How to Tell that Spring has Arrived : a Tutorial

You may not realize it but spring has arrived.  You might still be dealing with snow storms...and this is as we approach the end of April!  They tell us that we might get a little snow tonight and it is April 23rd.

We often hear about global warming, maybe under it's more popular alias,  climate change. So how do you know spring has arrived in this time of climate change?   Well, I'll tell you here in my short tutorial...

One of the first signs of spring is that lawn mowers start to appear and you can hear them circulating through the yards in the neighborhood.  I've already had mine going. It's self propelled so it drags me around the yard at a pretty good clip. I have a small yard so the whole thing takes 25 minutes if I dilly-dally around with it. I also have a gas powered weed whacker that uses plastic twine to decapitate weeds and anything else that gets in the way. The weed whacker is noisy and vibrates enough that I'm a little bit deaf and have tremors for a few minutes after each session. Both the lawn mower and the weed whacker will take out flowers and small shrubs if you let them get away with it. Stay vigilant.

This brings me to a second sign of spring...sneezing. I'm actually allergic to grass so I have the added pleasure of a stuffed up head and random sneezing after every attempt to gain control of the yard. I don't have too many other allergies to pollen like so many other people but occasionally get a sinus headache and runny eyes for no reason so there is something out there that doesn't like mt besides the grass.  Some people have a difficult time due to pollen but they medicate themselves and then have to avoid using heavy machinery.


My third sign of the arrival of spring is bugs and bug bites.  We have a few drowsy house flies trying to get in and I saw a mayfly a couple days ago. I've seen one butterfly.  I have already been bitten by something behind my left knee. The little creature climbed up my pant leg and bit me for no reason. I have a cat and some cats will chase and eat bugs but mine is a Buddhist and just watches them  as they go by. The exception is that he will go after house centipedes....those weird multi-legged things that scurry  up the wall or across the ceiling. He watches them until they get down on the floor and then he pounces and they fly apart into about six or eight pieces too small to eat. I have mixed feelings about it since house centipedes do eat spiders and I'm beginning to think that that's what bit me behind the knee.

Bird poop all over the car is yet another sign of spring. Where I live now I don't use the garage in the alley because it is too crammed with the lawnmower and weed whacker and other stuff. I park on the street and there are overhead wires where the birds sit and tweet while crapping on my car. There is no way to avoid it so I drive around with white blotches on the windshield. Later in the year there will be berries ripening so the blotches will be red or purple.

Another sign of spring is the annual junk pick up that the city schedules in April. Big bulky things start to appear on the road side and then there are piles of things. These usually end up blocking the sidewalk or spilling into the street. Scavengers (AKA your neighbors) will come and peer at the stuff you labored to drag  out to the curb. They don't offer to help drag it out but once it is there they will occasionally befriend something that you are getting rid of and casually make off with it. Finally the city sends out the crews to pick up the stuff and it all goes away to the landfill or, maybe, someones basement.

There are springtime events, like the Kentucky Derby or the Boston Marathon, that serve to reassure us that spring is here even though we are shoveling snow.  The Boston Marathon was the target of a double bomb attack this year with three killed and 100+ injured. Two brothers carried out the bombing because they were disgruntled about or by their religion. Good reason to blow up people.

I guess crazy people are around all the time but they are more active in the spring. The Oklahoma bombing, Waco Branch Davidian siege, the Boston Marathon bombing, Columbine school shooting and lots of other strange events seem to all happen in mid-April.

Probably writing pointless tutorials would be another sign of spring....being shut up too long in one's house may cause this behavior.

Everyday People

Do you ever sit in an airport or walk down a busy street and wonder about the people you see or those who pass by? What things or events have shaped their lives? What have they seen or done that would surprise me? What memories do they cherish...or fear?  We get wrapped up in stereotypes and first impressions and fail to see people as they really are. People are incredibly interesting....all we have to do is open up and listen or watch.

I got started on this line of thought because I recently took a train trip halfway across the country. Train stations are only a shadow of what they once were but they still attract all sorts of people. If you watch, you will see them all...There are grandmas and grandpas heading off to see their grand-kids. You'll see single moms struggling with luggage and a couple toddlers in tow. There are whole extended families off on a trip or maybe just there to see one of their members off on a new adventure. There was a recent veteran on one leg and and older veteran on oxygen with a story he had to tell.  There were Doctors. lawyers and Indian chiefs. There was another gentleman on his way home after a trip to Viet Nam and the 45th anniversary observance of the My Lai Massacre. There were a couple of young guys whose pants were so low that they defied gravity...how do they stay up?

In my opinion, one of the best things about Amtrak is the policy of "community seating" in the dining car. Passengers coming into the dining car are seated at tables wherever there is an available seat. Since I travelled alone, I was always filling in with a table of two or three people from all over the country on their way to a places I've never heard of or considered visiting. I had breakfast with a man on his way to Osawatamie Kansas. Osawatamie was the home of John "Osawatamie" Brown, the famous (or infamous) abolitionist/insurrectionist of the 1850s. We had a chat about John Brown...he still is a controversial figure after 160 years. Another one of my lunch table acquaintances was a National Park Service guide at one of our former president's homes who recently was "let go" because of the sequester budget fiasco.  I hope this gets settled fast and she gets called back because she is good at what she does and is committed to her work. Another dining car acquaintance was a editor/publisher of a regional food magazine promoting local farmers and local food production. We had an interesting talk about agriculture and how farmers decide what crops to grow. There was a lady who drags her husband all over the world as she searches out her family tree and discovers new cousins in different countries. He seems to enjoy the ride. There was a couple from Australia on a tour of the US by train  who had travelled all the way across the country and were now circling back to where they started.

I started paying attention to people some years ago when I was starting out on a new job. This was an office job and one of the coworkers was getting ready to retire in a few months. He was a procurement officer and sort of a legend in the office because he could scrounge things with almost no cost.  He was born in the 1920s and raised during the depression and knew how to "make do". One time we were talking and I was surprised to learn that he had been in a local community band when he was a kid. He had given up his musical interests as he grew older and other things intervened...war has a way of doing that. But what he remembered most from his short musical career was performing in a band directed by John Phillip Sousa. Sousa died in 1932 but in his later life he would sometimes travel around and be a guest conductor in small towns across the country. That's what happened -- my coworker happened to belong to one of those lucky community bands when John Phillip Sousa came to town...the highlight of his musical career.

I recall a few other instances from when I worked as a public welfare caseworker for several years. I often had cases of elderly people who were somehow destitute or in need of some sort of public assistance. One of those cases involved the one-time sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona. The sheriff was quite talkative and would occasionally offer to pull up his shirt to show the gunshot wound scars he got while serving the good people of Tombstone.  Another case I remember was a lady who worked as a secretary on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She frequently worked with General Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer and was given a special citation after the war.  Sometimes you are fooled. One young woman told a story about how she had worked the past three years as a "go-go dancer" in Seattle. It was an interesting and detailed story but I learned later she spent those three years in a mental institution.

Most people would consider their lives as somewhat unremarkable. Mine is pretty dull but there are little sparks of excitement now and then. You never know when you will be put into a "situation".  Maybe you are going to see a movie and end up being a survivor of a crazed gun nut. Maybe you will see an asteroid almost crash into your town.  It could happen...odds are that it won't but.... Most people don't go out looking for fame or notoriety. They just happened to be drawn into a situation that proved to be noteworthy after the fact. In some cases they didn't really fathom the significance of the situation at the time.

 

I just find it interesting to pay attention to folks and let them talk.

Remembering Tom

Tom Clements

I was on a cross country trip and a little out of the loop regarding national news. I heard scraps of news but nothing in detail. When I got home I realized that the shooting death of the Colorado Prisons Director, that I was only vaguely aware of, was a friend of mine from my time at the Missouri Department of Corrections. Tom Clements went to Colorado a couple years ago to be their prisons director but prior to that he worked here in Missouri.  I retired back in 2000 and only saw or spoke with him a few times since then but I had worked with Tom for maybe ten or twelve years before that. We both worked for the Board of Probation and Parole before jumping to the Department of Corrections. I think that's when I met him....he was in one of the St. Louis offices while I was in the central office in Jefferson City.

I am one of the most patient people around but Tom had me beat. He was able to express ideas and patiently work toward a distant goal or objective. He had an optimism that was rare in Corrections. I'm sure he was stressed out as much as everyone else but he managed to contain it and seemed to be a calming influence.

If you were a wrestler, Tom was the guy you would want on your tag-team.  We occasionally worked together and I never doubted that he would back me up.  He was a good friend, a dedicated professional and a caring family man.

I recall one odd occurrence years ago when my family and some friends went on a vacation in Colorado. We were driving home and stopped at a McDonald's restaurant in Limon, Colorado. While I was there I ran into Tom who was just starting a vacation trip to Colorado. It was a funny coincidence that we would both be there at the same time but Tom's reactions was just like it was a normal occurrence...of course we would run into each other eight hundred miles from home.

I don't know the details of his murder -- only that he was at home and someone came to the door and he was shot when he opened the front door.  In my imagination I can actually see him doing that without any misgiving or safety concern...somebody needed his attention and he went...that's the way he was.

War of 1812 Remembered

Lets hear it for the War of 1812!  We are well into the 150th anniversary of the Civil War but the good old War of 1812 is almost ignored during its 200th anniversary. I've been whining about the anniversary for a while and finally my daughter told me about a symposium at the university on the war and its impact.  

I decided to go and was surprised to see a pretty good turnout. There were supposed to be three speakers but one, the MU professor, cancelled due to the flu or some other health problem.  That left a military man from the Canadian war college and an author of a book on the naval aspect of the war.  Since the symposium only lasted two hours, this was sufficient for the time allowed. It was an interesting afternoon.

The War of 1812 was a four way conflict...the British, the Canadians, the Americans and the Indians.  Seems like all parties think they won...except the Indians. The Indians believed the promises of the British agents and fought against the Americans, for the most part. This was the time of Tecumseh and the Prophet and their efforts to unite the different tribes to resist the western expansion of the Americans.

Long story short...the Americans recall the battle of New Orleans, a few naval battles and the Star Spangled Banner and forget the rest. Canadians recall that they repelled a couple American attempts to invade Canada and remained loyal to Britain. The British were preoccupied with Napoleon and vaguely remember that they captured and burned Washington DC. The Indians got screwed, mostly. The biggest winner was probably Andrew Jackson who became a national hero and eventually president.



The war is said to be the second war of American independence and that is
probably true to some extent --- we maintained our independence and fought off the might of the British navy and invaders. The war deserves a little more respect and study. The problem is that looking back in history we are always blinded by the Civil War. The War of 1812 was fought mostly in the east or around the great lakes. Here in the Midwest it was mostly a series of Indian attacks planned or sponsored by British agents. Frontier settlements were few and far between and were sitting ducks waiting for attacks. The Indians were opportunists and extremely mobile and could cover a lot of ground in a short time. Some Illinois tribes sent warriors as far east as the mountains of Virginia and the Carolinas. There was an Indian attack on a local pioneer settlement just across the river from present day Jefferson City at Cote san Dessein. The settlement survived the attack and was later designated as a geographic reference for siting the future state capital.

By 1812, the United States had already fought the Barbary pirates and purchased Louisiana from the French. The country was huge by European standards and largely unoccupied. Sectionalism influenced everything that went on in government and there were large parts of the country that didn't support the war. The New England states actually considered secession for a while. Each region had its own war goals...naval security, overseas commerce, expansion into Canada, exterminating or punishing Indians, and securing slavery along the border with Spanish Florida.  Shortly after the war the United States took over Florida from Spain  . The US navy had some successes and, largely due to events in Europe, some of the commercial issues were resolved. The United States was unable to capture Canada from the British, which was one of the main goals of the war.

The actual Stat Spangled Banner, the garrison flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the British bombardment, is preserved and on display in the Smithsonian. What's left of it, anyway. It was a huge flag, 30 feet by 42 feet (yes, feet), and it made a good target because it is probably only 2/3 of it's original length. It was repeatedly snipped away and given as souvenirs or keepsakes until it reached the current size. Even one of the stars was cut out and given away. It probably took a stiff breeze to get over 1,200 square feet of cloth to fully extend but it would have been impressive. A few years back the Smithsonian spent almost ten years preserving and stabilizing the flag and it is now displayed with a background that shows it's original size. As recently as 2011 a small piece of the flag was sold at auction in Dallas Texas. This was one of the old keepsake snippets from the 1900s -- nobody is chopping off pieces now.

USS Constitution
under sail in 1997

Among the relics of the War of 1812 we still have the USS Constitution, a frigate that served in the navy from 1797 until finally retired in 1881. The ship is still commissioned and has a crew but serves mostly as a museum ship in Boston Harbor. She has been reconstructed and repaired several times over the years and sails on a "turn-around" cruise in the harbour each year.

The ship saw many battles and sailed around the world in the 1840s. The most famous sea battle was the defeat of the HMS Guerriere during the War of 1812. The ship sailed under her own power into Boston Harbour on August 19, 2012 on the 200th anniversary of the battle.




USS Constitution vs HMS Guerriere