It’s the ghost light!

I was headed to bed, but this is so funny that I just had to stop and post it before I forget:

Ron went to lunch at Napoli’s with some of the Tulsa Now folks today and came home with a present for me: A friend of his, who works with Tulsa’s awesome Metropolitan Environmental Trust, had given him a cool flashlight/radio/emergency siren/cell phone charger that works off a dynamo. You wind it up, and it charges the built-in batteries. It works a lot like a Freeplay.

Anyway, I have been talking about using an LED headlamp at night to save power, so it seemed worthwhile to carry this LED flashlight/radio contraption around this evening and see if it was bright enough to get me from computer to refrigerator and back without tripping over any dogs.

It worked just fine and is, I think, a marvelous renewable-energy alternative to keeping umpteen power-sucking lights on all night. (Yes, we use CFLs, but a 13-watt spiral bulb still can’t compare to a zero-energy flashlight.)

As far as I can tell, it has just one down side:

Songdog is terrified of it.

I have no idea what he thinks it is going to do to him, but he runs away from it every time I turn it on.

At first, I thought maybe the light was hurting his eyes, but even when I stand behind him and shine the light out ahead of us, so it just illuminates our path, he runs and hides in another room. The first time I turned the flashlight on, he ran and hid in his crate and refused to come out until I sat on the floor and invited him onto my lap, which is his favorite place in the whole world. He came out of his crate and immediately buried his face in my chest, trying to hide from the bad, scary flashlight. If I so much as touched it, he would look away and hang his head.

I shouldn’t laugh at him — the poor dog is obviously terribly frightened of this light — but honestly, his reaction was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Very few things scare Song, but that flashlight has him totally cowed.

Swamped

I haven’t had time to post much in the past few days, as I’ve been snowed under (I had a meeting Tuesday evening, church Wednesday evening, dinner with a friend Thursday evening, hung out with another friend in Stroud on Friday evening, and am headed to a Route 66 event in Kansas with yet another friend in a few hours), but I did spend some time taking photographs after dinner Thursday and am working on a special project that will probably take a couple of weeks to complete.

In looking back at my week, I’m starting to realize just how richly blessed I am to have so many dear friends, with such diverse ideas and ways of thinking about things. I have some thoughts on that bouncing around my head, but it’s getting late, I’ve got an early morning ahead of me, and I’m just too tired to put my thoughts together in any sort of coherent fashion right now. Stay tuned … I’ll try to say something profound before the weekend is out.

In the meantime, I will just report that today was a beautiful day, the chickens are healthy and happy (but still have not yet started laying eggs), the bees are loving the weather (not to mention the proliferation of honeysuckle, blackberry, and assorted other blossoms all over my yard), the zinnias and daisies and echinacea I planted the other day are thriving, the tomato and cucumber vines are covered with blossoms, and the irises I finally planted next to the pond the other day seem to be doing well. Film at 11….

Emily