update
Here are some updates on some of the very interesting items that have appeared over the last few months.
Very recently we have been following the saga of six-man football game between the Pawnee Jackrabbits-Coyotes and Briggsdale Rams-Falcons (who once were a combined team of Crow Valley) . The latest is that Pawnee has now forfeited the game to Briggsdale. We’ll let you know whether either or both teams make the state playoffs and the results. It really looks as if no one is going to touch the Idaila Wolves who are a perennial power. And by the way, all six players on the offense are eligible receivers and there are three down linemen.
There are 34 kinds of Crest Toothpaste at the local Wal-Mart. I learned this when I went to Safeway. I was at the end of the cereal aisle ready to head down it when I saw a man standing in the aisle just staring straight ahead at the cereal boxes. He looked normal enough, but he wasn’t moving or making a selection, just staring. I wanted to get a box of cereal, so I headed down the aisle. The man continued staring. In a friendly mood, I said, “It was a lot easier when there were just Corn Flakes.” This naturally led staring man to start talking about Crest Toothpaste. He said that he had counted how many different kinds of Crest there were at Wal-Mart: 34 is what he came up with. I told him he had way too much time on his hands. (This coming from someone who is never busy.) He said that he was looking for Cool Mint Crest and could not believe how many kinds of Crest he saw, so he started to count. He then added that after he told his wife this that she said that this was “freedom of too much choice”. This is an interesting idea that probably deserves an entire entry to consider. I made my cereal selection – Quaker Oats Granola – and left the man who was still standing in the same spot and had resumed looking straight ahead at the cereal. I am not sure what he was doing, but it was a little eerie.
You may recall that I had planted five peach pits last fall and one germinated. I nurtured it by taking water with a little liquid fertilizer in it to the sapling each day. I got a little tired of this and soon began missing the watering routine some days. Then I missed for several days. When I returned to water it, it looked almost dead. But the watering did revive it. Then the plague of grasshoppers arrived. They were eating the leaves and were sure to kill it. I decided I had to try to save the little tree, so I dug it up and put it in a bucket that I had gotten from the Safeway bakery – it had held icing for doughnuts and they give them away if you ask for one. I brought the tree into the house, pretty sure it was going to die because there didn’t seem to be much root to it. The next morning it was still alive and so my hope increased. It seemed to grow very slowly until the last couple weeks when it has had a surge of growth. It is about two feet tall and bushy. I now do not know what to do with it, but it remains my pride and joy.
This is something I have never written about, so it doesn’t really belong here, but I want to tell you about it anyway. This area of Colorado produces a lot of sugar beets. It used to be that migrant workers would be hired to thin the beets after they had germinated and then hoe weeds out of them later. The technology on planters improved, and the beets no longer needed thinning, but they still needed weeding. Then Round-Up, the weed killer stuff, produced a genetically engineered seed called Round-Up Ready Beets. The field can be sprayed with Round-Up to kill the weeds, while the beets continue to grow. This became so popular that all other beet seed quit being marketed. A judge in California has ruled that not enough testing has been done to conclude that Round-Up Ready Beets are safe and cannot be marketed. This means that there will probably be no beet seed that anyone can plant next year. Farmers will have to plant something else, and I assume sugar prices will rise dramatically.
Last year our locust correctly predicted that October 1st would be the first frost. This year they predicted that the first frost would be September 11th. We still have not had a frost here, which is very unusual. We got down to 39 degrees early in September, and I was thinking the locust were going to be right again. Then the temperatures stayed in the 40’s at night through the rest of September. We have been in the 30’s often in October, but our low has been 35. I feel bad the locust were so far off, but I am glad that we have been having an unusually warm fall. Just a couple days ago we were in the 80’s and yesterday was a perfect fall day in the 70’s.
There are probably other updates that you are clamoring for, but I can’t think of anything else to update now.
Jezu, ufam Tobie.