Whatever happened to...

Indulge me here. This bit of nostalgia appeared on my desk the other day from some long-lost hiding place that only Mom knew about, I guess, since she's the one that appeared it.

This is a scene from 12th Night - a Shakespearean comedy presented by ACU (ACC) Theater in the early '60s. The cast includes yours truly as Sir Toby Belch; to my left Leon Valentine as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Connie Bennett Greer as Lady Olivia and sitting across, Robert Silvey as the jester Feste. According to a synopsis of the comedy, "Sir Toby and Sir Andrew disturb the peace of their lady's house by keeping late hours and perpetually singing catches at the very top of their drunken voices." No doubt that's exactly what were were doing as the photo was snapped.

I could not help but wonder "Whatever happened..." to the friends from this picture, and that's where the indulgence comes into play. I realize that I am the only person reading this blog who cares about the whereabouts of these folks - apart from the folks themselves, I guess. And maybe Mom (but not all that much). But it was a very interesting exercise to try finding them using the Internet. No fair using the ACU Alumni directory.

I know where I am, so that wasn't hard. I will say that it appears I have always been partial to beards. And good food and drink. It also appears I have no Internet footprint. None.

Leon Valentine was a totally unique individual; talented, witty, and skinny! You can't really tell in the picture, but my arms were bigger around than his legs. To see him in Elizabethan-style tights was hilarious. At one time Leon was trying to gain weight and was drinking a dozen malts a day with no effect whatsoever. He also was the original pin ball wizard; whenever you wanted to find Leon you first checked the pin ball machine at a long-defunct eatery across the street from Sewell Auditorium. I found only one reference to Leon on the Internet - his obituary in 1999.

The summer we married, we returned to Abilene a couple of weeks before school started in the Fall because of my work. We couldn't move into our apartment yet, so the company put us up in a motel. James and Connie Greer had finished school but Connie was due to deliver any day and they were just waiting around for the baby to be born. We all had time on our hands so we sat in the air-conditioned motel room and played Monopoly for days on end. Mom remembers this differently, but it's my blog so we'll go with my version of the story. James was in the Philosophy Department at Pepperdine for a time, but I find them now in Port Orchard, Washington.

Bob Silvey was fairly easy to find. His biography on his blog says, "I'm a writer living in Berkeley, California. In the course of several careers, I have programmed classical music for WPLN-FM in Nashville, taught Shakespeare at the University of California in Davis, acted and directed at the Berkeley Stage Company, worked as a statistical demographer for the US Census Bureau, and managed corporate documentation standards for Hewlett-Packard." He was sort of into all that stuff back then - except for the Census and H-P. Robert was singing protest songs in the '60s and if you read some of his posts it is plain that he is still singing protest songs, especially when it comes to the war in Iraq and the previous administration.

The unseen director of this production was a graduate student named Don Wilmeth (son of P. D. Wilmeth, author of the classic A Father Talks to Teenagers. Okay, probably not in your library, but it was a CofC mainstay). Mom especially remembers Don; while she was driving his borrowed car one day someone ran into it. A simple Google search on Don returned a number of references to a distinguished career in theater at Brown University and numerous awards and achievements. Don is retired in Keen, New Hampshire.

And just think, I helped launch his career, as Sir Toby Belch.

Monday Meanderings

Some things about old age are a blessing. There's a whole library full of new books to read, even if I've read them before. And the turn-around time is getting shorter and shorter!

We have a protest going on near our neighborhood. A small commercial development on the Southwest corner of Lamar and Braker caters to Oriental businesses - never mind the huge Chinatown Center just a block away on Lamar. Maybe that's why the Oriental Grocery store didn't stay around too long and now the sign says "Monterrey Meat Market." But since the change, we've seen a solitary Oriental couple standing at the street entrance, holding up a sign. Unfortunately, you can't read the lettering. Maybe we need to stop and see if we want to take up their cause. Or not.

Our fancy new air conditioning system broke. We hadn't had to use it much, but the other night I noticed it was not cooling, so I placed a service call the next morning. The person taking the call said with alarm, "Is this the unit that was installed just 3 weeks ago?" When I assured her it was, she said that someone would call me right away! Indeed. First the Installations Manager called, and she sent out their Inspector, who discovered it had leaked all it's freon, so he called their Trouble Shooter, who came with his super freon sniffer device and found the leak; then he set up the appointment early the next morning to have the Install Team come replace the inside coils.

There's more. Because Barbara was at her desk working on Greek at the time, we learned that the Trouble shooter was in Air Conditioning repair and not the ministry because of Greek. Interesting.

Oh, and the a/c seems to be doing fine now, thank you.

And I got an email from Southwest Airlines advertising "50% off a Mystery City Each Day,"
Does that mean you buy a ticket and then they tell you where you are going?

No Comprende

I meant to tell this story after we got back from Peru, but being old and stuff like that I forgot about it.

Then a similar story popped up from a blogger that had just returned from Guatamala - it seems that this is a common occurrence.

While we were wandering the streets of Lima, one of our group told of a woman who some months back had made the same sort of trip we were on. The teller said she and a couple of others had gone out shopping and when they returned, she was in a panic.

She said, "I thought were never going to find our way back! All of the streets around here have the same name!" Knowing this to not be the case, the teller suggested that the woman was confused.

"Oh no. Here, I'll show you!" she exclaimed, and drug the man out to the street and proudly pointed to the street sign. "There! It says that on every single street between here and the Mall!"

Of course, you know what the sign said:

Truth in Advertising

Ya'll - I'm just a little bummed.

This magazine showed up in the mail the other day titled "Austin Seniors Guide." I thought, "Good. There's bound to be some coupons and two-for offers and stuff like that in there." So I glanced through the magazine and found that it was full of things like:

"Understanding Home Care" and "Is it Time to hang up the car keys?" Seriously.

Or "Dental Implants - The Tooth Replacement Solution" and "Will Hearing Aids Help Dizziness?"

Now that's stuff that might be interesting to OLD folks, but not us Seniors. I don't want to read about "What Type of Medical Transport Service Do I Need?" I want to read about who has Senior Discounts, and where you can score 50 cent coffee and two-for-the-price-of-one dining. They need to name that magazine Austin Geezers Guide. Tell it like it is.

Although I did think those scooters looked pretty sporty.

Monday Meanderings **Updated**

Hooray! NBA playoffs have begun - the only time we watch pro basketball. The drought is over.

The maids came the other day - a new set of maids. Barbara had given specific instructions about the alarm, demonstrated how to turn off the alarm, emphasized that the code was the same as their phone number, and even taped a note with the code by the alarm pad! But when she came home there was a phone message from Maid Central asking her to call about a problem with the alarm.

The problem was the maids could not disarm the alarm. We saw that the house had been cleaned, so Barb asked how they had managed to do that, if they couldn't deactivate the alarm. It seems they just ignored it! At best, it takes them about an hour to clean - so for at least an hour they worked in a house with the alarm screaming! And a special note of thanks to my neighbors, who totally ignored the alarm as well.

I mentioned Iris the other day and Bonna sent a picture of blooms in my sister's garden. No wonder my mother loved them so.


According to Sis my brother has gorgeous Iris as well. Maybe he'll send some pictures too. Hint, hint.

Late-breaking news from my sister: "Don't know why Bonna didn't send you the best picture."


And if you don't normally check Mike Cope's blog you might want to take in these non-singing monks. Heed the warnings.

Dinner at Victoria's Secret

Okay, here's the deal. The other evening we're dining at Johnny Carino's and they seat us next to a party of 9 or 10 women and 1 guy who may have had some identity issues, and it's obvious they are having dinner and a small wedding shower - we can see a number of wedding-style gift bags on the adjacent table. Their meal is ending as we begin ours, so our salads and their gifts come out at the same time. Now I am seated so that I am looking at the entire proceedings so I cannot help but see that this is a lingerie shower.

Y'all - there was more material in my napkin than in the sum aggregate of the gifts! They kept hauling these wispy little things out and holding them up and ooohing and aaahing and giggling about them and then looking to see if I was watching. I'm trying not to, but there's only so much attention you can pay to a Caesar salad; I mean after you've counted the croutons a few times there's nothing left to look at!

Now I'm not opposed to wispy lingerie -as I recall it serves a very useful purpose. I am opposed to every head turning with each opened gift to see my reaction. I thought about staring them down but there were more of them than there was of me. And I do think they crossed the line when they opened up the bag with little cop-style hat and the handcuffs.

Just one more reason to limit our eating out to Fran's and Chuy's. The only time I saw handcuffs at Chuy's was when the INS raided the kitchen and everybody was gawking then.

In honor of Tax Day

To commemorate this special day, I thought I would share with you a copy of a 1040A tax form. Not mine - my fathers.

Here is his return for 1940. You'll have to double-click on it to see the details. The family was living in Fort Stockton Texas at that time; my sister and brother were 11 and 8 years of age, and I was a few months away from becoming another deduction. My father earned $2,041.83 from Southwestern Bell Telephone Company in 1940 (quite an increase from his $80 a month starting salary in 1928). The "Great Depression" had come and gone, but another significant recession began in 1937 and there were still millions of unemployed during this time. It was good to have a steady job.

Several things catch my attention: line 3 indicates that this was the first year my father filed a tax return. The Income Tax as we know it had been around since 1913, but historically it affected fewer than 10% of the population. I'm guessing this was the first year he fell under its shadow, but he still did not make enough money to have to pay taxes.

Secondly, this document is titled "Individual Income and Defense Tax Return." War was raging in Europe and the US was soon to join in. While the Income Tax was at the astounding rate of 4%, line 21 tacked on another 10% of that amount for a Defense tax.

The other thing I noticed is the $110 deduction. Turn the form over and you will see that it was to the Church of Christ in Fort Stockton. Of course it was.


I hope your tax return was as easy and inexpensive as this one was. Happy Tax Day!

Monday Meanderings

Okay, I know that we had a lot of visitors on Easter Sunday who are not very familiar with church stuff - and I know that this is the age of technology - but I still was not prepared for "text your response to the invitation to my cell phone - there's the number on the screen; text 'A' if you want to know more about Jesus, 'B' if you want to know more about baptism and 'C' if you want to know more about Westover." There were more traditional options too, but I'm just saying...

I wonder what sort of business paints the slogan (and only the slogan) "If it ain't commercial we don't need your stinking business!" on the side of its truck?

Something you really, really don't want to see on your computer screen:
STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000034 (0x00000000 0x0000000)
The system has been shutdown.

Be careful about using FaceBook. A man in Canberra, Australia was notified on FB that he had lost his home after defaulting on his mortgage. The law firm that notified him had exhausted every other means of notification, since the guy was obviously dodging them. It took court approval to use FB; I guess they didn't have to ask to be his friend.

The woodpecker that was banging on the owl house the other day has been coming to the feeder, and the other day I saw that there was a pair of them! They are beautiful birds - I have them tentatively identified as Red Bellied Woodpeckers. The Bird Book says the name is sort of misleading - the red is hard to see - I certainly didn't see any and every thing else matches so maybe I have the correct ID.

What is it with women in California that lead the police on long car chases? There was another incident last week. This time I did NOT spend 45 minutes watching it live; I just checked out the 30 second TV news version.

And, I leave you with a little something to dance to.

Newly air-conditioned

I didn't want to be in the position of posting a picture on this blog this summer of the household thermostat reading in the high 90's. Believe it or not, I have seen such pictures on other blogs. Unfortunately, with our old air conditioning unit, that was becoming a very real possibility - I kept my fingers crossed all last summer. So rather than play Roasting Roulette another season, I called some folks and they came and did their thing and now we have a new super quiet, super efficient, money saving, highly discounted, City of Austin rebated, Lennox rebated, government rebated A/C unit that we paid a lot of money for. Cool.

The crew came last Friday and thanked me multiple times for an easy job on the last day of the work week. They said that Friday jobs were usually on the second floor after climbing a bunch of steps to get to the front door. Ours was "back the truck up and git er done!" They also commented on how much they enjoyed watching the birds at the feeders through the bonus room window. I commented that I was glad it was a fixed-price job, and not by the hour.

Did I mention super quiet? Our old A/C was not quiet. It was more train-like. We got used to it, but seeing the alarmed look on the faces of guests in our home when the air conditioner started always reminded us how noisy it really was. Last evening I'm sitting on the couch and kept feeling a cool breeze. The front door was open, so I got up and shut it. There is still a cool breeze. I check the overhead fan - nope. Look to see if the patio door is open. Where is that breeze coming from? Then I realized that the A/C had cycled on and I had not even realized it!

That's quiet, dear hearts.

Checking out Sam's club...again.

One or the other of us held membership at Sam's Club for years; Barbara through 1st Pres and me through Brentwood. However, we are long beyond those two relationships, and neither of us has been to Sam's since then. Sometimes the thought crossed our mind that maybe a membership to Sam's or Costco would be beneficial, but we never acted upon it. Then the other day we got a "Member for a Day" card in the mail from Sam's so we decided to check it out. Hey, we're retired - a trip to Sam's is a big outing for us!

Nothing much has changed. They still have good prices on merchandise, as long as you purchase in 55-gallon barrels or buy by the gross. We walked throughout the store checking out the things we normally buy, finding that we couldn't lift most of the bundled items, let alone be able to use them before their expire date. And the smaller items that seemed reasonable were not available in our brand.

We did buy a 6-pack of Puff's tissues (doesn't expire, stores out in the garage), a multi-pack of fabric softener (ditto), a couple of jars of peanut butter (looong shelf life) and a double bag of Mini-Wheat cereal (okay, had to make space on a shelf in the bonus room). And, I admit it - 4 pounds of pistachios. Hey, it was a good price!

But the best buy had to be sugar packets. For some reason you can't buy the little individual packets of sugar in Austin anymore. They disappeared from the shelves a couple of years ago and have never returned. And if you eat at the same restaurants consistently, they catch on when all the sugar packets disappear every time you come to dine and start hiding them. So I was delighted to find a box of 2000 packets at Sam's. Surely the corrugated carton held several smaller boxes of packets.

Or not.




Yep. That ought to hold me for a while. And I know what I'm giving for Christmas.

Monday Meanderings

I love pistachio nuts. Central Market has a big bin of them and I'll get a scoop or two from time to time. They're awfully pricey here in Austin, though, so it occurred to me that whenever I visit a real Pistachio hotspot I can stock up. You know, maybe from Setton Farms near Fresno. What's that you say? Bummer!

On my way home from the office I pass a house with a small cluster of Iris in the yard. Of course it makes me think of my Mother - she loved Iris and had quite a collection. She traded bulbs with others and even had some patented varieties. Which got me to thinking. Have Iris have fallen out of favor? Seems to me that you find them only around older houses these days. Or am I just oblivious?

Okay. I admit it. We are officially part of the Senior Early-Bird crowd now. IHOP with 2-for-one and Luby's with half-price LuAnn plates. What's not to like? Except eating out with a bunch of old folks.

I submit to you that one of life's greatly underrated pleasures is a grocery cart that does not go BUMP!BUMP!BUMP!; does not pull sharply to the side and steers with almost no effort!

There's a sign at the office that says, "When you work here you can name your own salary. I named mine 'Alphonse'."

Splat, the neighborhood squirrel

He's a little hard to see, but if you look beyond the blurry line bisecting the picture, you will see Splat the squirrel hangin' at his favorite place - the top of the Owl House. Splat got his name because when he relaxes on his perch he looks a lot like road kill. Some of you will remember the story of Splat the Cat that gained fame here in Austin a few years ago - but I digress.

Look very closely and you can see Splat's beady little eye. Most of the time when we see him in this position he has his eyes closed, squirrel-napping, as it were.

Between the woodpecker and Splat it's no wonder the owl moved out.

Sand, Surf and Sea (food)

I've talked about our visits to Port A. before. It's a relaxing, refreshing weekend at the coast for us. We stay at a condo right on the beach - takes all of 5 minutes to walk right into the surf, if you are so disposed. We seldom get wet however, content to just walk a mile or so along the beach a couple of times a day. Then we relax in the comfort of the condo, looking out over the ocean.

We bring a stack of books to read and this weekend we haphazardly kept up with the NCAA tournament. That means the TV was on. Truthfully, it was painful to watch TV - not because of the games, but because it was a small TV on the other side of the room and was a bit fuzzy. Good thing we really didn't care.

Tourism is the big dog in Port A, though there is considerable attention paid to fishing. We often go in the off season and a lot of the Tee-shirt stores and Pizza joints are closed then; this time we planned the trip to miss the big Spring Break crowds but things were still hopping. More people than we were used to seeing, but that meant that all the eating establishments on the island were available to us.

And yes, that's the other thing we do. Eat good sea food. We tried a new place (for us) this time, the Crazy Cajun. It's a butcher paper table cloth, order by the pound type of place. And pound is the operative word - they provide wooden hammers for you to break open the crab legs and shells on the table top, thank you very much.

But one place we never miss is Virginia's by the Bay, an open-air eatery right on the water (though this trip they had the garage-type doors down, thankfully; there was a stiff breeze putting a chill on things). The other must-visit is Trout Street Grill next door. Ask Ken and Bonna about Trout Street; we ran into them there one night back when they were living in Corpus. Drove over for the seafood.

So Saturday night we were enjoying a nice meal at Trout Street when a big group of Yuppie Motorcyclists pulled in. This was the "Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club" - more than 30 members. They finally got them all seated in our dining room, served them drinks and were busy taking food orders when the manager came out and said, "I'm sorry folks, We're out of gas, and the kitchen is going to have to close."

Barbara and I puzzled over this announcement, but since we were just finishing our grilled shrimp, it was merely a curiosity to us. However, to the BKLEMC, this was quite a blow; we gathered they motored over from somewhere just to eat here. Everyone was in an uproar when we left, but you have little choice when the kitchen is closed. As we were driving away we saw the group wandering out.

We finally figured out that there must not be any natural gas service on the island. Propane is your only choice and someone at Trout Street - probably an ex someone - forgot to order gas for the big weekend crowd!

I'm sure we had a better weekend than did the Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club. And the guy who used to work at Trout Street Grill.