Findings

Yesterday afternoon, in warming temperatures, I took a two-mile walk along the road and then across the open prairie near my house.  As is always my habit, I kept an eye on the ground in hopes of spotting a pretty rock or maybe an arrowhead. 

I regularly find pretty rocks.   Over the years, I have found four or five arrowheads out here—the last about five years ago.

Yesterday, way out in the exact middle of nothing, I found two unusual items: a live cartridge for a 30-06 rifle and a golf tee.

The cartridge can be easily explained by the presence of hunters during deer hunting season. 

The golf tee is a mystery.

You don’t see golfers out on the prairie.

My Open Prairie

My Findings

—Mitchell Hegman

Serious Thought

By my own estimation, I have engaged in over fifty years of truly serious thought.  It occurs to me, as I look at the results of all my thinking, I am not very good at it.

—Mitchell Hegman

Don’t Call 911

I shall start with a list of events I consider legitimate emergencies—events where I would place a 911 call.   Well, a partial list.  Here is a partial list of what I consider call-worthy emergencies:

Your House on Fire

Possible Heart Attack

Neighbor’s House on Fire

A Shooting

Possible Natural Gas Leak

A Plane Crash in Your Front Yard

In my mind, I also have a list of items that almost qualify for a 911 call.   On that list, I would place such stuff as finding a flaming bag of poo on my porch and running out of Scotch on a day when the liquor stores are closed.

The other day, I read a story about a 911 call I definitely would not make.

In this case, a 36-year-old woman from Ohio, Seloni Khetarpal, called 911 several times to report that her parents had cut off her cellphone service.   Dispatchers warned the woman that 911 should be called only if there was an actual emergency.

Khertapal reportedly called back two hours later, insisting she felt the lack of a working phone was a legitimate police matter.  The woman also became somewhat belligerent with dispatchers.

Khetarpal, a resident of Jackson Township, was eventually arrested and charged with disrupting public services, a fourth-degree felony

Did I mention Seloni Khertapal was 36?

The article I read does not indicate what phone she used to make her calls to emergency dispatchers.  No indication, either, why her parents have control of her phone.  During one of her contacts with dispatchers she mentioned that she could not contact her clients.  Apparently, she is a licensed realtor.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: David Moye, huffpost.com.

Something Walt Whitman Said

—I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

—Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

—The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.

Yahoo!

Every winter, as my boiler heating system is forced to gallop along, one particular zone develops a few air bubbles in the pipes.  Migrating around the loop of hydronic heating baseboards, these air bubbles sometimes produce noise ranging on a scale from mildly entertaining to frightening.

Not to long ago, my problematic zone took on more air and escalated in noise-making.  The zone began producing what sounded like an uneasy marriage between earth-moving machines working deep inside a gravel pit and a poltergeist mixing drinks with crushed ice in a metal cocktail shaker.

I have since bled sputtering and hissing bubbles of air from the offending heating zone.  We are once again at the occasionally entertaining level of sounds where the hydronic system randomly emits a little “ta-da” or releases something of a “yahoo” at the beginning of a heating cycle.

For now, we celebrate heating my house.

—Mitchell Hegman

Last Piece of the Puzzle

I recently finished piecing together a 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle.  Posted at the end of this blog, you will find a photo I captured of the last piece remaining before it was snapped into place.

Even as I start a new puzzle by sorting out edges and grouping pieces by colors and patterns, I am curious about which piece will be the last put in place.

Questions come to mind.

How many other people will end up with the same “last” piece?  Is there a reason a specific piece might be more likely to be that last?  Say, based on color?  Based on patterns that exist in the puzzle?  The shape of the piece?  The mood of the person putting together the puzzle?  The manner in which the pieces are sorted?

Does a mathematical formula exist for explain all of this?

There is a firm answer of sorts.  Not a good one.  My friend Kevin developed a rather devious predictor.  His late wife, Brenda, was something of a fanatical puzzle-builder.  Every so often, Kevin would sneak away a piece from one of her puzzles.  Naturally, as Brenda found herself hunting around the table and under chairs for the last piece, Kevin would swoop in with the last piece of the puzzle.  “Here it is,” he would say.

—Mitchell Hegman

Making a Snowman

Yesterday, as afternoon temperatures ascended into the 50s, the young and the old among us gathered at the lake to cook hotdogs over an open fire.  Snow, at this point, has mostly melted from the landscape around the lake.  But on the lake, the ice holds firm at over a foot thick, and a layer of snow remains atop the ice.

As luck would have it, the temperature and water content of the snow was ideal for making a snowman.  Such conditions are surprisingly rare.  Here in Montana, especially, we tend to have a powdery snow that behaves more like dry sugar.

The snowman building process started on the ice just offshore with great enthusiasm.  Tad and Stacie St. Clair, along with their two boys, began rolling and packing big snowballs across the perfectly flat surface.  The passion for making a snowman lasted only a couple minutes in the children.  Pretty soon, Sawyer, the smallest boy, found poking blue hole in the white snow with a stick far more entertaining.  Cooper, the older of the two boys, soon drifted back toward the fire.        

Gripped by a certain romanticism, the two adults continued on.  Quickly enough, a snowman stood tall near the frozen shoreline.  Tad finished his sculpturing by adding, as a final Montana touch, a set of deer antlers.

There!  A snowbuck.

—Mitchell Hegman

Food: The Wrong Answer

I am fine if there is a question about food and the answer is: “Add more diced black olives.”

But I worry my answer might be: “Space the insects slightly apart on a lightly oiled baking sheet and then bake your crickets for about 20 minutes at 225 degrees, or until crispy.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Purple

Rachel didn’t particularly like her arms, or her legs, or much of anything except her long hair.

She had her reasons.

Arm and legs too gangly.  And her feet?  Well, everyone, in her estimation, had ugly feet.

Rachel loved how the full sun twizzled colors into her black hair.  If she flicked her head, Rachel could see tiny explosions of red, and sometimes purple, deep within the strands lashed against the light.

Purple!  Just for an instant.  

What’s not to like about that?

—Mitchell Hegman

Broccoli: Proof Life is Not Fair

Life is not fair.  For proof, look no farther than your dinner plate.

Consider.   Sugar is poison.

Sugar sucker-punches the nutritious foods you eat and then races ahead of them, adding a zillion calories in doing so.  But sugar tastes thrilling—something akin to a carnival with fun music and wild parties on your taste buds.

Broccoli, on the other hand, is a superfood.

Broccoli provides vitamin C, fiber, and cancer fighting antioxidants.  But it tastes like broccoli.

—Mitchell Hegman

Talking with Connie

My big sister, Connie, passed on last year.   I miss her.  I miss talking with her.

Following is my journal entry from December 7, 1995:

My sister Connie called.   We talked about all the usual stuff: beads made from the glass of Vicks Vapor Rub jars by members of some tribe in Africa, UFO’s, alien abduction, bigfoot, fish.

Talking about fish was my idea.

She’s a twist, Connie is.  She’s astoundingly intelligent, a speed-reader, and frighteningly intuitive.  I really think she has a kind of connection to a sixth sense—a single wire perhaps, one upon which only an occasional signal arrives.  At times, however, some of the signals serve only to confound the rest of us.

Recently, to site an example, my nephew mentioned to Connie that he felt very apprehensive about a geology test he had to take in one of his college courses.  Much of the test required accurately identifying a slew of mineral specimens and their properties.  My nephew heard from the professor’s previous students that an elevated number of students failed the test.  At some point near this time in the conversation, Connie apparently captured something of a signal on her wire.  “If you listen to the rocks,” she told him, “they will tell you what they are.  Listen to the rocks.”

Well, I’m here to tell you that a person could take that sort of advice to a lot of places and be forced to take some other kinds of tests while under the strictest of supervision.  But my nephew did listen to the rocks.  And he scored quite well on the test.  If you’re willing to dance pretty fast, you can keep up with my sister...and you just never know where you might go.

Talking about fish?  Well, I’ve been having these dreams where huge rainbow trout are swimming under my blankets at night.  In my dreams, I wake to find these enormous humps migrating around under the blankets.

All I ever wanted was dreams where I go fishing and actually catch a fish or two.

—Mitchell Hegman

Ghosts Fear Me

I have never seen a ghost.  I thought about that a little.  Perhaps this is because—for some reason unknown to me—ghosts fear me and will not approach.

I like that thought.

But, no matter what, I am still going to run from spiders.

—Mitchell Hegman

Aging Gracefully

I have figured out the trick for aging gracefully.  Avoid looking in the mirror and don’t try to bust any fast moves.

—Mitchell Hegman

Falling Again

I am not sure how many documentaries about 9-11 and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center I have seen.  I am going to guess I have watched seven or eight.

I watched another last night.

Thing is, I am stupid for watching these documentaries.  My heart breaks each time I watch.   I cringe seeing smoke billowing from the twin towers.  Worse, is seeing people leaning outside the glass walls, having been chased there by fires raging inside.  And, though I know this is impossible, a part of me always hopes some of those poor souls will not begin jumping from the upper floors.  A dumb but inflexible little piece of me hopes the towers won’t fall this time.

—Mitchell Hegman

20 Pounds of Housecat at Rest

I have provided you with a photograph of my cat today.

Take a close look.

You decide: Is he resting normally, or is he the victim of some kind of weird sleep explosion?

—Mitchell Hegman

A Notable First Date

I once had a discussion with a woman about her misadventures in dating men she had encountered on a dating site.  Her most notable first date was with a man who picked her up on a Saturday morning in a clunker pickup and took her to a backyard small engine repair shop to browse through used lawnmowers.

“Geez, I wish I had thought of that one.” I said.  “Was there a second date?”

“There was not even a second half of the first date.”

—Mitchell Hegman

More Epitaphs

—He Left The Water Running

—Crazy Can Be Useful

—It’s Okay To Have More Questions Than Answers

—He Came… He Saw… But Why Did He Say That?

—Maybe A Lifetime Was Too Much

—Mitchell Hegman

The $1.50 Purse

Another random memory jabbed me yesterday while I stood at my kitchen sink washing dishes.

“Jabbed” may be too strong a word, but I use that word because the memory struck quickly and with no apparent trigger.  The memory is of a decent human event.

My late wife, Uyen, was a seamstress by trade.  In the last few years of her life, she made and sold crafts both online and in local craft shows.  She sold fabric origami cranes and butterflies, jewelry, kimonos she’d sewn, and an assortment of odds and ends.

I often helped Uyen set-up and work her booths at local craft shows.  At one such craft show in Helena, Uyen had for sale some small coin purses.  The purses were marked for sale at a price of $1.50.  While we were sitting at the booth, a young mother and her daughter (a girl aged no more than three) approached the table.  While the mother flicked through the colorful fabric cranes and browsed through kimonos, the little girl stood admiring the coin purses.

After spending a bit of time at Uyen’s booth, the mother and daughter melted back into the milling crowd without purchasing anything.  Ten minutes later, the pair appeared at Uyen’s booth again.  “My daughter wants to show me something she wants,” explained the mother.  “She has been saving her change.”

The little girl picked up one of the coin purses with one hand.  Obviously, she held her savings in the other hand.  The purse glittered with deep blue sequins.

“You don’t have enough money for that,” the mother said, looking down at the price.

The girl stood there, holding the purse, trying her best to process.

Uyen leaned toward the little girl.  “Let me see your money,” she said.

The little girl held forth the hand in which she clutched her money.  She slowly opened her fingers to reveal fifty-some cents.

“Hmmm,” Uyen ruminated, “I think we can make a deal.  You can have the purse for that much.”

“Are you sure?” asked the mother.

“Yes,” said Uyen.

“Give her your money,” the mother urged.

The little girl carefully transferred the change into Uyen’s palm.  “Thank you,” Uyen said, “the purse is yours.”

“Thank you so much,” the mother told Uyen.

The girl and her mother walked away with deep smiles on their faces.  As soon as they were out of view, I asked: “Why didn’t you just give her the purse?”

Uyen did not hesitate in her answer.   “Because her mother was teaching her.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Big Circled Just Once

Fresh snow tells tales.

At first light, as the entire horizon turns the color of my hand and light reaches into the valley, I venture out.

I am first met with scandal—the tiny, zig-zagging prints of a field mouse.  The mouse mostly remained atop the snow.  The trail disorderly, but ranging widely.

Under my birdfeeder, something bigger circled just once.  Blue holes in white snow.  A fox.  The fox prints angle straight in from the open prairie, and veer out to the nearest gulch after rounding the birdfeeder.

As a younger man, I supposed I could follow such tracks and eventually catch the animal standing somewhere in its last prints.

Today, I suppose I should go back inside and drink one more cup of coffee.

I like to keep my mornings simple.

And one more thing.  I see where a big bird flew in, touched down, and padded around below my Mayday tree.  Likely a magpie.  A predawn visitation of no importance.  The bird waddled about only a little, leaving trident impressions in the snow, before sky-jumping away again.

Oh, yes, and now the prints of my slippers.  Out from the house and soon back in.

In a few hours, after I have sipped the last of my coffee, the prints will melt back into grass and concrete and earth.  Tomorrow, if we are all lucky, we see our prints anew.

—Mitchell Hegman

Strange Talisman

One of my more mundane quirks is the nearly constant need to jot down notes to myself and place them at various places around the house.  At present, I have notes in five locations.  These notes range from “rotate tires” to “Brooke Annibale – under streetlights (acoustic).”

Back in my days of working construction, I left my work clothes on chair in the laundry room with my boots placed alongside them.  If, during the course of an evening, something about work struck me—say a loose end I needed to complete or something I needed to order—I would write a note and place it on my clothing so I would see it in the morning.

Often, thoughts about work struck me when I was too busy to write a note or had no immediate means to do so.  Instead of writing a note, I would grab something strange, say, one of my wife’s magazines or a fork, and I would place the item atop my work clothing.  In the morning, the sight of a strange talisman on my clothing would trigger the thought that caused me to place the item there.

Eventually, that transformed into a single method of reminder when a thought struck me.  Both my wife and my sister, on different occasions, caught sight of my talisman and asked: “Mitch, why is there a banana stuffed inside your boot?”

My answer would be something along this order: “Because I need to order more half-inch conduit.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Not My Question…But A Good One!

Computers, when they work properly, are swift and dazzling.  When computers are glitchy, they are an equivalent to using a Phillips screwdriver on a slotted screw.

In my way of thinking, hardware or software problems are (or can be) equally insidious.

Recently, I have been having software problems with iTunes.  I keep getting caught up in a vicious cycle where iTunes won’t allow me to access a song in my library until I authorize my computer.  So, I punch in my access information when prompted and send off.  A pop-up tells me the computer has previously been authorized.  So, I try to play the song again.  The same pop-up I started with informs my computer is not authorized.

On into infinity.

Please take a moment here to insert a few bad words of your own preference.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided to seek help from the vast an all-knowing internet.  I would ask Google why iTunes keeps asking me to authorize my computer.  I brought forth the search engine and began typing in “Why does iTunes….”

And directly below where I typed in my query, Google auto-populated the number one query to that point: “Why does iTunes suck?”

—Mitchell Hegman

The Law of Conservation of Energy

The law of conservation of energy states, in simple terms, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form into another or transferred from one object to another.

That seems like a pretty good law to me.

I’m just wondering why more energy didn’t get properly transferred into a couple of my coworkers.

—Mitchell Hegman

Creepers

I am not sure if my hoya plant is happy or unhappy.  Either way, something is going on.  In the last three weeks, the plant has set forth six creepers—each of them reaching out for the walls or ceiling of my house.  Two of the creepers have twined into a single strand reaching nearly straight up.

Is the hoya attempting to escape?   Why this sudden growth at this time?  What has triggered the plant to grow so dramatically?  The only thing I have done of note in the last few weeks is switch from listening to Sirius XM to listening to my iPod throughout the day if I am home. Could that spur the hoya to grow?

Consider, this plant is no debutante.

I have had this slow-growing plant since the mid-1980s.  My hoya came from a start I took from a hoya my grandmother started growing in her house in East Helena in the 1940s.

Sometimes called a wax plant or wax flower, hoyas are native to the warm and tropical climates of Asia.  If my plant is reaching out for new ground, it will need to grasp at the planter for my Christmas cactus or cat palm.

For now, I am simply going to monitor the plant and hope it doesn’t come after me.

—Mitchell Hegman

At the Same Time

This world is both modern and ancient at the same time.  While you stand watching with hand-held electronics in hand, a fox or your own housecat can, in two leaps, bound from this century to time primordial.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Unknown Dangers of Shuffling Music on an iPod

I regularly listen to Sirius XM and have, at times, listened to Paradise Radio and Spotify.  I like such subscription services.  You can choose a station or playlist featuring a specific genre you like and stream that music to your device of choice.

At the same time, my taste in music is wide.  I enjoy most everything: classical, alternative rock, southern gothic, new wave, classic rock, hard rock, punk, flamenco guitar, folk music, and on and on.       

Over the years, I have downloaded something near 3000 songs from iTunes.

Old school, I know.

I enjoy a wide variety at all times.  I play the songs I downloaded to my iPod in shuffle mode so music from every genre pops up randomly.  Having Frank Sinatra follow, say, Stairway to Heaven is satisfying to me.

Yesterday, however, my iPod went a bridge too far. The song “A Beautiful Day” by Freedom Fry was immediately followed Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.”  That was a bit too jarring—something on the same level as your grandmother using the F-word on you.

—Mitchell Hegman

Irrational Fear

I think my fear of spiders is rational.  For one thing, spiders have too many legs. Watching them shoot across the floor on all those legs is creepy.

Spiders also have too many eyes.  I read at Discoverwildlife.com that many people mistakenly think all spiders have eight eyes.  “While most spiders have eight eyes,” the fact site states, “there are some that only have six, and even some spiders that have fewer than six eyes.”

Small comfort, that.

My absolute limit is two eyes.

My fears are well-founded.

My housecat, on the other hand, has a lot of irrational fears.  He fears my neighbor, Kevin, which makes a little sense.  But he is also afraid of one of my two brooms (the big one).  He fears my vacuum cleaner.  For a time, my sneezing freaked him out.  He would dart out the room whenever I sneezed.  He has gotten better about that.

Yesterday, I terrorized my cat with something new: my Swiffer duster.  When he saw me walk out into the kitchen with the Swiffer in hand, he exploded into the air and then streaked back into the master bedroom to hide.

“Dude!” I yelled after him.  “It’s just a duster.  It’s soft and feathery.  And it’s a nice, powdery blue-green color.”

And then a thought occurred to me.  I brought the Swiffer closer to my face and studied.  “We’re good, buddy,” I called back to the cat.  “It doesn’t have eight eyes either.”

PHOTO: Scary Stuff

—Mitchell Hegman

Painting in a Hurry

I am not likely to pick up where Michelle Nirumandrad leaves off anytime soon.  The way I have this calculated, I have three strikes against me.

First, I am not proficient at multitasking.

Second, I like to finish stuff once I get started.

Third, I have no intention of jumping from a fully functional airplane unless said airplane is parked on the tarmac.

So, here is where we are: Michelle Nirumandrad is the world’s first sky-diving painter.  She produces acrylic paintings while free-falling from the sky.  Michelle doesn’t land on the ground with a Mona Lisa, mind you, but…there is paint on the canvas (and on her).   

As I mentioned, I don’t see myself following in Michelle’s “footsteps” anytime soon.  For one thing, I can’t scream in terror and paint at the same time.  If I did manage to start a painting while dropping at terminal velocity, my personality type is such that I would want to finish to my liking.  That would likely require hours.

I did the math on that.  It’s a “no go.”

Posted below is a video of Michelle Nirumandrad producing some of her works.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: https://www.ripleys.com

Video Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vygS6HjQlug&t=147s

A Warm Day

Yesterday, with temperatures climbing up in to the sixties, a bunch of us gathered down at the lakeshore for a midwinter session around the fire ring.  Though brisk winds prevailed on the lake ice and across the elevated landscapes around us, we remained in relative calm at the fire.  The ice, while melting on top, remains about eighteen inches thick.

Yesterday, in a single word: Perfect.

—Mitchell Hegman