Early winter ahead

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After the unpleasant invasion of Canadian wildfire smoke last month, I had to double-check, but yes, that was plain old fog coming on little cat feet in early August, and there it was again on Wednesday. I did some quick calculations both times.

Back when I was a tadpole, or a cub reporter, or insert your own descriptor for a young’un, one of the fun things about working at a radio station in the middle of a cornfield was the regular callers. There were several farmers and other characters who would ring us up just to shoot the breeze for a couple of minutes. You quickly learned to recognize their voices.

I think it was Ed Kastenschmidt who had the fog theory. Ed insisted that any morning a dense fog settles in, you can count on a snowstorm striking in 90 days. And three months later, he would call to remind us about the fog from 90 days earlier.

And so when those early August visitors lay over the land, I made plans to make sure the snowblower is primed and ready to go on or about November 6 and November 12.

It is easy to forget, with the day lilies and coneflowers and black-eyed Susans and cup plants and compass plants all bursting with midsummer color, that this land is regularly barren and white. It’s only a matter of time.

But enough of that for now. I plan to enjoy this fine summer’s day and raise a cup of coffee to the memory of good old Ed.

Miscellaneous thoughts about nothing much

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It was breathlessly reported this week that the new Toho Ltd. Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus Zero, has a running time of 2 hours, 15 minutes, which makes it the longest Godzilla movie ever filmed in Japan. A couple of the American-made movies of the past decade have been a little longer than that. The last Japanese film, Godzilla Minus One, clocked in at 2 hours, 2 minutes.

People like to talk about such stuff in enormous detail — what do we hope happens to the characters and will any of the other giant monsters like Rodan or Mothra make an appearance — and although I do enjoy the sneak previews we get in the trailers, I’m mostly content just to wait and see what happens when the lights go down on Nov. 6.

The Green Bay Packers’ first pre-season game is scheduled for tonight, and so talking season is upon us again. Sports fans in general and specifically Packers fans love to talk about their team. There are radio stations devoted to nothing but talking about the upcoming games and the games that were just completed and what it all means. Me, I will enjoy the three hours watching the game and won’t think much about it again for the next 165 hours before the next game.

I had a shocking realization last weekend when it occurred to me that the new Spider-Man movie had been out for a week and not only have I not seen it yet, but I had not even thought about it since around July 29 when I thought, “Huh, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is coming out in a couple of days.”

Now, I have been a Spider-Man fan since the summer of 1963, when I spent 12 of the 25 cents my dad had given me — comic book money — on an interesting looking new title called Amazing Spider-Man #4. If I wasn’t at the first showing on the first day, I definitely have been there sometime during the first few days every time a new Spider-Man movie has arrived.

This time, it completely slipped my mind. For more than a week! I hope this doesn’t mean I finally grew up after 73 years. Probably not. Did I mention the new Godzilla movie is 2 hours, 15 minutes long?

Cause and effect

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There are lovely passages scattered throughout the apostle Paul’s letters about living a Christian life.

You know the type, and I quote them fairly often here …

“The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”

And, of course, “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

People often talk about Christians living boring lives, since they’re instructed to live like fuddy-duddies (or whatever the more modern word is for a life where you don’t get to do anything “fun”).

The truth is when you turn your life over to Christ, you tend to give up the “fun” stuff not because you’re being coerced, but because it doesn’t interest you anymore. When you’re overwhelmed with love, joy, peace and all those other fruitful things, there’s precious little time for what more worldly types might call “fun.”

Not much about this life is especially boring.