Good morning all:

Weekly aging quote:

“Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.” ~ Fran Lebowitz

The quote covers both the leap year (a bit of a stretch) and the fact that five-year old Dinah and three year old Vai had playtime here yesterday – both are enamored by PBS programming.

At this point I just realized that I best dive into my coffee mug a little deeper.

Considering restaurants – I understand that last week I moaned on a bit about the restaurant we had my birthday dinner at—Mediterranean. With varied tastes I didn’t just want to head for a steak joint. I thought Indian, but their Naan bread – loaded on every nook and cranny of the table, reminds me too much of Robin Williams and his nano-nano Mork and Mindy thing; that I then live with for a few days. Mexican was tempting. At least with Mexican food I do not have to memorize the names on the menu. The quick and easy thing to do is just remember how many times it’s folded. Each item is actually the same thing just flopped over a time or two more—I learned this from my youth when I would stop by Taco Hell (fat Dirk era). So Mediterranean it was.

My eightieth will be at a steak house.

George’s – Christmas gift from Sandy was an afternoon of flying a WWII trainer aircraft, a Boeing Stearman. Years ago George soloed, but that license has long since lapsed. About a month ago I called him and found out that he was hard at work studying to get a Florida “Sports” pilot license. This allowed him to handle the controls in the front seat while the pilot rode in the rear.

So far so good. George flew the plane, a bi-plane designed to be flown by 160 pound nimble 18 year old kids. My minds eye was seeing George stuff himself and his parachute into that front seat reminded me of a well-endowed D-cup sized woman trying on a training bra. He managed nicely (he claims).

George assured me the plane was NOT nose heavy and he had a great 45 minutes of airtime flying over the south Florida country side. At one point another vintage military plane, this one a WWII fighter, pulled right alongside – how cool is that!

Spring activities – I made a huge mistake a few days ago. It began with eating dinner and then immediately (imperative word is ‘immediately’) went outside to do hefty yard work. We have an above normal amount of large clumps of elephant grasses; great stuff in the summer. Fall the tall blades dry and brown, and then they provide a vision of death over the yard till spring. At this point they’re cut down and the cycle starts all over. Some of the grasses approach 12’ in height.

Anyway, I began with twine to bundle and manage the things, then ‘flopped’ around the base of each clump with a large hedge clipper to knock them down. In reality, the idea of what I was doing was better than the reality. It was a lot of bending, re-tying, and re-organizing. A ways into the project I realized that I had started to sweat profusely and was also beginning to get a bit nauseous. HEART ATTACK, was my first thought. Marcia was out and so I took a seat on our driveway wall and chatted with a passing neighbor. The idea being that I’d have someone nearby with a cell should that be necessary—neighbor never knew.

Anyway, moments later all returned back to normal and I realized that a massive lump of food plus physical exertion do not make a viable team. Lesson learned.

Closing – Maybe it’s the “leap forward” time change event, maybe it’s seeing bright yellow daffodils, whatever it was, I just realized that just eight weeks from now I probably will be watching George Stroumboulopoulos on late night CBC at the cabin.

Make it a great week everyone and be safe.

Cheers,
Dirk