What a pleasant surprise. When ….
What a pleasant surprise. When I went on my weekly drive this afternoon to check things out, I went a different way. I went the opposite direction up into the town of Beaver. There I found three Amish farms that still had their grain shocks in the fields.
I imagine they’ll have to wait a few days to dry them out after the rain this morning. Along with the rain came thunder and lightning. You may have heard it. I read on Facebook that Craig and Peggy Brandt lost their smoke alarms and other damage when it hit their home.
Then up the street a ways a maple in Pastor Dan and Peg Zimmerman’s lawn on Mill Street got hit. Bark flew all over and it pretty well cleaned it all off on one side of the tree.
Lots of golden rods are showing up and a maple here and there is showing signs of leaves changing color. Our flowering crabs are dropping leaves too as we moved to the second half of August.
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You may have noticed my column was a bit shorter than usual last week. Not on purpose, but something I call computer error. It really wasn’t anything too important, but more on that later.
Along with dropping the paragraph, I had made some changes in the part of the column that did get in. As I read through it I noticed those changes hadn’t gotten made. Another computer error.
So my trusty new computer, just a year old, made a trip back to the computer hospital, which left me all alone again for a couple of days.
It wasn’t a complete loss as I spent some time reading. One thing I read was the Cumberland Advocate newspaper. One of the items in there is a column written by a lady who lives in Barronett. That’s a small community located between Cumberland and Shell Lake.
The first clue that something was wrong was her mentioning the new snow that had arrived. Then a bit later a couple of items confirmed my suspicion. Finally she mentioned being to the chicken dinner at the Pipe Lake Lutheran Church and I knew somehow an old column got put in the paper by mistake. That chicken dinner is the second Sunday in October and I had attended it as well.
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I’m always glad to get a story from someone that I’ll share with you. This is from an old high school friend that seems to have ended up with what you would call a lifetime job. If you remember our class reunions had gone from being just the class of ‘48 to one that involved the class before and one after, or ‘48, 49 and 50. Then someone from the class of ‘47 kept coming, since he married someone from my class, so it was expanded again. Poor Leona, she just happened to be married to one of my classmates and “volunteered” for the job, which is now a permanent position. Or so it seems.
Anyway, she shared this story with me and since she also volunteered anyone who wanted to read my column could just say so. So thanks to her I keep in touch with a few old friends.
She told of a group who attended a convention in San Francisco called the Mensa group. They were special. Anyone with an IQ of 140 or more could attend.
When the group broke up one day for lunch, some of them went to a cafe. As they were sitting there waiting for a waitress, someone noticed that the salt shaker was full of pepper and the pepper shaker was full of salt. They got their heads together to try and figure out how to get the salt back into it’s shaker and the pepper where it belonged without spilling.
Finally they came up with a plan involving a straw, napkin and an empty saucer. When they were ready they called the waitress over and explained the problem and told her of their plan.
She said, “Oh, sorry for the mistake” and carefully unscrewed the caps and switched them.
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I mentioned a part of my column missing last week. It was a story of how I found myself the happy new owner of a Minnesota Twins face mask. Susan Smith of Burnsville, Minnesota, the wife of Florence’s nephew, Kent Smith, crafted a special mask for me. Remember Kent and Susan had taken me to Florida so I could see Jackie and Bob’s new place in North Fort Meyers. That enabled me to also attend two spring training games with the Twins, thanks to another nephew of Florence’s, Charlie Forss of Little Falls, Minnesota.
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It has been an interesting week, even if it did involve a lot of politics.
After months of trying to figure out who would be the presumed Democratic candidate for president, another good span of time was spent by former Vice President Joe Biden to choose Kamala Harris as his potential running mate.
Harris is from California, which has a lot of votes in the electoral college and had made a name for herself in some of the congressional hearings earlier this year.
It is quite a history lesson as her father was an immigrant from Jamaica and her mother from India. She was born in Oakland, California, and was their attorney general before running for the United States Senate.
Her announcement must have caught the president by surprise as he really didn’t have much bad to say about her. Just that she was nasty. She, I believe was the one that brought Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh to tears.
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One of the biggest problems I see with the federal government is the complete lack of control over spending. We had already dipped another two trillion dollars in our national debt, yet Congress saw fit to spend a trillion or so more so they could send money to all of us, some in case of need, but some just for the fun of it.
