Just Ramblin's

Flintlock

2006-10-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

I had the picture of the day-and-a-half flintlock pistol developed that I wrote about last week. I cut it out Thrusday, painted it Friday morning and my grand daughter dressed as a pirate wore it in her belt in the parade Saturday morning. It's rough but most of the shaping was done with an angle grinder after using a scroll saw for the basic outline.

Gabbin' Gorbie

2006-10-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

"Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev told a group in Texas that the proposed 700-mile U.S.-Mexico border fence reminds him of the Berlin Wall."

So Gorbie must think we're trying to fence in America's best and brightest if it reminds him of the Berlin Wall. Dear Mr. Former sombody, this fence is for the oposite purpose. We're trying to fence OUT undesirables, not fence in desirables. Sit down and shut up.

Where we live

2006-10-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

Lake Eerie was classified a dead lake years ago but today there is commercial fishing.

In 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio caught fire it was so polluted. That wasn't the only time it burned nor the only river to do so. Many rivers in several states had been so polluted they caught fire and burned in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Have you heard of any such thing in the U.S. in the last 30 years? No, industry has stopped dumping raw waste into our lakes, rivers and streams.

Are we denuding our country of forests? The lumber and paper industries just like any farmer, know they cannot harvest if they do not plant. They have planted more trees than they have harvested for a century. Today there is more than twice the amount of forest land in this country as there was at the end of World War II.

When I started working in Indianapolis in the fifties we kidded about being able to tell where you were in the city by the smell. We would leave home 35 miles west of the city to a clear sunny day. By the time we were in the edge of Indianapolis you could not see the sun for the dome of polluted air covering it. There were huge smoke stacks belching thick plumes, many places still heated with coal, raw sewage was dumped into White River. You didn't swim or fish in the river because it was so dirty. Today the skies over Indianapolis are clear, there are parks on White River, it's a beautiful city.

And you know what? Most of this has been done by private industry, municipalities and individuals. Oh sure, government passes standards, regulations, sets up huge and expensive bureaucracies to enforce it, but often their regulations are behind the progress made by the private sector. Why did Detroit start making better and cleaner automobiles? Because they were getting stomped by superior imports and people weren't buying American cars. It was compete or die and they chose to clean up their act. The federal regulations often hampered rather than help this process along. Yes, there have been times when regulations have forced an issue much like the pollution standards that went into effect for 1973. All that did was require Detroit to slap together some of the most miserably operating cars to ever come out. I had a '73 Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon with a 454 cu engine that was so choked down I think I would have had more power if I'd replaced it with a VW engine.

So what are the environmentalist screaming about today? It seems to me most of the "causes" they're involving themselves in today are invented. When we lived in Vegas the environwackos started screaming about how the Desert Tortoise was an endangered species and all the building there was destroying them and their habitats. A law was passed based on this information that required a builder to walk all the land before starting a sub division. If there was a habitat (hole under a rock) they couldn't build there, and if they found a tortoise they were to turn it into a shelter set up for that purpose. Well, it seems there were many thousands more Desert Tortoise in the valley than they'd said there were and soon the shelter was so overrun by Desert Tortoise they had to start "euthanizing" them. I think they would have been better off taking their chances with the developers, don't you?

The fraud about the Spotted Owl needing old growth forest for nesting (they found hundreds nesting in forest under 20 years of age). The fraud about the endangered brown trout in the Jarbridge creek (they'd been raised in farms and introduced to that creek as a game fish a few years earlier). The fraud about Canadian Lynx in the north central U.S. (It was proven by DNA analysis the hairs were planted in the wild, taken from two Canadian Lynx being held in captivity).

Are we destroying the environment or restoring it? It appears to me there has been a huge change in the direction of restoration in the last fifty years. Game animals like deer, turkey, elk, antelope, bison, ducks, geese, trout and such are more plentiful today than they were over a hundred years ago. Most of that is not because of the loud mouths of do nothing environmentalists but by the monies from hunting, fishing and trapping licenses being used to create habitat, breeding programs, seeding and controlling the populations.

I like the differences I've seen in the last fifty years, but it wasn't accomplished by most of the lies, deceits, distortions and loud mouth, headline grabbing fabrications of many so called environmentalists. It was accomplished by the people, cities, states and the federal government, and at times in cooperation with honest environmentalists working with them.

Yes, there are species that have become extinct, but history tells us that is an ongoing process since the first life crawled up out of the mud (seen any dinosaurs lately?). I don't expect the feeble efforts of man can stop that process regardless of how loudly environwackos scream.

Let's not camp out

2006-10-12T05:27:00.000-07:00

We had talked with our Indiana daughter and her significant other about meeting at a state park in southern Indiana to camp out a couple of nights. Because of one thing or another the date kept getting pushed back until this week-end became the next available time slot (mid October). They've been having some nights dip into the freezing levels though, not really conducive to a fun camp-out, and so they're coming down this week-end to spend Friday and Saturday night with us instead. Lot's of talking time over coffee.

Then last night the Indiana son called to say they were coming down Saturday night and will be in around 3 Sunday morning. They'll probably stay over until Monday. Sunday we'll all get together with the son and daughter that live here close and we'll be with all four of our children once again. Twice in 20 years and now twice in two months because we all live in closer proximity these days. What a blessing that is.

One of the delights of life has been watching them from birth to now. All their wins and losses, marriages, divorces, stumbling and getting back up again. Four distinctly different people all with their own set of strengths and weaknesses, with their individual histories separate from my wife and I since they became adults. I think one of the hardest things was switching over from parent that guides and directs growing children, to butting out as they became adults. Giving advice only when asked but being their when someone needs an arm to lean on. In spite of all the mistakes we made as they were growing up, we did succeed in one way. They all love each other, and they all love us.

It'll be a great week-end

Is this gunsmithing?

2006-10-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

Did you ever use a four and a half inch angle grinder? Twenty thousand RPM and a serious tool.

We have this Pumpkin Festival each fall, car show, singers, food booths, a parade, you know the drill. My sixteen year old grand-daughter decided she wanted to dress like the pirate Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. She'd spent a couple of weeks gathering the various pieces of pirate gear - boots, sash, belts, head gear, ballooned sleeve blouse, long vest with brass buttons and a sword. She couldn't find a flintlock pistol however and didn't know what she was going to do.

Grandpa and his trusty angle grinder to the rescue. The parade was Saturday and I found out Thursday morning we needed a flintlock. We found a picture on the Internet, printed it out and I pointed it up to about 12 inches long as I drew it onto some one and a half inch thick board. I used the scroll saw to cut out the basic shape then did almost all the carving with a sander disk in the angle grinder. That little machine will do a lot of woodwork in a very short time but it's a rough finish. There wasn't much time to do a good final sanding though because I had to get it painted so it would dry by Saturday morning.

The hammer and striker plates I cut from quarter inch plywood so it wouldn't be as apt to break off, and formed the trigger and trigger guard from a piece of metal. A little brown paint, a little silver paint and she was tickled to death with it.

That's enough reward.

Electric Sports Car

2006-10-06T20:11:00.000-07:00

A 100% all electric sports car from Tesla Motors (love that name). 250 miles on a charge, zero to sixty in four seconds. Currently priced about a hundred thousand dollars, but it looks to me like they're getting closer to a decent electric with more performance and greater distance on a charge.

Us Antiques

2006-09-29T05:22:00.000-07:00

In '98 our youngest daughter bought this computer for us. Just had it delivered one day without even hinting she was doing it. It's still up and running eight years later, and in computers today it would have to be considered an antique. Officially Windows 98 was released on June 25, 1998 but the disk that came with this machine says it was originated 5-11-98. It contains Internet Explorer and Outlook Express 4.0 or 4.1, can't remember which.

This unit came with 32 MB memory and a 3 GB hard drive (about average for that time). I increased the memory to 128 (actually says 132 when it's loading), added a second, 8 GB hard drive for back up, put in an Ethernet card to get on DSL, put in a CD burner and a few other things but I'm still running Win 98 and am on my fourth reformat. Always before I could upgrade the operating system by downloading from Microsoft after I'd reformatted, but Microsoft has discontinued upgrades for 98.

I was able to dig OE and IE six point something out to upgrade after the last reformat, but my new printer requires a USB connection which I ain't got none of. (the old printer committed suicide by trying to print an animation of a firing gun and accidentally shot itself through the memory board).

I went looking for a USB card yesterday and changed my mind, buying a new computer instead. I think the new one is probably about average for today's machines with an 80 GB hard drive and 512 MB of memory but it's a pretty good increase over what I have. It does have Windows XP (does that stand for X-Perimental), so I'm going to have to spend some time exploring that. If I don't like XP I may try loading Ubuntu into this old machine and see how that operating system works. I have a disk for that and have heard some good things on it, but I'd like to talk with someone familiar with both to see what the pros and cons are on them before I bother.

Now I start with trying to transfer all the stuff from this one to the new one. I might just load it all onto the D drive in this one, pull that and connect it into the new computer, or save it all to a disk. One other thing I'll have to do. Over the years we've saved files on the 1.44 MB floppy disks, and computers today don't come with a floppy drive. I'll probably spend some time downloading those to a file on this unit, then burn all that to a disk before taking this unit down.

That's all I need, another project.

A little color is starting

2006-09-28T03:02:00.000-07:00

We're getting a little color in the trees around the house but according to this Weather Channel map we're in the late October region for peak colors. Year before last it was like an earth-tone rainbow around here, then last year much more muted. I should well imagine the difference is the amount of rain we have and if there is any early frost. The pictures I've posted are from Fall 2004. The fruit in the one picture is Quince Pear. Quinces are not consumed raw but are used for Marmelo which I understand is still very popular in Spain and Portugal. This marmelo has been the example for the marmelade we make out of citrus fruit today. Once they fall from the tree they don't last long. The deer DO consume them raw.

is a rose, is a rose

2006-09-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

We bought some rose bushes this year and they've been blooming pretty steady. I think the technical names are red roses, pink roses and some kind of peach colored rose. Then there's a picture of the windmill finally repaired and up again. Last picture is the old court house on the square in town. When we moved here it was painted white, then they got one of those federal grants to return it to it's original look and have spent a few months blasting it back to the old brick.

Please do your part

2006-09-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

This coming week is National Mental Health Care week. You can do your part by remembering to contact at least one unstable person to show you care.

Well, my job is done !

Procrastination

2006-09-17T14:38:00.000-07:00

Another of my personal mottoes. Never put-off until tomorrow anything that can be put-off indefinitely.

For the last forty years I'd considered the idea of writing the definitive book on procrastination. Finally it dawned on me any book about procrastination would have to be written by an amateur as us professionals would never get around to it.

There used to be an expression when someone thought you were not being completely truthful. "You're putting me on". For the secret society of procrastinators, we're really putting you off - along with everything else. I don't hurry up, I hurry down.

By the way, I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and am just getting around to posting it. That's almost record speed for me.

Float trip pictures

2006-09-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

In April of 2005 I wrote about a float trip my brother, nephew and I took on the Cumberland River. I was browsing through some pictures of that trip and decided to post some pictures of it. The first picture is of the boat anchored at the Rock House, a very large, natural stone arch at the edge of the river. You can see the boat. It's twenty foot long and six wide so that gives you a little perspective. The second picture is my brother in the front of the boat and me in the middle. My nephew is in the back of the boat with one of the several small waterfalls along the way.

Wupatki

2006-09-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

We visited the Wupatki ruins north of Flagstaff Arizona several times over the years we were in the southwest. There are numerous ruins through that area, but the largest community was built on an upward sloping rock formation.

At the base of the hill is a small opening in the ground no more than a foot square. The park service has cemented it in and put steel bars across it so small children or pets can't fall in. During the day in the middle of the hottest summers you can lean over this opening and hear and feel the cool air blowing up out of it. I video taped the opening and playing back the tape you can hear the air roaring in the microphone. This small hole is the only opening to a several million acre cave formation under ground, and the air rushing out during the day is at about 54 degrees Fahrenheit.

The ranger explained that the difference between air pressure during the day and during the night, causes it to draw air in at night then blow out during the daylight hours. He went on to explain that they believe the people that built here had created a rock and soil duct from this hole up through the rooms. This would allow a cool air flow during the hot summer days, and a 54 degree air flow during the coldest parts of the winter. A crude form of central heating and air conditioning. Ingenious.

September 11th

2006-09-11T04:22:00.000-07:00

Goin's on around here

2006-09-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Well the deal was finalized and the property adjacent to mine my brother had owned, is now owned by someone else. Nice young couple that live in Indiana. They're only going to be here on week-ends for a long time but his dad lives just a mile or so down the road from us. The young fellow that bought the place stops to chat each time he's here, and today he gave me a key to the house in case I have to get inside for anything. I've been keeping an eye on the place for him.

That means we no longer need the tractor for bush hogging around here since all the meadow area now has a new owner (first thing the new owner did was bush hog it last Saturday). My brother put the tractor, bush hog, a seven foot finish mower and the box grader up for sale. The tractor and box grader haven't sold yet so I've been using it to smooth out the areas on my daughters property where they ditched for the water line and septic system. We had all that rain after they'd finished with the ditching so it settled the dirt quite well. However there are places it left craters and others where the dirt is still piled up. Lots of work for muscle and shovel but pretty easy with the tractor. Fits in with my old motto: "Never use muscle for a job you can get gasoline or electricity to do for you".

Finished painting the windmill today and set it back up. The wind had knocked it over and busted several blades loose. This time I took treated lumber and built a platform for it to attach to. I tapered the corners of the platform at the same angle as the taper on the windmill, about eighty pounds of lumber, then set each of the four corner posts in eighty pounds of concrete in four holes. If the wind blows it over now with four hundred pounds of base, that will be the least of my worries. It would take the house first.

I'm going to have to go back to work. This retirement is killing me.

This 'n' That

2006-09-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

The power company should be here today to hook up my daughter's mobile home. The various inspectors and workers have come and gone. The water is hooked up, the septic system is in, the power pole with the meter box is in place, and the lines to the breaker box in the mobile have been connected.

Kentucky has a neat law on wiring houses. It's legal for the homeowner to do it themselves instead of having to pay a licensed electrician. Of course the state inspector gives it a much more thorough going over than if an electrician did it. My eldest son has done that sort of work, knows the current codes, etc. so was able to work with her to make sure it was all proper and pretty. Now all we need is the power company to connect the wires on the pole and put a meter in the box. If that gets done today daughter and grand daughter will spend the first night in their new home.

I've been repairing the blades for one of those decorative, eight foot windmills for the yard. Just a rough guess, if I had a job at minimum wage and put in as many hours as I have on the windmill, I could have bought eight or ten of the darned things brand new. Why do I get myself into these things?

Sitting here looking at a bottle of Glucosamine/Chondroitin on my computer desk. I pop a couple of those supplements every evening. I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis about ten years ago. Really painful. several nights I had to set up and keep ice packs on one joint or another to keep the pain down. The doc sent me to a Rheumatologist who gave me some literature about living with it, and told me he could give me progressively stronger pain medication as the pain worsened. He also said I had a 30% chance of being totally disabled within three years. I decided it was time to look for a different opinion and started talking to people involved in alternatives. One friend loaned me a book called "The Arthritis Cure". The bottom line for the book was to take 1500 mg of Glucosamine and 1200 mg of Chondroitin each day. Evidently this information had been around for a while because when I checked the pharmacy they had tablets in the proper combination in a product called Osteo By-Flex. Now there are numerous competitors. I had one finger joint lock up on me during the next year, but I've not had any pain since I started taking it. About two or three years later that finger joint limbered back up too. Arthritis (either rheumatoid or Osteo) destroys the joints and that supplement combination is the building blocks that builds them back up. It may not cure arthritis, but it has stopped all effects from it in my body. I just thought I'd tell this experience in case anyone reading this has similar problems.

This explains it all

2006-09-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

Many of you will recall that on July 8, 1947 , witnesses claim an unidentified object with five aliens aboard crashed on a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico . This is a well known incident that many say has long been covered up by the US Air Force and the federal government.

However, what you may NOT know is - in the month of March 1948, nine months after that historic day, Albert Arnold Gore Jr., Hillary Rodham; John F. Kerry; William Jefferson Clinton; Howard Dean; Nancy Pelosi; Dianne Feinstein; Charles E. Schumer; and Barbara Boxer were born!

This piece of information has now cleared up a lot of things.

Voyeurism

2006-09-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

I was sitting on a log in the woods a few weeks ago when some movement caught my eye. There was a box turtle mounting another. I presume the mounter was male and the mounted female but who knows. After a bit he was in almost a verticle position and it was about then I thought to go get the camera. By the time I got back he'd toppled over on his back but they stayed in that position for a very long time so I presume they were still discussing wedding plans.

I'm Offended

2006-09-02T19:32:00.000-07:00

It never ceases to amaze me at the things people find to be offended by these days. It's as if we have an entire sub-culture of people who are constantly on the lookout for any perceived slight. I remember one incidence while living in Vegas where the cops stopped a handicapped man riding one of those scooters designed to give the handicapped mobility. He was driving it at five mile per hour on a six lane street in the center lane of the north bound side, during the morning rush hour. Cars screeched to keep from hitting him, or dodged into adjacent lanes to avoid him. All the sidewalks along that street are the type municipalities have spent millions on to make them handicap accessible with the up and down ramps at every street, business entrance or alley. His reason for driving in the street was he finds having to drive up and down those little ramps "offensive".

My daughter worked for a while as a PSA (passenger service attendant) on the steam train that runs from Williams Arizona to the Grand Canyon. The job of a PSA is to answer questions and mix drinks, but the majority of the trip will be spent telling about the country they are traveling through, some of the history of the area, what to expect at the canyon, tours that can be taken once they arrive, and the like. She would also tell jokes. Bad jokes. Since that is open range country you will often see cattle along the line, so most of her jokes were cow jokes. One such joke would be, if they saw a herd of cattle, she would tell them those were summer cows. A little pause to let them think what a summer cow could be, then she'd say summer black, summer white and summer even brown. The railroad received three different complaints from black people that found that joke offensive (?) and she had to stop using it.

I guess the easily offended sub-culture baffles me even more than the "victim" sub-culture. The victims are usually trying to get something free by playing up their victimhood, but what do the people get from constantly searching for something that offends them?

Suspicions Confirmed

2006-09-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

It's too late to build an ark

2006-08-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

We've been having rain the last three or four days. Not showers. Not sprinkles. Not even downpours, but real gully washers, deluges of biblical proportions. The kind of rain that doesn't even know you have gutters and downspouts but shoots straight off the roof ten feet into the yard. It'll slack off a while to a shower or sprinkle, even stopping for a bit here and there; then right back it comes.

It's drowning the ducks.

Windshield wipers on fast speed can't handle the volume of water that has come down during the hard rains. If they had half that amount of rain in Las Vegas the entire city would go down the Las Vegas wash and pile up in Lake Mead.

If I don't empty the rain guage every so often it overflows. Each morning it's full and overflowing so I don't have a clue how much rain fell during the night. Even at that I've counted more than 20 inches from Sunday morning through Tuesday morning.

I think it's stopped.

The silence is deafening. The only sound is the lawn growing at a record breaking speed.

Houn'dog's howlin' across the valley

2006-08-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

We stopped in for lunch at the Chinese buffet in town. That was one of the special surprises moving here. Our little town of 1,600 has a really great Chinese buffet. It's owned and operated by a young couple from China. It's clean and neat, friendly and has a surprising number of items at any one time. Being a small town of course they don't have a packed house all day, so they only prepare small portions to go on the buffet. That way it's always fresh. If something runs out just wait a few minutes and there'll be more.

There's a place down the road about three miles called The Deli. It's not a deli. It's just a country restaurant with eggs, biscuits and gravy and the like for breakfast, burgers and such for lunch and dinners that include small steaks, roast beef Manhattans, fried chicken. Nothing that really reminds me of a deli but it's cheap and it's good and you can walk in and pour your own coffee. They'll keep refilling your cup even if you set there for hours and its 45 cents. We don't have a starbucks within seventy miles of town, so that's another good point about this place.

I had to renew the plates for the cars the other day. When I went into the license branch I was the only customer but there were three ladies behind the counter. All three pitched in and I was out the door in under two minutes with all the paperwork done. When I lived in Vegas that was a four to eight hour task.

I was in the Post Office and asked the counter clerk who I should talk to about getting an address for my daughters new place. She knew, wrote down the name and phone number of the person I was to contact and didn't even have to look the number up. It seems the lady I needed to contact had just resigned the day before though, so they sent some guy out to the property to determine a correct address. Since it wasn't his job he and I talked it over, and he gave her the address I told him I thought it should be.

An inspector came out and determined the septic system required for my daughter's property. When the guys installed it according to those specs they told him when they would be running a flow test on it. He was there right on time and the whole thing was approved and covered. They all knew each other by their first names.
My daughter picked up a load of things from her storage facility in town. She has about everything moved in now but one day she forgot and left the overhead door wide open on the storage. The owner's wife closed and locked it then called us to make sure we knew it had been left open. Nothing had been disturbed.

Until I was in my late 40's I'd always lived in small towns. Then I did a 17 year stint in Vegas. It's such a pleasure to get back to the way business takes place in a small town.

Don't Touch My Percolator

2006-08-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

Aaargh! When will they ever stop wasting money on studies in an attempt to prove how harmful coffee is for you? Every year or two there's another study. What have these studies cost the country over the years? It looks to me like they could simply take a quick glance at all us older folks, figure out our coffee consumption since childhood hasn't done us in yet, and let it go at that.

Okay, coffee might have some effects that are less than perfect for the healthiest lifestyle. So what doesn't? When my mind balances any such proven or imagined effect against the three score years I've enjoyed the morning pot, the after dinner cup, the coffee break, the hot thermos on a cold night I DON'T CARE IF IT IS LESS THAN A PERFECT DIET ITEM!

Why don't they take some of this grant money, tax dollars, research funding and do a study on the effects of increased blood pressure from being bombarded by ever more studies on coffee. Stay out of my kitchen. Stay out of my life, and if you value your life, don't touch my percolator.

In Black & White

2006-08-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

Watching a black and white movie on television one night when the kids were young, and one of them asked why they did it that way (meaning why wasn't it in color). I told them color hadn't been invented when that movie was filmed, that the whole world was still in black and white. "When I was young we didn't have orange juice for breakfast, we had gray juice." "Our green beans were called gray beans, and you would seperate the whites from the gray when you seperated an egg."

For a couple of minutes there they were listening to me like I was telling the truth, then I got one of those "Awww dad", and the jig was up. All four of them have grown up fairly normal in spite of my wonderful teachings. Of course they're not as gullible as some people.

The Weeping Willow

2006-08-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

My daughter wanted a weeping willow for her new place, so my wife picked up a six foot one from the nursery the other day. Daughter and grand-daughter planted it in their lawn between our two places but didn't fill the hole all the way to the top around the tree. Family and a couple of friends got together around noon on Saturday (25 of us), had a ceremony under a canopy I'd set up near the willow, then daughter and grand-daughter sprinkled some of James' ashes around the willow and finished filling the hole. They felt that would be their way of bringing his memory with them, making him part of their new place.

It was a short ceremony with my brother the preacher leading, then we all gathered at our place for a pitch-in dinner on the rear deck. It was pretty warm out but anyone that wanted to cool down would retire to the house for a while. Most of us just stayed outside munching and talking, and it was about five when people started drifting off toward their own homes. All four of our kids were here with us for the first time in six or seven years so that made the day special in itself.

They brought in a mobile home today

2006-08-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

My daughter and grand-daughter have been staying with us since my son-in-law died. My brother is selling all his property adjacent to ours but carved off a one acre plot beside ours for our daughter. He's giving it to her for the cost of the survey and deed change, so she bought a mobile home to set there. The mobile home company delivered and set it up today but a few details remain. The health inspector came out Monday and determined the requirements and placement for a septic and leech field so that has to be installed. The water will have to be piped in, power brought in, phone lines, permits, inspections and the like but they're already moving in furniture and the boxes and cases of their personal possessions. I guess old dad here is going to get the job of building front and back porches for them. Like our place, they back up on the woods so the largest porch will be on the back side of the mobile where they can set and watch the critters.

My brother and sister-in-law giving her that acre came as a total surprise to all of us. My daughter had been looking at possible places to rent or buy, but this is ideal. They can stroll over to sit with us on the back porch of mornings and/or evenings (a regular thing for us in nice weather), and my eldest son and his wife join us most evenings on the porch too. They just live about a mile and a half down the road from us. It seems our family is drawing closer together. When we were living in Vegas the four kids were in Arizona, Indiana, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Now we have two here and two in Indiana. All four will be here this week-end so the six of us will be together for only about the third time in more than 20 years.

There will be other family members here too and we're going to take the opportunity to do a memorial service for my son-in-law. My brother the preacher will officiate, and my daughter is planting a Weeping Willow on her new property. During the service she will sprinkle some of his ashes around the tree. Of course most of the day will be taken up with visiting, a pitch-in dinner and all the fun of family getting together with that solemn moment as the focus of the day.

The Bullies

2006-08-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

Someone sent this to me, author unknown. If anyone knows who wrote it I'd be happy to list it here.

I once witnessed a bar fight in downtown Olongapo (Philippines) that still haunts my dreams. The fight was between a big oafish bully and a rather soft-spoken, medium sized Latino sailor from my ship.

All evening the bully had been trying to pick a fight with one of us and had finally set his sights on this diminutive shipmate of mine...figuring him for a safe target. When my friend refused to be goaded into a fight the bully sucker punched him from behind on the side of the head so hard that blood instantly started to pour from this man's mutilated ear.

Everyone present was horrified and was prepared to absolutely murder this bully, but my shipmate quickly turned on him and began to single-handedly back him towards a corner with a series of stinging jabs and upper cuts that gave more than a hint to a youth spent boxing in a small gym in the Bronx.

Each punch opened a cut on the bully's startled face and by the time he had been backed completely into the corner he was blubbering for someone to stop the fight. He invoked his split lips and chipped teeth as reasons to stop the fight. He begged us to stop the fight because he could barely see through the river of blood that was pouring out of his split and swollen brows. Nobody moved. Not one person.

The only sound in the bar was the sickening staccato sound of this sailor's lightning fast fists making contact with new areas of the bully's head. The only sound I have heard since that was remotely similar was from the first Rocky film when Sylvester Stallone was punching sides of beef in the meat locker.

Finally the bully's pleading turned to screams.... a high, almost womanly shriek. And still the punches continued relentlessly. Several people in the bar took a few tentative steps as though they wanted to try to break it up at that point, but hands reached out from the crowd and held them tight. I'm not ashamed to say that mine were two of the hands that held someone back.
You see, in between each blow the sailor had begun chanting a soft cadence: "Say [punch] you [punch] give [punch] up [punch]... say [punch] you [punch]were [punch] wrong [punch]". He had been repeating it to the bully almost from the start but we only became aware of it when the typical barroom cheers had died down and we began to be sickened by the sight and sound of the carnage.

This bully stood there shrieking in the corner of the bar trying futilely to block the carefully timed punches that were cutting his head to tatters... right down to the skull in places. But he refused to say that he gave up... or that he was wrong.

Even in the delirium of his beating he believed in his heart that someone would stop the fight before he had to admit defeat. I'm sure this strategy had served him well in the past and had allowed him to continue on his career as a barroom bully. Finally, in a wail of agony the bully shrieked "I give up" and we gently backed the sailor away from him.

I'm sure you can guess why I have shared this story today. I'm not particularly proud to have been witness to such a bloody spectacle, and the sound of that bully's woman-like shrieks will haunt me to my grave. But I learned something that evening that Israel had better learn for itself if it is to finally be rid of at least one of its tormentors:

This is one time an Arab aggressor must be allowed to be beaten so badly that every civilized nation will stand in horror, wanting desperately to step in and stop the carnage... but knowing that the fight will only truly be over when one gives up and finally admits defeat. Just as every person who had ever rescued that bully from admitting defeat helped create the cowardly brute I saw that evening in the bar, every well-intentioned power that has ever stepped in and negotiated a cease fire for an Arab aggressor has helped create the monsters we see around us today.

President Lahoud of Lebanon, a big Hezbollah supporter and a close ally of Syria, has been shrieking non-stop to the UN Security Council for the past two days to get them to force Israel into a cease fire. Clearly he has been reading an autographed copy of 'Military Success for Dummies Arab Despots' by the late Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Ever since Nasser accidentally discovered the trick in '56, every subsequent Arab leader has stuck to his tried and true formula for military success:

1. Instigate a war.

2. Once the war is well underway and you are in the process of having your ass handed to you... get a few world powers to force your western opponent into a cease fire.

3. Whatever you do, don't surrender or submit to any terms dictated by your enemy. That would ruin everything! All you have to do is wait it out and eventually the world will become sickened at what is being done to your soldiers and civilian population... and will force a truce.

4. Once a truce has been called you can resume your intransigence (which probably caused the conflict in the first place), and even declare victory as your opponent leaves the field of battle.
This tactic has never failed. Not once. In fact it worked so will for the Egyptians in 1973, that to this day they celebrate the Yom Kippur War - a crushing defeat at the hands of Israel - as a military victory! No kidding... it's a national holiday over there!

President Lahoud has already begun to shriek like a school girl to the UN Security Council to "Stop the violence and arrange a cease-fire, and then after that we'll be ready to discuss all matters."
Uh huh. Forgive me if I find that a tad hard to swallow. He allowed Hezbollah to take over his country. He allowed the regular Lebanese army to provide radar targeting data for the Hezbollah missile that struck the Israeli destroyer. He has turned a blind eye while Iranian and Syrian weapons, advisers and money have poured into his country.

And now that his country is in ruins he wants to call it a draw. As much as it may sicken the world to stand by and watch it happen, strong hands need to hold back the weak-hearted and let the fight continue until one side finally admits unambiguous defeat.

From someone with experience in a part of the world few have.
(Author not named)

God Bless the Blogosphere

2006-07-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

There's only a dozen or so blogs I read regularly. However I seem to get more news, commentary and clear thinking on those blogs than all the news sources available to me.

Thanks all

RAINCROW

2006-07-26T20:02:00.000-07:00

In the summertime when I was a kid I often heard the call of the raincrow. I probably saw them too but didn't connect the call with the bird. Now I again live in the Midwest I've had the pleasure of hearing their distinctive call this summer. My bird book tells me the raincrow or stormcrow is actually the Yellow Billed Cuckoo. They used to be quite plentiful all over the U.S. and Canada in the summers but their population is declining rapidly. According to this web page there are only three small enclaves in Southern California, one in Arizona and one in New Mexico west of the continental divide today, as well as huge declines in the eastern states over the last 40 years or so. They tend to blame it on the loss of habitat but that doesn't wash. We have more than twice the forest area in this country as we had at the end of the Second World War. I would tend to think it more from pesticides that kill off their food source, or some effect from South America where they spend most of their year.

Three Great Guys

2006-07-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

Well, our Arizona family is here. They flew in Friday morning and we picked them up in Nashville. Their plane was about three hours late due to weather. Their luggage was about 36 hours later. Now for the "above and beyond" part of the story.

My daughter's stepson, brother-in-law, and nephew decided to drive her belongings here. They hooked a large fifth-wheel box trailer onto their diesel pick-up truck then added a second vehicle trailer for our daughter's pick-up truck behind that. They left Prescott Arizona with this rig about noon our time on Thursday, and rolled into Edmonton Kentucky at nine a.m. on Saturday, a distance of about 1750 miles. We'd rented a storage shed and helped them unload everything into that. They wouldn't even stay for a cup of coffee saying they had to be back in Arizona Monday morning, and rolled back out of Edmonton about eleven a.m. They were back in Prescott by eleven our time on Sunday night. They wouldn't take a penny from us for all that effort. When I do the math on that, figuring they had to stop for fuel, food and bathroom breaks, and spent a few hours in a motel in Amarillo Texas going and coming, they didn't pay much attention to speed laws either direction

Good people abound in this old country of ours, we just never hear about them on the evening news. I guess big hearts aren't big news.

Deer Ticks

2006-07-23T20:52:00.000-07:00

I hate it when people forward bogus warnings . . . but this one is real, and it's important. So please send this warning to everyone on your email list:

If someone comes to your front door saying they are conducting a survey on deer ticks and asks you to take your clothes off and dance around with your arms up, DO NOT DO IT!! IT IS A SCAM; they only want to see you naked.

I wish I'd gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid.

Sir Isaac Newton was right

2006-07-21T19:26:00.000-07:00

It's not a cookie, it's fruit and cake.

Or maybe that was fig newton.

James

2006-07-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

James had a massive heart attack. His heart kept stopping and they had to shock him back to life 54 times before his heart finally kept working. When he was finally released from the hospital he was told he would never be able to walk again or do anything else that took any strain. His heart had been so damaged they said nothing short of a transplant would help. James didn't like the idea of being an invalid. He'd always been very active so he decided to walk. Little by little he got his strength back and eventually started walking the dirt roads around where he lived. He'd walk until he'd black out then start walking again when he came to. He'd lost his reading ability but worked at it until he could again read fluently. By the time I met him his lifestyle belied the damaged heart. He'd decided to live as he wanted until he died rather than maybe adding a few years by being an invalid.

My eldest daughter met James a little over ten years ago, they fell in love and were married. With the money he had from some investments they bought 40 acres in Northern Arizona about ten miles beyond the end of the maintained county roads. In the boondocks. There's no water out there, no electricity, no phone lines. Just rocks, cliffs, Pinon Pines, Juniper trees and high desert vegetation. They bought a 16 by 80 mobile home and set it up. They put a fifteen hundred gallon water tank on top the hill and piped it into the mobile, put in a septic system, a diesel generator, subscribed to satelite television and had the gas company bring out a propane tank and set it up. The generator would run the electrical service in the home and the water heater, range and refrigerator were gas. By trying different companies they found a cell phone that would reach a tower from there place and they had a home.

His investments allowed them to live frugally but comfortably until they decided to take in a couple of kids that needed a home. Kids take a lot of food, clothing, medicine, they put them in a private school and money was short. My daughter took a job with the steam train to the Grand Canyon and they got by just fine.

Then James' bad heart caught up with him on June 26th and he passed away. Since that remote area isn't a safe place for a woman and two kids alone, my daughter and the kids are coming to Kentucky to live. We'll now have one daughter and son here in Kentucky and the other daughter and son about four hours north in Indiana. This will afford us more chances for all six of us to be together. Something that has only happened a couple of times in twenty years. I'm looking forward to it, but losing James to make it happen saddens me. James was one of the good guys. He and I became fast friends from the first and we spent many great moments together in the ten years I knew him.

Singing on the Hill

2006-07-08T20:32:00.000-07:00

Pull out of our road turning right onto the highway, then make an immediate left into the first driveway will put me at the home of a couple that have a gospel group. They have one of those big stainless steel buses and tour around the country singing in churches and religious affairs. One man and two ladies sing and are backed by a grandson on keyboard, a drummer and a bass guitar.

Tonight they threw a bash on their lawn. The third annual "Singing on the Hill". Their home sits on a hill and has a huge lawn great for that sort of thing. There was enough food to feed everyone in this county and at least two neighboring counties. The dessert tables stretched a distance of about 25 feet, were four foot wide and you couldn't have squeezed another morsel on the whole length. For starters there was fried chicken, baked ham, baked turkey, pork chops, lasagna, corn on the cob, corn off the cob, fresh green beans, sliced tomatoes, salads of all sorts and sizes, mac and cheese, fresh fruits, deviled eggs aplenty several kinds of rolls. I can't list everything. I couldn't even name everything, but no one went away hungry.

After the food there were two different gospel groups that sang, then the host group finished the evening with a selection of their favorite songs. There were 75-80 people that showed up for the evening, my wife and I included. That was my Saturday evening, how was yours.

Penicillin Posterboy

2006-07-05T14:48:00.000-07:00

When I was in my late twenties I went to work feeling a bit punk one day. By lunch time I knew I was running a fever so dropped in on the company nurse. I had a temp of 103 so she sent me home. I drove from there to the doctors instead and they read 104 degrees. I was diagnosed with double lumbar pneumonia, given a shot of Penicillin in each hip, and feeling too bad to drive went to sleep in the car. Waking up a couple hours later feeling much better I drove home and was back to work the next day. Should my head fall off I think a shot of Penicillin should have it grown back within a couple of hours.

I have "Walking Pneumonia". I started feeling a bit warmish (101.5) on my birthday last Wednesday so went to the doctor's the next day. After a couple of x-rays, some chest thumping and chicken bones being tossed it came up walking pneumonia. I told them how the original wonder drug still worked just that way for me, but they don't even have Penicillin there they have "something better". They gave me a shot, some pills to be taken one each day for a week, and my temperature was higher the next day. I took a pill. I took another pill on Saturday. When my temperature reached 103 that evening I went to the emergency room and they decided I should check in as a guest of their facility.

I told them of the wonderfulness of the wonder drug Penicillin, but they have things that are much better and started an IV. My fever goes up and down Sunday, then down and up on Monday, reaching 102 as they experiment. On Tuesday, the Fourth of July, my fever continues and the doctor comes in for one more bedside chat. I inform him and the hospital I shall be leaving their establishment the next morning because they ignore my plea for Penicillin. They may know everything there is to know about medicine, but I've been living inside this particular body for 67 years. I'm the world's leading expert on it. Because they refused to listen in the doctor's office I've spent my first night in the hospital ever, and the next night and the next. Prior to their ministrations I had a perfect record going.

They gave me a shot of Penicillin the afternoon of the 4th. This morning my temperature had been 98.6 for over twelve hours and the doctor jubilantly dispensing good news says "If it stays down for more then 24 hours we can probably let you go home". Give me credit - I held my tongue, but suffice it to say I was home a little after ten this morning.

The Old Homeplace

2006-06-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

In 1883 someone built a two room house with twelve foot ceilings, one room in front of the other. In later years there were two more rooms added in a "T" formation to the back of that house. Then there was another two room house built just ten feet behind it, an unfinished room added to that, then the two houses linked together by a hallway and a bathroom. Somewhere along the line there were three porches added, one porch enclosed to make a small room, a large closet converted into a half bath, the unfinished back room extended and converted into a garage. It was a conglomerate of patchwork add-ons over nearly a century and a quarter.

Some part of the 1920's my grandparents, their two sons and one daughter (my mother) lived there, then my parents bought the house in the mid 30's. On Wednesday of this week it will be exactly 67 years since I was born in the front room of that house. Back then it had one 20 amp electrical service with two outlets in the house and one light fixture in the center of each room with a pull chain. The bathroom had a tub but no water. That had to be carried and heated. It did have a drain, but there was no water in the house, and it had an outhouse in the back yard. I remember dad bringing in water, putting in the septic tank, hot water heater, adding a sink in the kitchen and plumbing the bathtub, and a flush toilet. He converted from coal heat to gas during my childhood though there had been a gas range from my earliest memories. I was living there when I graduated high school.

The house and yard are a quarter block wide and half block long, and the garden adjacent to it is the same size. The whole property takes up one quarter block in that small town.

After more than twenty years there dad built a new home west of town. My younger brother bought the old house from him, making more improvements to it then he sold it to his wife's parents some time in the sixties. The Father-in-law lived there until three or four years ago when he passed away.
The Methodist church that backs up to this property, bought it, converted the garden area into parking and rented the house. Today I learn the renters were trashing the place and have been evicted and the church has announced they will tear the house down.

I sit here examining my emotions on this and find indifference. My thoughts of that house are of the wonderful childhood I experienced there. The value is in those memories, not in the structure of the building itself. My link to that house is in my memories of our family there as part of that town as it was in the forties and fifties. It's not the same town, the same era, not even the same house. It does deserve a tribute for the way it served so much of my family for more than half it's existence, so I write about it today.

Good bye old house

One-Oh-Four point Seven

2006-06-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of wild grape vines in the woods dangling from the trees. I was noticing the other day some of the trees are struggling to expose leaves to the sun because these grape leaves are nearly smothering them, so my son and I cut grape vines this morning.

I took a pair of long handled branch cutters and he carried the chain saw. Anything too big for the branch cutters he hacked with the chain saw and in the upper part of the woods closest to the yard we decimated the grape vine population. He got out the lawn tractor and I started along the edge of the woods trimming back redbud branches that try to claw me off the mower on that first couple of laps around the edge of the yard.

I finished this chore as he was mowing then headed for the string trimmer to clip the edges. I was sweating a lot (a foreign sensation when I lived in the dry climate of the desert) and decided it was time for an iced tea break. I noticed my indoor/outdoor thermometer was giving me a reading of 74.5/104.7 and with my quick mental calculations decided the 74.5 was a far more desirable environment than 104.7. I've retired for the day.

Grape vines in the woods were part of our playground equipment when I was a kid. We'd find a vine two or three inches thick, cut it off a couple of feet from the ground, and swing on it. We had one for a summer on the side of a steep hill. You could run down hill holding to the vine and it would swing you across a small creek and deposit you in the fork of a large tree about twenty feet off the ground, jump from the fork and it would swing you back to the hillside. The danger of such playground equipment is it gets brittle after it's been cut for a while, and this one decided to snap when one of our more portly friends was half way to the tree. He landed flat on his back in deep mud beside the small stream creating a human shaped hole in the mud about three times his size from the splat. Fortunately it scared him, covered him in mud, but didn't hurt him. Of course as merciless as kids are it was several years before we stopped reminding him of this.

C-R-A-S-H

2006-06-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

Hello again. My computer took a rather radical dive. No virus, but just seemed to lose most of it's files, programs, etc. No idea what happened but when it dumped files from the main hard drive, it also removed all the back-up files of the same name I had stored on the slave hard drive. Nothing would work so I reformatted drive "C" then found out it had strung part of the programs between drives "C" and "D" and it still worked about like I do. By disconnecting drive "D" completely then reformatting "C" again I have been able to return the machine to some semblance of order, but a lot left to do. I think it is claiming temporary insanity. It must be contageous because I was starting to get the symptoms too.

It's an old computer. I think it came out about the time Windows 98 did because that's the disk I have for it. It has Internet explorer 4.0 so of course nothing worked very well on any web pages and Microsoft is no longer supplying updates for this as far as I can tell. I did manage to update it to six point something because I had called it something weird and backed it up on "D" so the computer couldn't find it to get rid of it.

I debated just buying a new one, and thought about taking this one to the local guru, but mostly I'd fool with it for an hour or so then go do something more fun. It's possible I could have had it back up and running the first day had I just applied myself to it, but it's summer and there are things more fun than dawn to dusk in front of one of these contraptions.

2006-06-08T19:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I tend to get carried away. I wanted to put up a post in the front yard with the house number on it. Then I decided to put a roof over the sign, then.... You'll notice I still don't have the sign with the house number hanging there.

I wasn't here

2006-06-08T04:53:00.000-07:00

I've been in Indianapolis since Monday afternoon, so haven't been on the blogs. My wife's brother was rushed to the hospital in Lebanon and after arriving there went into respiratory arrest. They weren't sure if he would pull through when they called us. His blood oxygen count was 61. They put him on a breathing machine and transferred him to St. Vincente's in Indianapolis to try to find out what is wrong with him. As of the time we left they had him on several antibiotics, 90% oxygen, had eliminated several things that were not the problem, but hadn't determined what is causing it. He's still on the breathing machine and being kept sedated most of the time. Anyhow, we came home yesterday afternoon after another visit to the hospital and talk with his doctors. Not much I could do and his younger sister, two sons and one of our daughters and sons live near Indianapolis so will keep us informed. Late last night one of his sons called to say they'd found massive infections in his lungs so were beginning treatment for that.

The Menu Broke My Table Down

2006-06-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

The federal government wants smaller portion sizes at restaurants and nutritional information listed on menus.

Legislation to require menu labeling was defeated in Congress last year. Similar bills are being considered in the District of Columbia and New York state.

(snip) The National Restaurant Association said the report, which it helped prepare but does not support, unfairly targets the industry. The laboratory work necessary to calculate the calorie content of a menu item can cost $100, or anywhere from $11,500 to $46,000 to analyze an entire menu, the report said.

That cost makes it prohibitive for restaurants, especially when menus can change daily, said Sheila Cohn, director of nutrition policy for the National Restaurant Association.

(snip)

"If companies don't tell them, people have no way of knowing how many calories they are being served at restaurants. And chances are, they are being served a lot more than they realize," said Ms. Wootan, adding that Congress should give the FDA the authority to require such disclosure.
~~~~~~~~
How do we get such ignorant busy-bodies in places of power? How many people are going to want such information in the menus at their favorite restaurant? Maybe one in every ten or twenty thousand will think it a good idea. Of course there won't be any servers. They'll all be out getting hernia operations from lifting the menus.

People that are really THAT nutrition conscious already know pretty much what each item on the menu contains. The rest of us that just like the way the sixteen ounce medium rare prime rib swimming in au jus tastes, and have enough trouble finding it in a menu cluttered with veggie burgers and other assorted heart healthy selections couldn't care less. Of course that prime rib comes with a baked potato covered in sour cream, butter, chives, salt and pepper - ranch on the salad please.

Uh !

2006-06-01T05:18:00.000-07:00

Need to get the tent out again

2006-05-29T19:46:00.000-07:00

When we moved to Las Vegas in '87 it was the first time either of us had ever lived in a city. After a while we realized we needed to get out of the city on occasion and started taking little road trips around the area, staying in motels but seeing the countryside. Redrock State Park was just west of town, Mt. Charleston just northwest, and a little further north is the Valley of Fire State Park, all day trips. But we also did Death Valley, Yuma and Florence Arizona, trips back to Sedona Arizona where we had before lived before moving to Vegas, the Grand Canyon, into Southern California, Utah and the like. One trip took us through Cedar Breaks, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park in Utah. In Zion we took a drive through what was then the Watchman campground, stopped to picnic at an empty campsite on the Virgin River and got to talking about how it might be fun to tent camp in a place like that. A tent, camp stove, air mattress, water cube, cooler a few other niceties and we were tent camping later that year.

During the rest of our stay in Vegas we tent camped many places in several states but more than anywhere else we camped at Zion. We never tired of the ever changing scenery, the trails, morning coffee at the campsite, and sitting around the fire of a night.

Initially it had been our system to buy four or five bundles of firewood at the store and take these along for our evening fires. At four to five dollars a bundle it was costing us around twenty or thirty bucks each time we went camping. One day I noticed some of the pallets we threw away at work had 2 x 6 top boards. I bought a $35 circular saw, started taking those pallets home and ripping through the sections between the verticals (I didn't try to pull nails), would stack these boards in the shed and that became our firewood when we went camping. I figure the first couple of times we used this firewood the saw paid for itself. I'm still using the same saw. I love it when a tool pays for itself and is still a good tool.

Zion also has a lodge with a fairly respectable, moderately priced dining room. One evening in each of the last several times we camped at Zion we had dinner in the Lodge just as an extra treat for ourselves.

Morning coffee is one of my great pleasures in life and camping out adds something special to this little ritual. That is always my first thing for the morning when we're camping. Perk a pot of coffee and do nothing but sit and talk while we have a few cups. Often deer would wander within a few feet of the tent, road runners would scurry through at times, the red and white monoliths towering over the canyon seemed to glow in the morning sun, and campers seem to be nice people. No one intruded on your space, the campground would become silent at sundown, and we could be gone all day hiking, leaving all the camp gear set there without anything being disturbed. Okay, one exception. We left a bag of English Muffins on the table one day and the squirrels ate most of them.

Since moving to Kentucky the reasons we had taken up tent camping have been left behind. We don't have a city we need to escape at times, and if we want to enjoy the woods and countryside all we need do is walk out the door so we've not taken the tent out in the last couple of years. Still, we have all the equipment and have been talking about packing it up and spending a few nights at one of the lovelier parks around the area.

Which way'd they go?

2006-05-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

In the old westerns the Sheriff and the Posse would come riding up to a small ranch house. The grizzled old timer standing out front would point off toward the horizon and say "They went attaway sher'ff". This must be the road they used to take.

At any rate that's what came to mind when I saw this sign somewhere in southern Arizona.

Firewood

2006-05-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

I live in the country now, so I'm required to have a stack of firewood. I think it's a law or something. The fact this is a total electric home with no fireplace, no wood burning stove, not even a fire-pit in the back yard has no bearing on it. You just have to have a pile of firewood if you're going to live in the country. Of course this is a feeble pile in respect to what most people around this area have, but my son is coming over Monday and he's going to help me cut a bunch more.

Actually, I was clearing some dead-fall and decided to cut it into fireplace size and stack it on the back porch. My brother has a large fire-pit down by the river and we had a wiener roast there a few days back. I've piled this here and when he's in the area with his truck he'll pick it up and take it down there with him.

Blankety-Blank

2006-05-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

For the most part I avoid using "profanity" in this blog and in my daily life. In a face to face conversation there are gestures, inflections and various types of body language we use to convey our meaning. In the written word though the occasional "light profanity" such as hell or damn can help convey the emotion behind the message.

I also don't find what passes for cussin' in this country disturbing. I heard them all over a half century ago, and talking with someone that salts their language with such words bothers me not in the least.
There have been times when someone has run through their entire list of cuss words repeatedly just to get a rise out of me. It comes off as funny. Other times I've tried to talk with someone that will use two or three cusswords for every one word of what they're trying to say. It's confusing, and this is usually from someone that's not the sharpest blade in the drawer. But it doesn't bother me. I know many people that are highly offended by even the most tame swearing. I was once scolded for using dang. They said "I know what you meant and you just substituted that word".

But we have a huge word prejudice concerning our limited supply of cuss words in the English language. We emotionalize them far beyond the actual meaning of the words, and definitely beyond their usual intent.

For instance we have teachers directing grade school classes on sex education where they speak of sexual intercourse. That combination of words is tame by accepted standards. Saying exactly the same thing by using the term "having sex" will be classified more coarse. Then such subjects in front of a men's group we might use the word screwing. Far more coarse. Then of course the foulest of foul, the "F" word. Yet each of these four words or pairs of words mean precisely the same thing. The thing that makes one acceptable in polite crowds and the other highly offensive has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the words, but simply with the emotions we've chosen to attach to them.

In spite of the fact these few words lost their ability to shock a half century ago, I am a product of my upbringing to an extent. I prefer reading blogs where these words are either absent or rarely used, and then only when the emotion projected by the words is intrinsic in the delivery of the point. In other words I prefer what mother would have called "polite company".

Fortunately I've found many wonderful blogs that are indeed polite company. Thanks to all who visit here, and for the wonderful thoughts and stories you give me on your own blogs.

Proof of Global Warming

2006-05-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

Saint John Kerry

2006-05-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

This is probably an old one, but I'd never seen it before.

On a Saturday afternoon, in Washington, D.C., Senator John Kerry's campaign manager visited the Cardinal of the Catholic cathedral. He told the Cardinal that John Kerry would be attending the next day's sermon, and he asked if the Cardinal would kindly point out Kerry to the congregation and say a few words that would include calling Kerry a saint. The Cardinal replied, "No, I don't really like the man, and there are issues of conflict with the Catholic Church over certain of Kerry's views."

Kerry's manager then said, "Look, I'll write a check here and now for a donation of $100,000 to your church if you'll just tell the congregation you see Kerry as a saint. The Cardinal thought about it and said, "Well, the church can use the money, so I'll work your request into tomorrow's sermon.

As Kerry's manager promised, Senator Kerry appeared for the Sunday sermon and seated himself prominently at the edge of the main aisle. And, during the sermon, as promised, the Cardinal pointed out that Senator Kerry was present.

Then the Cardinal went on to explain to the congregation, "While Senator Kerry's presence is probably an honor to some, he is not my favorite person. Some of his views are contrary to those of the church, and he tends to flip-flop on many other views. John Kerry is a petty, self absorbed hypocrite, anal thumb sucker, and a nit-wit. John Kerry is a serial liar, a cheat, and a thief. John Kerry is the worst example of a Catholic I've ever personally witnessed. He turned on his buddies in Viet Nam. He wrote a book and portrayed himself in the best light when he was a traitor to his fellow servicemen. He has lied about his military record and had the gall to put himself in for a medal (including the Silver Star with V, (which does not exist). He married for money and is using it to lie to the American people. He also has a reputation for shirking his senatorial obligations both here, in Washington, and in Massachusetts. He simply isn't to be trusted."

The Cardinal completed his view of Kerry with, "But, when compared to Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Kerry is a saint."

Yes, but it's growing again

2006-05-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

Only had a sprinkle of rain the last two days and the ground was dry this afternoon. I was finally able to get the rest of the bush-hogging done on the closer to vertical parts of the meadows. I ran a tractor one spring when I was about ten or eleven disking fields, but have carefully avoided anything that resembled farming ever since. That is until I moved here.

When you spend your whole life driving automobiles you get used to the idea a vehicle isn't supposed to lean very far to the right or left, or go up or down very steep grades, then I get on this danged tractor running at near a 45 degree angle on the side of some of these hills and everything I've learned sends my brain screaming at me "THIS IS SO WRONG". Fortunately International Harvester sets the center of gravity much lower in accordance to the axle than Chevy did on my Blazer. That and those two big tires are filled with some sort of liquid that makes each wheel weigh about a half ton making it stick on angles my brain doesn't like to deal with. It gets a little less nerve wrecking with each time out though so my jaws weren't aching from gritting my teeth when I finished up today like they usually are.

The good news is, I don't own the meadows, my brother does. He has that property up for sale and I'm tending it for him since he moved away. When it sells, the tractor will be sold or moved to his new place and the meadows will be someone else's problem. I have about an acre and a half that I mow and that works just fine. I even enjoy that little chore. The rest of my small property is woods and I intend they should stay just that so long as I live here.

Tractors are amazing pieces of equipment though.

The UN Global Gun Grab

2006-05-22T19:29:00.000-07:00

President Bush vs. The UN Global Gun Grab by Rod D. Martin

What's the most fundamental of all human rights?

"The right to life, of course.

Without it, all other rights are meaningless -- after all, if you're dead, you clearly can't exercise any of them.

Now, if it means anything at all, the right to life must confer the right to preserve one's own life. And if the right to self-preservation has meaning, it must include the right to procure the means with which to defend one's life and liberty.

All of which is to say, the right to life necessitates the right to gun ownership."

Read the full article here

Send this to everyone on your list

2006-05-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

Just sign this petition and send it to everyone in your address book. We want the borders sealed or prayer back in school or to stop them from removing any mention of God from television or stop destroying precious mosquito habitat...

I get one or two e-mail petitions per week, all from well meaning people. Just copy and paste the entire thing into a new email, put your name at the bottom and forward it to a zillion people or more. If yours is the one thousandth name forward the petition to the President at Whitehouse.gov.

The way I've been responding to these for a while is like the following. I take the first name at the top of the current forwarded petition and write something like this...

Let's look at this objectively... If this is forwarded to the White House it will be ignored. No one is going to take the countless hours to sort out duplicate names.

For instance, the first name on the list, John Smith of nowhere USA. Let's assume John Smith sent this to ten people. Each of those ten will have John Smith's name on it, and if they each send it to ten that's a hundred petitions out there all with John Smith on them. If those hundred send it to ten each that's a thousand such petitions, then ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. Now that's just in the first six forwards. By the time it gets to the required number of forwards there will be so many millions of these out there all with John Smith on it the White House would have to hire thousands of people just to sort out the duplicates. Then of course there are the second, third, fourth names and on down that would also be on millions of petitions. In fact the only non-duplicated name would be the last name on the list that forwarded it to the White House.

It sounds like such a good idea everyone is signing and forwarding it, but this logical look at the outcome will tell you it won't work. If they set up a website where each person could go on and sign it just once then THEY sent it to the President when they had accumulated enough signatures it might actually be effective. But then a list of typed names don't really look like signatures does it, and could have well been done by just one person. The recipient of the petition has no way of knowing and will probably give it credence in direct proportion to their doubts about it's validity.

Don't send me online petitions. Oh, and by the way, if the subject line says "don't delete this one" it will be deleted without reading. If it says "You better not break this one" I will break it without reading. If it says "If you love Jesus" it will be deleted without reading. Like most of you, I find these spiritual or emotional blackmail pieces without fail, have no value in their content - ever. Why should I waste my time.

End of rant, you may resume your normal life.

It's a Conspiracy I tell you!

2006-05-19T07:08:00.000-07:00

I received, yet again, a thing about how that was a missile or a jet fighter that hit the Pentagon instead of a commercial jet liner. The story this time is that most of the information about this conspiracy was being deleted from the Internet by some shadow government agency to try to hide the truth. I responded...

I know why it's being pulled off so many web sites - it's bunk. When that plane came in low over the city dozens of people looked up and all identified it as a commercial jet liner. They found the black box from that particular plane and many parts clearly identifiable as wreckage of a 757 in the Pentagon wreckage. When a plane hits the hardened walls of the Pentagon it disintegrates, but the heavier parts (engines, landing gear, etc.) managed to penetrate through several walls before it was just bits and pieces. The wings were shredded against the outer wall and the engines made it to the second wall. The one camera that was supposed to show a much shorter plane was not designed to photograph objects running at nearly 300 mph crosswise, but to photograph license plates on cars moving five mph away from it. Low grade digital and if you know anything about digital cameras they will distort anything moving at much speed. It's a conspiracy theory that just won't wash.

Here's the real catcher though. If it was NOT Flight 77 where are all the passengers and crew that were supposed to be on it? They could never go anywhere they would be recognized and all their friends and families would have to be hushed up and depended on to NEVER leak this information. We're talking about hushing thousands of people. At least one of them would want to make a fortune telling their story to the news media. And where is that plane? Did they hide the plane that was supposed to have hit the Pentagon and get the airline to cover that up?

A little logic will make you realize that just like each of the World Trade Center buildings, it was a commercial jet liner that hit the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001.

I'm seeing red

2006-05-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

Besides the normal Cardinals I've had a couple of other red colored birds on the feeder the last couple of days. I was able to find them in my critters book. To my knowledge this is the first time I've ever seen either one of these, but then I've not spent much of my life birdwatching either.

The top picture is a Purple Finch and the bottom is Mr. & Mrs. Summer Tanager.

Bush's Make-or-Break Border Speech

2006-05-15T08:10:00.000-07:00

Bush's Make-or-Break Border Speech
By Joe Mariani

"If the President wants us to believe he's finally heard our demands for a secure border, he won't waste the entire speech talking about "jobs Americans won't do" -- a crock if there ever was one. It's "wages Americans won't pay" that creates a market for illegal labor in the first place. He won't waste time cadging support for amnesty by telling us how illegal immigrants are good-hearted people who just want to feed their families. By that measure, if I steal a car in order to go to work to feed my family, not only should I be forgiven, but allowed to keep the car."

Read the full article here

Pay the Rent

2006-05-13T21:03:00.000-07:00

I've owned property, leased property, rented property, had contracts, deeds and mortgages, but I don't owe a dime on this little piece of Kentucky, nor for anything except this month's charges on the Visa card. That is until the property tax assessment comes in. That's when it makes me realize the state owns this property and that "assessment" is my rent. Just like any landlord, if I don't pay it they evict me from the property and sell it (rent it?) to someone else. Looks like if you paid their taxes when you earned the money they shouldn't be able to tax you on the property you bought with the money. But they do. In fact there are few areas of our lives where they don't double and triple tax us. You pay a state tax on the money you earn then a sales tax on most of the money you spend in the state. Your tax dollars support state parks but they'll charge you a user fee (just another term for tax) to use it.

But that's all right because I know the government is spending my hard earned money wisely. I also think I have an inside track for buying up oceanside property here in Kentucky.

an E-Newsletter

2006-05-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

In the fifties I graduated from a small high school in a town of five hundred and some people. There were only about 125 kids in the 8th through 12th grades. The first graduating class was in 1897 and the last one in 1975. In '76 that town combined with two others to create a unified school system so there is one high school that serves all three communities. Each still has it's own grade schools.

Since February 2002 I've edited an Internet newsletter for the graduates of my old high school. The youngest person on the e-mail list graduated in the last class of 1975, and the oldest on the list in 1937. Five days a week I put together pictures, editorials, comments, news, cartoons and anything these graduates send to me, then send it to everyone on the list. That way we can all keep in touch with each other without overloading our inboxes, and many of them have said the newsletter is one of their highpoints in reading their e-mails each day.

Of course there are times I don't send out a newsletter because I'm away, but most weeks it has been sent the full five times. It's a labor of love to me, usually doesn't take too long any one night but like blogging, gets to be a habit after a while. There are currently 84 names on the mailing list but two of them aren't graduates of that school. Someone had forwarded one of the newsletters to them and they wrote asking to be added to the list.

That little town isn't exactly a hotbed of news, but any item that directly relates to the town, to one of the locals, one of the graduates or anyone on the e-mail list is always at the top of the newsletter. Even if it's just a note telling about what they've been up to recently.

I have a couple of ministers on the list so have to be careful the type of material I put in for that reason. I did learn there are some graduates of that school that are ultra-liberal too, because they asked to unsubscribe after I started including conservative editorials toward the end of each newsletter. I duly posted their unsubscribe notes at the top of the newsletter each time and made that the last edition they received. I had several of these in late 2004, one following the other saying "me too", so I wrote a note asking if the readers felt the newsletter had run it's course and if we should let it die a peaceful death. I had several dozen responses saying they agreed with my political views, liked receiving the newsletter, and for me to let the liberals start their own newsletter if they didn't like it. At any rate, tonight I sent out newsletter number 1,050.

I Think I Lost My Cat

2006-05-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

When we got into warmer weather he decided he loved being outdoors, often spending the night on the prowl, roaming the woods. He loved for me to go for walks in the woods with him during the day, would trail along somewhere in my vincinity, charge up trees, attack leaves or anything that moved, then lay beside me when I'd stop to set on a deadfall or something. Usually he would be at the back door when we got up of a morning waiting to be fed. If he'd been out all day and all night then at times he would curl up in the house to sleep between eatings, and if it had been a rigerous romp he'd spend the night inside too.

He's not quite a year old but full grown, and a tomcat. It might be he found a female on a neighboring farm but it's been six days since I saw him last. I fear he encountered something in the woods bigger than he was, or a farmer with a pussy cat and a shotgun. I'll keep his scratching post, the food and his dish for a while longer just on the off chance.

I didn't want the cat to start with but it's funny how I became attached to him, used to our walks in the woods, his presence in the family, and all his little quirks. I miss my cat.

I'm Slow

2006-05-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

I was kicked out of church because I was too slow to Fast.

Since my brother moved down on the Cumberland River I've been mowing his yard here and keeping it up so it looks nice when the realtors show the house. The adjacent meadows he always bush-hogged three or four times a year are a different matter though. He'd usually bush-hog them one day. I've been on it two days and ain't half done yet.

Some people find urgency in everything. For me, slow works just fine.

Round up a posse

2006-05-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Our good buddy Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is back in the news. Tired of the illegal alien invasion streaming across the border from Mexico, he has decided desperate times call for desperate measures. With limited police resources, he needs people to help him corral the lawbreakers that are roaming his county.

So he had an idea....which is actually an old idea: mount up a posse. He's recruiting members of the general public to round up the illegals and ship them out. Says the Sheriff: "There are so many illegals trying to make it into the county that it's overwhelming my deputies, so I have called on members of my 3000 member volunteer posse to assist."

Nothing like a good old fashioned posse. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. You gotta like this guy.

Inner Neighborhood Services

2006-05-08T05:24:00.000-07:00

This was sent to me just as you see it here, and I won't vouch for the truth of it. I just thought it an ingenious soluction to the problem.

I have a friend who is president of his homeowner's association down in Washington. They are having a terrible problem with trash on the side of the road that is around his association's homes.

The reason according to Wallace (my friend) is, there is being built just next to them, six new homes.....big ones! Wallace said the trash is coming from the Mexican work crews working at the construction sites. (McDonald Bags, Burger King trash, etc.).

He has pleaded with the site supervisors and the general contractor to no avail, called the City, County, the Police and got no help. So...................guess what some people in his community did? They organized about twenty folks, named themselves The "Inner Neighborhood Services" to go out at lunch time and "police" the trash themselves.

It is what they did while picking up the trash that is HILARIOUS !!!!!!!! They got some navy blue baseball caps and had the initials "INS" in gold put on the caps. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, however, to understand what they hoped people would think it means. Well the day after their first pick up detail, with them wearing their caps and some carrying cameras; 46 out of 68, of the construction workers did not show up for work the next morning!!!!!!!!.............and haven't come back yet!!!!!

It has been ten days. Now the General Contractor, I understand is madder than hell, but can't say anything publicly, because he could be busted for hiring "illegal aliens". Wallace and his bunch can't be accused of impersonating INS folks, because they have it on their home owner association records the vote to form the new committee within their association, plus they informed the INS about what they were doing in advance, and the INS said basically according to Wallace.............."have at it"!

SO FOLKS, I THINK YOU COULD SAY THAT YANKEE INGENUITY TRIUMPHS AGAIN!!!!!!!

Gotta get me one of them mowers

2006-05-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

On May First

2006-05-07T05:10:00.000-07:00

On May 1st, as a result of the Mexican boycott, national retailers reported 4.2% lower sales for the day, with a 67.8% reduction in shoplifting.

A friend sent this to me. Cracked me up

The Old Mulkey Meeting House

2006-05-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

We drove over the other side of Thompkinsville yesterday and took my son and his wife to the Mulkey Meeting House. It is a log church dating to the early 1800's, and there are many soldiers from the Revolutionary War buried in the graveyard there. Daniel Boones sister is buried there, and there is a stone for their brother Squire. I found it interesting there is a slave that lived to 102 buried in one of the family plots.

I was up at the crack of dawn

2006-05-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

So I patched up the crack and went back to sleep.

I love retirement.

I had the back door open listening to the birds and letting the fresh air in, drinking coffee, reading e-mails and blogs, when I heard the distinctive sound of a Rain Crow. I heard these birds all the time I was growing up in Indiana, and until I moved to the western desert regions at age 42. I don't recall hearing one while out that direction even though they do live across the nation. It might be because I didn't live where there was much of a forest for their habitat. Now that I'm back in the Midwest I've been hearing their call again.

Like some of those little revelations that rise into one's consciousness at times, it dawned on me I had no idea at all what the "Rain Crow" looked like. The call is always off there in the woods somewhere. I dragged the wildlife book off the shelf and found no such critter as a rain crow listed so I did a search on the Internet. The sounds my elders identified as a rain crow actually eminates from the Yellow-Billed Cuckoo. Learn something new everyday.

Hog's Tooth

2006-05-03T05:49:00.000-07:00

"Green" is such an appropriate name

2006-05-01T06:09:00.000-07:00

In response to an e-mail I received, with many links to envirowacko articles...

Well, the "Greens" have never been big on truth and reading through a few of these shows me they aren't apt to start now. All the websites included in the articles I looked at are the far left envirowacko groups like the Sierra Club that seem to have the opinion we should save nature at the cost of humans. Like humans aren't a part of nature? Just things like the meeting in 2001 they mention that suggested opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The suggestion to open ANWR goes way back further than that, back to 1980 or so. They have shown pictures of pristine forested wilderness with Caribou and Moose that is supposed to be the ANWR sights - Wrong, the less than one half of one percent of ANWR that has been suggested for drilling is flat, barren and miserable looking.

The envirowackos were the ones that told us in Nevada the Desert Tortoise was an endangered species and estimated there were only a few thousand left in the Vegas valley. A law was passed that every contractor before building had to walk the entire site. If they found a Desert Tortoise they were to take him to a special shelter set up by the government. Well it turns out in the next few months the builders turned in so many of these critters the shelter couldn't hold them and the government agents started killing them off because they didn't have room for them. Seems to me the tortoise would have had a better chance competing with the builders. At least they had a fighting chance before the Greens and the government got involved.

The Greens were the ones that said the Spotted Owl was in danger of extinction and could only nest in old growth timber, so we had the spotted owl added to the list. Then one of the executives of the logging/paper industry took some Senators through their pine forests and showed them spotted owls and spotted owl nests in abundance, all living in trees that had been planted 18 years earlier (and in areas of the country where there were supposedly none). Hell, we had spotted owls in Nevada.

The Greens found Canadian Lynx hairs in areas of the North Central United States and tried to get a few million acres of federal and private land in that areas set aside as Canadian Lynx habitat. Then some nosy scientist had the hairs tested for DNA and learned they'd all come from two captive Canadian Lynx's under the protection of the Forest Service, and were not from any Canadian Lynx running in the wild. They don't roam that far south.

The Greens tore up a chinchilla ranch and set all the creatures loose in the wild. They were eaten by predators, starved, died of disease, because they'd grown up protected in captivity and had no ability to fend for themselves in the wild. This kind of story is repeated thousands of times in the history of the people that embrace the "Save the Environment" movements without bothering to inform themselves of the truth of the situation. Ignorance might be bliss, but it sucks at accomplishing anything constructive.

I've watched these groups over the years, and would be one of the first to join them if they were reasonable, honest and practical in their efforts. They are none of the three, and that really turns off most of the people in this country that have bothered to look behind the emotionalized rantings to find the truth. They don't seem to see anything wrong with setting traps to injure or kill timbermen (such as spiking trees) just to further their cause, to damaging private property, to lying before Congress, blowing up taxpayer funded facilities, sinking or damaging fishing boats and endangering or killing the fishermen.

That list goes on to some great length and has been going on for three or four decades now. All their aims seem to be socialist in nature, but they never seem to notice that socialist governments are the least nature conservative of any government. If they could get what they want they would be the first to complain (but of course they'd wind up in some gulag for complaining about the socialist government they'd fought so hard to establish).

I even had one of the ignorant envirowackos complain about the Christmas tree industry saying we weren't going to have any forest left if they kept cutting millions of Christmas trees each year. Now that's a prime example of emotionalizing in ignorance. I had a devil of a time trying to make them understand these trees come from tree farms and are not cut in the "forests". That just like any farmer they had planted the crop, tended it and when they cut one section they'd replant.

We've done an amazing job of cleaning up this country in the last half century. We have more than twice the forests we had in 1950. Lake Erie was a "dead lake" and now there is commercial fishing on it. I remember when I started working in downtown Indianapolis in the fifties. Kingans meat packing plant dumping sewage in White River along with every other industry and the city itself. It stunk, was diseased, you dared not swim in it, eat fish from it (at least the fish that weren't floating on top already), and there were huge piles of gray foam at ever rapids or dam. The city was covered in a dome of pollution, it was dirty, run down, lots of slums, huge smoke stacks belching pollutants into the air - but look at it now! None of this was done by the so called "Green" parties or envirowackos, all they do is bitch and complain, sabotage, lie, cheat and steal. No, the clean-up is done by farmers, city planners, home owners, the paper and lumber companies, industry, and all actual productive people in this country, often in spite of the Greens and government.

They used wood a lot

2006-04-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

A six pack of soft drinks came in a little wooden carton with returnable bottles when I was a kid. Dad took the wooden dividers out of a couple of those cartons, nailed boards on the top, drilled a hole the size of a quarter in the end and stuck a wooden peg under the hole. He hung them in a tree and they were wren houses for several years.

Most fruits and vegetables came into the stores in wooden cases. The "orange crate" was an important source of building materials for us when we were kids. The stores tossed them out back and we picked them up and converted them into the magic kingdom of kids toys. Toy hand guns, boxes for our treasures, go-carts, rubberband powered motor boats and the like. We even went to the extent of having an orange crate canoe almost done before we lost interest (cars and girls came into the picture). Little did we know the colorful labels on the ends of these fruit and vegetable crates would become valued collectors items one day. But then I guess the same could be said of the baseball cards out of bubblegum we clothes-pinned onto the bike frames to make motor sounds as we rode.

Our little town didn't have a lot to entertain kids back then. There was no skating rink, movie theater, swimming pool, arcades, youth centers, toy stores, or any of the other dozens of things kids in a city today take for granted. We did have iron wheeled skates you clamped on your shoes to skate on the sidewalks. Most of the time we entertained ourselves using our imaginations and orange crates, and there was never enough time in the day to get it all in.

We had long summers though. It was a farming community and the farmers needed the kids at home through the summer as much as they could. We went to school from sometime mid-September to the first of May with over four months off for summer. Of course the school didn't do weeks off for Spring Break, teacher's conferences and such, and Christmas holiday was from December 24th through January 2nd depending on how the week-ends ran. That and a couple of days for Thanksgiving were about it. The rest of the time you went to school. Of course we took the basics. A small school doesn't have enough teachers for subjects like under-water basket weaving, or how to feel good about yourself even if you are a dork, and if you wanted a foreign language there was Latin.

El Sombrero Cafe

2006-04-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Something Gayle said in response to my last post made me think of my all time favorite Mexican restaurant. "We have a Mexican restaurant in the town I live closest to in Central Texas that's been around forever too, and is still being run by the descendents of the family that opened it. Happily, they are legal citizens of the United States."

Nestled between a sometimes garage and a small taxi company at 807 South Main street in old downtown Las Vegas is the El Sombrero Cafe. It's a small restaurant housed in an actual adobe building and it's been owned and operated by the same family since 1950.

Shortly after arriving in Vegas in '87 I had to stop in there on business. Since the restaurant wasn't open as yet I entered through the kitchen door. There's a doormat and a sign that says "wipe you feet before you come in". I did, and I was in for a surprise. I've never seen a restaurant kitchen that clean in my life. Even the ceiling shined. It was obvious they spent a lot of effort maintaining the kitchen and this encouraged me to try the food. We did. Hundreds of times. We took visiting friends and family there, we would meet friends there, we would drop in just by ourselves. Any excuse was good enough. The number three dinner was my favorite. Enchiladas, Tamale, Taco and refried beans. It always was the exact same look, taste, proportions, and don't touch the plate because it will burn you. They do everything from scratch and don't mess with a winner. I'd get the cup of soup too.

It was funny. We'd take friends or family in to eat and there would be no dinner conversation. Not a word was said once they started eating until the plate was empty or they could just eat no more. It's that good.

They were legal American citizens of Mexican decent and wouldn't hire illegals. They did hire a new arrival as bus boy during the years we were going there. He didn't speak English but was here on a green card all nice and legal. During the years he learned to speak English beautifully, went to college, got married, had a couple of children, and became an American citizen the hard way. He called my wife "Mom" when we would go in, showed us his latest pictures and of course he eventually moved on to better jobs. But on occasion he would come back in to help in the kitchen or whatever they needed because they'd given him his start in America.

The old timers knew about the place. We'd see casino owners and executives there, entertainers, movers and shakers such as the mayor, governor, senators and such. We didn't tell the tourists about it. It's not a big place and we didn't want the riff-raff cluttering up our favorite Mexican restaurant. The people that read this blog aren't riff-raff though, so if you're ever in Vegas find your way to 807 South Main street and be prepared for a real Mexican style treat.

Frank & Mary's

2006-04-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

The last fourteen years we lived in Indiana we were about three miles down the road from a favorite restaurant. They have a full menu but a specialty is deep fried farm raised catfish dinners with fries, cole slaw and hush puppys. That was always what I ordered. Anything else on the menu I could get at many other restaurants, but no one did catfish they way they did catfish.

During those years when we planned to have dinner there my wife and kids would be ready when I got home about 5:15. We'd all pile in the car, drive the three miles and by the time we'd parked and were seated it was about 5:30 or so. By six o'clock the restaurant would be full and a waiting line down the hallway and out into the parking lot. We knew we had that little window of opportunity and were at times rude with people that seemed intent on closing the window for us, but that's another story.

The restaurant started as a bar and grille in 1945, added several diningrooms over the intervening years, expanded the parking lot to encompass about one block, is still owned and operated by that family, and still does a land office business.

Last week our youngest son started working there as a waiter. Normally that wouldn't be anything unusual except in their more than sixty years in business they've never had a waiter, only waitresses. He is their first male server. That makes two first for that restaurant in our family. His great grandfather was their first customer and paid them the first dollar they earned back in 1945.

Another sad trip to Indiana

2006-04-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

When we arrived at the funeral home on Monday my brother-in-law called me aside to tell me my uncle's wife had passed away that morning. We will be making another fast trip to central Indiana on Thursday for the viewing that afternoon, then stay over for the funeral on Friday. My brother the preacher will be going with us and has been asked by our uncle to officiate at that funeral. My aunt had been in very poor health for several years and her passing was expected soon, but to have to make such trips twice in the same week...

That uncle is 88 years of age and in amazing health. He is one of my heros. He spent four full years in the Pacific during the second world war. He had a wife and son when he was shipped out and during the four years he was gone she divorced him. He wasn't to learn this until shortly before arriving back home. He met and married the aunt that just died during the late forties so they've been together well over fifty years. They were two of the people my brother and I visited a couple of months ago, and though she was extremely feeble her bright smile and huge sense of humor was still fully intact at that time. My uncle is the last member of that generation and when he passes one of these days it will leave my three brothers and I as the older generation in our family.

Gone for a few days

2006-04-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

We'll be pulling out of here early Sunday a.m. heading up to Indiana. My wife's aunt died and the funeral is Monday so we'll be gone two or three days. She was a great lady, had a wonderful life and died easily. Her body was just giving up on her but her mind never did.

When we get back our eldest son and his wife will be staying with us a couple of weeks. They decided their sojourn in Pennsylvania has drawn to and end, have jobs lined up in Bowling Green Kentucky and will commute for a while until they find a place there. It'll be nice having them here for a while, and having them within an hour's driving distance after that.

I'll pick up blogging when I get back and have time.

Fish

Just sign this petition and...

2006-04-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

I received another of those Internet petitions today. It came from a good friend urging me to cut and paste it into a new e-mail, sign my name at the bottom and send it to everyone on my e-mail list. At the bottom it said something to the effect that the two thousandth signer should send it to President Bush at a White House e-mail address they'd included.

This sort of thing always makes me wonder at the intelligence level of some of my e-mail friends. NOBODY at that White House address is going to bother to correlate all those duplicate names.

For instance, the person that starts such a petition signs their name and sends it to ten people. Those ten people add their name and send it to ten each. Just in that first two steps the first person's name is now on one hundred different petitions. By the time it gets to two thousand signatures on these petitions that first person's name would be on so many millions of petitions it would be a logistical nightmare for the White House staff to try to sort out just how many actual petitioners there are. The only name that won't be duplicated at least once would be the last name on the list. They ain't gonna bother. Neither am I.

I think I'll save most of this (leave out the intelligence level sentence) and send it as a reply each time I receive one of these petitions. Okay, maybe I'll leave the "intelligence level" sentence in my reply to some that I feel need to be insulted.

The Sky ain't falling, the sky ain't falling

2006-04-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

"Global warming may not be as dramatic as some scientists have predicted. Using temperature readings from the past 100 years, 1,000 computer simulations and the evidence left in ancient tree rings, Duke University scientists announced yesterday that 'the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions.'"

Hey, does that shock anyone that checks in on this blog? Nah, I didn't think so.

A Living Wage

2006-04-19T20:26:00.000-07:00

When I worked in a grocery store during high school in the fifties the minimum wage was 75¢ in the U.S. I didn't get that much. I was given 50¢ and hour and tickled to get it. I was living at home, had no expenses that were essential. Buying ammunition for my .22 rifle and the occasional milk shake was about it. Today minimum wage is $5.25 for small employers and $6.15 for large employers and everyone screams about how a family of four can't live on that. No, I would think not, but then most of the time the minimum wage applies to kids straight out of school, or still in school, not families of four. By the time you have a spouse and children you should have moved well beyond the minimum wage level.

I got to thinking about the cost of living and all the babble we hear about how everything is so unaffordable these days, and started doing a few mental figures on just some that I remember. For instance, the four years I worked in that grocery during the 50s there was almost no inflation. Prices stayed flat. A pound of coffee cost 98¢ for the whole four years. Okay. If coffee was 98¢ a pound when minimum wage was 75¢ and that price had kept up with inflation, coffee would be $6.86 a pound today with minimum wage at $5.25. I'm not paying that much for coffee. When the Papermate ball-point pen hit the market in the mid fifties it was $2.98 each. With a minimum wage of seventy-five cents that pen cost almost four hours pay. Bet you don't pay that for ball-point pens today. A 3 transistor radio that picked up AM stations only was $75 (exactly one hundred hours pay). Now you can get AM/FM Stereo pocket radios for under one hours pay at minimum wage.
Dad's first television cost about a third of the price of a new car, had a ten inch black and white picture tube and picked up one station. What would that be in today's market? Eight to ten thousand dollars?

That's just comparing a few things and using minimum wage. If you compare actual incomes in the fifties with actual incomes today the difference is far greater than the difference in minimum wages.
I think one of the big problems today is wanting more. Very few people would be satisfied with an automobile today that didn't have power steering, power brakes, air conditioning, surround sound stereo, electric windows and door locks, anti-theft devices, cruise control and all the other things you couldn't even get on cars back then. We all have to have central heating and air conditioning at home, at least two cars, the latest technologies, dream vacations, a closet full of clothes and shoes, and everything that is "in" for the kids. Years ago people saved for years to buy a home. They'd build a small house when they had the money then add on when they could afford to do that. Today we have to have the new home immediately, so have a mortgage we have to pay, and often payments on all the furniture and appliances to complete it. We pay for Internet connection, phones with lots of whistles and buzzers and add cell phones to that for each member of the family, cable or satellite TV. There are just so many things we consider necessary in the average home today that didn't exist a few years ago. They cost money to acquire and they cost money to operate and maintain. And if you've moved too fast using credit, your payments can very well tip you over into the "can't afford to live" category.

It's been my experience watching the "They don't pay me a living wage" group through the years that there is no such figure for many of them. They have everything on credit. The home, cars, ATVs, boats, ski-dos, motorcycles, everything inside the house, maybe a summer cabin on a lake, vacations paid for with credit cards. If their employer doubled their salary all they would do would be run out and get more things because they can now afford to pay more bills, and a year later they would be right back in the same situation, only with higher bills to pay. I'm sure you've all read about people that won a million dollars and were filing bankruptcy two years later. It's generally not an insufficient income, but a bad case of the "gimmies" that wrecks so many people in this country today.

This year's Dogwoods

2006-04-18T06:41:00.000-07:00

Looking at the woods from a distance I can see splotches of white all through it. I thought I'd post these last three pictures of dogwoods before abandoning the idea.

Got The Picture?

2006-04-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

Shortly after moving to Vegas in '87 my eldest son moved there and got a job with a dry walling crew. He needed some tools so I took him to a pawn shop that I'd heard carried a lot of tools. While he was tool shopping I browsed a bit. In one of the cases they had a really nice looking SLR camera for sale for $125. All I'd ever had were point and shoot things and Poloroid so put a down payment on that one then came back the next day with the rest of the money to pick it up. It appeared to be brand new, not a mark on it but it had a lot of whistles and buzzers I didn't have any idea how to operate. Fortunately it was a current model and I was able to order an owner's manual. The same model was retailing for $649.95 at a local camera shop so I felt like I'd bought a real bargain. I guess it was more of a bargain than I thought because I'm still using that same camera nearly 19 years later and it works as well as it did the day I bought it more than a thousand rolls of film ago.

For a while years ago, I received a catalog from a camera supply company each month. There would be a flyer inserted with each catalog with close-out items they marked down to almost nothing just to get rid of them. I bought a $45 dollar set of stackable close-up lenses that allow me to take pictures as close as a half inch from an object. Those were four dollars total complete with leather nesting carry case. I bought a semi-fisheye wide angle $79 dollar lens with leather carry case for eight bucks, and a 70-210mm zoom lens for ten dollars. These were all new lenses. They stopped sending me catalogs. I guess they figured out I wasn't buying any of their regular priced items and their close-outs were more a reward for regular customers than for us bargain hunters. That's okay, other than a tripod what else would I need.

I do tend to get carried away at times though. I had a chance to go out on a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico once and wound up taking eight rolls of film that day. I wanted to get some good shots of this once in a lifetime event and figured if I took enough shots I'd get a few real winners. I did. We tent camped ten or twelve times at Zion National Park over the years, and have three to six rolls of film from each time there, plus videos. My wife shoots more film than I do, probably two to one. Needless to say we were tickled when they opened a one hour photo shop on the square in our little town a few months ago.

Let's not talk about our photo storage cabinets.

Spring in the back yard

2006-04-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

These pictures are from last spring. I've not developed the film from this spring as yet. Last year we had more redbud but this year the woods is white with dogwood and the redbud did little. This is my first attempt to add photos to my blog so we'll see how it goes.

Is this really necessary?

2006-04-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

I sharpened the chainsaw blade and have been playing with it down in the woods recently. I had decided to roughly mark the boundaries of the property but I have to establish a line of sight since I don't have surveying instruments or a clue how one would use them if I did have them.

Sounds like a good plan but the property I'm working on is that I recently bought from my brother. A couple of years ago he sold off the mature timber (trees over 2 foot thick three feet above the ground). When they pull these trees up out of the woods they first cut off the tops and all limbs leaving that part behind and taking only the main log.

This is where the laws of general cussedness comes into play. Down the east side of the property that line of sight includes three tree tops, each about the size of a tree with a one foot thick trunk, laying right along the line I need to go. If he'd dropped these trees twenty foot in either direction I could have practically strolled the property line, but as such things happen...hence the chainsaw.

If there was easy access to these downed oak and poplar tree tops there's a lot of money in cured firewood laying there, but because of the grade and all the surrounding trees you'd have to put it on a sled and snake it up with a cable like they snaked the timber out. I'm content to let it rot down and become nourishment for tomorrow's forest (and maybe mushrooms). In the meantime I get to do this whole testosterone thing with gasoline engine and flying wood chips.

With many a break for iced tea and a cigarette of course.

Amargosa Opera House

2006-04-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

Death Valley Junction

We visited Death Valley several times while living in Nevada, even tent camping there one beautiful April. That year the name "Death Valley" seemed inappropriate as most of the valley was covered with bright yellow flowers while we were there.

On our first visit we had driven north toward Reno then turned off on the road that leads past Scotty's Castle and down into Death Valley. On the way home we took the road from Furnace Creek toward Pahrump Nevada. Along the way we passed through what is left of Death Valley Junction. Originally the town was just that, a junction of railroads, some leading to the mines in Death Valley and there were a dozen sidings there. When we were there the last rails had long since been removed and most of the town no longer existed either.

I remembered reading about the place though, and of Marta Becket the ballet star from New York who'd moved there back in the 60's. We stopped and went into the motel. It had once been the offices for the mines, built with thick adobe walls, and had been equipped with rooms for overnight guests just as a motel would have. On one wing of the building there was a theater and she's named it the Amargosa Opera House, doing performances there during the cooler months in the desert (the theater isn't air conditioned).

She is also quite a talented painter. When I entered the lobby I noticed a guitar standing on a straight back chair against the far wall. On closer inspection it was simply a life sized painting. A large mural on one wall in the lobby is an aerial perspective of the building. In this mural Marta is pictured as a ghost floating above it and the building is in ruins. This told me she believes once she has passed the end of Death Valley Junction will soon follow.

The whole idea of this lady living out there in the middle of nowhere performing ballet in her own little theater is just quirky enough I couldn't pass it up though. Another couple and my wife and I booked rooms for the night and tickets for the show. The rooms are small as were such rooms in the day the building was constructed, but a bathroom with mosaic tiled shower was part of each room and a door to the inside hallway as well as a door out onto the portico. In each room she's used her artistic talent to dress them up. For instance the headboard in our friend's room appeared to be a massive ornamental wood and mirror thing almost to the ceiling, with candles in brass holders. The whole thing was painted on the wall. Our headboard was peacock feathers fanning out above the bed. Delightful little touches like this throughout the place.

The theater itself has a fantastically painted ceiling and is equipped with it's own audience painted on all the walls. I guess in the early days her performance would be to one or two people at a time so she created her own audience in all manner of costume so it wouldn't seem to be an empty room.

There were just two cars there an hour before show time and I wondered if tonight would be one of those near empty house performances. To my surprise traffic began to show up and by performance time they were turning people away. Since we had rooms in the inn we were allowed to enter first and took front row seats.

Now this performance would never play in Vegas. It was comedy, it was shtick, it was little acts and the dear lady danced on her tiptoes in her ballet slippers kicking well above her head in some of the performances. She was 72 at the time and we and the audience loved it. I'd taken my video camera and captured most of the show on tape. I'll have to play that tape after I post this just to relive the fun of that night. After the show she came and sat on the front of the stage and talked with anyone and everyone so long as they wanted to stay and talk. What a delightful person and just oddball enough to tickle me.

This has been at least ten years and she's still putting on shows, and I hope she can do this as many years as she would like. We don't have much of this sort of thing left in America. Everything is homogenized. The same motels coast to coast, the same restaurants, and the blandness that goes with the comfort of the familiar. I much prefer staying in the one of a kind motel, eating in the mom and pop restaurant, catching the acts that aren't merely a reenactment of what everyone else is doing in the country.

You go Marta Becket

The Illegals

2006-04-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

Why not start regulating the legals?
Interesting article by Mark Steyn at Jewish World Review

"Here's my immigration "compromise": We need to regularize the situation of the 298 million non-undocumented residents of the United States. Right now, we get a lousy deal compared with the 15 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented American community. I think the 298 million of us in the overdocumented segment of the population should get the chance to be undocumented. You know when President Bush talks about all those undocumented people "living in the shadows"? Doesn't that sound kinda nice? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork."
Read the article here

Shipwrecked

2006-04-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

A man was washed up on a beach after a terrible shipwreck. Only a sheep and a sheepdog were washed up with him. After looking around, he realized that they were stranded on a deserted island. After being there a while, he got into the habit of taking his two animal companions to the beach every evening to watch the sun set

One particular evening, the sky was a fiery red with beautiful cirrus clouds, the breeze was warm and gentle - a perfect night for romance. As they sat there, the sheep started looking better and better to the lonely man. Soon, he leaned over to the sheep and put his arm around it. But the sheepdog, ever protective of the sheep, growled fiercely until the man took his arm from around the sheep. After that, the three of them continued to enjoy the sunsets together, but there was no more cuddling.

A few weeks passed by and, lo and behold, there was another shipwreck. The only survivor to crawl ashore was Hilary Clinton. That evening, the man introduced Hilary to the evening beach ritual. It was another beautiful evening - red sky, cirrus clouds, a warm and gentle breeze - perfect for a night of romance.

Pretty soon, the man started to get "those feelings" again. He fought the urges as long as he could, but he finally gave in and leaned over to Hilary, cautiously, and whispered in her ear: "Would you mind taking the dog for a walk?"

the Passion Pits

2006-04-07T05:55:00.000-07:00

At the height of their popularity there were over 4,000 drive-in theaters in this country. At last count there were 51 still in operation. Some drive-ins were huge with more than one concession stand while others would accommodate only a few dozen cars, but they were all the rave for a few years.

The Statler Brothers recorded a song titled "The Class of '57". Well, that was me. I graduated in the class of 57 so my early dating years were in the heyday of the drive-in movie. It was THE typical date during the summer months, and unlike a regular movie you were in the privacy of your own car (at least as private as you can be with another car six foot to either side of you).

Some of my friends talked about having sex at drive-in theaters but it never happened for me. First I was six foot five and there was no position possible in the front or back seat of a car to allow anything remotely resembling comfort for such activity, and second every girl of the day wore a girdle. That was a garment difficult for her to remove while sitting in a car, and approaching total impossibility for the guy. Also there was the problem of privacy. Most of the summer it was hot and so all the windows were down on the car. Unless you parked on the back row of the drive-in there was a good chance one of the neighboring cars had kids that were far more interested in what you were doing than in the movie on the screen, and parking on the back row advertised your intent to your date chilling any chance you were going to even get her to sit next to you. I think "passion pit" was more wishful thinking than it was reality.

Of course I did have sex, and I married and had children, but I'll never admit which of those two came first. We did not stop attending drive-in theaters once we were married and had kids. We had a series of station wagons, would put the back seats down, throw some pillows and blankets in and the kids could go to sleep when the urge hit them. Makes me wonder why I didn't think about station wagons when I was dating. Well, not really. Station wagons weren't "cool". I had a fifty Mercury, scooped, lowered, souped, with custom chrome and lights and painted 1954 Chrysler scarlet.

Some drive-ins stayed open in the winter and had small electric heaters you could rent. They plugged into an outlet on the speaker post and did a respectable job of keeping the car warm. Most drive-ins were seasonal though, closing for the winter. When the kids were little the nearest drive-in had an all-niter for their last night of the season, dusk 'til dawn end to end movies. Usually the last movie of the night would be the most risqué when it was assured the kids were all snoozing, then the next day the Marque out front would say "Closed for the season - freezin's the reason". That theater is one of the remaining 51 in operation in the country.

The Spring

2006-04-05T18:54:00.000-07:00

Originally there was an old farm house here on the property from the days when farming was done with mules or horses. It would have been between here and my brother's place but he demolished it and erased all traces it had ever existed when he built his new house. It was placed where it had been for one rather obvious reason. Down at the bottom of the hill behind it is a pretty good, year 'round spring. A lot of the early settlers in this area positioned their homes close to a spring, and though carrying water back up that hill had to be a chore, it guaranteed them good clean water.

When my brother originally purchased this land, he built a large home close to the highway. Rather than drilling a well (which doesn't always get good water here), he set a large, closed cement tank below the spring, cemented in the spring and ran a pipe to the tank. He buried an electrical line and pipe from the tank to the house, some fifteen hundred feet, and supplied his home without having to carry it up hill. He used one of my favorite mottoes. Never use muscle for anything you can have gasoline, electricity or diesel do for you.

A few years later the county brought water down the highway and he connected his house to that, shutting off the power to the pump at the spring. He left the entire installation there just in case there would be a problem with the county water. One spring when he went down to check the system out, a large tree had died and fallen across the water tank, splitting it open. He had built the tank with an overflow but a lot of water was just soaking into the ground through the split in the tank, so he pulled the pipe from the spring itself and allowed the water to flow in it's original channel for the wild animals around the area.

Today was in the seventies, sunny and just a beautiful day for my walk in the woods so I wandered along toward the spring. I'd not been there since last fall some time but eventually arrived close to the old tank, took a seat on it's edge and just listened and watched. There was a woodpecker almost above me busy on a dead limb, and in the water close to where the spring comes out of the ground, a bunch of bluebirds were using it like a bird bath. They would flop their wings bellying down in the shallow water, splashing around then fly up on a low limb to flap and dry their wings. The cat had gone for the walk in the woods with me and had been busy entertaining himself on downed limbs, poking into every burrow under rocks and the like, until he spotted the bluebirds. I guess it's a good think I feed him because his stalking leaves a lot to be desired. Much too noisy. Of course to his credit there are still a lot of dried leaves on the ground because the spring vegetation hasn't taken over much yet. There is an obvious deer trail leading to the spring, and a lot of fresh deer tracks around it.

I spent countless hours in the woods of the Midwest as a kid, often just finding a good place to sit to listen and watch. I think I've found my second childhood.

a-one and a-two...

2006-04-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning and in the afternoon the time and date will be...

01:02:03 04/05/06.

Alternative medicine and the Roots routes

2006-04-01T05:45:00.000-08:00

The hospital sewed my sister-in-law up after removing some cancerous growths from her liver and abdomen, told her it was all through her, her liver was completely non functional, and that she had three months to live. That was sixteen years ago and she's still alive and kicking and free of cancer.

My brother contacted an iridologist he knew in Ohio and he directed them to another fellow that had a natural chemotherapy. That and a few trips to the iridologist to keep things in balance has given her more than fifteen productive years.

The four of us took a trip to visit that iridologist, driving up Thursday and back Friday, had him check all four of us and recommend anything we needed to balance our systems. The man is disgusting. He's seventy-eight and could easily pass for 55-60 years old. He's also so busy you want to make appointments or you'll not get in to see him for weeks.

We made a fast trip up on Thursday taking the Interstate roads, but coming back Friday we wandered the highways just enjoying the scenery. We had reservations in a small, 12 room, 50 year old motel in Yellow Springs Ohio that was just delightful. The young fellow that owns it has created a very cozy and welcoming atmosphere, has very comfortable beds, big fluffy towels like you never find in a motel, little breakfast baskets with fruit, rolls, teas, hot chocolate mixes and coffee, things like that.

Coming home we crossed the Ohio river at Ripley, Ohio. Ripley was one of the major parts of the underground railroad before the Civil War, funneling thousands of escaped slaves north. Then we wandered down toward Lexington through the magnificent horse farms and mansions, some new but most quite old and stately. A slight detour took us into Carlisle Kentucky. My paternal grandparents grew up there, were married and lived there until my father was three then moved to Indiana where I was born and raised. Many generations of my family are buried in the cemeteries there but we only visited a few graves as it was raining much of the time we were in that town. In 1958 my brother and I bought a '37 Buick coupe and decided to drive from central Indiana to Carlisle. A great aunt was still living there at the time, we stayed with her, and she showed us around the town, the farm where she and my grandmother had grown up, etc. That was the last time I'd been in Carlisle so this was a treat to me. Interestingly I was able to drive right to the home she had owned at the time.

All around it was a good trip. By the way, according to the iridologist I'm healthy enough "to pull a plow". Was he comparing me to a mule?

The grass is growing

2006-03-29T19:40:00.000-08:00

I got the mower out and did it's annual service with air filters, oil and oil filter, greased and oiled where it's needed, spark plugs, dropped the blade housing and cleaned and oiled that and sharpened the blades. The battery was almost dead, wouldn't start the mower but then it hadn't been run since October. A little time on the battery charger and now the whole thing is up and running again.

While I had the side paneling off to change plugs and oil filter I noticed the liquid car wax sitting there, so waxed these panels - then I waxed the rest of the metal housing on the mower. Then I picked up the Armoral and did the plastic and rubber. Now the thing looks so good I'm going to have to hire someone to mow the lawn so I won't get my mower dirty.

Yes, I do tend to get carried away at times don't I.

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p.s. Does anyone have a good recipe for batter for deep fried mushrooms that doesn't include beer? I don't care for beer batter.

Gettin' around

2006-03-28T07:20:00.000-08:00

I fell like a world traveler. I've been to London, Paris, Glasgow, Versailles, Warsaw, Frankfort, Edmonton, Lancaster, Nazareth, Lebanon, Columbia, Melbourne, Midway, Newport, Pittsburg, Providence, Richmond, Sacramento, Alexandria, Salem, Springfield, Trenton, Waco, and Utica. All of that without crossing the state line. Those are all towns in Kentucky. It looks like with all the millions of possible names for towns they could have come up with something original rather than snitching a name from somewhere else.

I do get a kick out of the more original names in Kentucky though. Not far from here is the town of Marrowbone, or another that sounds like a perfect address for a mail order porn store is Knoblick. Then there's Center. I've never figured out if that's supposed to be the center of the nation, the world or the universe, but there it is. Wisdom is on the road from Edmonton to Glasgow. Maybe they have the answer to my questions.

Don't have much time for this sort

2006-03-26T05:29:00.000-08:00

Freed peace activist Norman Kember gave qualified thanks yesterday to the soldiers who rescued him and two colleagues after 119 days of captivity in Iraq. Read it here.

Maybe he had planned to die as a martyr and the military spoiled his plans. I'd be happy to chip in for a ticket to send his sorry ass back.

Rant and Rave

2006-03-25T20:58:00.000-08:00

I was visiting my daughter in Indiana and strolled over to a nearby gun store just to browse. They have a pretty good selection of rifles, shotguns and hand guns, both new and used, and the fellow behind the counter was very friendly and informative. Just out of curiosity I asked him what was required for me to buy a gun from him.

He said I had to be a resident of Indiana for at least 90 days, have proper ID, fill out some paperwork for the state, some more paperwork for the feds, and they'd run a background check on me. I told him I lived out of state. He said we could still do it, but after I'd finished all the Indiana and federal requirements, he'd have to ship the gun to a gun store in Kentucky and I would have to fill out paperwork there, etc., etc.

I don't mind all these requirements though, because it has completely stopped gun crimes in the United States. Oh, wait, no it hasn't! Makes me tend to believe all those anti-gun, feel good laws are worthless. But then so are most of our laws. The war on drugs, DUI legislation, immigration laws. We have this mindset among legislators that makes them feel they've actually accomplished something by simply passing another law, yet don't put any teeth in it.

Let anybody buy any kind of weapon they want, but it they use it in the commission of a crime, give them 50 years in prison. DUI, a year in jail first offense, ten years for the second offense, and life if they're ever caught again (driving while intoxicated is attempted murder). Drug laws? Either legalize all drugs or make it really tough. Execute anyone selling any amount if you're serious about fighting illegal drug traffic, or throw the laws out, they cost too much. Illegal aliens crossing our borders? Publicize it in big letters on signs all along the border in several languages that if they pass this point we will shoot to kill, then do it. Passing laws is worthless unless there are some real teeth in them. And if they infringe on the freedom of honest people, throw them out anyway.

Last but not least change the job descriptions of all legislators. It seems we have set it up so they have two main jobs. Spending our money and passing more laws to hamper our freedoms. I'm sure a few great minds could come up with better things for them to do.

Hey kids, what time is it?

2006-03-24T10:54:00.000-08:00

The other day I received an invitation to the alumni banquet for the little high school I attended. I was counting the years and it's a shocker to realize next year's banquet I will be in the 50th year class if I attend (1957-2007). Where the hell did those 50 years go?

I remember the old folks around town when I was growing up - loved those people but they were ancient, then here I am older than some of those I remember from childhood. You just get busy living life and the years slip by unnoticed it would seem. So far it's been a blast though since all my years have been lived in a country where our standard of living is beyond the wildest dreams of crowned heads of Europe in earlier centuries. And beyond the wildest dreams of so many people alive in the world today.

Royalty couldn't have ice cream in August or fresh produce in January. Central heating and air conditioning, hot and cold running water, flush toilets, comfortable and quick transportation, real time communication around the world. So many things I just take for granted were beyond the wildest dreams of kings and queens in bygone years.

I've heard many people say they were born a hundred years too late, or several hundred years. Not me! I like the creature comforts. This IS my era. When I was young the house was heated with coal, so the temperature in the house in the morning was very similar to the temperature outside until the fire got going. We had an outhouse, carried water, took a bath in a washtub in front of the stove (with water we'd carried and heated on the stove), and got dressed in the morning in a room that was below freezing at times. Gee, I miss all that - NOT!

My wife and I tent camped off and on for several years when we lived in Vegas, just to get out of town for a while. Even there I didn't like roughing it. Our number one rule was, if we can't back the car up to the campsite, we ain't campin' there. None of this backpacking stuff. We used a 9 x 12 tent that was 84 inches high at the center, had an electric pump that would inflate the queen sized air mattress in 60 seconds, cooked with a propane stove instead of over a campfire, had a seven gallon water container that would set on the table and had a spigot so we didn't have to lift it but once setting up and once tearing down. A percolator for my morning coffee, and an ice chest for iced tea later in the day. I even had a porta-potty in the tent for any nocturnal needs. Figured that one out pretty quickly when my wife woke me up needing to go to the restroom. We were in a federal park and the restroom was quite a distance from us. Get up, get dressed, get the flashlight, unzip the tent, go out, zip the tent, go to the restroom and back, unzip the tent, go in, zip the tent, get undressed and get back in bed. We also tried to pick our times carefully when it wasn't going to be too hot or too cold because I didn't have central heating and air conditioning in the tent (though I did work up a design for a tent air conditioner). We've not taken the camping gear out since we moved to Kentucky. If we want to get away from it all we walk down through the backyard and into the woods.

There are people that love backpacking, roughing it, and I did that too when I was a kid. I'm not a kid any more and the older I get the better I like my comforts.

If I were going to have a tombstone (I'm not), it would contain two dates. One for the day I was born and one for my death. Between those two dates we're supposed to have some fun. I have, and I do.

Hip gnosis

2006-03-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

I was a practicing hypnotist for a few years. I found a lady that was a hypnotist licensed to work in three of the major hospitals in the area as a hypno-anesthesiologist and paid her to teach me hypnosis. It was one night a week for twelve weeks and several of us took the class. On the first night she handed us an 8½ x 11 copy and told us to read it to ourselves. Once we had, she said if we turned to the person next to us, read that slowly to them, when we got to the bottom of the sheet they'd be under hypnosis. She said that was all there was to hypnotizing someone and the rest of the 12 nights would be teaching us what not to do.

With hypnosis you're rummaging around in a person's subconscious, and if you don't take care can leave programs that will adversely effect their lives. Not something to be taken lightly. The subconscious has many similarities to a computer, and the GIGO law applies there too. It sets there as part of you handling details for you on a daily basis. For instance you can be eating with your attention on the television program and the sixty or seventy perfectly coordinated muscle contractions required to get a fork full of food accurately in your mouth is handled by your subconscious mind. You couldn't always do that, but as a child, with many a mess, you learned to get the spoon to your mouth and with practice the subconscious took over the details for you.

In your normal waking state the conscious mind is dominant and the subconscious is subordinate. Under hypnosis there is a slight shift and the subconscious becomes the dominant portion of you mind. The hypnotist works directly with the subconscious in this fashion. You will normally be aware of what's going on through the whole process, and can remember the session to the extent you go over it in you mind shortly after the session. If you don't review it, then much like a dream, it will fade away over the next few hours.

A friend I'd known my whole life called one day and asked if hypnosis would help a lady she worked with. The lady in question was seven months pregnant, was having troubles with the pregnancy that was potentially fatal to her, the child or both. She had a phobia about needles though and was determined to risk it rather than go to the hospital. This wasn't a fear of needles, but a full blown phobia. For instance, as a child she had walked around the barn, saw her father and uncle vaccinating cattle and at the sight of the needle took off running through briars, creeks, limbs, thorns and everything. By the time they caught up with her she was more than a half mile away and cut up pretty badly. She had no memory of such events, blanking completely at the first sight of a needle and running.

I told her we could try and the three of us met in my friends livingroom. She stayed in the room to allay any fears the young lady might have of being hypnotized by a strange man, and we got started. She made it easy, being a really superb subject, going in easily and deeply. I had her under for nearly two hours and she was totally relaxed and hadn't moved a muscle, responding well and clearly to my probing questions as I regressed her little by little back through memories of her life.

We were back into her first year and I was wondering if we were going to find the source of the phobia when it became very obvious to me we had done just that. She went rigid in the chair, and though I'd heard people say it I'd never seen someone go white. All the color just instantly drained from her face and tears were pouring down. Of course there was no working with her in that state so I immediately moved her out of it, worked with her a while and moved her back in. Same response, but on the third try, in a childlike voice she sobbed out a story of seeing these masked men take a large silver needle, stab a little girl to death, put her in a bubble and wheel her away.

Over the next little while I was able to get her to review the whole scene and bringing in her current knowledge and understanding of what she had seen. It seems at three days of age she'd had some minor surgery (she later confirmed this with her mother), and when they'd wheeled her into the operating room some doctors (in masks) had taken a large needle, drawn some fluids from the abdomen of a young girl that had been anesthetized, covered her with an oxygen tent and wheeled her out. Her mind had registered this event as traumatic and as she begin to learn had attached this explanation to what she'd seen.

We went back and forth over the scene for some while until she was able to discuss it easily with no emotion and I brought her out. I never saw her again but my friend said she had entered the hospital, had been injected with nine different needles and though apprehensive had not had the phobic reaction. A couple of months later my friend called to tell me the girl had delivered a healthy child.

Over the few years I did hypnosis, and the several hundred subjects I worked with, that was the case that justified it to me.

Lumbago Acres

2006-03-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

In the late fifties dad had a new home built about a mile and a half west of town. The house was on a hilltop but the property extended to the bottom of the hill and across a creek name Eel River. Something I've never understood is every map of Indiana I've ever seen shows Eel River running east of town, even my current Rand McNally road atlas shows it east of town. Maybe I should tell them.

At any rate, dad called his property Lumbago Acres because it had a "Crick in the back".

You youngsters may have to ask an old timer what that means since lumbago seems to have dropped out of the modern lexicon.

And today's forecast is...

2006-03-20T07:59:00.000-08:00

When I lived in Vegas it was my opinion the weather man had a pretty cushy job. All he had to do was say "hot and dry" and he would be accurate about ninety percent of the time. Here in south central Kentucky it's a different matter. The eastern states are effected by two basic weather fronts, the one swooping down out of the north and the one swinging up from the south. It seems much of the year those two meet right over my house, so you never know which one will be dominant for the day.

For instance, the morning weather report was a low of 42º and a high of 44º for the day, with chance of showers. Along about seven this morning the rain started but the temperature started dropping. Before eight we had sleet and the temperature was 35º. It's nine thirty, the temperature is 33º according to my outdoor thermometer and it has been snowing steady for more than an hour. Not much accumulation because the ground is still too warm but if the temperature drops another couple of degrees we could have quite a bit of snow on the ground at the present rate.

Probably go ten or twenty miles south and it would be around the forecasted 44º

Gods and Stuff

2006-03-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

Mohammed, Tao, Buddha, Money
so many gods it isn't funny.
"The Messiah isn't here as yet"
"Oh yes He is, and don't forget."

"Baptise in water, that's the stuff."
"No, just a sprinkle's quite enough."
"I don't eat people, so just hesh
It's just symbolic blood and flesh."

A faith in God, and cold hard cash,
and drink a cup of sour mash.
Worry, fret, and fantasize.
Too much religion in disguise.

We get ourselves all muddled down
listening to some human clown
dressed up in his fancy words,
expressing second hand or thirds.

Then we laugh and miss the point,
and get ourselves all out of joint,
when someone says in moments clearer,
"God looks back from your own mirror."

I had to buy the trees

2006-03-18T19:28:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post I'd written about setting up a shooting range in the woods just below the back yard. I'd bought the house and property from my brother, and his property wrapped around mine so the shooting range was on his land. I told him it was okay for him to shoot there since he owned the land (I'm big hearted that way). We've had a lot of fun there, all manner of friends and family, blasting away at poor innocent paper targets. It's a great set-up with a rifle bench at fifty yards and a platform with a reload bench for pistols at twenty five yards. There's about a forty foot hill behind the targets to prevent escaping bullets and the whole thing is under a canopy of mature trees.

Then my brother had the nerve to build himself a new home down on the Cumberland River, is soon moving there, and was putting this property up for sale. We came to an agreement and I've purchased all the woods behind and around my place to the edge of his property line, and that includes the shooting range. Half of the desirability of this property was the thick woods surrounding it and I had visions of someone clear-cutting around me. I have the deed in my lock-box. Sigh of relief. Think I'll go shoot some innocent targets.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

2006-03-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the day I've decided to buy my wife a fake diamond.

Hey, that's a sham rock isn't it?

1,200 Mosques

2006-03-15T20:52:00.000-08:00

...and Islamic centers in the U.S. as of 1999. A few years ago a relative worked on the construction of the Mosque and U.S. center for Islam in the U.S. It's in the county where I was born, in Plainfield Indiana. At the time it was constructed he related to me a rather sobering story. He said the plans called for a reinforced room in the basement with vault like doors. Before they were finished with the building, passing this room one day, they saw a large store of arms and ammunition inside just before the door was hurriedly closed. Now a few weeks ago another acquaintance in the construction business has related a similar story of yet another Mosque in Bowling Green Kentucky about sixty miles from here. Makes me wonder if it's true or the birth of yet another urban legend.

A brief review

2006-03-10T22:06:00.000-08:00

Part of our excursion was for the purpose of giving our eldest daughter a vacation and a visit with family. She lives in the wilderness north of Ashfork Arizona with her husband and two children, and works on the steam train to the Grand Canyon. We made the drive out staying two nights in motels on the way, spent one night with them and the three of us headed back east.

On the trip back we found ourselves "standing on the corner in Winslow Arizona" when we spotted the La Posada hotel, recently reopened after years of standing vacant. This hotel was designed and built by Mary Colter and she called it her favorite. She also designed and built many of the structures at the Grand Canyon including the Bright Angel Lodge, Phantom Ranch in the bottom of the canyon, and the Desert View Tower along the south rim among other structures there. We took a tour of the hotel and it's indeed a grand hotel in the period of the time.

Another stop we made was at Acoma, an Indian village high atop a mesa near Grants New Mexico. It's reputed to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States, and the view of this town from the vantage point of the cliffs at the edge of the valley is spectacular. At this overlook an older Acoma Indian was hand crafting silver and turquoise jewelry, beautiful stuff, and his prices were way under what equivalent pieces would cost in stores that feature such things. My wife and daughter had to have a few pieces.

My daughter's step daughter from her first marriage now lives in Missouri so we stopped off for a visit there, then on to Indiana where our other daughter and one son lives. We visited with them, a grandson, my wife's sister and brother and some of their families and the like. We're now home, it's Friday night, and our youngest daughter came in a little earlier to stay with us through Sunday. Monday morning we take the Arizona daughter to the airport in Nashville to fly back home again.

On the road again

2006-03-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

Hello again. I had some family business to take care of and about 4,000 miles later I'm back home. I left here on the 28th, drove to Ashfork Arizona then on the return trip took a swing up through Missouri and Indiana to visit family, then arrived back in Kentucky today the 8th. Our eldest daughter came back with us from Arizona and will fly out of Nashville on the 13th headed back home. I'm tired and going to sack in for tonight.

Bottoms Up

2006-02-24T20:55:00.000-08:00

A friend sent this to me. I got a giggle out of it...

The horse and the mule live thirty years
And nothing know of wines and beers.

The goats and sheep at twenty die
With never a taste of scotch or rye.

The cow drinks water by the ton
And at eighteen is mostly done.

The dog at sixteen cashes in
Without the aid of rum or gin.

The cat in milk and water soaks
And then in twelve short years it croaks.

The sober, modest, bone-dry hen
Lays eggs for nogs, then dies at ten.

The animals are strictly dry
They sinless live and swiftly die.

While sinful, ginful, rum-soaked men
Survive for three score years and ten.

And some of us, though mighty few
Stay pickled till we're ninety-two.

I'm sold. I'm gonna start drinking more.