Loose Leaf Notes

1. Word is that it briefly snowed in part of the county last Wednesday. Today it could hit 80.

2. This Rose Breasted Grosbeak is the Ruth Bader Ginsberg of birds because its initials are RBG.

3. I ran into my one-time firewood guy last weekend at Dogtown and was pretty sure it was his first time at the pizza/music venue.  After spinning and twirling to a few songs with friends, I went over to his table and said, “This is the hippy’s version of flatfooting.” He laughed.

4. I think my friend Steve wanted me to look at his T-shirt but all I could see was his nachos HERE.

5. My Grandson is a Teenager Today HERE.

6. I followed my nose and saw this on my birthday.

7. “May is a beautiful month with a hopeful sound to it (I may write a novel, I may take tango lessons, I may buy a schooner and sail the Atlantic, I may survive the journey), but here in Minnesota, snowfall is still a slim possibility, and I can imagine going out for a walk one morning and with my glasses fogged up from my mask, I hit a patch of ice and slip and fall, twisting, waving my arms and a vertebra slips loose and I land on my left hip, hear something crack, lie with my leg bent funny, thinking about getting up but not yet, and I’m not angry, I don’t call on God to damn anything, but I know I have entered a world of pain and an endless odyssey from Mayo to Sloan Kettering to Cleveland Chiropractic to Chicago Shiatsu to Sister Faith Atkins at Holiness Baptist in Luttrell, Tennessee, and wind up in a mindfulness class in Tallahassee where a woman named Maple leads us in deep breathing exercises and shows us how to exhale all our stress and anxiety.” Garrison Keillor

8. Time for the cake diet: eat a healthy hearty breakfast and lunch, then spoil your appetite with cake and skip supper.

9. Same cake different decade HERE.

10. The birds and bees: I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love.”

11. THIS is a post from 15 years ago when we first got a truck camper named “The Star Trek Enterprise” and I explained how I don’t have empty nest syndrome and that my goal was to camp along beaches and drop shells into a jar at the end of the day, the way others drop in loose change.

12. But now I’m having some empty nest syndrome for my grandsons because they are getting older and I don’t see them as much as I used to.

13. Spring is a fling of short lived blooms, more about romance than marriage. ______________Thirteen Thursday