SEOND CHILDHOOD?

Now that I am completely cured of my recent prolonged and horrid malady my
brain, now relieved of the stress of infirmity, has taken a peculiar turn. I awoke this
morning with " Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such sport and the dish ran away with the spoon "
This little nursery rhyme has lain dormant in my mind for perhaps 78 years.
Later in the day another of these things popped up. "A froggy would awooing go"
but the rest eluded me. Has anyone ever heard this one?
"Said the monkey to the owl, what'll you have to drink ? Said the owl to the monkey, I'll have a bottle of ink.' There must be more to it than that.
Another diddle diddle one- "Diddle diddle dumpling mice and John( or my son John) went to bed with his stockings on"
Do all these early memories indicate a second childhood ? They were certainly buried deeply in my memory and I wonder why they came pouring out now.

MORE ANIMAL STUFF

We have previously discussed feral hogs and bee problems but we have by no means exhausted this subject. It has come to my attention that the batratia are also in trouble. We are told that the frog and toad population has declined precipitously and those that survive are likely to be deformed in variously horrid ways. I personally have not observed this. Indeed, we have numbers of chirping frogs in our own garden as well as an occasional toad and they seem perfectly healthy. ( One exception: one toad that I ran over with the lawn mower )
Now we are told that we are being overrun by deer. Someone took the time to count them and came up with 20,283,415 deer and that is only in Texas. Those Texas deer that I have seen are smallish but am told that they are edible. We Americans have become lazy. No more hunter gatherer types , we get our meat from the grocery store. How pathetic we all have become. Meanwhile, the deer population continues to grow and they are becomin ever more destructive.

II AM BACK

By now I have lost all of my erstwhile faithful readers and so I write mostly for my own amusement. As many of you know, I have been under the weather ( to put it mildly) for the last month or two and am still in a recovery mode. This is a painfully
slow process which leaves me bemused, bewildered, discouraged and a bit depressed
from time to time. But enough about me.

A horrid program last night on TV was on the subject of feral hogs. It turns out that they are spreading so rapidly that controlling the numbers is almost impossible. Not only are they very prolific, for some reason each generation is getting much larger and they are even meaner than before. These beasts are dangerous. I foresee the day when camping out will be impossible. Even hiking will be too dangerous. The pigs are destructive and apparently fearless. I wonder if they are good to eat. Probably too
tough to chew and perhaps have acquired a gamy flavor. This is almost as bad as the
dying out of our bee population.

NOT DOING SO GREAT

When one starts to pile on the years things start to go wrong. Several rules must be followed to insure ones quality of life. Rule # 1, try never to fall. Broken hips are the worst thing that can happen, closely followed by broken arms and ribs. In my case,a broken rib. Very painful but a fairly quick healing of four or five weeks seems
to have taken care of that. However , the potent painkillers caused some other unwanted after effects which I suspect may have caused me to be awaiting surgery
on my plumbing system in the next couple of weeks. Not a pleasant prospect.

Jan was driving me about ( I find driving difficult for the moment ) and was hit by a careless driver, causing $2500 of damage. His insurance company ,Safeco, is a bunch
of crooks who claimed it was Jan's fault. Ridiculous ! Our insurance Co., Farmers has come through with flying colors. What a wonderful bunch they are. They were more than helpful and are dragging the other insurance company to arbitration to get back our deductible portion of the bill the balance of which they paid at once. We are supposed to hate all insurance companies. I love Farmers.

On a happier note, we now have a resident rabbit in our yard. He has hung around now for about a month. I wonder why he has selected us but we are happy to accommodate him ( Her). I wonder if we should feed him and if so, what.

ECONOMICS REVISITED

I refer you back to my prescient and brilliant series of bolgs of some time back.
As you probably know, the US has been loosing competitive position vis a vis
the rest of the world, in particular, Japan and now ( alas ) China. American industries, one after another have fallen prey to the foreigners. Our industrial base has eroded
so badly that we now import all those items that we once produced. This process
has been going on now for perhaps fifty years.

What, you may ask, brought this on. Simple-Our minimum wage has once again gone up, making us even less competitive than before. Just as bad, business
profits will go down. More people will not get the jobs that might have been available.
Congressional madness continues unabated.

Update on rib situation- The rib seems to be healing on schedule. However, the painkillers have had terrible effects which I am taking care of one by one. Now I
am without energy or strength or appetite. The medical people have taken over my
life for the time being. I don't think I will share the details at this time.

MORE ON BROKEN RIB

We know that we risk boring our family, friends and other admirers with
the broken rib saga, but that is all that is on my mind these days.
Treatment for broken ribs consists of nothing but pain pills. Day one: heavy dose of
advil. Day two: heavy dose of allive. Days 3, 4 and part of five: codeine. The codeine was most effective for pain relief but has several terrible side effects too horrible to mention. Today ,back to advile. I would rather suffer a bit more pain than continue with the codeine. My doctor assured me that each day I would feel better and sure enough, I do. I like to think that a heavy dose of advil will be sufficient for the next month or so.

Not being able to leave the house, I suffer from what is know as cabin fever.
It is not easy to fill the day with useful activities. Television gets boring and repetitious. My boggle game is not up to the old standards although I have played it even more than usual. All we seem to get on TV is ever more Michael Jackson
and Sara Palin. The Jackson stuff is turning negative ( about time ) and the Palin
stuff remains poisonous. I confess that I like Sara allot although I would never consider her for president. That might be a sexist thing on my part.

We are now well into month two with temperatures above 100 degrees. The garden
looks pathetic. The tomato and bean crops failed completely and I fear for the
papaya tree.

UPDATE ON BAD DAY

As I suspected, I have a broken rib. I recommend to one and all to try not to have
this happen. The doctor put my on a remarkably strong pain killer regimen and it
seems that that is the treatment . Time will take care of the healing, or so they say.
This is my first overtly broken bone. I injured my neck bone when I was 17 and have had a permanently stiff neck ever since. I injured my jaw bone in my 20s and now
my jaw cracks when I eat. Maybe these were broken but not for sure.

Back to the Jackson saga---The media has still not let go of this story. My conservative sources are more fascinated by the press hysteria than the actual story itself. I am reminded of the Princess Di story. She was turned into a saintly icon
in spite of her very checkered past. Our African American community did something
similar when OJ was acquitted.