Just Thinking

More traffic than usual, then I realized it was Friday, before a three-day weekend, and it was the first of the month and many people get a check of some kind. Kroger was swamped. Saving grace is that most everyone was filling their carts and I only needed a few things, the self-checkout lanes were open and I got out quickly. Celebrate with onion rings and a footer, in addition to a large shake, at The Buckeye Diary Bar on the way home. People out and about. I stop to collect some day-lily buds, and find a nice batch of cattail sprouts. One great thing about holidays is that almost everyone is busy so there's very little chance of interruption. I was, though, interrupted, while pulling cattail, by a park ranger. He pulled over to ask what I was doing and I told him that I liked to eat the sprouts; after he told me that I was actually breaking the law, he asked how to cook them. He pulled a mess too. Mess is an interesting word. Being raised in a military family, mess-hall, mess-call, mess in general, were words commonly used. Also mess as indicating enough of something for a meal, sometimes meaning a surplus, we caught a mess of fish, for instance. Stopped at the bottom of the hill, coming in, I'm not going to go out again until Tuesday soonest, so I breathe a sigh of relief. Copious reading matter, a great huge timeline of the history of technology from Joel, some manuscripts, and, thinking about Dorothy Sayers, I thought about that Irish writer, executed for insurrection, that wrote The Riddle of the Sands, also an excellent book, and I have a copy somewhere. I'm sure I can find it. It's blue. The driveway has taken a beating, the last few weeks of rain; the drains are still running clean, but the grader ditch clogs with silt. It's no joke to say that a clog often starts with a stick and a few leaves. When I walked in and out more often, I'd use a hoe as a walking stick, and break up any small dams that had developed. Recent years I tend to just batten down, eat from the larder, don't venture out, wait for the snow to melt, pick a good time, when the driveway is either frozen or dry, and make a run for supplies. In the mean time, little dams have diverted water over into the ruts and they've eroded away. The ditch has jumped, and water, when it has its way (as it usually does) can do enormous damage. Going down is easy, point zero, zero one miles per hour, but coming back up you have to use the gas, and control becomes an issue. You don't want to power over the edge, which you could easily do, if you bounced out of the rut. It's just another thing to be anxious about. So I always stop, at the bottom of the hill, and collect my wits. On average I make the trip, down and up, 52 times a year, but I could easily cut that to 12 trips, then four, then two. A sign at the bottom of the hill might say Diminishing Returns. High rise buildings are dependent on elevators so it's interesting to see how that technology developed.