Loose Leaf Notes

1. If you really knew me, you’d know that I’d never have a red car.

2. And that I only have a land line so I can call my cell phone when I can’t find it.

3. I’ve been drawn to the song “The Telephone Hour” from the musical Bye Bye Birdie ever since I saw the play in high school, especially the lines ‘what’s the story, morning glory, what’s the tale, nightingale, and what’s the word hummingbird, all of which I have used in answering machine messages in the past.

4. Recently, I found myself making up new lines, like ‘what do you say, blue jay? – what’s up, buttercup? – what’s new, cuckoo? – and what’s the buzz, mourning dove?

5. What Do You See, Lovely?

6. Cross word puzzling at the pool: “What president is on the dime, three letters?” I asked a neighbor who didn’t know and neither did I. A woman nearby looked it up on her phone and said Roosevelt! What? Three letters? Oh, FDR!

7. Speaking of the pool. It’s come to this. End of the season, and I’m the only one at the pool Monday. That was a first.

8. And speaking of dimes, I also recently learned that the man who designed the dime left his initials on it. You need a magnifying glass to see it.

9. I also learned from a master gardener running a booth at our Small Town Summer about antlions. He had a tray of sandy dirt that I touched with a plastic fork and something that was buried started hopping like Mexican jumping beans. Antlions are known for the predatory habits of their larvae, which mostly dig pits down in the dirt to trap passing ants or other prey to eat.

10. I like The Cranberries’ song Zombie as much as I like Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London.

11. Apparently, I’m not the only one.

12. POTTERS TAKE NOTE: “Modern technology makes firing pottery a lot easier, but some potters in North Carolina still do it the old way…” THIS is an NPR special from Inside Appalachia that features at story on a community woodfiring at my son Josh Copus’s pottery compound in Marshall NC… The story comes at moment 16:35…  HERE.

13. And here I am at my job, covering the August 14th Floyd Small Town Summer Event, my first assignment with the FLOYD TIMES,  a locally owned and nonpartisan news source for Floyd County that is set to launch this week. More to come…

______Thirteen Thursday