Sunday Sundries, 250

1. HBOTW [Human Beings of the Week]: Once again--the wonderful folks at Open Door Coffee Company, who continue to help make my daily life on this "bent world" (stole that from Gerard Manley Hopkins--link to his poem, "God's Grandeur--a poem I first read with Dr. Charles McKinley back at Hiram College in, oh, 1964 or so). Anyway, the owner and the baristas at OD are surpassingly kind to me--and tomorrow, I'll tell you a story!

2. I see that this is Sunday Sundries post #250. That's nearly five years of them! I'm actually always quite surprised when I discover, a week on from my previous post, that I still have something to say. May it ever be so! (Ha!)

3. I finished just one book this week (though I am running out of pages in a couple of others), a book called Papa Goose: One Year, Seven Goslings, and the Flight of My Life (2018) by ornithologist  Michael Quetting, translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst.

Let me explain why I bought and read this book: Back in September, Joyce and I were talking about the myriads of Canada geese around here, and we were wondering if, when they, oh, parade across a busy highway--or fly in that remarkable V--if they always do so in the same order. I was guessing that they did (geese, I think, are even more habit-bound than I!). So I looked online for a goose-book, saw this one, thought it would be perfect.

It sort of was. Quetting tells about his project of raising a set of geese from egg to departure. And he did. He took them into his life (he did not live at home!), maintained the incubator, made sure they were used to his sounds, and by the time they hatched, they had already bonded with him--and so they stayed until they winged off for the final time (not all at the same time, by the way). He tells about taking them for walks, showing them their rural world, "talking" with them, naming them (he put colored bands on their legs so he could tell them apart), and, finally, soaring into the sky with them (he flew an ultralight).

The stories he tells are amazing.

But ... he never really answered my question, though, based I what he said about other things in the anserine world, I'd bet that, well, I was right!

(Just checked online via Smithsonian: I was wrong. In flight they change positions to ease the strain from wind and weather on the one at the head.)

(I'm not going to look on the Internet for any info about the order they walk in: I don't want to be wrong twice on the same day!)

4. I've been watching Amazon Prime's Jack Ryan (season 2) in bed for a few minutes a night as I wait for Joyce to quit reading and writing and join me--at which time we stream bits of "our" shows (right now: Doc Martin, Waking the Dead, + some comedians now and then). I can't watch a lot of Jack at once: I get too ... nervous (it's just great being older!)  ... so I shut it down before I have a heart attack.

Back in the Day, I read a lot of Clancy, finally giving up when (in my view) he got crazier and crazier. Admired his research and knowledge, though.

5. Last word: A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers:
      
     - from dictionary.com

strepitous—or strepitant (STREP-uh-tus)

adjective

rare—noisy; boisterous

C17: from Latin strepitus a din