Friday's Odds and Ends

Its a beautiful spring day here in East Texas and I was out early picking berries and then I took my dog for a walk. We have to enjoy these spring days before the blast of summer heat hits. Here is a picture of one of my favorite wildflowers. They grow abundantly in my front pasture and I have been known to drive around them when mowing.

 We're headed into run-off elections across the country and some of them could carry pretty hefty price tags. I like what one small town in Reeves County Texas did. The two candidates for city council, Bruce MacNair and Bryan Studer,  agreed to a coin toss to select the winner. All that cost was a quarter. A run-off election would have cost the small town of Wolfforth, which is near Lubbock, $10,000.

According to Texas election laws, a coin toss is a legal method to break a tie between two candidates, and it appears it may be legal in other states as well. In doing some research I found that a coin toss has been used in Illinois, New Mexico and even in the Philippines.

I have an idea. Why not make it law to have a coin toss to settle every election tie? Obviously those are the two candidates that most people wanted, and it could save so much money. And another plus is we would not have to suffer through all those horrid campaign ads that sling so much mud you want to put on your wading boots.

Here's a quarter to use.

 A Truthout article by Mike Ludwig shed new light on the controversial fracking method of extracting oil. Fracking is used in many states, Texas included, and right now there is an effort to halt the proposed fracking in areas surrounding New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. If you would like to urge the Bureau of Land Management to deny this proposal, you can sign a petition HERE

After reading Ludwig's article that opened with, "Energy Information Administration officials told reporters on Wednesday that they are cutting their estimate of how much oil can be drawn out of California's massive Monterey Shale formation by a whopping 96 percent."

Fracking involves forcing gallons of water, containing chemicals, deep into the earth to break up rock formations.

Ummm... do we really want to keep doing that?

Now lets close with some fun. I got these jokes from The Laugh Factory in the Family Jokes category.

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says, "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!" The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her, "The driver just insulted me!" The man says, "You go right up there and tell him off – go ahead, I'll hold your monkey for you."

An elderly couple are in church. The wife leans over and whispers to her husband, "I just let out a long, silent fart. What should I do?" The husband replies, "First off, replace the batteries in your hearing aid!"

Friday's Odds and Ends - Funnies and Flowers

Before I get into the main part of this post, I want to ask if you have ever had trouble posting a comment here? On Wednesday, my guest, Mary Deal, could not leave a comment, and I know that was very frustrating as she wanted to thank me for hosting, as well as interact with visitors. I don't know anything about the technical side of what happens with the computer and programs and websites. I just know how to put words on a screen. Mary mentioned using an "atom" thing to try to post after she could not use the regular comment function. I don't have any kind of comment moderation set up. I've realized in visiting a lot of blogs that it isn't always easy to find where to click to leave a comment. For my blog, and several others I write for the comment link is at the end of the blog piece where there is a line:   Posted by Maryann Miller at 7:03 AM 6 comments:  Sometimes it will say "no comments" and you can be the first to leave a comment. (smile)

Let me know what your experience has been commenting here or on other blogs. 

In a recent letter to the editor in The Dallas Morning News a man suggested that the U. S. Postal service consider delivering residential mail on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and business mail on the other days of the week. Interesting proposal. It would save money, but would that work in this era of instant everything? People today would never have survived waiting weeks and sometimes months for mail to arrive way back when it was delivered by horseback and stagecoach.

Maybe we would all be better off if we took a few deep breaths and just.... waited.

Today I thought I'd share some great descriptive lines I copied out of a book I read. I made this note so long ago that I don't even remember which book the lines came from, and like a doofus, I did not write the book title on the note. I thought of just throwing the note away, but these lines are too good not to share.

"His eyes were ice blue. Hard. So sharp, Val could feel them cut."

"His eyebrows resembled a backwoods thicket"

I'm not even sure if the descriptions were of the same character, but they sure are vivid, and such a refreshing alternative to some of the common descriptions of cold eyes and thick eyebrows. If the author reads this blog post and recognizes the lines, I'd love a reminder of what book they came from.

Something just for fun from the comic strip Non Sequitur: The scene is a cemetery called Last Words Cemetery. One headstone reads: "Hey, why spend all that money on an electrician?"

Not so funny? Okay, how about this one from Pickles. Earl and his grandson are talking a walk. Nelson asks, "Grampa, do you and Gramma ever argue?"

"Argue? No. I can't say that we do. We disagree sometimes, though, and then she explains to me why she's right and I'm wrong.

"You might say we have one of those marriages where one person is always right and the other person is me."

Some time ago I noticed these wildflowers growing in and around a large branch that fell during a storm that blew through. This was on the side of the highway leading to our county road, so I had to be careful of traffic when I went to snap the pictures. I couldn't resist, though. It was so pretty.

Mix Ups Happen

If you were one of the three people who looked for me over at Pat Bean's blog, there was a bit of a mix-up and she has a different guest there today. However, you might want to pop over to meet Helen Ginger and get to read her short story that is in the book, The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories. It is quite clever.

The post I was going to do for her, will be here next Wednesday, so come back then to meet Frank, the central character in my story that is part of the collection. When I told him he was not going to be featured in the blog today, he was quite put out and insisted that he get his air time. I told him this was not television or radio, but he didn't care.

And now for your visual enjoyment, a picture of some of the flowers blooming around our place This is a little flower that grows close to the ground and is seen all over in East Texas. If I did more than admire wildflowers I would take the time to look them up on the Internet and find names. I'd rather just look at them.

A to Z Challenge - W is for Wildflowers

The most popular and widely known wildflower is Texas are bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, but we have some other very pretty gifts from Mother Nature that dot our meadows.

Here are just a few that I have seen in recent weeks on my morning walks. I have been known to mow around some of them that grow in my front pasture area. My husband laughs, but then flowers mean little to him.

This first one is my favorite. I let it grow wherever it pops up, and when the flowers in my old plow died in the drought last year, I didn't buy new ones. Now I don't have to.

This next one is an early bloomer in Texas and sometimes the fields will be a sea of pink and coral.

Here is another favorite of mine. This one reminds me of Queen Anne's Lace that I remember growing wild in Michigan, where I grew up a little wild, too.

This little  flower pops up all over, especially along the road, and one day I stopped to really look at it and thought it was quite lovely. Some of them are white, others yellow, and I've even seen some pink ones.

It's important for us to stop and take note of these little treasures around us. Sometimes we get so busy we forget that there is a whole world of beauty out there.

You'll notice that I have not named any of these. Do you know what they are?