Ugh

Posted on 03/06/2020 by Grumpa Joe

It must be the barometric pressure that is affecting me again today. My sorry butt has been dragging behind me since getting out of bed this morning. The sky is grey, it is threatening to rain, but it isn’t raining, but it did drizzle a bit. Whatever it is, by noon I was asleep on the couch pretending to read. One would think I got out of bed by six in the morning, but it wasn’t until 8:30 that it finally happened. Three and a half hours later I’m sleeping like I had shoveled a truck load of coal yesterday.

Funk Depression

Actually, last evening I spent a lovely hour on the phone with a young lady from our Lions club. She had just given notice that she and her son were leaving the club, and I had to know why. I found out more than I needed to know to answer my question. It wasn’t because of our failing as a club. Her son just turned twenty-four, and is having acute medical problems which was caused by his birth. He was born three months early and had a very rough time making it into this life. The medical effect was to put him on a drug that would take its toll on his kidneys at a later time in life. It is now that time. That puts him at great risk with the virus too. His choice was to accept life over a service club that puts him at risk of death with every activity he helps. We need direct contact with people in order to serve them. In fact, as Past President of the club I am going wild trying to find a way that we can serve without direct contact.

Because this is a pandemic, every Lions club in the world is affected the same way. What do we do? How do we do it? Those are the questions we wrestle with. Do we wait until the world is rock solid secure that COVID-19 will not affect us anymore? That might be twenty years from now.

Many clubs are having virtual fund raising activities. One in particular struck me as being novel, i.e. a virtual Five K run. No, you don’t imagine running five kilometers, you actually run the distance and report your time to the race officials online. They match your time against all the participants and award the prize to the fastest runner. It isn’t just the same as having a hundred runners show up at one place, register, and who then take off with the gun and fifteen minutes later show up again sweaty and pooped. It just isn’t the same, but people might just take the bait because it is different. The trick is to have a worthy cause to be raising money for.

This year, I will serve as our Club Service Chair which means I will have to stimulate people to find projects to work on. Most times we wait for the projects to come to us, but that leaves huge gaps between service. With lots of members who join to “give back” we need to offer them many opportunities to fulfill their needs. It will be my game to root out the opportunities. COVID has ruined several of our popular events in the Village. To date the Blue Grass Festival is cancelled, the Art on the Green is cancelled, Thursday night car shows are cancelled, and on and on. All of these events have deferred til next year. But, what if next year COVID-19 is still here in force? Do we go back into hiding, or do we begin taking chances with catching the damn bug and fighting back? My guess is that we will not hunker down again, but will fight it off.

Watching the country burn during this rash of riots caused by one man’s brutality against another’s will no doubt cause a spike in COVID. None of the rioters have paid much attention to social distancing, and wearing masks. At this moment I would not want to be in President Trump’s position. He upset the country by closing down and making us all hurt, and now he has to wave a big stick at us to end rioting.

To me the biggest joke is the organizers who really thought they could get away with storming the White House, and are now shouting that Trump is violating their civil rights. If I were president I would have had the entire riot force shot, and their bodies piled on the lawn in front of the White House while I would have stood on the pile brandishing my AK 47 in one hand and the American Flag in the other. That is only one of the many reasons I am not a politician.

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Odds and Ends

Posted on 02/06/2020 by Grumpa Joe

I may not look like I lost weight, but I did. It has been eight weeks since my last haircut, and I looked shaggy. My hair was long enough to have a true Donald Trump wave. After three days of failed phone calls, my barber shop finally picked up and I made a reservation to get sheared.

Before
After

The appointment was for mid-day which gave me a few hours in the morning to attack a new project in the garden.. I transplanted a perennial called Brunnera which flowers blue in the spring time. The rest of the season it has beautifully variegated foliage. It loves shade and was covered by two large perennials that over shadow it. Even I who planted it and knew where it was in the garden had trouble locating it for the dig.

Brunnera

The backside of my house is in shade most of the day so I thought what a great place for this plant. That is where it is right now, in the shade but fully visible to all. I foresee a few more sister plants to make a larger spread of the flowers.

A second project was to locate an overgrown downspout drain in the lawn and to unplug it. It took a little probing in the lawn to strike the plastic pipe, Once found, I dug out the grass that had overgrown it. The thing was completely covered with grass roots and one could be standing on it and not know it. Next came a long hose to reach the downspout and to rush water into the underground drain. It took a few minutes but water finally began gushing out of the drain onto the lawn. Success. One down and six to go. These plugged drains are the cause of my gutters over flooding water. I might as well not have gutters the way these work.

Today is the day I spend with my friends at the Stray Bar. The bar opened over the weekend but it is limited to serving outside on their patio where the tables must be six feet apart, and no groups larger than ten are permitted. After knocking down a few at the Stray I go home to attend a Zoom meeting with my Lions Club Board of directors. Evidently churches and clubs are not considered important enough to allow meetings to occur normally.

Rumors of expected riots within Frankfort are just that, rumors. No such activity has occurred yet. Our town is too little to be significant in the scheme of things. I do know that we have lots of neighbors who are black. They live with us peaceably and are just as upset about the riots as we whites are. I venture to estimate that there are blacks living in every neighborhood within our town. They move here to get their kids into good schools and away from gangs.

Our Chief of Police published a letter stating how terrible he thought the George Floyd killing was, and he assured us that the men on the Frankfort force were trained to arrest people in a civilized manner. I hope he is correct, and that he hasn’t hired that one bad apple that spoils the bunch

The one positive benefit of the Floyd George incident has been the news switched from talking non-stop about COVID-19 to street riots and his death. So far, no-one has complained about not hearing news on COVID. Frankly, I am one who has lost interest in the virus, and my attitude has switched to “if I get it, I get it.” I’ll deal with it if and when it hits me. Of course when I catch it, news about the virus will become the main issue.

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Global Warming Ice Age

Posted on 01/06/2020 by Grumpa Joe

The first of June and it is cold again. Of course cold is relative. The temperature today is what I considered warm back in January, but for June it is now cool, no, cold. At 1:00 p.m. it has risen to 67 degrees F. All this attention to cold has been brought on by my reading. I’m attacking a group of books the titles of which I have seen for years but never attempted to read. The latest is South: The Story of Shackleton’s Expedition. The adventure took place during World War One 1914-17. The short version is Ernest Shackleton’s journey to be the first too find the south pole by land. How he and his crew ever survived this trip to frozen hell is nothing short of a miracle.

Throughout the read I kept thinking about how those who truly believe that global warming will cause Antarctica to melt are daft. I recommend theses people read this book and then tell me you still believe it will happen because we use fossil fuels. I believe the world will exhaust its supply of fossil fuel long before Antarctica melts. As long as earth is tilted as it is, and as long as the south pole is where it is, at the bottom of the sphere it will take armageddon to melt it even partially.

Oh yes, the earth can tilt like it did when our moon was formed and send the Sahara desert into a zone where it is cold and then maybe just maybe the south pole would melt. But, wouldn’t it stand to reason that as the existing pole shifts northward to expose it to the sun that another area of the planet will take its place and freeze into a new Antarctica? Wouldn’t it also stand to reason that as the planet shifted it would do so slowly thus causing the freeze to occur in a continuum so by the time Antartica was melted its counterpart would be frozen?

Reading this story was a double feature for me. I loved it as an adventure and second it got my stagnant brain to begin thinking logically about what would happen to all that ice. The reason for the ice is because most of Antarctica is in the dark just as the north pole is in the dark for much of it’s year. The second reason is that because the axis of the earth is tilted it puts Antarctica further from the sun so the place is really cold. Shackleton recorded minus fifty-five degrees below zero for a winter segment of his journey. He described what happens when the ice that had trapped and was holding his ship captive, cracks open and water fills the void. At minus 55 the water turned to ice four inches thick within minutes.

The photo above shows the change of Antarctic sea ice between 1850 to 2013. I learned in my fourth grade science class that water expands when it freezes, and it subsequently reduces when it melts. What that tell me is that we should have been seeing a loss of coastal regions to ice melt water since 1850. Have we? I have never read nor heard any such phenomenon reported. Try this experiment for your self. Fill a glass tumbler with ice cubes to the brim, next add water until it is at the brim. Let the ice-water filled glass sit for a couple of days and watch to see if there is any water on the surface the glass sits on. There won’t be any. That is because as the ice melts it’s volume contracts you will have a full glass of water without ice when it is done.

Watch the animation above and see how the sea ice changes from year to year. Tell me have you read of any reports that the oceans are rising and falling at our shorelines in sync with this changes? I haven’t.

I believe only God can increase global warming that will cause the ice at the poles to melt. I don’t believe that mere men can effect such an extreme shift in temperature that will cause the ice to melt and the oceans to flood the earth.

My recommendation to all the people who believe in man made global warming that will cause the ice at the south pole to melt and flood the world is this: put your energy into believing in God. Nature will take care of planet earth and we will not be responsible for it’s demise, but God will.

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, family, Science | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

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