Monday, Monday.
I don't think there's anything better for an online eBay seller than the last hour of a heavily vetted item.
Is there?
Probably not.
If
you're an online-er.
Did your item sell?
I'm selling something for my mom right now.
My mom gave us something last weekend and it involved gold.
I tell, my brothers and I agreed we're gonna sell and give the money back to my mom and yeah, I'm having fun with it.
So it hasn't sold, but there are bids and it closes in an hour.
So I might be distracted here in the next
hour.
Wow, okay.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Do you wanna plug it?
Like I know it might feel odd to use the radio for your personal sales, but if somebody out there might care that it's a thing that's available.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's like an 1887 gold piece is what it is.
Okay.
And I don't know how my...
Grandma or anybody got it, but there there it was and my brothers and I are just like mom doesn't want it sell it give her the money She can give it to the church or whatever she wants to do with it So yeah the bid the bid started at $1,000 and that's what it's at right now So but the meltdown value of the coin is about 12 or about 1200 so it'll
It'll go up.
There's like 18 people watching it.
But there's, if you enjoy that online stuff, if you've ever sold a tractor online or anything online and there's bidding and it's winding down, there's just a certain addiction to it.
And there's a certain like, oh what?
Anybody?
Anybody?
Two minutes later?
How long ago did I look?
Three seconds ago?
Oh, it might have changed.
So you just kind of keep going
I didn't I've never even heard of these coins so apparently in the late 80s the US Mint produced gold coins in five different denominations You have a gold dollar.
It was a face value one dollar There was the quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents basically ten quarters There was the half eagle, which is five dollars the eagle is ten dollars and the double eagle twenty dollars now I'm sure to coin collectors.
It's like we know I've never heard of this before I didn't know I mean yes
different currencies, different eras.
There used to be a thousand dollar bill that was a thing like, and it's, it's a thing.
So this is an 1887 S golden gold half eagle, $5 gold Liberty coin.
So it's a half eagle to $5 coin.
Gotcha.
So it's actually, I believe from 1887, or if it's a replica coin, whatever, there's gold in it.
If there's gold and silver in it, people will want it.
So, you know, without getting political, the names of these coins sound like somebody just made them up yesterday.
It's just like, you know, this is,
From the same administration that brought you Operation Epic Fury, the double eagle coin.
And guess whose face is on the back side.
And guess who's backside's on the face.
Anyway, Joe, go on.
So I have a, uh, I have something for anybody who knows somebody in the car industry.
Okay.
A guaranteed way to have the best selling car, new car, or you can even modify a used car.
All right.
Here's what you do after, after my wife and I took a little trip down to Medford this past weekend with our, our newer car, which is wonderful.
It's got all the backup things and all that, you know, the light goes off.
If someone's bugging you in your rear view mirror, whatever.
all that stuff.
But one thing it doesn't have is a radio that really functions very well.
Everything else is there.
You turn on the digital little LED screen, you know, and it prints out and it gives you this and that and the temperature control and all that.
But when you try to turn on the radio, there's an issue.
There's an issue finding the radio button.
It's it's there, but they really don't want you to go there.
They want you to go to Sirius XM and they want you to go to your Android phone.
And all we're driving back from Medford and
It was Saturday, or no.
What day, what day did the Packers play?
Thursday.
They played Thursday.
It was not Saturday, it was Thursday.
It was last Thursday.
And the Packer game had started.
So I do like most radio guys do when you're the program director.
I said, well, turn on 98Q, make sure the packing game's on.
So I turned on the radio, dead.
Just dead air.
So I immediately sent the message out to all our powers, you know, 98Qs having issues with the Packers.
And then I proceeded to go to the local station in Medford, also dead air.
So it's like, oh, what are the odds?
What are the odds?
And then I went to any radio station and it was dead.
I had audio from everything else and through a long story short, my wife went into the manual and they said, well, sometimes it literally said, sometimes the computer gets confused and you need to reset it.
You need to pull over, shut off the car for five minutes, lock the car and then it'll reset the computer.
And that worked.
That worked.
But the radio just went, just absolutely silent.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Just like, it's a brand new car.
So I thought to myself, brain.
My wife and I were reminiscing about the old radios and cars.
You know what I'm talking about?
Where you hit the button when you want a channel, you
push it,
you push in a button and the little toggle goes left to right.
There's a little orange thing on it.
It goes, and it slides across to the station.
And then when you want to lock that in, what do you do?
You pull that button out.
And then you snap it back in and you lock that thing in.
All right, so we make these fancy schmancy cars that we have right now.
Go ahead and all the safety mechanisms and I'm all in on that.
But then right below the LED screen.
You put this a little old time radio, right there.
I love that.
Just the old time radio.
So you can just reach down, left knob, a little click, click.
You know what powered on?
You turn it up.
The right knob, you can just scan.
I don't need that little scan button.
That thing's going to way too many channels on the digital scan.
I just want to grab that little knob.
I want a one arm drive, and I want to just turn it slowly and see what I find on that
knob.
See, I think what we, to me, the ideal blend is a
mix of what we have and what we had and actually Rachel's car.
We've got a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee that is awesome.
It has all the buttons you need on the touchscreen and directly below it, physical versions of every single one.
So if you want to touch the screen, you can and it'll work.
But if you don't, you can do that old school thing where I can stare down the road and by feel
Know exactly what button my hands are on because yeah, the round thing is the dial and immediately to the right of the dial There's three buttons and the top one is skip You know like you can right without looking you can do that not possible with a touchscreen And you know what the difference is between people who like touch screens in cars better than touch than buttons in cars
They're weird.
It's that they didn't experience cars with buttons right exactly that like if all you've driven is a car with a touchscreen You might not say hey, it's better, but you'd say hey, I don't see why it's so
bad.
That's why it's so bad.
We used to be able to text in class while making cold eye contact with the teacher.
You know why?
Because the phones had real buttons.
They had real buttons and I'm not saying this should be a thing.
I'm not saying kids should be able to text in
class.
The old blackberries.
Yes.
Where you hit the button and you could feel it.
you just feel that little
nudge.
What are the first two things they teach you in keyboard and classes back in the day?
I know those don't exist anymore, either in a lot of cases, but the first two things they teach you are, here's the home row.
Yeah, yeah, you line up your fingers, ASDF, GKL, whatever, and it's right there.
And it's kind of the second part of the same lesson.
Don't look at your hands.
you look at the screen to see if what you typed is correct.
And as you get better and more proficient at typing, you'll make fewer mistakes and you don't have to look down.
But no, the touchscreen is the requirement to look at the keyboard at all times.
So it's like, not only is it less safe to do things, but it's more difficult.
Less safe, more difficult, no benefits, takes more power from the battery.
Like, hey, how about a list of reasons to do this?
I don't got one.
I remember the first time I took apart one of those old radios because my
My dad liked to go to the dump every Saturday out of necessity, but sometimes we'd pick up old stuff out of the piles of steel.
Oh, I love the leave behind at the
dump.
Yeah, so one time I had a radio and figure, well, obviously this thing doesn't work.
I'm going to take this thing apart.
I want to know what's going on.
And then I realized that the knob, the tuning knob on the old radios, where you just tune it left and right, the little orange toggle goes left and right.
It's basically driven by a rubber band.
There's like a rubber band, like a belted rubber band in
there.
A lot of the time, yes.
And it's just, and the reason why that breaks sometimes is because the rubber band breaks or the little, like a belt on a car, the little grooves in it go bad.
So sometimes you have, sometimes you have the old cars where you're trying to turn the radio and you got to like turn it like 20 times to go like a quarter inch.
It'll go just a little bit, but it's skipping like a bad timing belt in there.
But when I realized that, I just thought,
I've just been turning a rubber band my whole life in this radio.
This is awesome.
This is cool.
I will admit that there is a downside that you get with the type of radio we're talking about that you don't get with the touchscreen.
And it's that certain point when the radio has aged.
And I think in a lot of cases it was cheaper cars.
So some people experience this more than others.
But if your cheap car got old enough, you might get a point where turning the knob to the right sometimes caused the volume.
to go down and it's like if you go slowly it might go like if you you know because they had they had ticks in the knobs so it was click click click and you go if you're going clockwise five clicks it might go up up up down down yeah up up up down up
It's like, why?
Why are you going?
And if you go left to try to go right, it'll just go left.
And then there's that moment when I remember the first time that I saw a radio and it had more than just the two buttons, more than just the volume on the left and the tuner on the right.
There was like a third button.
I'm like, what is the third button?
What is going on here?
balance.
Oh, I can go left and right speaker on this course and then later the bass and the treble and then what we have now everything there you can you can go in and just change everything about the way a stereo sounds.
And I understand the basic concept behind offering that maybe people in the back don't want music as much but do you know what balance?
Yeah, the fade.
Yeah.
Do you know what fade and balance actually do?
That's how your kid blows your speakers.
That's what that's for.
Like, hey, what if we isolate everything to the
front left and crank it hey cool it's really loud out that now it's really quiet out the driver's side door yeah that's all that's for
now your speakers sounds like a vibrating piece of paper but the member of the old speakers when they would blow it would just be that
old speakers Joel you're talking about my last car yeah I know
maybe speakers still have this is probably a more advanced filament but it basically is a glorified piece of like thin cardboard in there and when you blew it you just kind of heard that bubble bubble
it's kind of like a mixture between cardboard and
And yet somehow when it tears it sounds like tissue paper blowing in a hairdryer It's weird what happens when those cones break speaking of I saw a video recently of a Eastern Asian factory where people were making small cheap Bluetooth speakers
Boy, is it amazing how much that process just, it's both way more simple and way more complicated than you're probably envisioning.
It's a person on the line, but here's 5,000 pounds of circle-shaped magnets three inches across.
I mean, the quantities of stuff like this, it's like these people just made, I don't know, 15, 20 grand in Bluetooth speakers, and again, not talking about pay disparity or anything like that, but if you think that making electronics is complicated, you're right.
but assembling them?
No, they're using slingshots and having food fights.
It's amazing how...
I don't know how blue collar, how factory oriented it is.
I would have thought that electronics are a bit more sensitive than that, but no, these people are playing baseball with one hand and making speakers with the other.
I appreciate people who have nice sound systems in your car.
I remember the first time I experienced, is it called a bass cannon, I believe?
Is that what they used
to call it?
Well, so a subwoofer.
You put it in the trunk of your car, a friend of mine had one, and the thing was, I mean, it was too much.
But it was awesome at the same time.
time.
But a good stereo system, our 98Q Cruiser out here, the red vehicle we have, has a really nice stereo.
It has the premiere.
When first time I drove that, I was just like, Oh, this is nice.
This is nice.
Tromex.
Oh, rocking here.
Yeah.
But a good sound system and a car.
Yeah, I don't know how many speakers it takes to make that thing rock, but
When your favorite song comes on and you crank that, you feel like a rock star.
It's
nice.
That was a few fellow millennials and a lot of Gen Xers, especially, will remember Pimp My Ride, which was a heck of a TV show.
And it was not what it seemed to be.
A lot of people have since come out to say, yeah, it was terrible to be on that show.
And the car broke down and they didn't help.
All kinds of wild stuff and crime happening behind the scenes.
But that was one thing they loved to do.
And they did it a couple of times.
One time, they took out a person.
entire back seat to install what I believe was called a jackhammer and this was a single subwoofer bass speaker that was like the cone was like a foot across but it was two and a half feet deep so this thing was basically right by your right ear and the back of it was almost touching the back window of this little car and they built this steel cage just to hold the sled chair the was the jackhammer whatever
wouldn't bounce away so
well so what they would do
And of course a lot of guys, you know, it's the same type of people who will do like fish tails in a parking lot or show off their hydraulics.
You know, it's like a hang out with your car buddies and one up each other kind of thing.
But if you maxed out the bass and the volume on that bass cannon, aside from actually blowing your drums, it would break the windows in the car.
And like it was causing the windows to vibrate and look like they were made of liquid and people's clothes are jumping off them to the beat of the music.
It's like, this is, this, this sounds like a Looney Tunes skit.
Absolutely silly stuff.
I remember Pimp My Ride was from like the nineties or something like
that.
Started late nineties, early 2000s.
I remember
the first time, one of the first times I went to Las Vegas, I pulled up to a stop sign.
in a rental car and the car next to me all of a sudden started going, whatever the air is in there, you know, they're
up and down, starts
bouncing.
And the first thing I thought was pimp my ride in person.
I
said, I just saw it.
I'm looking over and I'm giving him the thumbs up and I'm just saying he peeled out or whatever, but it was
pretty cool.
I picture a bumper sticker on the back that says, already been pimped or something like that.
It fits too well, but no, it's a different world.
You know, I heard somebody put it that,
People do that with their cars for the same reason people in the city like their shoes and they collect things like that.
It's people collect and love and
Spitshine, the thing that gets you places.
And you know
who does that around here?
We were just there Friday, D&D Tire.
I mean, I'm sorry, I don't know to what extent, but they do that stuff.
They do that special customizing stuff.
That's awesome.
For some people, yeah.
Well, and they do the simple stuff too.
So if you need oil changes with a loyalty program to save some money, complimentary mountain balance for the life of the tires you purchased there.
All work done by ASC certified technicians.
That's D&D Tire and Auto in Park Falls.
And excellent segues.
Those come from Joel Karnick at night.
Hey we've got a bottom of the hour update as we approach eight thirty and just after this news weather and sport update we've got birthdays and then we'll finish the hour chatting with our Northwoods news reporter Maddie Schaefer all this and more up next on ninety eight Q.
coming up shortly.
The top five places that you could walk into Start working and no one would notice.
All right coming up shortly.
That's called a pre that's called a presale
Joel will tell you where I'll tell you how I've got a method
all right
I might have a method to get you into anywhere and I mean just about anywhere and you should use it wisely
because I am
One of the podcasts I listened to over the evening was talking about the Kramer thing where he walked in and started working at a company and he never was hired.
He worked there for like a month and never got paid and they fired him and he said, well, I don't care.
I really don't work here anyway.
So I thought to myself, could you pull that off?
We'll talk about that in a moment.
You know what that brings to mind though?
Where's my stapler burn the building down a little office space for you Happy birthday yesterday to Diane Morgan don't let us know Excuse me.
No Becky texted us that one.
Thank you Becky for texting us.
Happy birthday yesterday to Diane Diane the first one
birthday box this week for that cake drawing on Friday.
Happy anniversary over the weekend to Ginny and Mark Luma.
All right.
Don did text us that one.
Very nice Luma.
Happy anniversary to the Luma's there.
All right.
I've got
A very special happy
birthday today.
By the way, the Lumas, you guys bought one too many vowels in your name, just saying.
It's the you.
No, wait.
No, it's the O. It's the O. It's the O, yeah.
Hold on.
We have a complex conversation to have about when two letters go walking.
No, okay.
Happy, a very special happy birthday today to one Hannah Jane.
Hannah.
Your dad told me how cool you were, and I thought, we better give you a happy birthday.
Hannah Jane is turning five today.
All right, Hannah Jane, all right.
And happy birthday, love dad.
Thank you for that text message, sir.
And happy birthday, Hannah Jane.
You only turn five once.
Those no school birthdays, those summer birthdays.
I've always been jealous of you people.
Mine was April, never a no school birthday.
See, but from now on, the birthday comes two weeks before school starts.
So there's going to be a complex relationship there.
Little bitter, little sweet.
Happy anniversary.
to Chris and Eric Sharp from The Other Sharps.
All right,
The Other Sharps.
They featured frequently last week.
I think we're getting all birthdays and anniversaries out of the way for The Sharps over the next 10 days.
Coming soon, The Sharp Reality Show.
And a happy birthday today.
I believe today to Joanne Carlson from Friends.
All right.
Happy birthday, Joanne.
If you celebrate today, you celebrate alongside some people you probably know from things, you know, TV shows, movies, and other similar things.
And where is that list of birthdays?
The Young People List.
There it is.
It's where we start.
The Young People List starts with Taisa Farmiga.
She's 32 today.
She did four seasons on American Horror Story.
Now she's on HBO's The Gilded Age.
She's bought a lot of.
Bowls and consonants.
Yeah.
Yep.
There's there's some extra ones there.
Yeah, uh, Juliana Ransich is up next and I probably misspelled that one or mispronounced it Excuse me.
She's 52 today fashion police host and survivor of breast cancer married apprentice winner Bill Ransich or what again?
However, that's pronounced Donnie Wahlberg brother to Mark Wahlberg is 57 a day former new kid on the block
ever been to the Wahlberger burger chain restaurant ever been to one of those I actually haven't I stumbled upon one
Once, uh, I don't know where it was.
I mean, it was good.
It's good.
I didn't know Donnie was a new kid on the block.
This was me learning that.
Yeah.
I know Donnie from a band of brothers.
OK.
Yeah.
I think he plays a staff sergeant in that, like a really well acted and well done role.
It's like, wait a minute.
He was a new kid on the block.
Yes, sir.
Guilvie Clark is 64.
The Guns N' Roses rhythm guitarist replaced Izzy Stradlin.
Last gig was rock band Supernova, if you've heard of them.
Sean Penn is 66 today.
Belinda Carlisle.
of the gogos is 68.
If heaven's a place on earth and you know that, Belinda Carlisle's who you've got to thank.
Ooh!
One of the all-time greats, Robert De Niro, is 83 today.
We're into the old people birthdays officially, by the
way, with
Melinda Carlisle, yes.
Oh, Robert De Niro, one of the great actors of all time.
No doubt about it.
Joel, I hate to tell you, but Donnie Wahlberg turning 57 is the old people birthdays too.
I'm sorry.
The fact that you didn't know
about New Kids on the Block, that was the turning moment.
I know about the New Kids on the Block.
I just didn't know who was in them.
Yeah, no.
Robert De Niro, the godfather part two, raging bull, taxi driver, the deer hun-
the Untouchables, Goodfellas, Awakenings, Casino, meet the parents, analyze this, and that's just to scratch the surface.
Meet the parents.
I love his personality in his older, in his last 15, 20 years where he just leans into the cool old guy.
They're so, so good, so good.
Meet the parents was probably one of the first DeNiro movies I saw.
So this like incredibly funny nose he seems like a, like a
Like a hard guy kind of thing, but like being that hard guy for comedic purposes that it takes a lot of self-awareness Super cool of deniro to do that.
Just you violated the circle of trust Greg Oh man May West one of the all-timers of Hollywood a hard man is good to find as she used to say and when I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better.
Yep May West born today's date 1893 she passed in ninth
1980 at the age of 87 and that's where we leave birthdays today But if we missed yours or a shout out you'd like to give somebody birthday or anniversary you can text us you can call us get a hold of us It's a good day to text us and in fact a good time to mention that our office might be a little bit skeleton-cruise today So if you've got something you need like a certificate best to plan a pickup Call us to ask about timing or to plan those for tomorrow.
Yeah should be around till noon or so afternoon might be
little sketchy.
Top five.
Here we go.
Ladies and gentlemen, can we break into the budget and find the drum roll somewhere?
Is there one in the budget somewhere?
I
think as a matter of fact, we can.
All right, ladies and
gentlemen, these are Joel Karnick in the morning shows top five places where with proper uniform, I believe you could walk in and no one would know that you actually didn't work there.
You could just blend right in very fast.
Here we go.
Number five, McDonald's.
I believe with the proper uniform, I believe you could step in and convince someone that you could run the drive-thru window, and I think that would happen fairly, fairly fast.
I'm thinking go regional manager, dress decently, and just say I'm here to observe.
Yeah.
That gives you the best chance.
You could blend in fast, yeah.
Number four.
Major construction site.
I believe with the right clothes you could walk in.
You could just, you know, start throwing around things like, you know, jackhammer and, you know, Twiddley Bobber or whatever.
Whatever phrases.
Leave
your Twiddley
Bobber at home or you will be caught.
I think you could walk in, especially in the big cities, you could walk into a major construction site and you could be five floors up on a beam before you know it.
No one, no one would flinch.
See the thing is that they've got a check for people doing illicit drugs on every floor of.
any construction projects so you might be noticed unless you assist with that search.
Okay,
alright.
I'm thinking there's more vigilance there than you might expect but do continue.
Number three.
places where you could walk in, blend in, a carnival.
I believe you could go to a carnival and just say, yeah, it's break time.
And you could run the Tilt-A-Whirl.
I'm pretty sure you could run the Tilt-A-Whirl.
You know, that might be where the workers and the attendees are the least distinguishable.
That might be the place.
You know, the average carnival midway, just like, yeah, if you hop on that lever, I have no reason to distrust that you're about to send my kid hurtling through the air safely,
probably.
All right, number two.
places where you could blend in.
Definitely.
This would work.
If you had the right penny on Walmart, you could just blend in at Walmart.
You could just start running a cash register.
You could just walk in the back room and start restocking.
Pretty sure you could blend in for at least a week before anyone would realize what you were doing.
But they wouldn't pay you and you wouldn't be scheduled.
That's
not the
point.
The point is how long can you last before someone calls you out?
I think Walmart, if I had to put over under a number of shifts, I'd go like three.
I think I could go three full shifts pushing that cart around and just putting groceries in and just looking like not really doing anything but just looking like I am.
I would fill the cart with stuff and then I would empty the cart and then I would fill it and then I would empty
it.
Man, I worry that you're going to inspire some YouTuber with more time than since.
Oh, man, somebody's going to try this soon.
The security card might be a problem, though.
I think Walmart employees have some kind of security card and stuff.
That might be a problem modern day.
All right.
And the number one place where you could walk in, start working, blend in, and we wouldn't notice is 98Q Country.
We would just not even be aware.
And we'd be like, hey,
welcome.
How you doing?
So I mentioned that I've got the method for you I once heard it said that if you bring a clipboard into a place and look around often and look irritated well that you're busy, but there's also another version of it, which is the ladder Safety vest hard hat you bring you wear the safety vest in the hard hat and carry a ladder Nobody's going to stop you.
Just look like you know where you're going and they'll let you go
anywhere because they know you're not going to have like a security card to get in because you're there just to do something for a day or two so people are just like oh he must be here to fix that pipe over there that somebody told me about you're right you're right because that's not a logical position that you would say well that person should have security clearance or a card
or
something to get in there no they won't have one
no the confident the safety vest the hard hat the ladder and the confidence that you look like you know where you're going that all adds up in every observed
mind to somebody else knows that's okay to be happening right now it's automatically you've become not the problem of whoever you run into because somebody from above me you know that's your you are you're taking advantage of the limitations of the middle management system in corporate America just safety vest hard hat and onward onward you go past the cameras past the ballards past the people in their in their uniforms until that one stops you with the question oh hey who are you here
with today and they ask you in that friendly way your toast.
So how old would I have to get if I tried to pull off the Walmart thing where when they catch me I'm not they're not going to punish me there's going to be like get that old guy out of here just go home.
Just go home.
Whereas if you're younger, they might say, you know what, you know, we're going to call the cops and you were violating.
I think if you get to a certain age, you're going to be like, you know, funny stuff, but give us the best and get out of here, grandpa.
Well, how old?
So right now you wouldn't get away with it.
But if you purposely did a bad job shaving your beard, leave a couple of patches behind.
Put your reading glasses on the end of your nose and make sure, I mean, get some strong ones.
So it's obvious they're reading glasses.
You know, you've got to and then just hunt your shoulders.
forward a little bit more than you usually do.
And you'll be shuffled out of there with no police presence a lot more likely than you would right now.
If you're the tall, confident shoulders back, what is this idiot doing?
You know?
Yeah, call the cops.
You've got to, you've got to nudge people to the reaction you want them to have.
And as long as you don't steal anything, I mean, I'm not going to do anything like that.
I'm just going to see if I can just mingle and be a part of the crew for a while.
Yeah, man.
Um, if you see Joel in the news sometime soon, and if you see an unrelated story about somebody
impersonating Walmart employees.
Those stories are not actually unrelated.
All right, quick word from sponsors coming up next.
We're actually a little over time to chat with Maddie Schaefer, our Northwoods news reporter coming up next on 98Q Country.
Joel, get back here, Joel.
No, not Walmart!
All right, 98Q Country back hanging out with just the two of us.
I think Maddie heard what we were talking about and she said, I don't really
want
to
be a part of that.
Yeah, I'm not waiting
into this.
She was on vacation last week and she's getting back into the rhythm of things, so hopefully we'll catch up with her maybe yet this week.
I do
have one quick
thing very briefly.
Yeah, all right.
Happy birthday today to Matt Lynch somebody texted us about Matt's birthday Congratulations Matt 44 years young according to whoever texted us and if you're the one who texted us Matt's birthday Could you please send us another text message with your first name in it, please?
That way I know who I'm talking to and that's all it's for I won't use your personal info for anything except for a few things No, I just it'll tell the system the first name of whoever's texting so I can see who it is and interact with you a little bit more
directly and personally.
Well all the signs of fall are out there folks.
I went for a walk yesterday and I saw the shells of acorns.
I think the sign now with the super El Nino they say that's in place now.
They're saying that we could be in for a heavy snow winter which if that's what last winter was but
To me, a true sign is when the squirrels start packing away acorns on August 16th, because there was just shells.
They were gnawing through them pretty good.
They're packing away acorns in August for the winter.
I think that's a sign that this could be a little tough winter coming up.
Well, and for me, I kind of had a...
It was another one I mentioned last week how I spotted that sugar maple on the way to work Well yesterday, I took Toby out to go to the bathroom and one of his favorite spots to hang out and play fetch I looked and the ground was covered in berries And I thought what berries are around here.
So I like any fool look up begging to be a
Dive bombed or miscellated by a bird, you know, it's just like heads up exactly, right?
It was it would have been the perfect moment And that was when I realized that the house I've been living in for four years now has cherry trees Choke cherries right in the backyard.
Oh, really?
And so that was what it was yesterday was oh, I've got choke cherries How blind have I been for the last four years?
But also they're ripe and falling off the tree already and I thought
Oh, no.
And I mean, if you're not a choked cherry person, that doesn't mean much.
But yeah, mid-August, I don't think that's necessarily early, but it was late for me to realize it's mid-August.
Yeah.
And there's certain we're finding out, especially in the Price County area, what plants we have in our yard that are camels.
That just don't need water
because
there's certain ones that just they're still green and they're still fly I have a rose plant.
That's just beautiful.
I don't we give it a little bit of water But you know what I mean?
There's certain plants like the tiger lilies I have those things dried up like a month ago.
They're they're out But other ones like the sedums and a rose plant and the and the hostas they They can go a long time without really any significant water.
They're still green and doing all right
Well in the hostas that those in particular they don't even need sunlight.
I think those things are like
Succulent in disguise because I've got so we've got the garden from the previous owner Which was a little rhubarb then a little bit of mint then a bunch of never has a little room Well, thankfully they contain themselves and actually they put it They put a tomato cage around it which kind of stifled it a little bit which probably did us some favors Yeah, but it's rhubarb then mint then a lot of lamb's quarter for some reason and hostas right in there and a couple other Decoratives and then some strawberries that they tried to plant right
The strawberries still pop up now and again.
The lamb's quarter is dominating everything.
But if you part the lamb's quarter, the hostas are just thriving under there.
It's like, hey, we're under the bed, but we're doing fine.
What do
we use the mint?
What do we use that for?
It's kind of cool and it smells nice, but what do we use in that for?
A good reminder that you've mowed a little too far into the decorative plants.
When you smell mint, you should have backed off into the yard a little bit further.
But honestly, I've used it a couple of times
make Rachel Moscow mules it's a favorite drink of hers and made right they've got mint in them huh yeah it's a it's a really interesting plant to grow and I know it's it's well actually the funny part is when you mow so far that you hit both mint and strawberries at the same time that is an incredible smell and I know people weren't running lawn mowers back in the day but I'm betting there were some stepped-on accidents kind of things where it's like oh
what if I hit my neighbor's cable line then what
Well, then you've got problems that I can't describe with smell unless some really odd and unpredictable things.
Everybody
has that moment when they decide with their property.
It's like, OK, we're going to expand.
You have that moment.
You put on the goggles.
You put on your long car heart jeans.
We're going
to expand?
Let's just go out and let's just shove this more into the long grass and see what comes flying
out of there.
I thought you were going to make some joke about having manifest destiny at home or something.
I
remember when, as a kid, when we created a football field,
There was a lower field in my dead side.
I'm going to create a miniature football field for my kids to play.
And it was wonderful when it was done.
But that process to get there was pretty interesting because there were a lot of things lingering below the weeds back there.
And there was an interesting process to get it to get it to that point.
You would have made so much fun of me yesterday that yard work that I mentioned doing it specifically was a long row of we call them suckers.
They're small saplings from basswood.
mostly okay, you know those things grow a couple feet a year they are like a really fast growing and they would be basswood trees if we left them be but they're growing in places especially around the bases of other basswood trees but I was basically kind of out on a ledge because where it was it's kind of it's almost like a like a berm or a hill that runs along an edge that separates two different heights and so I
I'm standing in long grass, right at the edge of that hill, reaching out over the edge of it, not knowing if I'm about to step down.
And it's not a far step, but it's just a kind- It's far enough.
It's the kind you don't want to take without meaning to.
So I'm out there leaning over, like I don't actually want to do this thing that I'm doing.
And I realize after I spend five minutes standing in the same spot, trying to reach as far as I can, there's a whole foot of ground that I haven't taken advantage of.
Oh, you know, it's like, I worry that I'm drowning in water that's actually 18 inches deep, but it's like, oh, just stand up.
We've all had those inadvertent ankle twists though in grounds and it happens at the just just like what am I doing?
Why am I not paying attention where you just snap it just a little bit and and Depending on how bad at least a week or so you just kind of feel it for a while
I'm pretty sure the last time my life flashed before my eyes was when I thought there was one more step and there wasn't or when there there was one and I didn't think so
that's solid Is there anything that feels heavier than the foot hitting the ground when you?
And what is it?
You don't think there's a step and there
is?
And there is one.
Yeah.
And you just kind of, he's just like.
Boom just like oh that jarred something up in my up in my ear just that that went from my foot
to my
ear
just like that well because there's there's an emergency mode that only exists between where your foot thought it where you thought your foot would stop and when it finally does so it's like when you're when your foot hits the spot you thought was solid ground and there's still eight inches to drop there's an emergency mode that activates that you have no control over and that is get that foot down now down the
velocity in those eight inches I think is something
like from a Star Wars movie.
It just goes
I mean, literally gravity goes times a hundred right there.
Your foot becomes the the unstoppable force that you talked about in physics class back in high school.
It's just, yeah, you're this close to splitting an
atom.
It was that five second pause.
You're just like, is this going to hurt for a month?
Just like, OK, I think I'm all right.
I think I'm going to be OK.
Yeah, it's lucky we're built for that.
Because can you imagine a world where we like got legitimate serious injuries from that thing?
It's just like you go into the ER with your foot looking like the gun barrel that banana
exploded out of a Looney Tunes film.
You know, you just like got a war wound level thing happening.
You just, you miss a stair?
Thank goodness we're not that
fresh.
At the local hospitals, you got the clinic, you got the ER unit, then you have the missed a stair unit.
Just right there.
Just everybody checking into the missed a stair.
What are you going to school for?
I went seven years to be a missed a stair doctor.
Yep.
Just the things that people do.
to their feet and just oh man those wooden steps and like campaigning for six inch height stairs instead of eight inches like the silly things all right this this fictional world that we're describing does not exist thank goodness our feet are more resilient than that
yes have a great monday everybody i'll be back in a little bit afternoon no brewers today so i got i got a whole shift i'm being exhausted by the time i'm done today
i i remember when i was hanging out on afternoons you get those days the brewers are off it's like man i used to do this every day
Yep, your back's gonna hurt, son.
That's just all there is to it.
All right, it's past nine o'clock.
You've been listening to 98Q Country, 98.3 FM WCQM on the Civic Media Radio Network.
So concludes this episode of The Gray Area.
And we'll archive it.
I've got something to do.
I'll archive this so you can listen back on demand anytime.
What for?
great background noise.
Seriously, it's amazing to have this kind of thing on.
It's people you know at least a little bit and topics you know, at least a little bit.
That makes for a cozy Monday morning, Monday afternoon.
Whenever you want to listen back, go to 98Qcountry.com.
Click on 98Q podcast in the top right.
But for now, I'll see you on the other side of your top of the hour updates.