Musings

I have a snow bank in my front yard about five feet high amassed by plowing snow from the communal driveway I share with my daughter and family.  The storm here was nothing compared to some others areas, notably in the Midwest, but we did get more than we’ve had at one time in quite a few years.

It may not be perfectly precise, but about 6:30 AM, Friday, February 4, 2011 is probably as close as you need to get to being the middle of winter.  Starting then it’s all downhill rolling toward the first day of spring which starts at 6:21 PM, March 20, 2011.

If you hadn’t noticed yet, the days are getting notably longer.  Back on the first day of winter, last December 21^st, our day was 8 hours 46 minutes in length.  Friday, February 4^th, our day will be 9 hours 56 minutes, an hour and ten minutes more of daylight, nearly an hour of that in the evening.  These facts are for the top of New York State, or the 45 degree North Latitude region, half way between the equator and the north pole.  They vary with latitude.

Our Northern Neighbors

Are you aware that Pelee Island, Ontario, Canada is in southwestern Lake Erie.  It is the southernmost inhabited land in Canada.  South of Pelee Island lies Middle Island, the southernmost land in Canada, although uninhabited.  South of that, yet within the waters of Lake Erie at about 41 degrees 38 minutes north latitude, is the southernmost point of Canada.

Believe it or not, parts, or all, of 27 states within the United States lie north of that latitude.  They are Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and, of course, Alaska.  You knew about that last one all the time, didn’t you?

When you think of your northern neighbors, think again because some of them are not as far north as we usually think of them.

Now, just for fun, if you were to follow a compass due south from Middle Island in Lake Erie, which is about due north of central Ohio, where might you walk into the Gulf of Mexico?  What if I told you that Middle Island is approximately 900 miles from the east coast at Boston?  So, as Jacksonville, Florida is near the east coast, then a point possibly somewhere around 900 miles west of there might be close?  Would that be in Louisiana, or maybe eastern Texas?  In fact, following a compass south from Middle Island would have you pass maybe 50 miles or so west of Jacksonville, and you would ultimately go swimming in the gulf somewhere south of the Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida area.

Just Stuff I've Heard

My oldest brother, Bert, told me once there was an old adage that said:  Half your grain, and half your hay, must remain on Groundhog’s Day.  Seeming as winter is approximately half over then, it makes perfect sense.

Punxsutawney in a Native American tongue means ‘Land of the sand fleas.”  That’s almost as good a claim to fame as being noted as the last bastion of the ridge running coal miners.

As Punxsutawney isn’t all that far from Pittsburgh, it may be that this whole Groundhog’s Day thing is some sort of advertising gimmick for the Superbowl.  It doesn’t hang in there with clothing malfunctions, but the Steelers got to make do with what they got.

If you believe everything you hear or read, you might want to look into the tale about February second being forty days after Christmas, and as such Mary, mother of Jesus, went through a rite of purification on that date, and that started the whole bit about Candlemas Day, which is the same day as Groundhog’s day.

When I was very young my Daddy said something about groundhog, and I thought he was talking about sausage.  That’s not true, I just made it up.

On February 2, 2022 when you say the date it’s going to sound like a train going by. Too, too too, ohhh too too.

Trucking Along

I think it was 1954, but I’m not positive.  Mort Backus decided to quit the milk route he had been running, and he started a used car business.  My brother Bert bought the truck and milk route from Mort, and in addition to running a dairy farm, he began the tedious job of hauling milk from dairy farms to the milk plant in town.  It was a seven day a week job, rain or shine, hot or cold, but then so too was farming.  Like the mail, that milk had to go to the plant every day.

Bert soon found that running a milk route, with its repair and upkeep costs added to day to day expenses, was just about a break-even endeavor, and if he was to enjoy a profit it had to be from using the truck in some other manner in addition to the primary job.  This brings us to the moving business.

Bert started to take on an occasional job of moving people from one home to another.  He would normally take a fairly long hard look at the household belongings, take into consideration the distance to travel, account for our time, (I was his helper) and quote a job price to the homeowner, take it or leave it.

One day a little old lady stopped us on a street in town, and asked what Bert would charge to move her several blocks away, right in town.  Without leaving his seat in the truck, Bert noted it was a very small bungalow, quoted her $100, and offered to do the job the next day.  The lady accepted.

After milking the cattle the next morning, then running the milk route, we pulled up to the house to begin the quick-money good-profit moving job.  The house had a cellar.  Bert had not noticed that.  That cellar was packed almost solid with glass bottle canned goods.  We had to carry those bottles a couple or three at a time from that cellar, up a set of narrow stairs to the truck, place them where they wouldn’t get broke, and then another trip, and another, and another.  We managed one trip across town that day, and didn’t even finish the cellar.

The second day we finished the cellar, and started on the birds.  Yes, the little old lady had rooms full of birds in cages.  One or two at a time for hours we removed them to the truck.  One more truckload that afternoon.  Then a flying (pun intended) trip across town to spend some more hours unloading the squawking menagerie, as well as the remainder of those blasted bottles of pickles, beans, and whatever.

On the third day it was back for finishing the one-day easy $100. job.  That was the day we had to recruit help to move the piano.  As we pulled away from the new home for the third, and last, time, Bert turned in the seat, and said to me, “If I ever decide to take a job again without looking at it, I want you to kick me right square in the ass,” and with that we laughed off and on all the way home.

Propagation

It’s all about the survival of the species.  Alex and I, in our travels throughout the immediate area, chanced upon a gray, papier-mâché like formation a bit larger than a softball, but more football shaped.  Alex asked me if I knew what that thing was?  When I answered that it was a paper wasp’s nest, he wanted to know what that was all about.

I answered something to the effect that the residents were a wasp, more or less like a hornet.  They built and used these structures as a home.  Then I began to wonder more about them.  As this was their home, were they in it?  The nest seemed partially disintegrated.  If they were in it, could they survive the extreme cold of our area?  Did they store winter food like honey bees?  If they were not in the nest, then where were they?  Did they migrate like birds?

In fact, about twenty to thirty mature wasps live in a nest.  They are divided as workers, queens, and males.  The nest contains many cells in which a queen deposits a single fertilized egg in each.  The sterile workers assist in the building of the nest, as well as the care and feeding of the grub-like larvae that are hatched.  The young pass through several stages before becoming an adult.

As fall approaches the queens stop laying eggs, and the colony goes into decline.  Mated offspring of the queen seek shelter elsewhere, often hibernating beneath siding on houses or other sheltered areas, to await the following spring when they go off to build their own nests.

When you get down to the nitty-gritty all they do is continue their species.  Following that line of thought, that’s also all that humans do.  The rest is just details.

The Calendar

Twenty-seven hundred years ago the calendar had ten months, March, April, May, June, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December.  Those last six were what we think of as the numbers five through ten.  Apparently they couldn’t think up any more names for them.  Some of the months had as many as forty days. 

According to Plutarch (46-127 AD), not to be confused with Pluto the friend of Mickey Mouse, Pompilius, who died in 673 BC, decided the calendar was all screwed up so he set out to rearrange things.

Old man Pompilius’ calendar started the year with January, a month he thought up and named after the Roman God Janus.  Janus was noted as the keeper of the gates, and Pompelius felt Janus could transition from the old year to the new as a part of his job.

Pompelius still felt that some months were too long so he also developed another month he named February, and stuck it in after his first month.  February was named for purification, a rite to prepare for spring which was soon coming.

March, named for the God, Mars, remained as before, as did April, possibly named for Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Love and Beauty, and associated with the Roman Goddess Venus.

May was named for the Goddess of Spring.

June was named for Juno the Goddess of marriage.

The rest of the months remained the numbers, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December.  Nobody seemed to care they weren’t actually those numbered months since the addition of the new first two months.

Everything went along fine with this setup until Julius Caesar came along.  He lived from 100 BC through 44 BC.  Old Julius decided he was too important for folks to forget about him after he died so he decided to name a month after himself to remind everyone he’d been there and done that.  He grabbed the first of those no-name months, Quintilis, and changed its name to July in honor of himself.

Augustus Caesar was the adopted heir of Julius, and as such followed Julius as Emperor.  He was around from 63 BC until 14 AD.  While he was emperor he figured out that if Julius could grab a month and call it his, then so too could he, so he took Sextilis and changed its name to August, and so today, 2000 years later, we have the named months as we know them.
The Photo?  Oh, that's old stone-face Numa Pompelius.

Norfolk To Jacksonville

In May of 1960 I was transferred from the Naval Air Station at Breezy Point on the Naval Base at Norfolk, Virginia to NAS Cecil Field, Jacksonville, Florida.  I had bought a 1953 Ford sedan the previous year, and I loved that car.  For you mechanically minded guys, this was the last year of Ford’s flatheads.  Fords the next year had the newly developed overhead valve engines.

Before leaving Norfolk I made arrangements to have my 8’ X 35’ mobilehome towed to Jacksonville and stored to await our arrival.  My wife and I then came to Northern New York to visit our parents.  A few days later we left New York headed for our new destination in Florida.  The first day we got to central Virginia before stopping for the night in a motel.

We awoke the next morning, jumped in the car, and drove cornerways down over a four inch curb to the street.  The car’s engine fan went through the radiator!  Believe it or not I actually located a man that would work on the car even though it was a Sunday morning.  He located a used fan and radiator and installed both at quite a reasonable fee, while we ate a leisurely brunch, and we were once more on our way.  That night we spent in a motel in Jacksonville, Florida.

The next morning we awoke to a beautiful day, that is until leaving the motel we drove cornerways down over a four inch curb to hear once again the same sound as the previous morning.  Absolutely, the fan went through the radiator again.  As luck would have it I spotted a garage that worked on radiators a block or so up the street.  When I told the mechanic the fan had came loose from the engine and ruined the radiator the day before, he started checking further.  It seemed the front engine rubber mounts had disintegrated causing the engine to shift allowing the fan to strike the radiator.  The fan had been destroyed by contact with the radiator rather than coming loose like the man in Virginia had surmised.

For the second time in two days we were repaired and under way again.  Our radiator was repaired, a different used fan, and new front engine mounts.  I went to the local office of the national mobilehome mover that was storing our home awaiting our arrival.  They had never heard of us, much less were storing our home.  A call to Norfolk discovered our home was being stored there.  Two more nights in a motel while our home was towed to Florida, but at least that gave us time to locate Cecil Field and Cox’s Trailer Court in the vicinity, so when our home arrived it had a place to stop.