Three Little Things Coffee Talk

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Hello and welcome to the November edition of the Ultimate Coffee Date with Coco from Running With Perseverance and Deborah from Confessions of a Mother Runner. Grab a mug of your favorite hot beverage and pull up a seat. Virtually, of course.

The Time I Almost Got Arrested

Yes, it’s true. Some of you may have the idea that I’m Miss Goody Two-Shoes, but let me tell you, I’m Miss Total Badass who escaped arrest by the skin of my teeth.

OK, I may be exaggerating.

Our running club runs every Tuesday night in the winter on lighted park roads. Rather than braving dark, congested streets, in the interest of safety, we run 1.7-mile loops in a nearby park.

The park in question closes at dusk. The club, however, has a letter from the park’s board of directors, allowing us to run there each week. It has been a Tuesday night tradition for over a decade.

One Tuesday night in November as we were running, a police car with lights flashing slowly made its way around the loop. One of the officers in the car was announcing through a loudspeaker that everyone must leave the park immediately or face arrest for trespassing.

As the squad car crawled by me, I tried to tell the policeman of the agreement the running club had with the park and offered to show him the letter, but he ignored me. “Runners included“, he announced through his speaker.

At that point, I was almost exactly halfway around the loop.

What a quandary. I wasn’t sure whether to retrace my steps and run back to my car or try to go forward. I opted to go forward, hoping that I wouldn’t get arrested before I got back to my car.

I didn’t.

The next day, the president of our running club reached out to the local police, and the misunderstanding was cleared up, so we are once again welcome in the park on Tuesday evenings.

I was just glad I didn’t get thrown in jail!

Photo by Egor Kamelev on Pexels.com

And Another Bee Story

If you are noticing a wasp-related theme in my posts this fall, you are right. I have had many more encounters with wasps than I wanted.

I hope this is the last one.

I was pulling weeds in a honeysuckle-covered bank in our backyard last week. The temperature was in the mid-50s and the sun was shining. We have had some frost, but not a hard freeze this fall.

Weeding is a mindless chore, so my mind was wandering as I heaved up handfuls of weeds. All at once, a movement in the dirt where I had just dislodged a huge weed caught my eye.

A very large wasp, sluggish and disoriented, was crawling out of a hole in the dirt.

All of you readers who are averse to violence may want to skip over the next few sentences, I’m warning you.

I stomped her.

She was still crawling, so I stomped her again. This time, I stomped her with so much force, her head was severed from her body.

I bent down to examine her. Incredibly, even though her head and body were no longer connected, her antennae still waved. I picked her up in my trowel and carried her to the house, but did not take her inside.

Research showed the wasp I beheaded was a queen of the Vespula maculifrons species of yellowjacket.

I was very happy I hadn’t discovered her a month ago when she would have been surrounded by several hundred worker wasps.

Shutting It All Down

Late this summer, my husband and I, encouraged by the decrease in cases of Coronavirus in our part of the world, began tentatively engaging once again in social activities.

We didn’t go to any huge gatherings, but we did sometimes eat dinner with another couple, or occasionally go out for an alfresco meal.

As the number of cases increased this fall, however, we became more and more wary of social interactions.

When one of our dear friends invited us to a Holiday party where typically 40 or 50 guests gather under one roof, with no mention of masks or mitigating procedures, we were skeptical. OK, we were aghast.

We made the decision to once again shut down our social life entirely – no holiday parties, no going out for dinner, no gatherings of any kind.

We don’t like it, but with the vaccine on the horizon, we need to be sure we run through the tape (so to speak) during this pandemic. Now is not time to let our guard down.

We are hoping that by foregoing gatherings this year, we will be around to go to lots of them next year.

You can find the places I link up here.