Ramble with Storm: Jackpot

Mulling things on my morning ramble

with Storm, the family’s mixed Lab.

So my Wednesday morning routine is first finishing up the extended online Midwest Fishing Report before the meathead and I set out on the ritualistic morning ramble.

Today I had on Jonathan “Johnny B” Brandmeier on WGN-AM in the background. And he has on this PR guy who has written about beating the lottery.

Well, that is generally a bunch of nonsense. And that was largely true in this case too. The only useful thing he said was that odds are better if you are part of a group buying tickets.

Duh? Buying 100 tickets as a group will beat buying 10 tickets as an individual. Of course.

Where he went screeching off the rails was when talking about when he doesn’t buy an instant ticket. He said he doesn’t because the numbers are randomly generated.

Duh? Again. Whether you have a system for picking numbers or just get a random number, the odds are identical, unless there is something out of kilter with the system or the fix is in.

Just as the odds of flipping a heads or tails on a coin is 50-50, whether or not the same one has come up the previous 10 times.

I was growling at the radio.

BTW, I do not buy lottery tickets. Especially not Powerball. If you win Powerball, your life would be over.

I don’t want that. Now, winning say $10,000, that’s doable. It won’t change our lives, just enable us to pay off a few bills and maybe upgrade a car.

Fortunately, I finished up the MFR before dawn and the meathead and I set out before I stewed (far different than mulling) on such nonsense.

Another crisp morning, though not as frigid as yesterday: 20s instead of the teens.

The skim ice on the north old clay pit had built out a good 50 feet from the east shore and there were patches of ice on the south shore line.

So explain to me why the belted kingfisher was set up in the trees by the ice. What was he going to do? Dive through the ice?

Seriously? Sometimes I don’t think animals or birds are smart as we want to fantasize them being.

A muskrat leaped off the bank by the bridge over the neckdown between the two old clay pits. That sent the meathead into a frenzy. Two other muskrats swam around the south pit.

There was no skim ice, other than a small patch by the bridge, on the south pit. There are two possible explanations: First off, eight Canada geese quietly swam, that certainly contributed; but I suspect it is the difference in the structure of the two pits.

Several weeks ago, Todd Carlander brought his cartopper boat to the town pond and we went all over both pits. The north pit is basically a shallow bowl of 4-6 feet, so it cools much quicker. The south pit is smaller, but as deep as 14 feet.

The geese quietly bunched up and eyed us as we headed to the old rail bed trail.

That was it for wildlife this morning.