Thor's Day May 17, 2018 by WW

On this day in history, May 17 :  

218 7th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet
    352 Liberius begins his reign as Catholic Pope replacing Julius I
    884 St Adrian III begins his reign as Catholic Pope
    1521 Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, is executed for treason
    1525 Battle at Zabern: duke of Lutherans beats rebels
    1527 Pánfilo de Narváez departs Spain to explore Florida with 600 men - by 1536 only 4 survive
    1536 Anne Boleyn's 4 "lovers" executed
    1544 Scot Earl Matthew Lennox signs secret treaty with Henry VIII
    1579 Artois, Henegouwen and French-Flanders sign Treaty, the Peace of Parma recognizing Spanish Duke van Parma as land guardian
                     
    1590 Anne of Denmark is crowned Queen of Scotland.
    1620 1st merry-go-round seen at a fair in Philippapolis, Turkey
    1630 Italian Jesuit Niccolo Zucchi, 1st to see 2 belts on Jupiter surface
    1631 Earl Johann Tilly attacks Maagdenburg
    1648 Emperor Ferdinand III defeats Maximilian I of Bavaria
    1672 Frontenac becomes Governor of New France (Canada)
    1673 Louis Joliet & Jacques Marquette begin exploring Mississippi
    1712 Maximilian Emanuel of Bavaria honored as "sovereign of Netherlands"
    1733 Great Britain passes Molasses Act, putting high tariffs on rum and molasses imported to the colonies from a country other than British possessions
   1742 Battle of Chotusitz: Frederick II and Prussia defeat the Austrians

   1744 French army takes Austrian Netherlands
   1750 -18] Tax revolt in Gorinchem
   1756 Britain declares war on France (7 Years' or French & Indian War)
   1775 American Revolutionary War: the Continental Congress bans trade with Canada
   1787 English slave ship Sisters, en route from Africa to Cuba, capsizes killing hundreds
   1792 24 merchants form New York Stock Exchange at 70 Wall Street
   1794 Hard frost in southern New England

   1803 John Hawkins & Richard French patent the Reaping Machine
   1809 Papal States annexed by France
   1814 Denmark cedes Norway to Sweden (National Day)
   1814 Norwegian constitution passed by constitutent assembly at Eidsvoll
   1814 Occupation of Monaco changes from French to Austrian

   1824 The diaries of Lord Byron are burnt by six of the poet's friends at the office of John Murray in London, sometimes described as “the greatest crime in literary history”

    1848 Gerrit, Count Schimmelpenninck resigns as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Netherlands
    1849 Fire destroy Centrum in St Louis, Missouri
    1853 Thorbeckes liberals win 2nd-Parliamentary election
    1859 Australian Rules Football first 'laws of the game' published
    1860 German football club TSV 1860 München is founded
    1862 Battle of Princeton West Virginia, ends with about 128 casualities
    1863 Battle of Big Black River Bridge, Mississippi
    1863 Rosalía de Castro publishes Cantares Gallegos, her first book in the Galician language
    1864 Battle of Adairsville Georgia, Union forces Confederates to retreat
    1865 The International Telegraph Union (later the International Telecommunication Union) is established
    1871 General William T. Sherman escapes from the Comanches in an ambulance
    1872 Bohemian Club incorporated in San Francisco
    1875 1st Kentucky Derby: Oliver Lewis aboard Aristides wins in 2:37.75
    1876 7th US Cavalry under General George Armstrong Custer leaves Fort Lincoln
    1877 Edwin T Holmes installs 1st telephone switchboard burglar alarm
    1881 7th Kentucky Derby: Jim McLaughlin aboard Hindoo wins in 2:40
 
    1881 Frederick Douglass appointed recorder of deeds for Washington, D.C.
    1881 Revised version of New Testament
    1883 Buffalo Bill Cody's 1st wild west show premieres in Omaha
    1884 Alaska becomes a US territory
    1890 Clyde Fitch's "Beau Brummel" premieres in NYC
    1890 Comic Cuts, 1st weekly comic paper, published in London
    1890 Pietro Mascagni's opera "Rustic Chivalry" premieres in Rome at the Teatro Costanzi
    1894 19th Preakness: Fred Taral aboard Assignee wins in 1:49.25
    1895 W G Grace completes his 100th 100 v Somerset at Bristol
    1897 The first successful submarine that can run submerged for any considerable distance and combines electric and gasoline engines is launched in the USA by its designer John Philip Holland

    1898 Camp Merritt forms in Presidio [see 0503]
    1899 Victoria & Albert Museum foundation laid, London, England
    1900 British troops relieve Mafeking (Cape Colony)
    1900 In China, three villages within 100 miles of Peking are burned by Boxers and 60 Chinese Christians killed
    1902 Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais discovers the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical analog computer
    1903 Cleveland Indians beat NY Highlanders 9-2 in Columbus Ohio
    1904 Maurice Ravel's "Shéhérazade" premieres in Paris
    1905 Waseda U of Tokyo defeats LA High School 5-3 in baseball
    1906 Switzerland's Simplon Tunnel open to rail traffic
    1909 White firemen on Georgia lroad strike to protest against hiring blacks
    1910 Canada sets the designs for the 1-50 cent coins
    1911 36th Preakness: Eddie Dugan aboard Watervale wins in 1:51
    1915 40th Preakness: Douglas Hoffman aboard Rhine Maiden wins in 1:58
    1915 Cubs George "Zip" Zabel relieves with 2 outs in 1st & winds up with 4-3 19-inning win over Brooklyn in longest relief job ever

    1915 Last liberal British government of H. H. Asquith falls
    1915 National Baptist Convention chartered
    1916 British Summer Time (Daylight Savings) introduced
    1919 UK War Department orders use of National Star Insignia on all airplanes
    1920 1st De Havilland double-decker flight (London) lands in Schiphol
    1920 1st flight by Dutch airlines KLM (Koninklijke-Luchtvaart-Maatschappij)
    1921 Belgian and Luxembourg sign customs union


    1921 US President Warren G. Harding opens (via telephone) 1st Valencia Orange Show
     Etc
     Etc

   
However, in Palmville, on May 17, 2018, Sven Guyson was looking for dryer vent parts that he knew were ’somewhere.’ He’d seen them here and there for a better part of a year. He’d pick them up from one place then put them somewhere else while looking for other things. They were part of a home fixit project he meant to do but just hadn’t gotten around to doing. Monique, his wife of nigh on ten years, had helped him look, discovering things she thought had been lost years ago, and things he said were not lost, but simply put aside until he had time to do them.

Sven’s basement workbench and the area around it needed a good thorough cleaning for a long time. He sorta had an idea where things were, he’d recall seeing a certain tool here or a brush there and kept those locations in his head for recall later, only thing was Sven’s recall was getting shorter since he retired and sometimes his memory wasn’t what it should be. He was convinced the dryer vent parts he was looking for were somewhere around his bench because he had looked in the Toyota pickup, high and low, behind and below the seats--and in the glove box. (He thought to tell Monique he had found the eyebolts in there he was looking for two weeks ago--then had purchased new ones.)

He had looked in his old work car that had blown up when he had forgot to change the timing belt. He had kept stuff in there, but no, they weren’t there either. Not in the front seat or back seat or ‘way in the back where a can of pine tar had leaked and he had scraped it off and wrapped the whole back mat up and stuck in a garbage bag. Wasn’t back there ...

They weren’t on the entry, nor on the basketball hoop and stand box behind the door that had never been opened. They weren’t in the big planter in the corner that held walking sticks, fishing rods, and a skull and antlers of a big deer he had found three springs ago in the woods. He remembered the dryer vent parts had been there, but weren’t there now. Hmmm. Nor down by the goose decoy they used for on-floor decoration. Monique always said their house was more of a deer camp than anything she had ever lived in and that goose decoy proved it.

He looked on the entry shelves where he never goes anymore--too full of old bottles of antifreeze, fogger juice, pairs of plastic snowshoes, broken ice salt bags--and that old electric trolling motor he had used just one time. What a disaster to find anything in there. No, they weren’t there for sure.

They just have to be on that workbench! So he opened a beer and walked around to the walk-in basement door. Ho hum, might as well get serious about it. He turned on the overhead florescent light and set about separating ‘tools’ from just stuff, then putting them back into the tool box drawers where they should of gone in the first place. Monique was in the bathroom, on the other side of the wall, when she said something and he couldn’t hear her too well, as seems normal now no matter where they are together they’re apart and he can’t quite hear her and she can’t quite hear him so there’s always one or the other of them sayin’, “WHAT? I didn’t hear you!”

About that time, Sven looked up from the bench and there, through the basement crank-out window, he saw a good-sized woodchuck, perusing, as it was, his drain field area right near the house. Because the basement light was on, or the sun was where it was outside, the woodchuck couldn’t see indoors and see Sven looking back. They were only about ten feet apart, one on the outside of the house, the other on the inside, and the one on the inside was backing away from near the window, slow-like.

“I see me a big ol’ woodchuck on the drain field here,” Sven said pointedly to Monique without a trace of excitement in his voice lest Mr. Woodchuck sense, through eight inches of concrete and ten feet of pure unadulterated northwest Minnesota country air, that he spoke otherwise and should feel threatened for his life. ‘You seen my shotgun?”

Now it ain’t so disorganized at Sven’s house that he loses everything, it’s just he had secreted away his guns previous to a visit by a grandchild a few months back and couldn’t recall exactly where that shotgun oughta be when he needed it. “Uncle Wayne”, a neighbor and close friend of he and Monique’s who keeps loaded weapons at close hand for day or night, would not be impressed by Sven’s obvious unpreparedness--so they didn’t call and ask him. However, Sven knew where his .22 (‘twenty-two’ in layman’s terms) was for sure because he had reloaded its ten-shot clip an hour or so earlier and leaned the rifle against the bookcase, a short arm length away from his desk.

“I think I saw it on the entry,” Monique said from the other side of the wall before she flushed the toilet. Both of them had heard the other perfectly. There was no need to ask for repetition. Just like back in the old days on the frontier, when Jeb whispered to Ma to fetch ol’ Bess there alongside the door, ‘cause he was fixin’ to shoot some big ol’ bear bent on squeezin’ into their barn after the newborn calf, their hearing became innately acute. So it was when Sven, leaned back and hoisted the .22 out of the corner by the bookcase. With the old rifle in his right hand, he turned and slowly opened the extra-wide back door with his left hand, so it wouldn’t make any noise.

Clearing the doorway with the end of the 24-inch barrel, he eased out of the door--to see the woodchuck looking at him around the corner of the house, about fifteen feet away. Stopping dead in his tracks, Sven slowly raised his rifle to take aim, when Monique closed the front door as she entered the entry. The woodchuck vanished. Sven hoofed it fifteen feet around the corner of the house to see the woodchuck out in the close-clipped yard he had mowed the day before. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder to shoot, pulled the trigger but it misfired--as so much of his recently purchased ammunition has done. All he heard was a ‘click.’ He reloaded, pulling the bolt back and ejected the bad shell sending it spiraling off somewhere in the grass.

The woodchuck ran to sit under the pickup, a silhouette at best, but a target nonetheless and Sven shot offhand. He missed. Damn. Then the woodchuck ran under the SFH (Shed From Hell) (another story for another day).

Sven, if not the best shot, is a hunter. It’s in his blood. He’s hunted for food, in season, since he was about twelve years old. His mother was his catalyst for hunting, not his father. She grew up, not too faraway from Sven’s home, eating wild game and fish, and so encouraged Sven to shoot and fish for food. So it is, that not all people hunt, it’s an accepted fact. Sven’s dad had nothing against hunting or killing animals for food, it’s just that where he grew up in the Midwest, they didn’t hunt so much. Their meat came from the animals they raised and slaughtered for food. Sven’s mother’s family lived in northwest Minnesota where life was much different, where they hunted and fished. The animals they raised were for market money, they didn’t eat them so much as they did deer, moose, and rabbits.

They didn’t eat woodchucks either. Woodchucks dig holes that sometimes damage fields -- or in Sven’s case, drain fields of rural septic systems--that is, where the household poop goes. Sometimes horses step in woodchuck holes and break their legs. Back a hundred years ago, the horse would had been destroyed because they couldn't fix its leg, a big expense that impacted the whole family. Sven thinks that’s why woodchucks got such a bad rap originally. Nonetheless, Sven may not have horses but he does have a drain field that he doesn’t want woodchucks digging in, so apart from capturing the woodchuck in a live-trap (very difficult) now that Sven knows one has been checking it out, he has to eliminate it or pay huge repair costs afterward.

Sven wished he had an empty peanut butter jar. Monique taught him a lesson about using one to lure woodchucks into the yard. He had been skeptical that would work, but she had proved him wrong several years ago, something he had never forgotten. But he hadn’t talked to her about it and here he was standing waiting for the woodchuck to show itself again, with nothing to show for two spent rounds, one that fired and one that didn’t.

The woodchuck came back. It was standing on what Sven thought was a concrete block next to the wall in front of the SFH. Sven sat right down where he was standing, to get a better shot. He figured he could hit it from there if he took a fine bead, that is, looked closely down the barrel and aligned the front sight bead right in the bottom of the rear sight’s vee. In his youth, he had shot a lot of Fox squirrels that way, their heads making a small target the size of a green walnut hull. His mother had taught him to make every shot count. Just take his time ...

Sven sat right down where he was standing.

Sven knew, by the angle of his shot, there was nothing behind the wall that would be damaged by a bullet, so he inhaled his breath and held it, then exhaled slowly as he squeezed the trigger.

The woodchuck disappeared. The shot sounded different, like it hit something. When Sven hunts during deer season in November, bullets that hit an object sound differently than bullets that don’t, and this was similar but quieter. A bullet the size of a pencil sounds much different than one fired as big around as your finger.

Sven sat where he was for five minutes, waiting to see if the woodchuck would reappear if he hadn’t killed it, and five minutes became long minutes just sitting there, watching a fly walk across his wrist and back again. He got up and estimated his shot to have been 54 yards at a target the size of a bottom of a cup.

One thing sure, he had hit the wall of the SFH, close to the floor.

Two, what the woodchuck had stood on wasn’t a concrete block--it was a motorcycle battery.

Three, Sven couldn’t see that he had shot the woodchuck, but did note he had shot the battery in its negative pole corner.

“Maybe it vill still verk,” Sven said to himself, “Mebbe I vill put a little duck tape on it?”

Sven wondered if the bullet went beyond a two by four near where it entered the flooring, and when he stood up he saw the dryer vent parts inside the shed, that he’d been looking for all afternoon and laughed.