Random Thoughts

I'll never forget one time I was pedaling as fast as my little legs would go toward the small piece of plywood leaned up against the curb when my mom called my name. I turned slightly to see what was going on and the handlebars edged to the side just enough to point me about a foot to the side of the "ramp". I missed, hit the curb at full speed, and went flying not unlike the General Lee but without the car, or the bike.
 
Vino Bevo said:
I'll never forget one time I was pedaling as fast as my little legs would go toward the small piece of plywood leaned up against the curb when my mom called my name. I turned slightly to see what was going on and the handlebars edged to the side just enough to point me about a foot to the side of the "ramp". I missed, hit the curb at full speed, and went flying not unlike the General Lee but without the car, or the bike.
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Similar story. For two long years I lived in Brownfield. To a 10 to 12 year old boy, perhaps the best thing about Brownfield in the early/mid 1970s was that curbs leading to driveways were gently sloped, allowing for a natural ramp to jump your bicycle from the street to the sidewalk, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing.

Well, one day, a sandstorm blows through town while I'm out on my bike, and I have 50+mph winds at my back. Aha! My 11 year old brain thought. This will let me do the mother of all driveway jumps. And it worked! Kind of.

I sailed past the sidewalk into the front yard of some random house. I look up, and this random house has a 2 1/2 foot tall brick wall separating their yard from the neighbor's. And I had no chance of stopping. So I hit that wall, sailed over the neighboring driveway, landing in a heap in their yard. My bicycle fared worse than me. The handlebars were about 90 degrees offset, and the front rim was bent completely out of round, meaning I had to walk the damned thing back home on the back tire only. It was damned embarrassing, but I still feel lucky there was no car parked in the way. I had no helmet and literally may not have survived the impact.
 
I remember the night I watched an evening movie (Disney I think) where a kid found a stick and tied a white cloth to the end of it. He packed it with clothes and snacks then ran away from home. I thought that was so cool. The next morning I mimicked his stick and excitedly told my mom I was running away. She shoved me out the door and didn’t let me back in until dark. I never had the urge to run away again.
 
So Learned your lesson? We learned many lessons from common sense approaches.
Today your Mother would be visited by CPS alerted by a faux outraged Karen
 
We had the same problem years back in another home where they kept flying into a set of second floor bedroom windows, and we put some cling decals that looked like flying bird profiles and it helped.
 
True story.

I was in 5th grade, 10 years old. Teacher split us into two teams and we went out to the field and played softball. I played catcher, got too close to the batter, and took a swing to the back of my head. Knocked me out cold.

Teacher took me in to the nurse’s office where she had me lay down, and I went to sleep. Sometime later I woke up, nobody was in the nurse’s office. Hello? Silence. I walked out into the hallway to find an empty building. School was out, everybody but the janitor was gone, and I had apparently been forgotten.

Went outside, got on my bicycle and rode home. I’m sure my mom called the school the next day but I never heard anything further about it. Didn’t care.

If this happened today there would probably be police cars, a SWAT team, helicopters, mandatory counseling, medication, and lawsuits.
 
I've got a couple of those "if I only knew then what I know now" events in my past as well...

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LonghornCatholic said:
Does anyone know how to prevent birds from crashing into my porch windows? The one this morning looked like a crime scene. Poor birdie.
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Oh that’s tragic. One thing you can do is turn that window into a feeding destination.

We put a couple of these on our dining area windows and it’s pretty cool to watch them fly in and have a snack. Occasionally they get into brief squabbles over the food, pecking at each other and flapping their wings, standard bird drama I suppose. It’s really funny sometimes.

feeder.jpg
 
LonghornCatholic said:
That might be a great solution. Do they leave a lot of poop under the feeder? My wife is anti-poop.
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It’s been clean. We have a little garden directly beneath the feeders, mostly milkweed to attract butterflies and some rose bushes, and I don’t see bird poop there or along the brick edging at the bottom of the windows so maybe they have the sense to poop somewhere else.
 
Will Durant reminds us that people we consider to have lived during the Middle Ages thought of themselves as living in modern times, with the Middle Ages in their past. Likewise, people of the future may view today as part of what they call the Late Middle Ages:

We are tempted to think of the Middle Ages as a fallow interval between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (476) and the discovery of America; we must remind ourselves that the followers of Abélard called themselves moderni, and that the bishop of Exeter, in 1287, spoke of his century as moderni tempores, “modern times.” The boundary between “medieval” and “modern” is always advancing; and our age of coal and oil and sooty slums may some day be accounted medieval by an era of cleaner power and more gracious life.

[from The Story of Civilizations, Volume 4]

source: @waitbutwhy
 
Sorry, had to laugh at “more gracious life”. I do not believe man capable or perhaps should say no longer believe man capable. In the year 2024 we still have the sheer brutality of man made war.
 
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