Squirrel and the bird feeder

Shortly after we moved here in July 2000 I mounted a bird feeder on a 4 X 4 post and put a piece of used stove pipe on the top 4 feet of it to keep the squirrels off. It worked for quite a few years then one of them learned to drop down from a tiny branch about 8 feet above. Although I promptly sawed it off it seems like ever since it's been a continual competition between them and me.

When we added the porch last summer I had to move the feeder because it was so easy for them to jump to the feeder from the porch roof. I carefully measured how far it was from all the trees around and thought I had it far enough away. However at least one has learned to jump about nine feet from a sturdy oak tree off to the right of the picture below. It's quite fun to watch him climb the tree and spend a fair amount of time adjusting his height and staring at the feeder before making an amazing jump over to the roof where he digs his claws into the somewhat rotten wooden shingles and feasts.

Then Tim noticed when he was here this past weekend that one was also getting to the feeder by jumping up the post and using his hind feet to jump all the way up around the stove pipe.  So Saturday I used scrap aluminum siding to wrap the post below the stove pipe and used another two pieces to put an aluminum roof on the feeder. 

I'm sorry the quality of this picture is lacking a bit if you look closely you can see that a squirrel is attempting to jump from the ground up to the feeder. I'm happy to say he couldn't make it.  The best attempt though I didn't capture with my iPhone. That was last evening when we watched as the squirrel made it's preparations by climbing the tree going through his usual calculations in his walnut sized brain and made a perfect leap to the top of the roof but alas he couldn't get a grip and went sailing straight off the other side onto the ground. It was quite funny to see.

I thought he was going to try it again this morning and I was prepared this time but it seems maybe the pain and embarrassment he experienced last time deterred him from trying again.

Ramblings

Most of the time I like to have a single theme for a blog post but I have a number of unrelated subjects today so this is "Ramblings". I could have titled it Sunday morning missive which I used to email to you all but it is neither Sunday morning nor is it an email although most of my followers will get this post by email.

Glass shard that was in Jonathan's thumb for a month

When Jonathan came home on March 8, Lois helped him pull a small splinter of glass from his thumb. A week later when he returned here from his trip to Seattle and Southern CA his thumb was still bothering him. A few days later he saw a doctor in West Lafayette who dug around for a while but couldn't find anything. Today he sent a picture which I've blown up here so you can see the shard he says "popped out" last evening. It was in his thumb for about a month. We're almost as glad as he is that it's out.

Happy Birthday Eldon! I asked Grammy this morning why this day was important for Eldon and she couldn't remember. I'm sure she was aware of it 66 years ago!  When Pappy was 66 (1984) they were living at Cochranville and he was still working full time selling spreaders - I think.

2013 maple syrup

Last weekend we finished up our maple syrup season. We only had two taps in this year instead of three but the weather was really good for sap production. I didn't keep up my spreadsheet of how many gallons of sap I harvested but based on the end product of about 6.5 quarts, it must have been about 65 gallons of sap. We tried several different methods of cooking sap this year. The weekend Jonathan was home we hooked up a copper tube to the place where the pressure bobber valve usually sits on an old pressure cooker and ran it into a tub of water. The problem was you couldn't monitor or add sap without removing the lid. So we did a lot of it in crock pots again.  I really would like to build an outdoor oven for next year. Lois and I have agreed on a spot to do it on our property but it will be a lot of work.

The treasurer for our church who has been doing an excellent job for about 15 years recently stated her intention to pass the work on to someone else. I have decided to volunteer for the job although I was hoping I'd be retired when this opening came along. I will enjoy some of the work but it does add up to about an hour or two a week.  I have chaired the finance committee for several years so I'm more familiar with the work than anyone else. It feels good to be useful for our church.

Health

When someone asks me how I've kept from adding on weight as I've aged I usually mention 3 things: heredity, diet and exercise. I might mention how my Mom has tried unsuccessfully to gain weight all her life. I might say that I haven't tried it but I think because of hereditary influence, I couldn't be obese if I wanted to. If they seem still interested, I might mention how a diet high in fiber and low on the food chain is great for keeping a healthy weight and that finding ways to incorporate activity into my life has been important for me as well.

This week on the 8th anniversary of Pappy's death, I think I should add a 4th one: environment.  Pappy grew up in an environment where no one "exercised" - movement and activity was just a part of life. In fact I remember his saying that Grammy's father John Kennel saw Pappy running up a stairs or some such rigorous activity and Papa (as we called my grandfather Kennel) admonished him to slow down. Papa's philosophy seemed to be that you were only awarded a certain amount of activity in life and the sooner you used it up the sooner you wore out.

In spite of growing up with that influence Pappy somewhere came across and read Kenneth Cooper's book Aerobics published in 1968 (review here) the year Pappy turned 50. To Pappy's credit, he was convinced and started jogging. I don't know if I would call Pappy obsessed with it but he talked about it a lot and did things like keeping track of his aerobic points, taking his resting pulse and writing down how much he jogged. In the winter when it was too cold to exercise outside in the track he made in the woods behind the house in Cochranville, he used to run round and round the basement.  It was not a large basement so he used a handful of sticks that he would put down and then pick back up to keep track of his laps.

The reason this all came to my mind this week was because of a sad situation at work. My cubicle is not far from a person who is 63 and just had barometric surgery of some kind. She has probably lost 30 pounds but my guess is she still is obese. This week a coworker and I found her on the floor in the copy center. She had slipped some how on the linoleum and couldn't get up. We brought her a sturdy chair and we each held it down while she tried to use it to get up. She literally didn't have the strength to get up off the floor at first. She tried hard and got so out of breath she had to stop for a few minutes. Then she was able to get herself up on to it. Then we brought her an office chair that she pushed in front of herself to get back to her cubicle.

I found myself being very judgmental. How could she let herself get to this point in her life? Wouldn't the bypass surgery she had some 6 years ago have given her a clue that her lifestyle needed a major adjustment? Then's when the thought occurred to me that environment and specifically Pappy's influence helped motivate me to exercise.

And that brings me to Thanksgiving. I'm so glad I grew up in the environment I did for many reasons and just one of them is the encouragement to live healthily.

Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone.

John

Memories

Probably about 10 years ago Tim recorded an interview with Grammy and Pappy on mini-disk.  He recently asked if we'd be willing to see if we could get it put on a media that is more accessible. I found out that Goshen College will copy them on to CD for a reasonable fee so we made a master and 4 copies.
Unfortunately, the interview is not dated but since Tim did it during college it would need to be somewhere between the fall of 1999 and the spring of 2003. It also starts and ends rather abruptly and you can't always here the questions. Still, I really enjoyed them and liked hearing Pappy's voice again. The interview is wide ranging covering subjects from his growing up years to his theology, his job history with lots of interesting anecdotes. There's also a part where Grammy talks about her growing up years.
The funny thing is that I assumed Tim did this at some point when I wasn't around but my voice is on the recording asking a few questions. I have absolutely no memory of it. My brain is so strange. Occasionally some obscure insignificant memory from years ago will pop into my head but here's an hour of my life in what now seems a significant and interesting moment and I have no memory of it.
The college did a nice job. They broke it up into 8 tracks so you don't have to listen to it all at once. They also asked if we wanted pictures on the CD label so we gave them Grammy and Pappy's wedding picture and another Olan Mill 1984 portrait.
Both Abby and Tim asked for copies of the CD. We didn't know how it would turn out so we didn't order enough for everyone that might want.  The college charges $4 for additional copies. I could also email the audio files to anyone that wants. They are not very large.

Tichu

First a real quick introduction for those of you that don't play Tichu.  It's a card game with 52 cards very much like playing cards plus four special cards. The general principle is similar to Scum aka President where the object is to get rid of your cards before anyone else by laying higher ranking cards on the current cards being played. You can play single cards or sets of cards like Scum but you score somewhat like Rook. For those of you that haven't played Tichu, I highly recommend it. Our children brought it home from Goshen College.

So tonight was our third Thursday night playing with our two renters that are Goshen College seniors, one of whom is Lois' nephew Ted. The other is Lucas Nafziger - no relation to me.  In Tichu you play with set partners so Lois and I have been playing against them.  Even if you know nothing about Tichu you will appreciate the rarity of Lois starting the first two rounds having all four Ace's in each round and in the final round I had all four Ace's! But in between Ted had two sequence bombs and Lucas had consecutive King bombs.

The game ends when either team scores 1000 points.  We started off by my being set (down 100) then we surged to a 550 to 50 lead but near the end they managed claw back to an 850 to 750 lead.  Then I Grand Tichued (basically double bet I was going to go out first) and made it plus got all the points so we won 1050 to 850.  Overall we've won 2 of our 3 games.  If we keep beating them I think we'll still have them coming back for more because we always feed them something.  Actually it's very unlikely we'll continue to win. They are both good players.

This is the first we've ever had so much fun with renters.

Happy palindrome day!

Several weeks ago I noticed (or maybe read) that today's date would be a palindrome when written mmddyyyy 11022011.  The next one will be Feb. 2, 2020. Cool eh? I looked up Palindrome on Google and found a Wikipedia article noting that "the most recent palindrome date was 11/2/2011". I also found many other references to this extraordinary date.  It's so hard to be in front of the curve these days.

Biking in Seattle

I didn't get to bike as much as I hoped in Seattle even though Alex's father Kim graciously loaned me his mountain bike and Abby let us borrow the bike we bought her for her birthday. There were just too many other interesting things to do. Seattle is very bike friendly. Lois and I rode about 23 miles one of the first days on the Burke Gilman trail. It's a rails to trail path.  It supposedly went a good bit further but we were about done biking for the day.

One highlight on the bike though was successfully biking up Dravus Street. Alex had introduced it to us the night before in the car. He said locals know it as Hill of Death. I know this is a little hard to see in the accompanying picture but this is my iPhone with the app that acts as a level showing the slope on the street as 16.5%.  It probably wasn't quite that steep averaged over a foot. I biked up with the mountain bike in the "granny" ring in front and the lowest in back. It felt like I was ratcheting up the hill as each down stroke took me a bit farther up and I nearly stopped in between each stroke. I wished for my road bike several times but I don't think I would have made it up this hill as it isn't geared low enough.

The additional picture to the right shows a garage opening on to the street. You can't see from the picture that there is a bit of distance between the street and the garage door but it still looked like a challenge to get a car in there.

Going down I felt like if I braked hard I would fly right over the handlebars so I was pretty cautious and didn't let it gain much speed. The steepest part was only one or two short blocks long but the whole hill was at least 6 or 8 blocks.  I might not have been able to control the bike on the nearly level cross streets if I let it to to full speed.