Super-Sunday-not

 Today is definitely not a Super Sunday.  For a Kansas gardener, it's a Mediocre Sunday, and if the gardener decides to curl up and find a good book, it could possibly become an Okay Sunday, maybe even a Fine Sunday, but at 7ºF outside at 12:00 p.m., it's not going to become a Super Sunday, football frenzy or not.  

I had been wanting one decent snow this winter, enough to make everything clean and smooth and white and I still haven't seen one.  What's on the ground now is just a little dusting, a little frosting on the prairie cake; just enough to need sweeping off the sidewalk but not enough to get out a shovel and struggle.  The primary dampening of my spirits, however are the result of the frigid temperatures.   We've had a mild winter, hardly a Zone 6 climate up until now, but yesterday somebody shut the freezer door and the temperatures plummeted alongside this dry snow.  More pertinently, there are some highs-in-the-teens and lows in the subzero temperatures predicted over the next 10 days, back to a true Zone 5 climate that we haven't seen in several years.  Last year at this time I was already clearing perennial beds on 55ºF afternoons.

For the record, I will watch the football game this evening, although I really don't know or care who I'll be rooting for.  Yes, it would be nice to see the long-suffering and local-to-me Kansas City Chiefs win another behind Mahome's spectacular passing accuracy and their daunting defense, but I also wouldn't mind watching 43 year old Tom Brady show Patrick the difference between how an old bull and a young bull approaches the field.  On the other hand, Brady was born in 1977, the year I graduated high school, so neither one is old enough to really appreciate the old bull and young bull joke genre that I'm alluding to.

Also for the record, yes, I cheated on these beautiful forced tulips that are currently in the middle of our kitchen table.  The local grocery store had these ensembles of glass, greenery, and glory for $9.99 the other day, priced low enough for even my miserly soul to consider worthy of a sawbuck.  Seven tulip bulbs to brighten Mrs. ProfessorRoush's Valentines day and keep me in her good graces, and then later I'll plant them in a pot with good soil and move them to the garden this summer.  I usually force a few bulbs on my own, but this year I just haven't found the urge or the time.  When these fade, however, I'm now inspired to go cut some forsythia and flowering almond branches to bring into the house and force into bloom.  Maybe the spring colors can provide us a Super Sunday later in February.     

Super Sunday!

Don't get mislead; ProfessorRoush cares not even a minuscule portion of his bones that it's Superbowl Sunday.  Well, perhaps a few deep cells of his bone marrow care that it is the last REAL football game until August, and it is one of the two sports I still watch enough to know who's on top (tennis is the other), but only when I'm entirely bored and stuck in front of a TV (which seems to be "never" these days, by choice).

No, what I do care about is that it is the second day of February, it is beautifully sunny outside, and my local temperature is predicted to be 66ºF at 2 p.m.   Right now, writing this, it is 57ºF outside and the back yard looks like the photo above, taken a few minutes ago, so I'm only here for a brief second.  Garden beds and sunshine are calling my name.

 
As you can see from the temperature reading on the second picture on this page, the temperature this winter hasn't always been nearly so nice, but that didn't keep the critters away.  I looked through the winter's selection of game camera photographs today as I removed my old game camera, and among other deer, there was a pretty nice stag rambling around at some point.  I'll have more fauna-captured photographs this spring and next year since I replaced my old camera with two newer and better game cameras.

Today is another milestone perhaps more important than the Superbowl to those of a superstitious bent. Today is, of course, 02/02/2020, a rare global palindrome and the only one of my lifetime.  The last such palindrome was 909 years ago (11/11/1111) and the next is 101 years away (12/12/2121), so forward or backward, I can't really hope for a life expectancy of 161 years to see the next one.  02/02/2020 is also a palindrome day of the year (the 33rd day) and a palindrome of the days left in the year (333 since it's a leap year).  And evidently, Las Vegas is promoting marriages today on the basis that if you married today, your 2nd anniversary would be 2/2/22, all symbolizing the pair-ness of monogamous marriage.   Myself, married some 37 years already, I'll just say goodbye to date palindromes like this deer turned tail and said goodbye to my game camera.

In other notes, I spent some time this morning searching for a word to describe the group of people who are over-stimulated by math like today's palindrome and along the way I was sidetracked by the discovery that there are "weird" numbers  (of which 70 is the first) whose proper divisors sum to greater than the number, and "happy" numbers, of which 1, 7, 10, 13, and 19 are the first 5 happy numbers of base 10.  Interesting to know, but none of this made me happy in base 10 or any other numeric base because I couldn't find the word I was searching for.  Anyone know a word to describe "math nuts"?  I'd spend more time looking myself, but I, and the lovely Bella, are out of here!