TreeTopViews

Well, it’s spitting a little snow. It’s the first of the season. Ordinarily, this would be an occasion for joy and celebration – new snow being the thing of beauty and marvel that it is. But this is different. The ground is not frozen. It’s not cold enough. It’s going to be a royal mess.

The National Weather service warns of heavy wet snow in large amounts falling on trees still laden with leaves which will hold an unusual amount of the sticky stuff and likely cause limbs and whole trees to fall across roads and power lines. For those of us who are lovers of electricity and free access, this portends trouble, or at least inconvenience. I just hate inconvenience.

Of course, it may all be overblown and turn out to be a false alarm. Not likely. I have the generator all gassed up and ready. I even toped off the VW with overpriced diesel. I have extra water and a supply of other necessities that could be, ah, necessary. Plenty of wood laid in. If readiness counts for anything, I am there.

I even have a couple of books on hand. I am half done with one by one of those “machine” authors who have a stable of writers who can clone his stuff as good as he can. I can’t believe I’m admitting this. This one is about a husband and wife team who are financially independent to an absurd degree. Who search the world over for terribly interesting objects which are always being sought at the same time by the most ugly of bad guys. They have the inexplicable ability to know just the right person in any remote part of the world who is unbelievably always ready to do the most impossible things to rescue them from certain peril.

I am impressed by their sophomoric bantering in the face of the kind of danger that would make me reach for the Kaopectate. It is so bizarre that it is entertaining. Mindless for sure. Maybe that is the quality that holds me to the story, if that is actually what it is. Oh well, sometimes the mind needs to be indulged with a touch of, well, mindlessness. Just the thing on a stormy night. Stay tuned.

Well, she promised she would meet me when the clock struck seventeenAt the stock-yards just five miles outside of town;Where there's pig's feet and pig's ears, and tough old Texas steersSell for sirloin steak at nineteen cents a pound.   She's my darling, she's my daisy. She's hump-backed and she's crazy,   She's knock-kneed, she's bow-legged and she's lame;   And though they say her breath is sweet, I would rather smell her feet   She' my freckle-faced consumptive Mary Jane.

If you are still here after that, you must have less to do than I do.  Actually I am making a couple of loaves of potato bread.  And yes I have been thinking of my father.  On his birthday, I have a kind of ballad I composed a while ago that I’ll share.  You’ll be happy to hear that it is not musical in case you were thinking of taking a trip that day or maybe making some bread.

I think it’s a “he”. I’m not that sure, but for the purpose of this piece, this fly shall be male. And, he is doomed. He is on the threshold of eternity. His days of skating across my bald head, nibbling at my exposed toes as they point toward my fire, prancing up my arm or even resting on my glasses as I type this, are numbered. It’s a low number. You might even say that his hours are numbered.

There are 16,000 types of flies in North America. Kind of makes you think of going out and getting an industrial strength insecticide bomb doesn’t it? But wait, there are only five common types that you are likely to encounter and of that five only three that usually become a nuisance, and only one that makes you want to bring out the double barreled shotgun. There is the house fly, the blow fly, the fruit fly, the phorid fly and the drain fly. We’re talking house fly here.

With a conscientious program of hygiene and proper disposal of the old banana or apple, one can, for all practical purposes, eliminate the fruit and blow types.

Over the years I have employed all the house fly elimination techniques known to western civilization. They range from spraying Flit™, a petroleum based product which would kill anything in appropriate doses, including humans, to hanging that ugly and septic fly strip from the ceiling. Somewhere in there is the fly swatter. 87% of respondents cited the flyswatter as their preferred weapon in the house fly wars. If you count the rolled up news paper with a rubber band around the handle end that number would reach up toward 100% I am sure.

There are two real fly swatters in this house, neither of which can be found. So I am employing the rolled up paper model. It’s not as quick as the real thing but when a little stealth is used, it can be just as effective. Alas, he has escaped my attempts on his life all morning.

Short of the shotgun, I have a “house and garden” spray can somewhere that will do the job when I get good and tired of this particular pest. I am at that point now. I know all about the environmental implications but I don’t care. Only once or twice a year do I bring out the chemical weapons of mass destruction. Can you blame me? Probably some of you will. Well, please understand me when I say, “I don’t give a shit”. One shot and this S.O.B. will be “legs up” within a few minutes if not seconds.

I_have_had_it.

It seems to me, and that’s an important distinction to keep in mind, that the death of Steve Jobs is causing an enormous upheaval of comment and speculation in the pundit division of the Apple world. There is an entire segment of broadcasters, bloggers, writers and hangers on whose existence depended on what Steve Jobs did. Now that he is gone it seems that there is an unusual level of anxiety about what is next. Not what’s next from Apple, but what’s next for them! They seem anxious to me. Unsure. Many of them are broadcasters, journalists and what I call, micro experts – knowing a lot about a ridiculously confined area of knowledge. But there is one thing they all share: the ability to talk incessantly while saying very little.

Jobs was a star in the most serious of terms. He played the media and had a field day with the music industry. He designed products that revolutionized the way we do our lives. Few people can say that to any degree. Not only was he a star, he knew stars.

He was a private person until he walked on the stage to introduce a new product. Then he was himself the star. I remember driving 50 miles one January to sit with a friend and a bunch of his fellow teachers who were streaming a keynote on a large screen at a high school in mid-coast Maine. I was excited. Everyone was excited. What would Steve tell us that would define our MAC experience for the next six months to a year? What would be that “One More Thing”?

Apple INC is not folding. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs but he is in his own right a big leaguer. There will be one more thing. The blogging motormouths will have more than enough about which to speculate and pontificate.

I, on the other hand, can’t wait until tomorrow to get the new mobil operating system (iOS) download and other goodies. Do I need these things? Come on, you have not been paying attention. NO! I don’t need this stuff. I WANT it. Need does not enter into the equation. I need water, food and shelter. OK, maybe a little tenderness. But I confess – I love my MacBook Air and iMac. I can’t wait for November 18 when I am eligible to upgrade my iPhone! Hey, I don’t fish, hunt, gamble or trade cars. I suppose that is the only justification pundits need to continue their work as well. Onward and upward folks. The idea is to have a little fun along the way.

It was freezing this morning at dawn.  A few coals in my little Waterford box nurtured a small fire that quickly pushed back the morning chill and I began to plan my day which was shaping up to be a day on the road.