We’ve put out a hummingbird feeder in front of the house this year, and it has proved very popular. The critters are pretty to look at and fun to watch. There are at least two species, maybe three, that are coming to the feeder. My problem in identification is that from the living room window they are all backlit, so subtle color variations are hard to distinguish.
Before I put the device out I checked with the Audubon Society folks to see if doing it was completely kosher. I mean, it’s just sugar water you put in there.
But apparently it’s a good thing for the birds. An energy boost to help get them from flower to flower, where the real stuff is.
A donut in the morning does the same thing for me, come to think of it.
Interesting how aggressive they are. Even though there are five little perches on the feeder, there is almost never more than one bird present at a time, because they drive one another away with their dive-bombing.
******
Interviewer: We haven’t talked in a while, but I would really like to know what you think about a couple of things going on down here. I realize that you must be quite busy up there in Valhalla, what with your daily battles and all, but if you have the time, could you tell us what you think about the Cluck affair as it now stands?
Ragnar: Please, I was just quaffing a flagon of mead when you broke in.
Interviewer: Drinking in the morning?
Ragnar: It’s not morning here, thou dimbulb, we’re a few time zones away from where you are.
Interviewer: Sorry, didn’t mean to judge. Not my business.
Ragnar: Don’t do it again, or these little conversations will come to a pretty swift halt. But your question … I’ve been talking about your problems with some friends recently, namely Halvor the Toothless and Sven the Malingerer. We are unanimous in thinking that what you need is a good defenestration*.
Interviewer: I miss your meaning.
Ragnar: You’ve got the guy dead to rights, right?
Interviewer: Well, yes.
Ragnar: There is really no doubt as to his guilt, the only problem is what to do with him, right?
Interviewer: Well, he is innocent until proven guilty.
Ragnar: Are you going to waste my time … ?
Interviewer: Okay, there is no doubt.
Ragnar: So he’s a snollygoster** and a traitor to boot, right?
Interviewer: Yes. But, violence? Throwing people out of windows?
Ragnar: Mmmmmm … Okay, then just use a window on the first floor. He’ll get the point.
*
*Defenestration – the action of throwing someone out of a window
**Snollygoster – a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician. Not to be confused with a snallygaster, which is a mythical bird-reptile hybrid associated with rural Maryland
******
******
Looking Up At The Clouds Department
******
After I’d placed that silhouetted image above, I studied it more deeply and realized that what this leaping figure is doing … the only part of that posture that I could have achieved at any time in my life was the curving downward of the foot in front. And that would happen only when I got a cramp in it.
******
******
I’ve noticed that Robin and I are getting some of the signs of cabin fever. You know, the kind you’re supposed to get in winter when the snowdrifts build up around your home and you are stuck indoors for waaay too long?
Cabin fever is not a medically defined condition but a ‘folk syndrome’ commonly understood to refer to a combination of anxiety, lassitude, irritability, moodiness, boredom, depression, or feeling of dissatisfaction in response to confinement, bad weather, routine, isolation, or lack of stimulation. A person subject to cabin fever may suffer from sleeplessness (insomnia) or sleepfulness (hypersomnia). They may even develop paranoia and difficulty in rational decision‐making. At its extreme, people may feel compelled to escape their spatial restrictions or limited routines, regardless of external conditions or the cost to themselves or others.
National Library of Medicine: Cabin fever – the impact of lockdown on children and young people
But this time it is the heat that’s trapping us. The relentless, unforgiving, dad-blasted rays of good ol’ Sol. Here in Paradise we’re not experiencing the awfulness of some places in Arizona and Texas, but even when it’s in the nineties for weeks on end it pinches off your possibilities.
Every day in the media we are treated to the Dr. Sanjay Guptas of the world telling us that, really, we codgers shouldn’t go outdoors at all, because we will die of a heat stroke within five or six minutes and then the city will have to come out and scoop up our inert forms for disposal. An unnecessary expense for the taxpayer that could be avoided if we would just stay indoors with all of the shades drawn like well-behaved senior citizens.
But eventually we must go out, because it is either that or homicide begins to be a real possibility, and we must take enough water along to drink a cupful every few minutes to try to keep up with the body’s losses. That’s an easy plan if we’re only going to walk from the car to the grocery store, but not if we’re out there for a while.
As a kid summering on my grandfather’s farm, these blistering and dehydrating August days were dealt with by Grandpa Jacobson bringing a 5-gallon milk can filled with cold water out to the field and putting it in whatever shade was available, to stay as cool as it could.
Whenever we needed we would grab the dipper and dip it into the can for a drink. Everybody used the same dipper, of course, which might be a problem for the more fastidious people today.
Robin and I have small backpacks containing water bladders that hold 2 liters that we carry on most of our walks, even when the temperatures are less dramatic than they are at present. Both of us have had experiences with dehydration that have made us cautious. Nothing life-threatening, but each time they were enough to definitely diminish our endurance.
******
******
David Brooks has a very good piece in Friday’s New York Times entitled “What If We’re The Bad Guys Here?” I think it might be good reading for anyone who wonders about the direction our democracy has taken.
The ideal that we’re all in this together was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
On Anti-Trumpers and the Modern Meritocracy, David Brooks, New York Times August 5, 2023
******
Little Home In The Valley 