I noted a few days ago that I showed my bug crazy Grandson how a colony of Red ants in our yard were carrying off black ants to make slaves of them. As of yesterday the abductions continue although more black ant eggs than ants are being ferried across our driveway. Obviously the sacking and looting of an ant colony is a time consuming event. It is not without its perils for the captors.
I recently read somewhere that the enslaved ants sometimes rise up and fight back killing the eggs of the ants who enslaved them. Nat Turner had company.
My Guy Friday, Liam, noted that I sat on the last post for a long time. I think he deduced from that a bit of a vacation on my part. Well, it was only a break from posting. He continues to make calls on my behalf and he told me that he’d sent me a letter by snail mail that he hoped I would use in the campaign. I’ll probably get it today. I can’t wait to open it.
And no, I’ve not exactly been inert. On our Anniversary I pooped out and went to bed at 9 which is even early by my standards. However, I woke up at 3 AM and got up to type a campaign piece that I rather enjoyed writing. In case my competitors allies are reading this I won’t tip my hat as to just what it was. Hey! I’ve got to be a little cagey.
Yesterday, I took up one of my remaining home fix up projects. None of them are very big by comparison with the 20-man hour painting of my daughter’s picket fence and shed. I spent a few hours scraping and painting piano windows on my living room and cleaning out two sets of basement windows in the front our our house. They will need painting too.
I may not be able to get started on that today if it rains. Heck, one forecast said it could be 90 degrees tomorrow. I may regret hauling our large air conditioner to St. Louis with our son to keep his cold blood cool in the Missouri heat.
While I was painting I came up with an idea for my next Not Eudora column. I was quite eager to start typing it up but was in the midst of paint and ammonia so could only run the idea over and over and edit it in my head. I would have to wait until later to put fingers to typewriter by which time the idea had cooled a bit. In the interim we had paid our Sunday evening call on my daughter to eat dinner with her boys – three of them at the moment – and watch PBS.
Claudia and I saw the last twenty minutes of a bang up three part documentary on Winston Churchill while the boys were being settled into bed. When it was over I texted my son to tell him he ought to watch it since he’d taken my suggestion to heart and named his new cats Winston and Clementine. The main entertainment was “The Lady Vanishes” after which we old lovebirds flew off to watch the whole of the Churchill documentary’s start on “Second Chance.”
I only got a couple of decent hours sleep and crawled out of bed at 3 and finally at 4 to do something more useful than toss and turn. I didn’t feel inspired to flesh out the Reader column but that’s not due till Friday so I’ve got plenty of time for that. Instead I took advantage of my recent office organizing. One of the common scraps of paper in my heaps were notes reminding me of song lyrics I might want to add to the always growing list of songs I have collected to sing to my Mother. Long time readers will recall that she has severe dementia and that only one way communication is possible between us now. I give a one man performance piece a couple times a week with some story telling and lots of a Capella singing (if you can call my warbling that).
This started when my daughter gave me four voice lessons with a professional down in the Twin Cities when my Mother was placed in 24 hour care. Its grown into sort of a new hobby of collecting the lyrics of familiar tunes. I have a big fat three ring folder of them and I’m always amazed how many other songs I find that are very familiar. The latest additions to the lyrics collections are these:
A Taste of Honey, Candyman, Cast your Fate to the Wind, Chances Are, Gotta Travel On (I’ve laid around this old town too long) , Happy days Are here again!, Hit The Road Jack, I Heard it through the grapevine, I’m Just Wild About Harry, I’m so lonesome I could cry, Marvelous Toy, Take me Home Country Roads , Volare, What A Wonderful World, You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
Its funny how strong the memories are of many of these songs. They each give me something to prattle on about when I visit my Mom. For instance, Happy Days are Here Again was the theme song for FDR the politician that so aggravated her father. And Volare was a song our good friend, Norgic, a Filipino Bus Ad professor would warble when he paid us a call with his wife Luthgarda back when I was in Junior High. They introduced us to several pretty Filipina nurses at about the same time that Richard Speck murdered nine of them in their Chicago apartment. If you listen to Simon and Garfunkel’s version of Silent Night you can hear a faux newscaster mention the gruesome event with other harrowing news of the times to contrast them with the song’s message of peace.
