The Country Curmudgeon

Supposedly, if you place a frog in a cold frying pan and very slowly turn up the heat, it will cook to death without realizing anything is wrong. This sounds ridiculous until you look around.

For whatever reasons, the local school districts always need more money. Some of those reasons are valid. Where does a school district get more money? The town is faced with rising costs every year. How will it ever handle the extra expenses? Our local library has gotten itself into a financial mess. Some of the independent funding for the new building was not forthcoming. Whatever will we do?

If I hear that thing about every snowflake being different, one more time, I will scream. I just don’t believe it. You can’t prove or disprove this because as soon as you pick one up to examine it, it melts. I would argue that there are a finite number of crystalline configurations for water, even if it is 1 million or so. I’d like to see you prove me wrong. Once the snowflake hits the ground it is joined into the ones already landed so it must change, thereby conveniently making comparisons impossible. Let’s see what else we’ve got.

It snowed the other day and this time it stuck. It was also of a depth sufficient for that endangered species, the snowmobiler. Once abundant in this region, the last 40 years has seen a gradual decline in their numbers. A couple of them roared through my yard one morning, interrupting a nice, lazy sleep-in. Oddly, you cannot protect your domain by stringing wire. Some kind of picky law about mantraps.

Whenever we get a hard winter with a lot of snow, our bird feeder begins to do double duty. Not only does it provide seeds for birds, it also provides birds for birds.