DONNIE JOHNSTON: On Trees, COVID, Chocolate, the Moon, Baseball, and March Madness
How about a few random thoughts today?
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
How about a few random thoughts today?
A friend told me she wanted a tree in her front yard taken down so she got quote from a landscaping company.
“They wanted $4,500 to remove that one tree!” she exclaimed. “That’s outrageous!”
Having seen the tree, which wasn’t all that imposing, I agreed.
“Why not just leave it there?” I asked. “It provides a lot of shade.”
The lady gave me several reasons, one of them being that she was tired of raking the leaves in the fall, to which I explained that she could hire a lot of leaf rakers for $4,500.
But her biggest reason was that she was afraid the tree, or at least part of it, might come down in a storm and hit her house.
“Let it come down,” I said. “You have insurance. If it hits the house the insurance company will take care of the repairs and have the tree removed at the cost of your deductible, which you said was $1,000.
“That will save you $3,500 and you’ll get to enjoy the tree and its shade for a longer period of time. And in reality, it may never come down in your lifetime.”
There is always a more economical way to handle these problems.
I had COVID-19 about a month ago. It was maybe the fourth case of the virus I have had during the past six years. And it was not the worst, only taking me partially out of action for maybe three days.
This time, however, I had after-effects. For about three or four days after I got better, I found that my tastebuds had changed. On the way to where I play golf there is a store where I almost always stop and get a hamburger. And this store has the tastiest hamburgers around, at least in my opinion. After COVID, the hamburger wasn’t that appealing. It just didn’t have the same taste, and it took about two weeks for the full flavor to return.
But the second after-effect is far more disturbing. I still have no taste for chocolate. That’s right! No taste for chocolate. Not that it tastes bad, it’s just that this sweet treat now has very little flavor at all.
There has never been a chocolate bar that I didn’t love, and I could eat an entire pan of brownies at one sitting. Now I pass a Hershey Bar on the street and it does nothing for me. I sure hope this after-effect goes away.
COVID is a cruel virus.
We are finally going back to the moon!
About durn time! Americans have not set foot on that satellite since 1972. That’s 54 years ago! After all the hoopla of getting there initially in 1969, and the several subsequent visits, you would have thought that we would have placed a colony up there long ago.
No! We just gave up on the moon and turned our attention to Mars and some other areas in space. We should be building condos on the moon by now, offering weekend getaways. No. We just gave up.
Now we have renewed our interest in the moon and we could be returning there as early as this week. Well, not actually landing, but orbiting our nearest space rock.
As someone who embraces science, this comes as good news to me.
Well, baseball has finally done it. That automated strike zone is in. Okay, each team only gets two challenges and technically the umpires are still in charge, but now there is at least an opportunity to appeal a perceived blown call.
So far, the new rule has been very Shakespearean, as in “Much Ado about Nothing.” We shall see how it works out over the course of a full season, but I don’t really think it will have much of an impact.
How about an automated system to determine whether or not a batter actually swung at a pitch. One of those calls almost cost the Mets the ball game Saturday.
Maybe that’s next.
Baseball just can’t stop messing around with the rules.
I can’t finish without a quick comment on Connecticut’s last second win over Duke Sunday.
I was pulling for Duke, in particular because Blue Devil forward Maliq Brown is a hometown kid and I have been friends with his family for three generations (and I had them winning it all).
Still, you must give the Huskies credit, down by 19 twice and they fought back.
And that last shot by Braylon Mullins? Every kid that ever shot hoops on a driveway court imagined himself in that situation a thousand times. Game on the line. Clock running down. Three, two, one… the great shot followed by the imagined cheers.
For most of us, it is only a dream. For Mullins it actually happened.
Enjoy the moment, kid.
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