Two flickers! I just saw two flickers!
For a week or so I've been seeing one, hopping along the back lawn like a robin, looking for ants (?) but now I just saw two at the same time. Maybe they're nesting here?
They hop in for a nervous second on the dying willow just outside this window, eyeing all the goodies -- the peanuts, the suet, the sunflower seeds -- but so far they're too jumpy to help themselves.
I reached for the camera so slowly -- this is my picture!
It isn't one I googled! I got a picture of my very own flicker! Stay tuned!
A web site just now asked me to establish a security q&a: --
What was your favorite tv show when you were a child?
First off, I was married and already a mother before I ever saw a live television screen -- which, as I think I told you before, was on a set facing out in a store window. We stood out on the sidewalk to watch some b&w dancing cigarettes.
And then again, the way things are going right now I'm not sure I could remember a show even if I had watched tv as a child.
My son has a friend who answers all security questions with the same word. It might be "cheese" -- or then again it might not (see failing memory complaint above.) At any rate, that's what has just become my favorite tv show. Also the city where my father and mother were married. Also my sixth-grade teacher's name.
Cheese.
This just in from the newspaper that carried Norman Lank's obituary, but never mind that part. Once again, we see the truth of the advice -- when you hear the words "To serve you better..." WATCH OUT!
When I ran into this 1936 black-and-white film on tv yesterday, I was so astounded I didn't even make a note of which channel was offering it. I came in toward the end,
as a girl was making a dash across the room and out the window of a skyscraper. Soon after that a judge was sentencing a young man to an institution for the criminally insane for the rest of his natural life.
I clicked on the little 15-word description of the movie, and learned that it depicted the way
"young people go from marijuana
to wild piano playing,
hysteria and death."
Later I located these posters, according to which the movie should have been restricted to adults only, but there it was on tv in the middle of the morning where any kid playing hookey from school could view it. Wild piano playing!!
Once upon a time -- I'd be heading out today, taking a child out of school
to see and hear an ex-president of the United States.
But instead -- I'll be heading out today,
taking my rollator out of the car
to see and hear a speaker on the subject of captioned telephones.
For the first time in years -- mainly to put off emptying the dishwasher -- I went ego-surfing. Just to see what would happen, I googled the name Edith
Handleman, which I haven't used since 1948. The third link down trumpted my full birth date in bright purple, so of course I had to click it, and --good grief -- there sure isn't any privacy left in this world any more.
Going further down the Google list, I find Norm's obituary.
I discover that in June of 1943 I won a $5 award at the Penn Yan Academy commencement. (That $5 had, another web site informs me, today's buying power of $69 -- not to be sneezed at.)
And then I find my great-grandfather -- Wolf Handleman. That's a name I only found out myself a few years ago. How does this web site know it? -- so I've got to click another link to see what's going on there. And before long I learn (which I never knew) that in February, 1916, my father left Montreal by railroad and entered the United States at St. Albans, Vermont.
Now, of course, I have to google each of the kids. I may never get out there to empty the dishwasher.
