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Wednesday, April 1, 2009

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City Boy here is a lot of fun to watch when he's trying to be Farm Boy. My wife and I were helping out in someone else's barn the other night when it happened: the large shadow of something flying over our heads. I hadn't seen the creatures yet; all I could see was this massive shadow on the wall. I knew my responsibility as a man. That's right, run for help! Well, there was actually no reason to run. When we looked up, we saw what was casting those huge, unsettling shadows: some little moths, flying around the little light overhead. The shadow was scary; the reality behind the shadow was not scary at all.

Monday, March 9, 2009

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During two weeks that I call "The Ice Age" in our area, a car slid into our vehicle in a parking lot. So the right side looked pretty ugly. Interestingly enough, that damage didn't affect the performance of our car at all. Like so many older cars we've had over the years, the outside was banged up but the engine was running fine.

Monday, February 23, 2009

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When I came home from my first trip to Australia, my kids were eager to see what souvenirs I might have brought back for them. I couldn't fit that kangaroo in my suitcase, but there was one very Australian item I did bring back - a boomerang. Those things are amazing. If you throw it right, that boomerang will go out, make a U-turn, and come right back to you. It's probably a good idea, then, to pay attention after you throw your boomerang. I can just see a klutz like me throwing it, turning my back, and getting boomed with my own boomerang!

Friday, February 6, 2009

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My wife and I are some of those psychos that I call marathon drivers. Now I know long-haul truckers have to do it for a living. But sometimes we choose to do it, just because we want to get somewhere quickly. Of course, like most men, I like to be the one driving, sometimes for longer than I should. My wife tells me that our lives start to be in danger from the time I start rubbing my right leg while I'm driving. Apparently, that's the first tip-off of fatigue. She will gently offer to drive and I will, of course, refuse. She offers several other times to drive, when I start doing a Jane Fonda workout at the wheel, when I turn on some obnoxious radio station at full volume, when I open the window to let in the 20-below wind chill. Finally, just before we're just about to become a National Safety Council statistic, I grudgingly pull over to the side of the road. We change seats, and I'm out before she can start up the car again.

Monday, February 2, 2009

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Now, I had never been to a quilt auction before. And I probably never would have been to one except for the fact that I had been invited to speak at an outreach at a Mennonite Relief Sale, where thousands come to bid on items made by Mennonite and Amish craftspeople. All the funds go toward worldwide relief efforts. It was amazing to hear the spiraling bids shouted out for some exquisitely designed quilts. While I was there, one went for $2,000. Last year, they told me that one quilt had gone for $4,000. They even sold two handmade dolls for almost $1,000. I was there long enough to see what gave great value to an auction item. Those dolls, for example, were made by a Ugandan refugee. The quilt that went for $4,000 was made laboriously by a severely handicapped woman, and it was the last one she made before she died. When we were told who made it - when we were told the effort they went to make it - it was suddenly worth a whole lot more.

Friday, January 30, 2009

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When I was a kid, I used to like to put on shows for the other kids in the neighborhood. Hey, wait a minute, am I still doing shows for the kids in the neighborhood? Anyway, I bought a couple of cheap books on magic back then and this little kit of magic tricks. Even at my juvenile level, I soon learned that magic wasn't really magic - it was illusions. My beginner magic book talked about this basic magician skill called misdirection. The idea is that while you're doing the trick over here you do something that will get everybody looking over there. They said it helped to talk a lot. I knew I'd at least be good at that part.

Friday, January 2, 2009

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It started out as a family adventure; it ended as a family tragedy. James Reddick took his 12-year-old son and his 11-year-old daughter on a hiking expedition up on Mount Rainier in Washington State. All of a sudden, a freak snowstorm arose. It created instant blizzard conditions and hurricane force winds. With a blinding 'white out' around them, they could not go any further. Dad knew they had to create some kind of shelter. All he could do was to cut out a large hole in the ground; he used a cup from their cooking kit to do it, and then he put his children in that hole and he covered it with a tarp. But the fierce winds just kept blowing the tarp away, and that left the children exposed to that deadly storm. The father tried everything he could find to hold down the tarp, but nothing worked. Finally, in one last desperate attempt to save his children, he actually lay across that hole himself to keep the snow from blowing in. Two days later, a search party noticed the edge of a backpack. They uncovered the hole and they found the two children alive and well. But first they uncovered their father who froze to death, protecting the ones he loved.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

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Some of us have had some very strange winters with wild temperature swings between unseasonably warm, and then sudden drops to very cold and back again. Maybe it's like that where you live. Out of those rapid changes come some less than fun driving conditions like black ice, for example. There's a snowstorm or ice storm one day, and then it's warm enough the next day to start melting much or most of that frozen stuff. Then it gets cold again at night, and what thawed during the day freezes at night, sometimes into this dark, invisible ice patch on the street - that's black ice. And invariably you turn on the traffic report and you hear about a rash of accidents often from cars or trucks speeding along at top speed down the pavement that appeared to be totally dry. Then, out of nowhere, they find themselves sliding on one of those deadly little frozen spots.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

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The snowstorm hit Chicago on a Saturday, and many of the people stranded at Chicago's O'Hare Airport didn't get out of there until Tuesday. That scene was not unique for O'Hare. I've sat in a plane on the runway for three hours just because brief thunderstorms went through. Maybe you've got some travel war stories like that. The fact is, O'Hare Airport is a hub for so many connecting flights to so many places. And because it's in the Midwest, it's near one of the Great Lakes and it can get hit with all kinds of weather, which sometimes shuts down one of the busiest airports in the world. Someone said, "When O'Hare sneezes, the whole airline system gets pneumonia." It's true that when bad weather makes the hub close down, nothing can get to where it needs to be.

Monday, October 13, 2008

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For many years, my wife's father managed to squeeze out a living for his family on their little farm in the Ozarks. It was always a battle financially, but the battle got really intense the summer of the long drought. First, he emptied all three of their ponds to get water; then all of the ponds on his parents' adjacent property. A friend, then, let him use his well that had never gone dry. Well, it went dry the summer of the long drought. Finally, Dad had no choice but to find water and dig a well on his property. But that meant mortgaging a lot of his cattle. And as the well diggers had to go deeper, it eventually meant mortgaging all his cattle. And they never found water. His farming days were over.

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