15 February …

 

Tonight is the radio club meeting.  Report next week …

Yesterday was our first trip “out” since the first of the year.  I replenished my supply of flour and butter. 

It was a good day, with one exception.  It had been seven weeks since we saw the retinologist rather than the regular four and there had been a bit of regression in George’s AMD, i.e. an increase in fluid under his retina.  We will be on a strict four week schedule from now on so things should improve.

Weather was good and all we needed to get done got done.

Today we go to Yreka after firewood and the rest of the grocery list.  I also have to pay the second installment of property taxes.  In the past, tax payments were due on 10 December and 10 April.  This tax year the dates were moved to 1 November and 1 February.  Next year (this year?) I will try to pay the entire bill in November.

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A bit ago, I got a really surprising contact from a woman in Portland, Oregon.  She said she had an aunt whose maiden name had been Wilma Dibelka.  Wow !  Floored me.  I had been told my name, which I inherited from my aunt, was a female form of my grandfather’s name (he was Charles William called Will) and I had known only two Wilmas, my aunt and I, until I went to college where I met a Wilma and then here to Mt Shasta where I worked with another Wilma for twenty years.

The woman in Portland said her aunt had been a Czech and gave me her married name.  My first thought was this might be a lead-in to Dibelka research in the old country so, of course, I started looking. I still have a long way to go with this search, but I have already found a Wilma Diabelko, born in Czechoslovakia in 1923, who applied for a US Social Security number in 1941.  War refugee? 

This is going to be fun.

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Does anyone remember high jumps before the Fosbury flop?  I remember the first time I saw a flop and that there was a way to get over the bar before, but I couldn’t recall exactly what it looked like.  Then I found this picture from the Olympics …Fosbury

But my point in bringing up this obscure item is that last week I learned the flop first saw light in Medford just a few miles up the road.  It is a technique which shifted the jumper’s center of gravity to a spot below his body (even below the bar) allowing a higher jump.

Dick Fosbury failed to clear 5′ to qualify for a meet while in high school because he couldn’t master the then favored technique in order to get his 6’4″ over the bar.  So he (and his coachs at Medford High School and the University of Oregon) fine-tuned the back-first style and won a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics at 7′ 4 1/4″.

The name came from an article in the Medford Mail -Tribune in which the reporter said he looked like a fish flopping in a boat.

What triggered this trip into useless trivia?  Last week Dick Fosbury was in Medford at a sports fundraising event and caught my attention on a tv news report because he stood head and shoulders (almost head and torso) over the young man reporting the event.

And now you too are an owner of this trivia.

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The roads out here on Hammond Ranch are in pretty sad condition.  Rain 9 Feb 2017The road subsurface is supersaturated with rain and snow-melt runoff.  As a result the road surface has been breaking down creating rather large mud holes. 

Sugar Pine Road is essentially impassable at one point.  Wreckers have been coming out routinely to pull vehicles out of the mud.  Maybe it wasn’t as much of a problem as we thought that our driveway and the immediately adjacent road weren’t passable.

In forty years of residence out here we have never seen this much road damage.  However, that isn’t so surprising since for the majority of that time the road was used by comparatively few families.  Now there are, at a minimum, close to a hundred families in which at least one member needs to go out and in every day.  No wonder the roads break down.

Weather has been iffy …10 February 2017 melt one day,

11 February 2017 then a light snow,

15 February 2017then more melt.

AC and Fluffy

 

 

AC and Fluffy were on the boardwalk this morning.

 

 

But spring is on the way …Here Comes Spring

All-in-all, Milne had it right when he wrote … 

”It’s snowing still,” said Eeyore gloomily.

“So it is.”

“And freezing.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” said Eeyore. “However,” he said, brightening up a little, “we haven’t had an earthquake lately.”

 

So … ’til next week …