By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
I need to talk to you about pictures. I’ll start by thanking the folks at the News for putting that big picture of me in my birthday shirt in the middle of my column last week. But I want to make sure you know I didn’t send them that big picture. I sent them that little picture of my niece Hilda Anding. It’s lovely of the paper people to do that, but if I had sent it, you might think I’m a little self-centered. You may still think that, and it could be true, but please don’t use those pictures as evidence.
The next thing to tell you about pictures is that I missed taking some good ones this week. Bobby and Deboriah Greeson’s second round of peaches (freestones,) started ripening last week. Carl and I both really love peaches, so we ran right over to pick us some. I love the Greeson place. They have chickens, and rabbits, and some fantastic vegetables growing in raised beds that Bobby builds. They have blackberries too, but we missed those, and this fall they will have pecans. The chickens were having a great time eating the reject peaches that fall to the ground. The rabbits produce poop for the worm farm which provides fertilizer for the garden. Bobby and Deboriah have the kind of place I always wanted. I got too old before I moved to the farm, but I had dreamed of being more self-sufficient. Deboriah says she wishes they were, too, so Bobby could quit his AC work and just tend to the place and make things like the gliders and raised beds he sells to friends and online. Deboriah creates and sells a variety of mixed media art and handmade jewelry, as well as antiques and other interesting things you can find through their business page on google which is very nice. The link is http://deboriahs.business.site, and Deboriah built it with Google’s business listing service that she says is easy to use.
Carl and I brought home a bunch of peaches and, sort of like Blue Bell says, we are eating all we can and sharing the rest. They are wonderful. If you would like to try some of these, and you really should, better call first because they go fast! Their number and directions are on their website, I had every intention of getting a picture of all of us picking peaches, then I forgot. But Deboriah saved the day by sending me the one you see here.
The other picture slipup happened when Carl pointed at my living room ceiling fan and hollered Look! There inside the fan’s light globe was the silhouette of a small lizard! How on earth could a lizard get there? We’ve seen the cat bring things in and toss them in the air while we did our best to save them from him, but could he toss that high? Surely it couldn’t walk across the ceiling and climb in! And it was bound to be cooked by now. I should have got a picture of that. Carl took the globe off, and we were amazed to find a very pale lizard, very much alive. I really should have got a picture of that. But we figured he was bound to be dehydrated and maybe starving, so we quickly took him outside and put him in some grass where we hoped he would recover. That is when I kicked myself about not getting a picture. Especially when it occurred to me that maybe I could write about him a little.
So today at column time, I decided to Google my lizard. Best I can tell he is a house gecko. He has magic feet that science is studying. His feet are covered with jillions of little hairs that are covered with more jillions of little hairs on them, which makes him able to bond with any surface, utilizing something called the van der Walls force by being able to totally and completely contact the surface in a way we can’t. That van der Walls thing is what holds drops of water together and makes snowflakes. Folks generally welcome geckos, because they eat bugs and spiders, but they do excrete large poops that you would think a mouse did, except they are bi-colored like birds and snakes because they don’t urinate. A female gecko can reproduce without a male, but that is not the preferred way. Talk about extreme inbreeding! This picture doesn’t look exactly like my lizard, but it is sort of close. If my lizard was not a gecko, he at least led me to discover some interesting information, and it may interest you. I wish I could explain that van der Waals force to you, because it is fascinating, but I don’t really understand it that well. But you can get a good explanation at http://www.randysplanet.com/2014/06/anti-grav-geckos-2/.