A Bob's Life: Monday Musings - October 16, 2023

Monday, October 16, 2023

Monday Musings - October 16, 2023

1. This is the third Monday of October! There are 10 Mondays remaining in 2023. Better start thinking about those Christmas decorations!

2. Family Football Results. It was a good week for the family teams.

Commanders (3-3) defeated Falcons (3-3), 24-16

Cowboys (3-2) play tonight

Steelers (3-2) had the a week off

Ravens (4-2) outlasted Titans (2-4), 24-16

Dolphins (5-1) sank Panthers (0-6), 42-21

3. After reporting the weekend scores above, I have to write that I was entirely frustrated with the NFL yesterday. I was so disturbed that I did not watch a single game. I wanted to watch the Ravens play in London, but that was carried only on the NFL network. Turns out my cable plan does not have the NFL network and I did not have any of my streaming services which had access meaning that I had to purchase the network separately. I watch one game per year on the Network, why am I going to purchase the network for one game? So I boycotted the day.

From the North Fork Loxahatchee River Bridge
Tequesta, FL
October 15 ,2023

4. It was a beautiful morning yesterday and I headed our for a 16 mile ride. I crossed the same bridge that the day before I motored under. I stopped to take an image of the flat water and the solitary boat just outside of the main channel fishing. It was an idyllic scene.

5. The flooring project is complete with only a small amount of painting to do in the powder room where we tool tile off the wall. I was able to get the wall prepped yesterday and expect to paint it today, thereby putting the exclamation point on the completion of the project.

6. Today in History. On October 16, 1934, the embattled Chinese Communists break through Nationalist enemy lines and begin an epic flight from their encircled headquarters in southwest China. Known as Ch’ang Cheng—the “Long March”—the retreat lasted 368 days and covered 6,000 miles, more than twice the distance from New York to San Francisco.

Civil war in China between the Nationalists and the Communists broke out in 1927. In 1931, Communist leader Mao Zedong was elected chairman of the newly established Soviet Republic of China, based in Jiangxi province in the southeast. Between 1930 and 1934, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek launched a series of five encirclement campaigns against the Soviet Republic. Under the leadership of Mao, the Communists employed guerrilla tactics to resist successfully the first four campaigns, but in the fifth, Chiang raised 700,000 troops and built fortifications around the Communist positions. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were killed or died of starvation in the siege, and Mao was removed as chairman by the Communist Central Committee. The new Communist leadership employed more conventional warfare tactics, and its Red Army was decimated.