

The Juncos are back. Saw a couple of them hopping around in the Rose of Sharon bushes this afternoon. Also saw a Tufted Titmouse. Eats just like the nuthatches and Chickadees: grabs a sunflower seed and whacks it against a tree branch to help open it.



There was also a flock of Starlings here this morning, but not the huge hoard you usually get. They were hanging off the suet feeders and hogging the food, as they always do. I let 'em go for a while, then pounded on the glass to scare 'em away. I don't begrudge anyone a meal, but there are limits when it comes to Starlings.


The Cooper's Hawk was hanging around late in the afternoon yesterday. He was in the maple tree where I have my trail cam hanging. Ran to get the camera hoping I could haul him in with the 300mm tele, but when I raised the camera he took off like a shot. I'm surprised, because he seems to have become somewhat tame--as tame as any wild hawk can be. I've caught him sitting on the deck railing any number of times.


It would be very cool to have a color video cam trained on the feeders to capture all the comings and goings during the day. There may be all sorts of interesting bird I never get to see because they come when I'm not here or not looking. Something like a security camera attached to a hard drive or an old VCR. Would be a pricey proposition, though.


It's supposed to warm up tomorrow, so I may get out the hedge trimmers and lop off about three feet of the Rose of Sharon bushes. Even without leaves they hinder my view of the feeders. Should have done it in October when it was still warm, but the bushes held their leaves well into November and even re-flowered. Weird. Must be the work of the Goracle.


Here are some trail cam pix from the end of October I forgot to post. Finally captured something other than a fat black Lab hunting rabbits and mice.

WHITE-BREASTED NUTHATCHES

Last few days there have been some White-breasted Nuthatches on the feeders. They seem to come and go--sometimes I won't see them for days or weeks.

I like having them around because they're fun to watch. Nuthatches seldom sit still, flitting from one place to another they're a perpetual motion machine. They're on the feeder one second, grabbing a seed--often upside down. Then they flit to the maple tree to eat the seed they've just liberated. But they don't often go right back to the feeder. Usually they'll run around on the tree first, often upside down there, too.

Chickadees are still my favorites, both for their antics and for their tameness. When I fill feeders they won't fly away like other birds. They'll perch on a branch four or five feet above my head and chatter at me to hurry up and put the new food in so they can get busy on it. I'm sure I could train them to eat out of my hand, but I don't much feel like standing stock-still in the cold waiting for them to get used to me.

It would be kinda cool to train them, though. It freaks people out when they see Chickadees eating from someone's hand. Feels really weird, too, when they hop around on your palm and dig in with their tiny claws. If you didn't feel that you'd never know they were there because they're so light you cannot feel any weight in your hand. They literally are just a tiny bundle of fluff.

EDWIN WAY TEALE

If I mentioned the name Henry David Thoreau, you'd probably know who he was, or at least you'd think of Walden almost immediately. If I said John Muir, you'd probably come up with Yosemite and the Sierra Club. You might even know Aldo Leopold and A Sand County Almanac. But I'd almost be willing to bet the ranch you've never heard of Edwin Way Teale. And that's a shame.


Teale was a naturalist, photographer and writer--Pulitzer prize winner--who published more than thirty books, starting in 1930 and ending with his death in 1980. The topics of his books were very catholic, although they were all about the natural world in one way or another.

His most famous books were a quartet on the seasons of North America: North with the Spring (1951), Journey Into Summer (1960), Autumn Across America (1956), and Wandering Through Winter (1965), which won the Pulitzer for general non-fiction in 1966.

I bought all four earlier this year--used, to be sure, because none is still in print, more's the pity. I've read the Spring volume and I'm now working on Summer. They're not quick reads because the writing is dense and often a bit turgid, although marvelously descriptive.

Teale and his wife hopped in their car and followed the seasons across the continent, zigging and zagging, logging tens of thousand of miles--and God knows how many notebooks--in the process. It's fortunate Teale started when he did--1947--because there were no interstate highways and very little development outside the major urban centers. Mostly he stuck to those roads Bill Least Heat Moon calls Blue Highways, roads off the beaten path that sometimes lead to nowhere in particular, which is why some of us like to take them.

These are books filled with the wonders of the natural world and the wonder of a human being who is thrilled to be seeing it all. No environmentalist polemics here, just a naturalist's appreciation of the teeming life around him and the occasional gentle poke at the folks who don't appreciate the wonder of it all.

If you have any interest in the natural world I'd commend them to you. Buy all four and watch all four seasons of the year unfold across the country and the page. If you're a wacko greenie you'll probably find them entirely too sublime. But if you're a conservationist, as I am, you'll find them to be just about perfect.

(Try alibris.com. You'll find them there for well under $10 each.)

NO MORE COFFEE SNOBBERY

If I had told you ten years ago that Americans would one day pay $4-5 for a cup of coffee you would have called me crazy. A shot of single-malt Scotch, maybe, but not a cup of coffee.

Well, the guy who started Starbucks obviously thought there was a market for snob coffee and he made millions serving it. Everybody just had to have their mocha choca soy non-fat lattes with sprinkles.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I've been grinding beans for my coffee for maybe 20 years. I've tried all the fancy coffees from all over the world, but frankly, I keep coming back to Columbian beans--decaf for the last 15 years or so.

And yes, I do have an Italian automatic espresso maker. It can do latte or cappuccino, but mostly the wand just collects dust. I use it to make regular coffee every morning. I guess technically it's espresso, but I make big cups of it, not those tiny little things you drink in Italian restaurants.

Us coffee snobs would never think to drink something like Maxwell House. And instant? Forget it. Only old people and rural rubes would drink instant.

But you know something, I'm drinking it from time to time these days. I bought an electric kettle--as the Brits call them--that can heat water in about two minutes and I pour it over a couple big spoons of freeze-dried instant. And you know what? It tastes okay.

I think the dirty little secret is, coffee is pretty much coffee. Yeah, you can taste the difference between Columbian and Sumatra Mandheling, but it's still coffee and it still tastes pretty much the same if you dump a bunch of liquid coffee creamer in it.

This holds true of many things in life. A Timex generally keeps time just as well as a Rolex. But the former has no cache to it while the latter screams "I have more money than I know what to do with."

Of course it doesn't hold true of all consumer goods. No one can make the case that a Chevy Aveo drives as well as a BMW. And even a novice can tell the difference between a cheap blended Scotch and an aged single-malt.

But mostly it's all about snobbery, trying to make yourself feel superior to your friends and neighbors. Not keeping up with the Joneses, but leaving the Joneses in your dust. And it's just downright silly.

The message seems to be sinking in with a lot of people--even before this nasty recession started. Starbucks is closing stores, not opening new ones, and their financials ain't good.

So do yourself a favor and just say no to coffee snobbery. It'll make you a better person and put more money in your pocket.

STALACTITES AND COFFEE CLUBS

The sun is out and it's 24º, but it somehow feels colder than yesterday. Wind seems to have more bite.

You know it's cold when the dog has stalactites of frozen slobber hanging from her mouth. Doesn't bother her in the least, but it's a good indicator of windchill.

Lousy day today in the woods. Too windy, too noisy. Had a couple of good squirrel chases, but that was about it for fauna today.

One thing did happen while we were gone. The trash guys dropped off an olive drab cart that we're supposed to use now for recyclables. Yes, Virginia, Camden Township is entering the modern age: we now have curbside recycling.

It'll be convenient, but in some ways it really sucks, because it's going to mean the end of our twice-monthly sessions at the township recycling center.

It's not exactly a recycling center per se. It used to be part of the old township school that was rehabbed into an all-purpose building mostly used for 4-H events, birthday parties and wedding showers. But they also used a recycling grant to buy an old straight truck that they back up to a freight door they installed. Inside the truck are big plastic bins where you drop off your glass, cans and plastic (#1 & #2 only, mind you). When the bins get full, Jim, the township road man, drives over to the landfill/recycling center and they empty everything out so we can fill it up again. It's a real low-rent, low-tech operation that suits us just fine.

Every second and fourth Saturday we go there to drop off our recyclables, and some of us old guys sit around telling lies, drinking coffee and, yes, I'll admit it, occasionally ripping off a good fart when there aren't any women around. It's the only place we have to gather around here.

We used to meet every day at Kipton city hall, but the new mayor and his council acolytes decided they didn't like that, so they kicked us out. Excuse was something about cost of heat and lights, but everybody knows that was a lie, because we didn't turn the heat up and we only turned on a couple of fluorescents and sometimes we sat in the semi-dark. No, they kicked us out because they didn't like the idea of us sitting in their village hall making fun of them. We definitely were guilty of that crime, but mostly we solved all the world's problems every day. We even paid for our own coffee. But they gave us the boot after Al, who was the town clerk, gave up his office.

Al started the coffee club, you see. He'd get there before 9 every morning and put on a pot of coffee and when it was ready, he'd tape a sign in the window that read "Coffee's On." The village hall used to be a little bank and it still has a drive-up window on one side and that's where he'd tape his sign.

They say all good things must end and to our chagrin, that good thing ended in '07. So since then the only opportunity we've had for socializing was the twice-monthly recycling Saturdays. Now even that is giving way to progress. I missed the recycling day after Thanksgiving because we were out of town, so I don't know when the new regime starts. I'm guessing it will be in January. Tomorrow is supposed to be a recycle Saturday so I suppose I'll get the poop then.

The only guy who will be happy with the new arrangement will be Jim. He really hates driving that old piece of shit truck, even though it's only like nine miles each way. Now I guess he won't be bothered with that chore anymore.

IT'S NOT THAT I HATE COLD WEATHER...

...I just don't like it very much.

Actually, as long as it doesn't snow and make the roads a mess I don't mind winter too much. I like it when the leaves are off the trees and you can really see things in the woods. Birds are tough to spot in the summer because when they're in trees they're almost always hidden much of the time.

Sounds seem to carry better in winter, too. If the wind is calm you can hear animals a long way off. The other day I heard a Pileated woodpecker from at least and eighth of a mile, maybe more. Thwack, thwack, thwack as he slowly wacked away at a tree trunk. Today I saw two Pileateds flying and moving around in the trees. No leave, no problem.

When it gets too cold, though, you have to cover up all your exposed skin and then you feel like a mummy. Today was one of those days: 15º with a windchill of -2º. I took a facemask hat along, but decided not to use it because the woods would shield us from the wind, at least partially. So I pulled on a knit hat over my ball cap to cover my ears.

But I don't feel comfortable with my ears covered because it really impedes hearing and you often pick up animals with your ears rather than your eyes. And if you pull the hat down far enough it cuts your vision as well. How often have you picked up movement in your peripheral vision? Lots of times, I'd guess. I know I have.

So for whatever reason we didn't see too much wildlife today. Not a squirrel, nor a deer. Lots of woodpeckers moving around again, though. In addition to the Pileated woodpeckers we saw Downy woodpeckers and a Red-bellied. Chickadees and Nuthatches, too.

Dogs seem to pick up more scents in the winter. Maybe because there's no background smell from flowers and plants. Don't know why or how, just seems to be.

DOES FATHER KNOW BEST?

I recently bought the first season of Father Knows Best. I remember that show like it was yesterday. Funny thing is, the show started its run in 1954, when I was one year old. I'm pretty sure we didn't have a TV in 1954, and if we did, I'm pretty sure I wasn't watching it. Even if by some miracle I was watching it, what are the odds I'd remember 55 years later something I'd seen when I was one?

Now, the show ran through the '59-60 season, so I must be remembering the later episodes. By then Betty was pretty grown up and kinda hot--at least to a seven year old--and Bud was even dopier than he was in 1954. Must be the shows I saw when I was five or six or seven that I'm remembering.

It's funny to watch those first season episodes because Robert Young looks way too old to be the dad of that family. He looks nearly as old as Marcus Welby, MD, who was old. Jane Wyatt doesn't look like a spring chicken, either.

These '50s TV shows are a great retro microscope on American culture back then. Dad wore his suit at the dinner table, mom wore a cocktail dress under her apron and the kids wiped their mouths with cloth napkins before asking to be excused from the table. Mom and dad slept in separate twin beds that were covered with those nubby bedspreads. Mom stayed home and cleaned the house and cooked while dad went off to an office we never got to see. Oh, and mom wore FMPs when she did the vacuuming.

We do know what Jim Anderson did for a living, though: he sold insurance. I like that little touch. I'm still wondering what Ward Cleaver did. We got to see him at the office a few times, but it was never clear exactly what he did. Sales, maybe. But what he might have sold remains a mystery. I guess if it didn't matter to Wally and the Beve it shouldn't matter to us, either. It's just one of those little things that have always bothered me.

BTW, Leave it to Beaver ran from 1957 through the 1963 TV season. TV seasons used to start in October and run through June. Shows used to have 39 episodes each season. Talk about change....

WILDLIFE AND A WILD DOG

I haven't taken the dog to the Vermilion River Metropark since it was hot out. We used to go most days during the summer so she could swim in the river. Labs love water and this one is crazy about it. Black Labs don't much care for summer sunshine--they heat up real quickly.

But I got bored with taking her to the bike trail in Kipton, so yesterday and today we went to the park and walked the Bacon Woods Trail, which winds through the woods for about a mile.

Yesterday we saw a Barred Owl, tons of fox squirrels, two deer and a mess of small woodpeckers. I think it's the first time I've seen a Barred Owl. Wow, it's a big bird. I thought they were just little things, but it's nearly as big as a Great Horned.

It's kinda spooky when they sit there looking at you with that owl face. When I first saw him he was only about 20 feet away in a small tree. He stayed there maybe 30 seconds before flying deeper into the woods and perching higher up in a big tree. Very cool.

There are some very hefty fox squirrels in the park. One of those suckers would almost feed a small family. I don't think I've ever seen fox squirrels that big and fat. The dog sure loves to chase them, but she hasn't quite figured out where they go, although today she did tree one and jump up against the tree and watch it run up the trunk. Then she started yelping a high-pitched yelp I've never heard before. It was pretty funny.

She never did see the two deer yesterday. When I saw them they were already on the move and I didn't see much more than white flags bouncing through the woods. I told her to go, and she did, but she never saw them. She ran around a bit smelling something, but they were long gone.

No owls or deer today, but we did see two Pileated Woodpeckers. They are impressive birds, especially when they attack a tree. You can find them pretty easily when you hear that loud, slow thwack, thwack. The sound carries quite a distance on a clam day. They're also large birds that are easy to spot. The big crest on the back of their heads makes you think of a pterodactyl.

On the way home a Great Blue Heron flew over the truck just as we got to the north end of Kipton.

All in all a pretty good two days. Colder than a bitch, but nice days for walking in the winter woods. I had a good time spotting wildlife and the dog had a good time chasing it.