Love cicadas ~

I love hearing the sound of the cicadas. I've read the stories about how there's gonna be a bumper crop of millions of cicadas waking up and then I listened to them and feel like I'm participating in that news story.

I love how they sound! I love the constant ululating of the pitch that they are at - there's nothing else like it. I could record it but it just wouldn't be the same because it's so surrounding when you're sitting in the yard and just listening to it. I remember a few years ago my wife and I were sitting in the backyard having a fire and we could hear the cicadas in the evening as the sun was setting. The sound came in waves from across the field and then closer by in the field and then in the trees that were to our left and above us and then off to our right and it was just like a tidal wave of their sound. It was amazing and huge and so big that it was just weird to think about.

Bugs are funny like that because they're everywhere and they're in the middle of everything, but we really don't give them much credit. But they're amazing.



#personal #outdoors #bugs

The Bible Project ~

One of the online things that my wife and I are supporting is theBible project. They continue to develop videos and other things that promote learning about the Bible and understanding what the Bible says and means.

It's very interesting because they go through and they'll study a book of the Bible or a main passage from the Bible and they'll illustrate it with cartoonish animations and descriptions and it's amazing how they make it so clear.

They really fit well with what the Bible is saying, which means that they're following what God is telling them and what the Bible says, and they use very engaging lettering and graphics and animation that just bring the Bible almost to life.

It's one of those things because it's hard because the Bible is so old and the stories and the letters and the information given in it is just so ancient that it really doesn't seem like it applies to today.

But every time I read the Bible and every time I listen to a Bible project video, I realize how much it does apply to today. and the future and how it helps me in my everyday life. One of the specific video series that they've been doing lately is the Beatitudes from the New Testament where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount and talked about who among us would be blessed in the kingdom of heaven.

The upside-down kingdom of heaven. Everything he says in there is so backwards and doesn't fit how we in modern society think. But if you listen to their videos about it, you can gain so much insight.

It's almost as good as all the secular baloney about Zen, Buddhism, and all that. I listen to those videos too, and they're very engaging, but I prefer to worship the one true God instead of the group consciousness that everyone thinks they've created.

I recommend the Bible project for learning more about the Bible and learning more about life. You can check them out at
https://bibleproject.com

St Augustine grass ~

I grew up in central Florida. One of the things that my dad enjoyed doing in our yard was watering the grass. We had a yard filled with St. Augustine grass. It's a nice thick turf grass that sends out runners and takes over an area, but it needs a lot of sunlight. So in areas where there were trees or shade, it tended not to grow very well.

When I moved away from central Florida we moved to northern Georgia near Atlanta. Most people there grew fescue grass and really enjoyed their fescue grass and seeding and overseeding and aerating and fertilizing and messing with their tall fescue grass every year.

They would talk about how to have the best fescue grass yard and brag about how great they were doing. I just wanted St. Augustine grass. I read about Zoysia and I read about other kinds of grasses, but I wanted St. Augustine.

So one year when we went to my parents' house I dug up some plugs of St. Augustine grass from their yard. I grabbed some runners off of the edge where it was overgrowing onto the driveway I put it all in a plastic bag and brought it to Georgia. I planted the plugs and made sure roots on the runners were covered with red Georgia clay and a little bit of dirt and then I waited. I knew that it would take a while since I wasn't getting sod or anything but my hope was that it would take over the area between the sidewalk and our house and then it would take over as much of the backyard as it could.

I hoped it would take some of the front yard, but it had already established turf grass that I didn't think the St. Augustine could beat easily. I didn't really water it or fertilize it after I planted it, I just let it grow.

I'd treat it like all the rest of the grass and mow, and it spread. It spread to take over the area that I wanted it to take over. It spread throughout the backyard. When it hit the areas of the backyard that were shaded for the majority of the day, it stopped.

It did it just what I wanted it to do. This was funny to me because when I told someone that had a background in horticulture and experience in working with plants about what I was doing they said it would never work and that St. Augustine couldn't grow that far north. I just laughed and told them "Well, I've got a yard full of it in Georgia right now."

There are some issues with my St. Augustine grass. Each year when everybody's out buying pre-emergent weed killer and all the things that they talk about here in Georgia, I don't do that.

My wife says we need to spray the yard for weeds and I remind her that the weed killer that we have here in Georgia will kill St. Augustine grass. So we need to leave it alone.

There are weeds that come up in the St. Augustine grass, but St. Augustine is slower to get going in the spring than everything else. And so the weeds have a field day and then the heat comes and St. Augustine chokes them out and covers them up.

It's pretty funny. I always laugh when I walk on it in my bare feet and go, yeah, this stuff won't grow in Georgia.

Silly how I do things that people say can't be done. Over and over and over...


#grass #yard

Funeral thoughts ~

I recently went to the funeral of a friend that was held in a church in the middle of the city. The funeral was a good service, I really enjoyed the way the pastor and the music minister worked together as the three-piece band played old-time hymns like I'll Fly Away and Amazing Grace. The pastor would be humming and singing along with the music and then he'd break off and say a couple of things and then he'd go back into the song even as the music minister was singing also.

The husband of the lady that had passed away went to the microphone to say a couple of words. He was very fat, morbidly obese would be the medical term. Now this man had been in jail for as long as I knew about him and had gotten out in the past year or so and I had an odd thought as I watched him speak.

People make such a big deal about us needing to rehabilitate criminals while they're in jail rather than punish criminals while they're in jail. They talk about how we need to teach people to reach for different foods instead of the easy or the cheap foods that are available to them.

So how did this man get so fat while he was in jail? There's no way that he had packed on 200 plus pounds in less than a year after getting out of jail. And why didn't the penal system teach him and help him by correcting him to make choices on his food intake?

It just seems odd to me that amidst all the cries for more action and more money and more efforts, why didn't they do the right thing while they had him in there as a literally captive audience? It just raises questions for me.

Exactly what they asked for ~

I was a manager for the last half of my career. One of the funny things that happened as a manager was I was a support manager over two offices that supported our operational facility.

I had been an operations manager and a supervisor before that. And so I knew what was going on in the operation and I had suffered through many briefings from support managers and support staff on what they did and how they expected us to use them to help them.

Typically the presentations that the support offices gave had a lot of words and a lot of chapter and verse from the handbook and the different orders that drove how we were supposed to do things in our operation and in our facility.

While I was a support manager, the operations managers were younger than me and ready to change the world. And so when it came time to have a supervisor seminar, they demanded that my office's briefings not be just a bunch of words on a screen that somebody sits there and reads to them.

I looked around the room, and I said, are you sure you want that? Because that's typically the most informative way to get information to you guys that everybody understands. They responded that "We're tired of seeing the same thing, David, and we want something better."

One of the things that I found funny was they thought that they were demanding something from me that I couldn't provide. That I was not unwilling to provide. They were young and from other facilities and so they didn't understand that I was a revolutionary and this was what I lived for, to do things differently.

As a support manager I felt so bound by the way things had to always been and the way the orders were phrased and interpreted and I couldn't get around them. But I could provide a briefing that was a lot different than anything they had ever had.

So when the supervisor seminar came and I had a room full of supervisors and a couple of operations managers in the room. I started my presentation and told them who was in my office that I managed and then I showed them one slide with pictures on it. Each picture was an icon or small thumbnail of different aspects of what we did in our office. I proceeded to use a stick pointer to point to each picture and describe that activity that we did in our office and how it was supposed to be activated with us and what they could expect from us when they asked us to support them on that aspect of our duties. As I went through it everybody really enjoyed it. Everybody except the operations managers.

These younger managers thought I was being flippant and disrespectful and so when my manager called me into his office and talked to me and told me that I laughed and I said I gave them exactly what they asked for.

No words, just pictures. I literally drew them a picture and they still don't understand I don't know what else to do. My manager went back to them and chewed them out and said David drew you a picture he drew you a lot of pictures why don't you shut the hell up.

I hope they use that presentation in the future! It was such a great stroke of brilliance on my part :-) I did it for the other office that I managed at the time also and it was a completely different set of pictures and icons. I even had door prizes that I handed out, little doodads for everybody to take home with them. The supervisors loved it, the operations managers not so much.

That's the story of my career, over and over and over. I reached the people that actually did the work, and the people who just took credit for the work didn't understand and didn't like me LOL

July 4th and clothing ~

This past July 4th, our church had a big patriotic acknowledgment of the veterans that have served in our country. It was very nice, and I like when we do that, although sometimes it seems overdone. There was a lot of red, white, and blue worn in the congregation that morning.

A lot of people wearing flag symbols on their clothing, but one thing stood out that bothered me. Our pastor was wearing a flag shirt. It was like a Hawaiian shirt, button down, long untucked, short sleeve, and it had the American flag on it.

It was the American flag with the stars over his left upper part of his body and the stripes extending from the left lower part of his body and about the middle of his chest to the right part of his body.

It wasn't a patch, the shirt was the flag. Growing up on Air Force bases as my dad worked his way through the military I learned respect for the flag. Everybody had to pause in the morning and the evening when the flag was raised and lowered.

I said the Pledge of Allegiance at school every morning. We stood when the Star -Spangled Banner was played. And we didn't stand and keep doing things. We stood and watched reverently. As an adult, I got away from that a little bit, but then once I got involved in scouting for my boys, I got back into it.

Scouting teaches a lot about the American flag and respect for it. And teaches how to care for the flag, how to properly display the flag. and how to dispose of a flag properly you don't just throw it away there's a ceremony that you should have for a flag.

There are actually laws on how to display and use the American flag. In 4 US Code Section 7, Position and Manner of Display, the law actually outlines the use of the American flag. There's a lot of different things that it says in that.

Especially about making sure no other flag is displayed above it and that sort of thing. But, it doesn't say you can't wear a shirt that is a flag. It does say things about how the flag should be displayed.

But it bothered me that he was wearing a shirt that was the American flag. All I could think of is that he's probably going to throw that on the floor when he takes his shirt off later on in the day.

That's one of the things you're not supposed to do with the American flag. You're not supposed to change the American flag and you're not supposed to wear it and do the sorts of things that I see. Even pages on the internet, like National Flag Foundation stuff, says that American flag coffee cups, sweatshirts, and curtains are not patriotic and they refer back to the U .S. code. The flag should never be worn as apparel or used as bedding, curtains, or covering for a ceiling.

And so that's where I choke on what he was doing with that shirt. I don't understand why people have such a lack of respect other than they haven't been educated when I talk to my wife about it.

She said you should say something but I also reminded her that nobody really cares what I say and usually people react negatively when I give them feedback that involves a correction.

I'll probably send an email and just say, hey, you may want to review this page in the US code and let your conscience be your guide. We'll see.