Beginnings of A Spiral

Now I know where the idea for spiral stairs came from - squirrels.

There were a pair of squirrels involved in a lively game of tag today. I noticed they never ran straight up or down the trees. Time and again they spiraled around the trunks as they scurried from ground to branches and back again.

I'm guessing it's an instinctive countermeasure to confuse predators.

But long before that "ah-ha"moment came to me I was imagining a perplexed homesteader trying to figure out how to get a staircase into a compact home. Getting ready to fell the next tree in preparation for making the components of his stair, the builder was startled to have two gray furry critters dash between his feet and spiral up the tree.

Picking up on the gift he had been given, the builder simply axed the tree just below branch height, shoved it through the front door and into the opening to the second floor. After pruning selectively he was left with a set of branches spiraling upward.  Wa-la. The spiral staircase was born

Close Encounter of the Second Kind

It could have been a close encounter of the third kind.

There I was driving home, minding my own business, and accompanying the songs on the radio in my Freddy Mercury falsetto when a noise akin to the howling wind of a category 5 hurricane rattled the very nice and bolts of my car.

Finding nothing to the right of me and nothing to the left, I looked up - to discover something roughly the size of Starship Enterprise overhead.

It was only then I realized I was passing the Air Force base. The small city overhead was not a starship but a standard issue C-10 transport.

I might not have been so quick to breath a sigh of relief if I had known the armed forces had the testing of laser guns on the agenda  today.

Steps Make the Journey

In some ways we humans are not so different from wild animals.

One day after another we rise from our slumbers, set about our daily routines, pause to feed ourselves, and return to our beds.

What makes us different is the desire to improve our circumstances. But our aspirations are often so heady that we fail to enjoy small accomplishments.  Where an animal might might thrill at the discovery of a particularly succulent piece of fruit, we overlook the such momentary accomplishments. So focused are we on the goal at the horizon we miss the improvement of today.

We all ought to remember to allow ourselves a self-administered pat on the back for being more efficient at a single task, for discovering a tastier way to prepare a meal, for allowing more time to spend with a loved one. It is these individual stepping stones that make the longer journey worthwhile.

Hummer A Crazy Tune

The man was definitely insane.

I didn't know who he was, had never seen him before, wasn't near enough to hear him speak, but there was no doubt in my mind the guy was certifiably nuts.

He was driving a sparkling new Hummer 2 with temporary tags.

Only someone whose sanity had fled into the night would buy an eight mile per gallon civilian tank with gas prices nudging toward four dollars a gallon.

Time Lapse Morning

I lived an entire day in forty minutes.

You might have seen those time lapse sequences where a seed sprouts, a stalk grows, leaves fill out, blossoms open, pedals fall, and the stalk wilts all in the span of eighty seconds.

Such was the way today started.  I pulled out of my driveway just as the faintest hints of swirling pastels were forming on the eastern horizon.  Ten miles into my drive, heavy clouds the color of purple twilight were edging in from the west.

Another ten miles and midnight had descended. The flowers of the ornamental trees that had been coaxed into full blossom by the previous eighty degree day fairly glowed in stark contrast to the pitch black.Quickly the trees were obliterated by rain that didn't fall but blew in horizontal sheets.

As quickly a false midnight had descended, clouds thinned and the western sky sported pink finery. Quickly the remaining clouds raced to the northeast, their sheared edges showing the wear of their hurry.

And then, for the second time in the morning, the eastern sky glowed with the windmilling colors of dawn.

Digging Up the Past

There's a surprise in every sand dune.

I can only imagine the adrenaline surge a local beach comber experienced when his metal detector registered something large enough to send the meter right off the scale. The guy had to have dropped to his knees to start digging furiously.

Such a treasure hunter was doing just that kind of furious digging in a sand dune that once provided shelter to a military base during the World War.  The base was home to some "guns" big enough to sink a ship well off shore.

I invite you to picture the expression on the treasure hunter's face when his goldmine turned out to be ordinance from one of those monster guns - not an empty casing, but a fully in-tact "rocket".

I'm betting he dropped his metal shovel in one heck of a hurry.

Hours later authorities showed up on the scene and... you guessed it... DETONATED that World War relic.

I'd be willing to bet I could pick up a metal detector for cheap if I had a mind to,

Dream Psychosis

It was the socks that made me do it.

There are times I wake from an off-the-wall dream and wonder where in the world that came from.
Once I clear the fog from my head I can frequently track psychotic activities to a movie or television show I watched or perhaps a book I'd read. 

But I could come up with no such explanation last night.  I simply could not put my finger on a "real world" link that would account for strangling people and throwing them into the fireplace that heated an elaborate mansion.

It was only while cooking breakfast this morning that I remembered my dream dismay of discovering I was wearing mis-matched socks.

Which of course explained the brutality.