Thank you, Lord!

Last night, I prayed for some kind of sign that God is working to ease our financial burdens.
I got the answer in today's mail.
It came in the form of a new mortgage coupon book lowering our monthly payment by 18.25%.
And a substantial check refunding escrow overpayments.

B.C. flashback

Marathon Oil Co. gas stations gave out B.C. comic strip-themed glassware and Fire King bowls and casseroles as premiums back in the late 1960s and early '70s.

My stepdaughter and her husband were cleaning out his house with the aid of my wife and this was among the castoffs that was just too cool for the dumpster.

The third of June

"It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty delta day..."

So begins the haunting Ode to Billy Joe by Bobbie Gentry, released about this time in 1967.

It still holds up 52 years later and, as I discovered yesterday, Bobbie Gentry is still with us - 76 years old living in seclusion in a suburb of Nashville, Tenn.

There are several bridges over the fabled Tallahatchie River in Mississippi and I've ridden a motorcycle over a few of them. None seemed high enough for a successful suicide.

The photo is from 2014.

4mm! Really!

I requested some new reading glasses from the Amazon Vine Program and they arrived this morning.

I was not prepared for how amazingly compact they are. The ThinOptics Brooklyn Computer Glasses + Milano Anodized Aluminum, Magnetic case are officially now my go-to reading glasses.

The lenses are polycarbonate with a light yellow tint to block harmful blue light radiation from computer monitors and cell phone screens. Mine are a +2.0 magnification, just like the readers I bought at the Walmart in Gillette, Wyo. in July, 2008 when I rode to the BMW MOA National Rally without packing my prescription reading glasses. Those Walmart readers have stood up to daily use for 11 years and are still like new. But they are big enough that they need a clunky hard shell case that makes an inconvenient lump in the front pocket of my pants or in a jacket pocket.

So here's why I love the ThinOptics readers - the anodized aluminum case is ONLY 4mm THICK! Really! And the case has a very strong magnetic base so I can park it on any ferrous metal surface.

They cost about $70, but the difference is well worth the investment.

Happy birthday, Lisa

My beautiful, brilliant granddaughter Lisa is 15 years old today. She'll be driving soon. Good luck, Steve.

O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

If you've followed this blog very long, you know that I'm kinda crazy about Bang & Olufsen audio products, especially when they're offered to me for review by the Amazon Vine Program.

I got my first set of B&O headphones - the H8 on-ear model - in February, 2015 and was instantly overwhelmed by their clarity, imaging and comfort. Then, in late 2017, just in time for Christmas, they sent me the H9 over-the-ear model, which was every bit as impressive as the H8.

Over the years, I've received and reviewed the wired H6 and Form 2i headphones, and the Beosound 2, Beoplay P6, P2, and S3 speakers.

When Bang & Olufsen introduced the improved H8i and H9i headphones, I was disappointed that they didn't offer either of them to me. I wondered if I was no longer a desirable Bang & Olufsen reviewer.

I shouldn't have worried.

I was overjoyed about 2 a.m. one night recently to find an offer for the H9 Third Generation headphones when I scanned my Vine offering list. I jumped on it and they arrived this morning.

They are every bit as impressive as their predecessors. They also have a button on the left earpiece that summons Siri on my iPhone and lets me give voice commands, like "where is the Orinoco River?" and "what is the weather forecast?" I didn't think I would use that feature, and then I started having a text message conversation with my wife and quickly became a believer.

O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

Ferris Fain from out of nowhere

Ferris Fain’s name popped into my mind sometime after midnight last night.

He played first base for the White Sox in 1953 and 1954 and I distinctly remember having this Topps baseball card.

My dad and I were White Sox fans in those days and my dad hardly ever missed listening to a game on the radio. Somehow the name of Ferris Fain stuck in my memory and reappeared an I lay half awake and half asleep.

I picked up my iPhone and Googled him to make sure it was a real memory. It was.

After he retired from baseball, he had a career as a homebuilder in California and did time for having a substantial marijuana growing operation in his home.

Two out of three ain't bad

The Lebanon Reporter won three awards in its division of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors competition last night. And I won two of them.

To be fair, Sports Editor Will Willems won a first place for Best Spot News Sports Story.

My retelling of Daphne Cavin's story of love and loss in World War II took third place in the Best Feature Writing contest and my photo of Lori Schein winning the Republican nomination for judge won second place in the Best Spot News Photo competition.

It's the first time I ever won anything in a serious photojournalism contest with a photo shot with a smartphone. That would probably shock a few people if they knew.

Arbeit adelt

Joe Biden recently talked about "the dignity of work."

That calls to mind "Arbeit adelt," the motto on the Reich Labor Service hewer in Nazi Germany. It means "work ennobles."

Just sayin'

Dora is 6 years old today

Dora was born six years ago today. Here she is (far right) with her littermates and their Mom Grace.

Grounded so far

I got this drone from the Amazon Vine Program back in mid-February, but I still haven't tested it because of the crappy weather we've had since then.

It seems it's either snowing or raining or too windy during the hours I can have semi-private access to the field across the street and this week looks like it will continue to be rainy and windy.

I'm hoping circumstances will improve in May and I can have some images and video to post here.

New frontiers in selfie photography

Testing the AONLink waterproof cell phone pouch for the Amazon Vine Program.
It's clear plastic so you can shoot selfies in the shower.

My dad's old sign

When my dad was a young man in the 1930s, he worked for a time for the Federal Land Bank.

The Federal Land Bank is a system of banks that was established by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to aid farmers in rural communities. In the 2000s, the 12 banks that comprised the Federal Land Bank merged into what's called the Farm Credit System today. It was an important financial aid for farmers in the Great Depression.

The building where his office was situated from the '30s until 1956 has recently been renovated after it was discovered that there was an elaborate and historic opera house on the top floor that was boarded up and abandoned for 100 years. (Dad's office was on the second floor.) The renovation revealed several artifacts including this sign which had to come from my dad's office.

U-Haul

My stepdaughter and her husband are moving and are jettisoning a lot of unneeded stuff, including a big chunk of his extensive wardrobe.

Maria brought home three or four big boxes of clothes plus a big trash bag of apparel from a weekend visit to their new home.

This jacket was among the discards and I've taken an immediate liking to it, since the weather this morning was chilly (50°) drizzle. My son-in-law used to manage U-Haul stores and this is a leftover from that period. It's very cozy and stops the wind nicely.

The Flora team at work

I really enjoy working with Maria. We got a chance to collaborate Wednesday evening on coverage of a debate involving the three candidates for mayor of Lebanon.
Maria wrote the story and I shot the photos.

Thursday afternoon anxiety attack

Jack and Dora escaped from the fenced back yard and were missing for about 45 minutes this afternoon - 45 minutes of extreme anxiety for Maria and me.

The neighbor kids said they saw them headed for the Big Four Trail that runs behind our property. I guessed that they would end up by the baseball diamonds in the park and, sure enough, that's where I found Jack. I took him home and kenneled him and went out to look for Dora.

I had just pulled into the park playground parking area when Dora came trotting up. I opened the car door and she jumped in, none the worse for wear.

Phew!

Try taking pills with tomato juice

Do you gag occasionally when taking pills? I used to frequently.

I tried taking them with Kefir and that was better but not good enough.

Then I discovered tomato juice. Even the biggest horse pills go down easily with tomato juice.

I figured it was just something peculiar to me until my son tried it when I was visiting him in Las Vegas earlier this year. He was so impressed that he suggested it to his wife and now she's a believer. They choose to use V-8, but as a medium for pills, there's no difference.

Try it and let me know what you think.

Still waiting

The Amazon Vine Program sent me this cool drone six weeks ago and I'm still waiting for decent weather for learning to fly it.

Feeling out of sorts

I'm still fighting the second - and worst - cold of the season and it's a nasty tenacious mofo.

I've been hacking and wheezing for more than two weeks and, of course, Maria caught it from me and is suffering too.

We've both been taking Mucinex and elderberry syrup and Maria is now on heavy-duty antibiotics trying to walk the delicate line between pneumonia/bronchitis and C-Diff. She tells me most of the people she sees on a daily basis have this or a similar bug, so our misery has lots of company.

The temperature got up to 72 yesterday - the warmest so far this year - but a rainy cold front has the temperatures back down to the mid-30s today. The Groundhog's prediction notwithstanding, this will be a late spring. (The Vernal Equinox is about 5:20 p.m. next Wednesday.)

They're back!

The turkey vultures are back, soaring through March Indiana skies, as they have for millennia.

I saw the first of them on March 8, which has been the return date for these harbingers of spring for as long as we've lived in our Thorntown house. They typically return to Indiana a few days before the Vernal Equinox – some returning to longtime roosts and others stopping in transit to roosts farther north.

Gazing out my office window on this chilly windy afternoon, I can see a couple of them soaring lazy circles over the houses a block to the west.

The turkey vulture is second in size only to condors and eagles in the ranking of North America's birds and is a common sight in Indiana.

Neil Sabine, associate professor of biology at Indiana University East at Richmond, has been studying turkey vultures since the mid-1990s. He's trapped more than 200 birds and marked them and collaborated with the U.S. Air Force on a study on turkey vulture strikes on jet aircraft.

Turkey vultures don’t kill anything. They won’t touch anything that isn’t dead. Besides that, they will pass on dead carnivores like dogs, cats and coyotes, preferring to dine on dead herbivores like sheep, goats and cattle.

The Cherokees called the turkey vulture the “peace eagle” because it soars like the predatory bird, but does not kill.

They are about 25 inches from end to end with a six-foot wingspan. The average adult turkey vulture weighs in at 6 pounds.

The annual return of turkey vultures to Indiana, Sabine said, is temperature-dependent.

“If we have a hard winter they'll stay south longer,” he said. “This year we had a colder winter so the birds will come late because they move based on availability of food.”

If their food sources are frozen, they can't, get at the interior of a dead animal because they have weak bills. They need a food source that is soft and available to them, he explained.

After wintering in South or Central America, they return to northern nesting areas in two waves – transitory birds that may stop over in Indiana for perhaps two or three weeks before moving on – and permanent residents that will nest and remain in one particular area throughout the warm weather months, leaving as winter approaches in November or December.

“Some resident turkey vultures will stay all winter and go just far enough south where warmer weather is accessible, just kind of shifting with the weather,” Sabine said.

“Others will go all the way across the Caribbean to South America. Most of the birds we're seeing are from southern Mexico. The turkey vulture has the largest distribution of any bird in the world,” he said, noting that the birds are still expanding their range northward, moving into Canada.

In connection with the Air Force study, Sabine said turkey vultures can attain an altitude of nearly 1,000 feet if thermal updrafts are sufficient.

Bill Kohlmoos, president of the Turkey Vulture Society, wrote on his web site (turkeyvulturesociety.wordpress.com) that they have a rich social life, like to play aerial tag, and will invite other roosts to join them if they find a particularly large meal.

In California, he said, they’ve even been known to tell condors about major feasts and guide them to the scene.

“One lady wrote us that she has built a small wooden tower-like feeder in her back yard and puts out food for her friends each day. One day she noticed that after eating their breakfast, the vultures had gone down to the lawn in her yard and six of them were in a circle around a soccer-size ball left on the lawn by her grandchildren. The vultures were hitting the ball back and forth to each other by butting it with their head and beak. Each day thereafter they played this game. And although there were four balls of different colors, they always picked the orange one.”

He also learned that turkey vultures are affectionate and often make good pets. “When a bird is injured and taken into rehab he will become emotionally attached to his handler and follow him around and watch him, much like a pet dog. They love to bring an object to a person and then play tug-of-war.”

“A lady in Southern California wrote that she and her husband would drive their car five miles from town and take a daily walk in the country with their dog. A turkey vulture would join them, soaring above and watching them. And then one day at home she broke a leg and the walks were not possible for a while. One day she was in her back yard on crutches and there was her turkey vulture sitting on the fence, waiting to say hello. He had found her in a town of 12,000 people!”

Turkey vultures are covered by an international migratory bird treaty that makes it a federal crime to kill or injure them or to possess one without the appropriate permit as a wildlife rehabilitator.