​We have a band of turkeys that hang out down the hill back behind our house. They roam during about 8 months out of the year, then park themselves during the other four months (winter) twice a day (typically) below the bird feeder my wife fills with regularity. The squirrels dump the seed for the turkeys to eat. Animal teamwork.
 
As an avid composting family, we save all leftover fruit and vegetable remnants, then put them outside in our composter. With winter descending on Wisconsin, snow falling regularly, I decided to modify that routine a bit and test market on the turkeys. What do they like? Will they eat an onion? Do they appreciate the subtleties of beets? Is a banana peel attractive to their senses? In fact, what senses do turkeys use? Do they sniff to forage? I don’t know and haven’t Googled to find out.

Instead, I test market to them the old-fashioned way. I toss things while they’re pecking away, and after their initial fear drives them off when something lands near them, their curiosity seems to get the best of them, and they return to stick their beaks into what’s laying on the ground.
 
My favorite toss out the back sliding door was an apple core last week. When you move before opening the door, they must see or sense this, and they quickly strut back into to the woods. If you want to throw something into their midst, you must move slowly and open the door quietly.

I succeeded with the apple core and gave it a high underhand toss, like pitching in a slow pitch softball game. Bonk. It came down on the back of the lead turkey and he leapt about three feet in the air. I slid the door shut and cracked up. Interestingly, one of his buddies grabbed the apple and took off.
 
This taught me that they’ll go for the apples, so I tried it again later in the week. Sure enough, I one-hopped it, and one of the turkeys saw it coming, caught it on the bounce and trotted off. Impressive. He must play second base on the team.

There were 17 turkeys in the flock two summers ago, and 15 this past year (three adults and 12 children). They’re all huge now and adult size since we’ve been fattening them up with our leftovers.
 
My wife tried peanut butter recently. This also passed the test market. The squirrels took to it first, but even they were hesitant the first day or two. Something clicked and one of the squirrels came over to check out the jar. This brought the rest of his buddies, then the turkeys followed a few days later, poking their beaks in it, then pulling it out, looking quite amusing with brown peanut butter beaks. But they ate it, so it was another successful test market.
 
I’ve thrown banana peels their way that now sit frozen on the turf. I guess they want the real banana.
 
They chow down on radish leaves, cauliflower, lettuce and carrot stubs. They don’t pounce on leftover bread, but it does disappear by the next day (maybe it’s them, maybe it’s the possums who eat it overnight).
 
Test marketing turkeys is a great winter pastime. You may find a second baseman fielding your leftovers or a comedian sticking peanut butter on his nose. Regardless of the leftover food you send their way, it raises the entertainment value of the outdoors when the snow is flying.

​I have a nightmare of drowning in plastics. I’m buried in a landfill. More and more plastics are dumped on top of me. It builds and builds. I try to push it off. More keeps coming down. It’s unending. I attempt to swim up through it, but it continues to push me down as bags, bottles and containers continue to rain down until I submit to the onslaught.
 
That’s the nightmare. Others rage at the plastic nightmare blowing through trees, sitting by the side of the road, building up in our oceans, overwhelming as far as the eye can see. I have a good friend who can barely contain his anger at motorists who toss plastic debris out their moving car window. It takes all of his self-control not to jump out of his auto at the next stoplight and wring the neck of the perpetrator. You can see the veins bulge in his forehead when he tells this story.
 
So, his wife got him one of those extension arms for Christmas that allows you to pick garbage up with a clipping device on the end of a long pole so you don’t have to bend over. He was quite happy for a while. Then in broke. I’m not sure if he fixed it. If not, his frustration has probably been building again.
 
I’m a lot like him. I’ve repeatedly thought about buying one of those pointed sticks that’s used by people who cleanup the areas to the sides and in-between our nation’s highways. Spear the trash, slide it in the bag.
 
Another friend sees a spot every morning as he walks to the YMCA to work out. Twenty-five yards of sidewalk has heavy overgrowth. “People throw all their sh…t in there,” as he puts it. He walks by and thinks, “If I had a bag and one of those pick ‘em up sticks, I’d clean this up.”
 
For all of this, not having the spear or “pick ‘em up stick” can be an excuse. We put off doing the job. We keep looking at the mess, watching it grow and not acting. I’m guilty like the next person despite the fact that I participate in the occasional organized cleanups.

Our mother was a forward thinker and someone who put action over words. She would walk our dog after the three of us sons left the house, picking up trash and carrying it home to recycle or properly dispose of. The mile on either side of where we lived in Topeka, KS, was always spotless. Think if every homeowner did this.

Walk a mile in each direction. Pick up all the trash. We’d clean the world and get exercise. What an ideal solution.
 
There are so many opportunities for us to do good in our local neighborhoods that I sometimes think inertia stops many of us from actually doing something. We look and look and think what a blight the blowing plastic and other debris is, but we don’t stop the car to pick anything up. Perhaps we are commuting to work and time is short. Maybe we are en route to vacation and want to get there. The excuses are endless.
 
Start small. If there’s trash blowing around by the place you work, take a few minutes over lunch to pick up the parking lot. Expand from there. If you want to exponentially extend your reach, have someone buy you the “pick ‘em upper.” That will create a true commitment.

​At the doctor’s or dentist’s office, where you workout, or anyplace else where magazines are left for people to read as they pass time, there is always a “Last Magazine Standing.” That’s the one people don’t know about or don’t have an affinity for the subject matter.
 
As a full-fledged magazine dinosaur, I continue to flip pages by paper rather than on a touchscreen. I like being able to fold a page down to go back to it if I found something important. It’s great to rip a page or a section of a page out to save for future reference – a recipe or book to read, for example. Reading in the paper format also focuses you on that subject matter: you’re there to read about world news, entertainment or the environment, whatever the specific subject is. You don’t jump ahead to whatever scans your way next on the electronic screen.
 
I subscribe to the following magazines: Sports Illustrated; Milwaukee; GQ; Referee. Which do you think is the Last Magazine Standing?
 
If you said Referee, which I’m guessing you did, it’s no surprise. Of those four noted above, it is the most esoteric. People haven’t heard of it. If you are a sports official, you should know of it, and subscribe, as it has great stories, tests, personal anecdotes, unique game situations, all designed to help officials improve and support their cause.
 
My younger brother has read multiple issues and found Referee to have better writing and more interesting than Sports Illustrated. It’s a huge compliment, but not a reason you should know about the magazine. It is a reason to read it if you ever get a chance. And an opportunity to subscribe if you are sports official or interested in sports officiating (hint, hint to sports announcers on TV who regularly butcher the rules of the sports they are announcing).
 
Where I work out, there is a magazine rack to insert old copies. I put mine in there immediately when I’m done, typically within days of receiving them in the mail. Each issue stays relevant that way.
 
As I come back to the fitness facility, I perform the mental routine of watching which magazines disappeared and which remain. Referee tends to lag behind.
 
This does not disappoint or sadden me. I expect this. What it does point out though is sports officials are overlooked, underappreciated and just not in the frame of reference of most people. I consider us an underbelly profession – nobody pays attention to us expect to shine the spotlight on errors (most typically sports officiating is an avocation, as the vast majority of officials hold full-time jobs and officiate for the love of the game and to improve sport, not for the money).
 
I do wonder though why people don’t pick the magazine up to explore. Check it out. “Hey, I remember the hoopla last weekend about those officials. I wonder what Referee has to say about it.” You might find thorough and interesting coverage not available anyplace else.
 
And maybe, just maybe your interest would peak. You might think to yourself, “Hmmmm, I played football in high school and loved it. It sure would be fun to get back in touch with the game and be involved on the field in what is going on.”
 
If you see a lonely Referee magazine, pick it up and read through it during your next workout. Make it your friend. It might stay with you for life.

​Usually my wife saves me. Last week we reversed roles. I saved her.
 
Maybe the word “saved” isn’t perfect. “Baling her out” or “showing her a new trick” might be a better way to say it.
 
We need to set the context on this incident, because almost always it’s my wife who comes to the rescue and not the other way around. When I’m working on the desktop downstairs in my cave and the cursor disappears: “Deb, I’ve rebooted three times and the cursor still doesn’t come up. Can you please help?”
 
And she comes down to save me. Within minutes, sometimes within seconds, she has diagnosed the problem, implemented the fix, let me know everything is copasetic with the hint of a smile, then she heads back upstairs to her knitting.
 
She is a technological genius, from computers to cars to mechanical yard tools. I break them. She fixes them. Actually, I can’t start them and she figures out how to start them. Some riff on that theme is a fairly consistent one for our marriage and how things get done.

Recently, for example, as we prepped the great Wisconsin snow-out, I attempted to get the snowblower running so when we got slammed it would fire right up.  Now, of course, there are five apparatuses you must set correctly for our monster machine to successfully engage.  And each year, because it’s been 9 months since the last time I fired it up, I forget at least one of those steps.

This year was no different. I turned the ignition, set the choke, primed it, set the drive in the proper direction, then turned the electronic starter, which chugged along, but wouldn’t give you the explosive start where you’d yell “yes” because you knew you’d be to shoot snow for 90  minutes straight.
 
“Deb, it won’t turn over.” She was waiting at the sliding glass door, knowing what would happen. Nine seconds later she slapped her hands together and trudged back inside, having turned one of the knobs about a tenth of an inch to the right to make sure it was perfectly in position. I’m incapable of accomplishing that.
 
So, when the polar vortex attacked last week and her car wouldn’t start at the supermarket and she called in what was clearly an emotional and scared voice (it was -24 outside with a windchill of -54), I said to get inside the store and I would be down.
 
Growing up in the northern tier of the U.S., I knew some car starting tricks in brutally cold weather.  Since the car battery did let the starter grind, it was not the battery. Somehow the gas was not getting from the tank to the engine.

Like the snowblower, the car engine needed to be primed, so rather than attempt to jumpstart the car, I took her keys, pumped the accelerator five times and pushed the ignition and WHAMMO, it blasted to life. “HOW’D YOU DO THAT? THANK YOU!”
 
I showed her what I did. Not a biggie really, and a good lesson to have in your hip pocket for future situations. 
 
If there’s no sound when you try to start your car, yeah, it’s probably the battery. If the battery shows signs of life, pump the accelerator before using the ignition and see how that goes.
 
You’ll earn brownie points and feel a bit less like a mechanical dummy.