Pumpkins, Ahoy!

I suppose it was inevitable, in a way.

Look. For one thing, coastal Maine was once famous for its tradition of shipbuilding. In fact, it’s only a short drive to one of the nation’s most famous shipyards in Bath.

For another thing, for all the brevity of the growing season, folks in Maine are crazy for gardening. And, as good modern Americans, they are not immune to the outlook that a thing is made better if it gets made bigger.

Given all that, I suppose growing pumpkins the size of compact cars and turning them into boats makes all the sense in the world.

The Damariscotta Pumpkin Regatta has been held on or about Columbus Day for every one of the past five years, though this is only the second year it has been officially blessed by the town’s government.

It all began with Buzz Pinkham, who owns a nursery, Pinkham’s Plantation.

"Admiral" Buzz Pinkham

Buzz, shown here in his latest creation, was trying to think of something to do with a 700-pound pumpkin he had grown to show at a state fair. As he told a local reporter, he decided to try hollowing the pumpkin out, attaching a small outboard, and, putting his trust in gourd, finding out how it would do on the Damariscotta River, which flows into the harbor at Damariscotta.

He wasn’t trying to draw a crowd, he said, “but it’s kind of hard to sneak through town with a 700-pound pumpkin.”

So, a small crowd stood around on the banks of the river while Pinkham noodled around on the river, having a good time.

The next year, a couple of buddies joined Buzz with their own pumpkins, and drew an even bigger crowd.

By the third year, the businesses in town were starting to realize that the informal event was bringing people and those people usually brought their wallets with them, etc., etc.

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about ordinary pumpkins. This lot is a breed apart, hybrid monsters that have been been around, though not so grandly, since the early 1800s. Back then, somebody or some chance intermingled the DNA of a variety of Hubbard squash and a Kabocha pumpkin.

So, for a long time, Cucurbita maxima, to use the monster’s scientific name, were simply an unusually large variety of pumpkin weighing of a couple hundred pounds.

And then came Howard Dill. (A major chord would be appropriate here, if this was a movie.)

Before 1981, the world record for the largest pumpkin stood at an anorexic 460 pounds. Then, Dill, of Nova Scotia, set the world, or the portion of the world that cared, on its collective ear by submitting a pumpkin of almost 500 pounds.

Dill patented his seeds as Dill’s Atlantic Giant, and that breed is credited as the progenitor of the giant pumpkins of today, augmented by an orgy of crossing and re-crossing his variety with other types of pumpkins.

Dill died in May of 2008, at the age of 73.

The result of all this mad cross-breeding has been what must be a peculiarly North American phenomenon, even if they are grown now in other countries. Heck, people in other countries drive Hummers, but it was our idea, for better or worse.

This year’s world record holder is Christy Harp’s 1725-pound Atlantic giant pumpkin, which won the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers annual weigh-off just this month. Photos of Ms. Harp, like this one that I swiped off the Internet, show her standing behind what appears to be an orange asteroid.

The World's Biggest Pumpkin, 2009 edition

Put that in perspective. That’s about the weight of two Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide motorcycles.

It must be pointed out that these exaggerated pumpkins are, how shall I say it? Unattractive? Butt ugly? I’d love to see one that had been raised in zero gravity. Perhaps it would be, oh, pumpkin-shaped. The really big ones bear an unfortunate resemblance a gargantuan loaf of bread that failed to rise correctly.

My vacation was over couple of days before the actual regatta.

I did manage to hang out for an hour or so at Pinkham’s Plantation while some of the guys were building and carving their squash navy. Buzz wasn’t around, but Bill, Tom Lishness, and one other fellow whose name I did not catch were busily measuring, eyeballing, sawing and scooping.

It is a little alarming how much goop lives inside a 700 pound pumpkin. We’re talking at least a wheelbarrow load or more for each one.

Bill said the little pumpkin he was rigging up for the race weighed in at 860 pounds. He stated, matter-of-factly, that he had actually grown one that weighed more than the 1275-pound state record holder, which loomed a mere 30 feet away, but Bill’s gourd split from its own weight. In the photo, Tom, Bill, and Mr. X, ponder mounting onto an 800-pound-plus pumpkin the transom that will hold the motor.

Pondering the "How-to's"

Lishness, a compact fellow with bright blue eyes and a beard reminiscent of the one on the Travelocity Gnome (one of which was attached to the front of his pumpkin yacht a year or two ago, along with a miniature cannon,) said that in the early days of giant pumpkin contests gourds the size of his and Bill’s would have taken big prizes. Today, if your punkin is smaller than a thousand pounds, nobody remembers your name.

The details of pumpkin nautical architecture would seem simple, on the surface, so to speak. But distinct challenges present themselves.

First, one cannot help but notice that the pumpkin, whatever its dimensions, has not evolved a shape that lends itself to a graceful passage through water. Their roundness makes them prone to a certain vertical indecision, so that any overly enthusiastic motion from the pumpkin operator can result in his immediate demotion to keel.

Tom said the first outboards used on the pumpkins were two- to three-horsepower trolling motors. But, this is America and we all know that means there is no such thing as too much horsepower. From the photo I picked up online, Buzz Pinkham’s pumpkin this year boasted a 25-horsepower Nissan rig.

If I understood Tom correctly, some outfit that sells and repairs snowmobiles and jet-skis is working to develop a pumpkin/jet-ski hybrid. Heady stuff. I hope nobody from Morton-Thiokol, who builds the solid-rocket boosters for the space shuttle, ever gets wind of the regatta.

Of course, there’s no easy way to attach an outboard motor to a pumpkin. The guys figured their way past that by attaching a plywood platform to the top of the pumpkin that gives the motor a little platform, or transom, to hang onto. There’s also a little frame to hold a block of polystyrene for floatation, to counter the weight of the motor. Without it, the pumpkin seems, briefly, to be headed for the sky, and then sinks out of sight.

They sometimes sink out of sight anyway. Tom’s pumpkin betrayed him this year, according to some published accounts.

Better luck next year.
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

A mini Burger to Go, Oct. 7, 2009

Oct. 7, Wednesday:

As promised, a wet morning.

I sat awhile by an open window, awash in the very cool air, and not a little of the wet, listening to the rain sighing on the open water, ticking against the glass.

Across the harbor, a lobsterman’s boat idled, providing the bass line for the concert, a flock of crows in the trees across the harbor, the chorus.

To hear the crows tell it, the performance is a tragedy, German, even Wagnerian, by the sound of it.

But then, it is a cold rain, and they are in it.

Friday, Oct. 2, Huckleberry Cove, Maine Coast Botanical Gardens, near Boothbay.

•    I am grateful for the bench.
•
•    After a year of pavement and office floors, heavily wooded hillsides and mossy paths have been a rude shock.
•
•    Protests abound. My feet and ankles wave placards and rude signs. My knees brandish pitchforks.
•
•    I leaned the cane against the bench and take the camera strap from around my neck.
•
•    The cane is a concession to the knees, etc.
•
•    The camera is in aid of a fantasy that I might one day take decent photographs.
•
•    Huckleberry Cove sits, still and dark before me.
•
•     The tide is almost fully out, exposing the limp strands of greenish bladderwrack on the stony shore. A few gulls and ducks mill about on the far shore.
•

Huckleberry Cove, low tide

•    The gulls mutter like old men, and no and then one will rise into the air for no apparent reason, and come down only a few feet away. One flies to my side of the cove, plops into the water, swims around eyeing me. Then he flies back to the other side. Just nosy.
•
•    For the most part I ignore the camera. The moment is too perfect to be snapping away like the tourist that I am. Instead, I listen.
•
•    Back home, I forget what “quiet” means.
•
•    I remember it here.
•
•    Quiet is being able to hear a gull mumbling a few hundred feet away, orhearing the breeze sighing through the spruce and fir along the banks. Or the sound the small red squirrels make peeling pine cones to get at the seeds tucked down inside. Winter is coming, and the squirrels are busy with their hoardings.
•
•    The kitchen gardens uphill from me are full of pumpkins and gourds. The other tourists wear khakis and dark sweaters and talk too much. But down here, away from the graded, mulched paths, few of them come. There are logs to step over, a stream to cross, twice, on flat stones.
•
•    The trees sway. The gulls arc into the air then dip back into the still, black water. A red squirrel carrying a nut scampers only a few feet away, weaving through the tree trunks and into a jumble of granite boulders and is gone with no more than a faint rustle of leaves. The moment is full of a kind of grace.
•
•    I retrieve the cane and camera and lunge to my feet. I like to think that at the least I provide a nice contrast to the grace of the setting.
•
•     My left knee pops, then settles into place and wobble up the slope and the signs that will point me back smoother path, the one with the signs that will keep me from losing my way.

Maine, Sept. 29, 2009

•    Sept. 27, 2009 The Osprey cottage, New Harbor, Maine.

•    Rain hisses against the windows. From the kitchen table, we can see the lobster boats bucking and twisting at anchor. The trees toss in time to the dancing of the boats. Everything is wet and in motion.
•    The wind plays tunes around the Osprey, rattles the windows and shakes at the door. I would light a fire in the Franklin stove, but decide we would enjoy it more when we’re not bushed from a day on the asphalt.
•    From my writing table I can hear the somber tolling of the buoy near the harbor mouth, and the moaning of the wind around the corner of The Osprey. All the cottages have been named after birds that live on or near the water. Heron, Tern, Gannet, Osprey, Gull, etc.
•    Two years ago, the Osprey’s piers, weakened by 24 hours of hard rain, slipped out from under it. The house dropped perhaps three feet, and slid toward the water another three feet or so.
•    We were in it at the time.
•    Almost our first question to the owners was, would they rebuild? They did. We were back the next year. The only thing missing was the charming way the house sort of bounced when we would walk across the floor, or creaked in a high wind.
•    Well, I thought it charming. Sue had less enthusiasm for it.
•    New Harbor, from which the village gets its name, is small, cluttered with lobster boats and their dingys and a few pleasure craft. At various times during the day one hears the lobster boats chugging out to tend their traps, or back in after selling their catch at Shaw’s, 100 yards or so toward the harbor mouth from here.
•    We come every year, and every year, I try to describe why we love it so. I’ve never succeeded. I don’t think so, anyway.
We yearn for this spot all year long. Our eyes hunger for every nuance of the light. We slip into honest mourning when we have to leave.
•    We celebrated our arrival with a glass of scotch. I prefer Laphroaig, which starts at $40 a bottle for the 10-year-old stuff. It goes all the way up to a 40-year-old edition. I don’t want to know what it costs. We got a serviceable single-malt for about $10. It isn’t Laphroaig, but it isn’t terrible. It did, however, take the wind out of my sails for about an hour.
•    We bought the booze at a New Hampshire state store. In New Hampshire, the state liquor stores have their own exits off I-95. What could possibly go wrong? One elderly woman had a clerk help her load eight to 10 cases of booze into her Caddie. She had a sharp face, and a sort of junkyard dog demeanor.
•    Sept. 28: Dawn came cloudless, but still windy. We ate breakfast at a little restaurant/gift shop next to the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point. Still in a fury from the night’s storm, the surf hammered at the point, sending spume 30 and 40 feet in the air. The shop, as usual, swarmed with tourists, mostly well-to-do folks from the New England States. They all look as though, somewhere in their lives, at least, they enjoyed skiing, and know a lot about fondue. I try to blend in as well as possible. Thank god I didn’t wear my bib overalls. And yes, I packed my bib overalls.
•    The rest of the day involved a trip into Damariscotta for supplies and a nap once we got back to the cottage. It’s vacation, remember?
•    The reading list, River out of Eden, by Richard Dawkins; Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant; A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin; The Norman Maclean Reader; The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria; Faith in a Seed, by H.D. Thoreau; Creation by E.W. Wilson; Letters to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris, and Emerson’s Essays & Lectures.
•    Don’t be impressed; many of them will go back in their box unread at the end of the vacation. And the ones that take the most concentration will put me to sleep while I’m reading. I don’t have the circuitry for genius.

==============================.

© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Late Night Musings on Bugs and Art

(Note: This is a slightly written version of a column written many years ago.)
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In the King James version of the Bible, the 19th Psalm has it that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shewith His handiwork.”

These deep summer nights, when I watch the spiders harvesting moths snared from their ecstatic loops around the floodlights on the deck, it seems as though He is “shewing” us a dark, fevered Nature unlike the brave, noble version most of us were brought up to believe in.

In an earlier essay I wrote about the praying mantis that lived in a potted plant on the back porch of our apartment in town. I admired her for a number of reasons, not the least of which is her role as a reminder not to become overly sentimental about “nature.”

Most often, when you hear somebody say they love “nature,” what they really mean is they enjoy scenery, the “Nature” that they see in the advertisements for 4X4 vehicles and motor homes.

“Nature,” after all, is the whole package, from the dawn mists around a forest cataract, to the shelled and jointed things humping and dragging their way through the leaf mold. These are what the essayist Loren Eiseley called the “ugly, innocent, necessary” aspects of Nature with a capital “N.”

When I lived in town, I would often say, thoughtlessly, that I missed Nature. It is an absurdity, of course, like standing in a forest and saying I longed to see trees.

French naturalist Henri Fabre (1823-1915) once said his own back yard contained enough nature to keep him busy for a lifetime. I read somewhere else that the typical suburban yard contains some 40,000 spiders of various sizes and species, and a cubic foot of soil from that same yard may contain billions of individual living creatures.

American nature writer Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980), described his early interest in nature starting at his grandparents’ farm in Indiana. In his book “Near Horizons,” Teale described tucking himself away into a burrowed-out hollow in a field of rye, to spend hours observing ants, beetles, snakes, and other creatures in their everyday existence. He wrote that returning home that evening was like returning from a “distant voyage of discovery.”

What all this means, if one lives in town, is that one does not need to look far to find a very busy nature; one need only look more closely. Even in my third-floor apartment, surrounded by asphalt and a few houseplants, I still found plenty of things to watch.

The mantis, for example. She is cousin to grasshoppers, cockroaches, crickets and walking sticks. Like other insects, she has just enough brain to operate her angular body and that’s about it. Insects are hard-wired, operating on instinct, each species mass-produced by nature from a single mold.

Once I watched a spider, trying to salvage her web during a powerful storm, mooring one of the stays on a branch of my night-blooming cereus, near the spot where the mantis poised, all patience and severity. In the morning, the abandoned web fluttered in the light breeze.

The next day the mantis, calligraphy against white boards, watched as I walked past, her strange, triangular head pivoting on its ball-and-socket neck.

The next night I sat again, watching as she ate another mantis. The female mantis usually eats its mate. The unfortunate Romeo usually gets his head eaten off during the mating, possibly to prevent him from changing his mind.

This mantis lay horizontally before “my” mantis, clutched in the spiked front legs, being eaten aft to fore. Horribly, the victim continued to gaze about, only mildly interested in the proceedings, its antennae waving a vague semaphore while the clockwork mouth parts of its destroyer munched away.

These are the things that inhabit my summer dreams. The profligacy of insects is necessary but the stuff of pure nightmare. If predation and sheer accident did not kill most of the young, who wriggle and rattle near the bottom of the food chain, we would be wading through seas of the things in a matter of weeks. The clattering females of the thousands of species must each lay eggs by the tens of thousands in order to keep ahead of the mortality curve.

The same day I watched the little act of mantis cannibalism, I watched two dragonflies trying to lay their eggs in the parking lot behind the apartment. Female dragonflies lay their eggs by dipping their tails into the water of ponds and streams.

The dragonfly in flight is a spectacle worth watching; perhaps nothing else in the insect world is so graceful or so swift. Teale, who called them “winged bullets,” said some species can achieve speeds approaching 60 miles per hour. The largest living species reach wingspans of seven inches. Fossilized dragonflies with wingspans of 30 inches have been found.

The dragonflies are almost wholly creatures of the air. They scoop their prey into their clustered legs and eat literally on the wing, letting the drained bodies fall without missing a wing-beat.

For all their grace, they are not bright. The dragonflies in the parking lot tried to lay their eggs on the shiny roofs of automobiles. The hapless bugs flew from car to car, thudding uselessly against the shimmering surfaces.

I can watch this kind of thing for hours, on walks in the woods or along a pond, until I just cannot watch any more, and my uneasy sleep is haunted by hockey-mask faces and Rube Goldberg movements.

After awhile, though, I go back, ever curious. If I have learned anything in my somewhat spotty education, it is that “nature” like “art” is a process, never a finished thing. More importantly, as in art, one cannot begin to learn from it until one casts aside any expectations that it’s all going to be pretty.
==============================.

© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Lightning in the Rainbow

It is suddenly storm season in my part of the world.

Every couple of days, sometimes more often, big, strident, Old Testament thunderstorms have stomped through, flooding basements, downing trees, darkening whole neighborhoods and just generally smiting and smoting like nobody’s business.

Well, the garden is happy, and the creek is higher than it usually is this time of year.

Mid-August here in south-central Pa. is typically hot, humid and rainless. I’ve seen the creek so dry by this time of the summer that the fish were taking sponge-baths and my watermelons were the size of baseballs and had similar flavor.

So, I grudgingly admit, the rain is at least provisionally welcome.

That is, it’s getting to be a pain in the butt.

My truck doesn’t have A/C, which means when I’m out in a storm I have to close all the windows and just sort of stew in the stale air.

I have an umbrella and a good, bright yellow rain parka. They are inevitably locked up, safe and dry, in the truck, because if it is not raining when I get out of the truck, I don’t give them a thought. It’s the sort of thing that makes me think I should have had special teachers in school, if you take my meaning.

So, Friday, working on a long story that wasn’t showing any signs at all of helping me write it – some stories practically write themselves, you know – all hell broke loose overhead. I jumped online and called up PennDOT’s traffic camera website and took a peek at what the cameras were seeing.

To the north, east, and south, the view was pretty much…not much. All I could see was a few sets of headlights, nothing else. No road, no discernable details on anything.

Guess where my rain gear was.

It was OK, though. By the time I had beaten the story into a semi-readable condition the storm had raged on and was kicking the crap out of the Poconos.

I squeezed into the Dakota and started on the hour drive home, boring through the occasional light shower and dodging morons, keeping the grumpiness meter down on the sunny side of a full glower. It was, after all, Friday.

I was three-quarters of the way home when the rainbow appeared.

The sun had tumbled down off the edge of the cloud cover way out west, sending its beams eastward across their undersides, turning them to a bright apricot. The fresh-washed air teased the trees and cornfields, some lit gold, some in deep shadow.

Due east, the rainbow arced, vivid against black clouds over toward nightfall. Traffic slowed as drivers, including me, kept looking over to the vast curve of light refracted through raindrops. It’s easy to understand why people used to think them magical. Hell, I still do.

And then, the black boil of storm behind the rainbow cracked open with a fiery spider web of lightning, the kind that snakes briefly from cloud to cloud, painting the landscape white for a split second and then it is gone. All of it framed within that rainbow curve.

Within the cars around me, I saw people pointing, slack-jawed with wonder, or laughing. I made eye-contact with some, and we all smiled together.

It was still sprinkling a little, but I rolled my window down anyway. Suddenly, I didn’t mind the wet so very much.

==============================.

© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Lottery Ticket

Normally, I’m not one to buy lottery tickets.

For one thing, I’ve written about the subject and know the odds are lousy.

For another thing, I don’t want to get in the habit to the point where if I DON’T buy a ticket I’ll think that the one I didn’t buy would have been THE ONE.

The whole Lottery idea is a pie-in-the-sky thing, yet another means of luring dollars away from those who can least afford it, who buy the tickets in the forlorn hope that they will hit it big and become rich as kings, or at least pay off the credit cards so they can buy more stuff on the credit cards.

I had a relative who worked at a lottery kiosk at a grocery store. She would tell tales about people who would come in and cash their welfare checks, then spend the money on lottery tickets. Sometimes one of them would win a little something. Usually they did not.

Nobody ever won the pot at the end of the rainbow.

But she herself would buy tickets out of her own meager income.

I guess hope springs eternal, even against the odds. Maybe especially against the odds.

On Friday, I bought a lottery ticket.

Times are tough. I had just depleted my checking account filling up my pickup truck. It gets lousy mileage, and has no air-conditioning. My car did have a/c and got pretty good mileage, but I blew the engine. At work, we’ve been taking furlough days, which have cut into my income.

They’re also talking about layoffs.

So, I saw the ad for the Cash 5 game. The prize was up over $300,000.

It’s not like reaching for the crown, the Powerball, with its $160 million-plus jackpot, I reasoned. It’s a modest goal, $300,000. Enough, but not a wretched excess that might lead me to doing goofy things like buying a motor home and a GIANT MOTORIZED WATERCRAFT.

I had a dollar in my pocket. Instead of the usual cup of coffee, I bought a Cash 5 ticket and stuffed it in my shirt pocket with my cell phone.

I got back in the truck and shifted through the gears to overdrive, and settled in for the hour-long drive home.

Two minutes later, my cell buzzed to let me know I had received a message. I reached in and pulled it out.

A piece of paper in my pocket popped out with it, whirled around in the cab playfully for a moment, then out the window it went, to flutter like an albino butterfly amongst the cars and tractor-trailers before disappearing from view.

My $300,000 lottery ticket.

I stared ahead, trying not to wobble all over the road.

I knew two things.

I knew that I would never be able to find the ticket.

I also knew that this was going to drive me crazy.

For the rest of my life, I would suspect, no, I would KNOW BEYOND A DOUBT, that the little square of paper that had blown out of my pocket was THE WINNING TICKET. I knew that, in my dotage, in some dark, dank, charity nursing home somewhere, I would spend my final days staring at the walls, muttering “That was THE ONE, yes, it was, I know it. It had to be….”

The staff would call me Mr. Millionaire or Tycoon Terry or some such, just to get my goat.

I parked the truck at home, trudged in, my mood black.

As I changed clothes, I reached in to pull out the cell and felt a piece of paper.

The Ticket.

The paper that had blown away was the receipt for my gasoline.

I have to confess: I laughed out loud.

A little later, I checked online for the winning number.

Not. Even. Close. Naturally.

But at least I knew.

I threw the ticket in the trash.

Now, what am I going to grumble about at the nursing home?
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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Ringo is 69

Ringo Starr is 69 years old today.

For those of you who need the reminder, Ringo was the drummer for the Beatles, a British band terrifically popular mostly in the 1960s who pretty much changed music forever. For those who have forgotten or never heard of them (if there really are such people,) they were Starr, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison.

It was sort of all about the youth movement.

Youth.

Movement.

I note with interest that the Beatles were hitting their stride when The Jackson 5 with tiny phenom Michael Jackson hit the scene.

I’ll spare you the details of how I feel about the Beatles versus Michael Jackson. Imagine me comparing the style of the Ford Company’s autos with those of the Studebaker Company. It would have no meaning if you had no idea of what a Studebaker looked like.

I still have my first Beatles album. It’s a record, an actual vinyl disc, sort of a paleolithic early CD.

Ringo Starr is 69. John is dead, killed by a nutjob. George is dead from cancer. McCartney is licking his wounds, having been gutted by a divorce.

I think I will sit back, drain a fifth of Geritol, and ponder my misspent youth. Hell, I feel so old I think I misspent my youth in Confederate money.

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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Seat of Magnetism

My partner Sue has a magnetic seat cushion.

It’s not the kind of magnet that you find in a compass or in science class. The thing has small magnetic plates fitted into little pockets.

I don’t remember where she got it. She’s pretty big into this homeopathic healing stuff, and herbs and whatnot.

Every morning she mixes us both a drink cobbled together with apple cider vinegar, aloe vera, vitamins, minerals, and I don’t know what else.

I don’t want to know.

What I do know is that I haven’t had the flu or even bad colds since I started drinking the damned stuff. I figure it must be really good for me because it tastes godawful.

The magnetic seat cushion rests in her recliner, and covers the seat and back. It’s in a nice dark material and doesn’t look weird or anything, and doesn’t disrupt my wristwatch or make paperclips slide across the floor, so I guess it’s not a particularly powerful magnetic field.

I can’t say that it works. She sits in it and feels OK, but then, there’s no way to know how she’d feel if she didn’t sit in it. Maybe if she was twins, and we had two recliners.

When she’s not in it, the cats compete to see which of them can curl up on it first. I don’t know what it does for cats, but they sure do sleep well when they’re there, and they’re pretty grumpy when you make them move.

I sat in it one evening when she was out of town on business.

I can’t say that it did anything one way or the other. My joints didn’t hurt when I got up, but then, they weren’t hurting when I sat down.

I probably won’t repeat the experiment, though. For about an hour afterward, my needle kept pointing North.

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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:
http://burger2go.wordpress.com/
http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Miniburger2Go: Happy Birthday, USA, or Artillery and No Worries.

We live near Gettysburg, so this time of year, the nights flicker and thud with fireworks, and the days rumble with re-enactors’ cannonades.

The re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg take place perhaps two miles from my house some years, including this one. When the weather conditions are right, I have worked in my garden while artillery stuttered away right down the road.

One year, I sat with friends on their porch in town and watched a pickup truck drive by with a Civil War cannon in tow, on its way to or from a re-enactment battle.

How many places in the world can you hear artillery or see cannons being moved from one place to another, and say “Oh, they’re just playing?”

Not many, I’d guess. Not as many as there ought to be, anyway.
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