Weather

I can’t remember it ever being so cold for so long in the 30 years or so I’ve lived in Auburn (elev. 1,500 ft.) Really cold for a couple weeks. Bird bath water frozen again this morning. All the birds are happy though — camp robbers, sparrows, chickadees, and another little gray bird with a top crest. They know to swarm in every morning for the breakfast birdseed I put out on the deck. The hummers stop by too for the sugar-water in the feeder that hangs off the canopy.

Lots of snow in the mountains and foothills above about 3000 feet elev. Lots of rain in the valley. Freezing cold and stormy all over the country. Where’s all that global warming that Al Gore keeps talking about.  I’ll bet he’s got (frozen) egg on his face today.

Food – Exotic and Otherwise

Hamburger and scrambled eggs this morning. Grinding my own chuck these days in the food processor. Works pretty good but not much flavor. Not enough fat in the meat.

Still eating brown rice. Sometimes I even have it for breakfast. Terrific with garlic, bay leaf, soy sauce and veggies, usually spinach or broccoli. Sometimes I fix white rice, which makes me feel like a traitorous wimp. Not much nutrition in white rice.  So I hear.

WRITING:

Still rewriting and reformatting Beastly Monster — after scanning it from the hard copy. It’s strange working on a story I wrote five or six years ago — I keep coming across a page or two that I can’t remember writing. I’ll read something I wrote and say to myself, hey, this is not bad, you old dog. Then I come across a passage and think, oh oh, I think I wrote myself into a corner here. And now I’ll have to rewrite a couple pages to justify this mess and get myself out of the corner. Then I read ahead and see that I already wrote my way clear.  And I say to myself, Hey, that was clever! What a tricky bastard you are!

Gardening

Not much gardening going on. Too cold. Even the lawns aren’t growing much.

Golf

I have finally figured out the secret of the golf swing. Yeah, right. Where have I heard that before? Okay, so forget everything I’ve said previously about the golf swing. I’ve changed everything again.

The final, final secret came to me like a thunderbolt out of the blue. HERE IT IS! Don’t hit down on the ball. That’s the killer move of all swings promulgated by about a thousand golf instruction books. Instead, do this: Simply hit through the ball without going down after it. After all, the club has a long shaft and it can reach the ball without your having to go down after it. Of course you keep your head steady, don’t you. Try whiffing the ball a few times. You’ll soon get the idea.

But don’t hold me to this final, final explanation of the ancient art. Some fine tuning may come later.

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