I have always thought of myself as a lifelong learner. I am by nature a curious being and like to experience new things. My head is full of the thousands of bits of trivia that I’ve acquired over the eight decades I’ve been riding around the Sun on this old mud ball called Earth. As I age and have more time for self-analysis, I can see areas where my expertise is as thin as my hair. Electricity is one such area. I know how it’s made, how it’s transported and how it makes things work. It still scares the she-bangs out of me. I don’t mess with anything with a cord on it. I’ve taken a college course on household electrical wiring and learned how to rewire a lamp and install an outlet. I bought “The Complete Idiots Guide to Electricity” and read it from cover to cover. I just can’t shake the feeling that I have that it was developed by Wizards ions ago and if not worshiped properly will kill you and burn down your house. I have handled my lack of knowledge in this area by having fathered a young techno-wizard of my own who knows all about appeasing the gods of sparking things and I let him handle all things electrical.
Another area where I will admit to a woeful lack of knowledge is birds. I like the little feathered critters and realizing how hard it is for them to make a living during the winter, I open “The Brooks Fly Inn and Diner” around the time of the first frost. The menu doesn’t vary from year to year, Black Oil Sunflower Seeds being the only item on it. They come in a brightly colored forty pound bag which has to be wrestled from the pile in the bird seed store into a cart, from the cart into the back of Casper, The Friendly Kia, hauled home where I gird up my loins and lug it from the driveway to the metal garbage can from which it can be dispensed to the four feeders. This usually leaves me rather warm, damp and requiring some recliner time. Our feathered guests slurped down over 300 pounds of seed this year. Between the squirrels and the birds, we have one of the more active back yards in the hamlet. There are birds everywhere. I know several of the more recognizable ones, Blue Jays, Chickadees, and Cardinals but then there’s the whole herd of brown birds. I know Sparrows are brown so I identify the brown birds as Little Sparrows and big Sparrows which works for me although I know it’s inaccurate. We inherited some bird identification books from the Queen’s mother. The problem is most of the birds in the books are various sized brown ones and they don’t look like anything like the residents in our back yard. I’ve started eliminating some of them so I can narrow down the proper names of the feathered friends at our feeders. So far I’ve eliminated Golden Eagles, Ostriches, and California Condors. I think I’m going to stick to calling them little and big Sparrows.
Thought for the week—The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Until next week, may you and yours be happy and well.
Whittle12124@yahoo.com
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