Squirrel in the wheel

See this photo?

It’s a pretty picture, but I almost didn’t see it. I did because I did something I haven’t been doing lately–I took time and looked up.

I saw these clouds as I was driving back from a boys high school golf tournament last Thursday morning. I had enjoyed being on the links, zipping around on a golf cart, trying to find some of our local kids. I don’t get out on golf courses too often–never have been a golfer. I enjoyed the sun and breeze and singing birds along the way, but I was too busy to be really aware of them.

Until I turned the corner on my way back to the office, when my eyes fell on these clouds, and I felt compelled to pull over and get out my camera for a photo or two. The squirrel escapes his wheel for a moment.

Otherwise, he has been in the wheel and running very hard for very little that seems meaningful. Work on the summer tourism section is over, and now we are in the crazy May spring sports season. It’s just one month long in the U.P., since spring usually is slow to arrive and everything has to be wrapped up by early June. That means lots of events are crammed into four poor little weeks, along with the graduation runup, special editions, Memorial Day previews, early deadlines and all that. Run, run, run, run, run. In June, we can exhale and get into summertime mode.

Plus the other stuff in my life, away from the job. Driving back and forth to visit my mom. The Stanley Cup playoffs, which I find entertaining but which sure can suck up many space hours. A bunch of other things. B and I have been writing back and forth a lot, and we even tried out Skype a time or two. A face-to-face, so to speak, thanks to the webcam on my laptop. The countdown to our first-ever meeting now stands at less than eight weeks.

Today, of course, is Mother’s Day. My wife and I decided to go out to a nice lunch and then take a nap together. Naps are fun! She got her flowers yesterday, at the same time we got my mom some–we drove down and visited her for a while. Then, on Monday, I go back into my wheel.

I’ve got one other thing in my life right now. It is a very major thing, one that would be great and wonderful news if it comes about. I’m not superstitious by nature, but maybe if I say nothing about it, it may enhance its chances of coming true. That’s how I’m playing it for now. It it comes about, you’ll know about it. Definitely.

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I can tell you about a major project my wife recently finished. She was in charge of things for her church’s fellowship dinner last Sunday. It involved plenty of time on the phone and, during the week before the dinner, a special mission to ***-mart, where we raided their frozen food chests. Frozen green beans, to be specific. For a dish she wanted to make (100 servings), she calculated she needed 15 pounds of frozen green beans.

They didn’t have large bags of frozen green beans, as we had hoped, but they did have 28-ounce bags of beans. Hmmm, says my wife, let’s see. How many 28-ounce bags of frozen beans equals 15 pounds? She remembered that my phone has a calculator, so I converted 28 ounces to 1 3/4 pounds, then divided 15 by 1 3/4. Turns out we needed 8 4/7 28-ounce bags to get 15 pounds. But ***-mart only had seven bags, so we bought out what they had and got the remaining 2 3/4 pounds from one of our local stores.

We also got mushrooms and tomatoes. A bunch of other stuff. The final thing we got was frozen sherbet. Six half-gallon containers of that. All that stuff was taken to the church basement over several days.

Sunday came. It was a nice day, they had a big turnout and lots of food to feed everyone. The beans were very good, and so were the mushrooms and things other people made–ham, casseroles, salads, desserts, cakes, you name it. They even opened one of those six half-gallon containers of sherbet. But people were sort of stuffed by then and didn’t have much room left over for dessert. Don’t know what became of those five other half-gallons of sherbet (some rainbow, some orange).

This last week, I noticed, my wife was observed relaxing a bit more than usual. Deserved it, don’t you think?