Saturday Special

In honor of the thousands of snow persons that popped up all around Austin on Tuesday, here are some classics:

(Click on the frames to enlarge)

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

 

Fun in Fresno

Not that you need an excuse to go see your kids and grand-kids, but when the College Church planned and hosted the Renew Conference this past weekend, we were so there! With Randy Harris, Jason Locke, John York and a worship team led by Sandra Henderson the conference alone was worth the trip.

But of course, there was more. We got to see first-hand all the decorating that Julie has done, and it looks even better in person! Imagine that! And we got to see and smell the famous Tulip tree that has graced her blog the past few days (and there's another one in the back yard).

Jericho spent most of the weekend downtown with the California All State Junior High Band. They bring these kids in from all over the state, put them through intense practice sessions and let them perform.  We went to the concert Saturday night and trust me - this did not sound like any Jr High band I've ever heard. They were awesome!

We also got to catch an award ceremony at Jacob's school and see him receive an academic honor; we also saw him really hustling in a basketball game. And by the way, the boy is quite the reader.

Plus, the family enjoyed some serious Olympic watching together. Ask me something about Curling! Go ahead, I dare you.

And when we got home from sunny California, there was...

Snow!

Okay, there was not quite this much, but for Austin Texas there was a lot!

Remember when flying was fun?

Okay, maybe it was only fun when you were a teenager and sold enough newspaper subscriptions to win a trip to Abilene, where we toured a bunch of cool places (including the radio station where I would later work) and GO ON AN AIRPLANE TRIP! You know, the really interesting thing about that that trip was I don't think we went anywhere. Maybe to San Angelo or Midland, but we didn't get off the plane anywhere until we were back in Abilene. I do recall that it was a propeller-driven DC-3 and the tail sat on the ground and you almost needed a rope to pull your way up the aisle to your seat.

Now flying is a necessary evil to cover long distances. Otherwise, why would you spend hours searching the Internet for a nearly non-exorbitant fare that you can't renegotiate except at another exorbitant fee, get to the airport hours early so you can stand in long lines and be checked, cross-checked, scanned, sniffed, hands wiped to check for residual explosives (new this trip), put all your metal items including your permanent fillings in a basket so you won't set off alarms and get shunted aside to be patted down - all the while wandering around barefoot because some nut job tried to set his sneakers on fire!

Observation #1 - Why - if you know you are going to have to take your shoes off in the x-ray line - would one wear tight knee-high boots? And boots must be very in right now; I saw many women wearing them.

And standing in line is not the end of it. Most airlines now charge yet another fee for checking your bags so everyone tries to carry on all their earthly belongings so the attendants are on your case to put your carry-ons under the seat because there is insufficient room in the overhead bins. That means you don't have any room for your feet, but that's minor compared to the lack of leg-room and butt-room and the fact that you can't put the tray down if your stomach is plus sized (okay, not every one has this problem). And forget it if the gorilla in front of you puts his seat back!

Observation # 2 - The Nebraska baseball team was on our flight, and while not the basketball team there were some tall boys on the team. One sat next to Mom in the window seat and could not fit his legs in the available space; he had to put one knee in the slot next to the bulkhead and the other in the slot in the middle.  The guy behind her kept his feet in the aisle and the attendant kept having to say, "Excuse me. Watch your feet. Cart coming through."

Observation # 3 - The Fresno State women's basketball team was on our return flight and there were some tall girls on the team who kept their feet in the aisle as well.

Meals? Snacks? Fageddaboutit. You could purchase a sandwich for 10 bucks. Blanket? Soon 8 bucks. Soft drinks are still free, but only until they think they can get away with charging for them. Enough already. You can match my stories.

But after all the grousing, the trip was so worth it!

I'll blog about that next.

There goes the neighborhood!

It's no wonder we can't get any owls to stay more than a few days at our Owl Motel. Who would want to come home and find this hanging out in the doorway?!

MMs - Feb 15

Ahhhh. Let the games begin. I have long admitted that I'm an Olympic Junkie. It just gets better and better. My only problem is how I am going to watch all 840 hours of coverage with only one little DVR box to help.

I confess that I started bawling at the initial panoramic views and I'm not sure when I'll stop. Forget the Super Bowl commercials; what we've seen in just the first evening are far, far better. The GE commercial where the Ahhhs turn into Ode to Joy just wipes me out. Every time.

Observations on an Olympic theme:

Saturday night we watched men's short track. Thought about my not-brief-enough experiences on ice skates. Let's just say I was not accomplished.

Also saw some of the women's moguls. All I can say is that if that were me, on the first mogul you would have heard my knees go "crack! crack!" and the next sound would be "splat!"

And if I were a short-track speed skater, out in front and concentrating totally on getting around that rink, the first time someone behind me reached out and put their hand on my butt you would see two tracks gouged in the ice leading off to a hole in the barricades! How long does it take to get used to that? Just asking.

Love the winter Olympics.

Speaking of, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue showed up last week (for the record, Barbara is the subscriber to this magazine - I don't even get to read them until after she is done) as did the Super Bowl issue. Quite a week for the old home town - the Super Bowl MVP and the SI Swimsuit cover model - both from Austin.


Eagerly anticipating the first blooms that have developed on our orchid plant since it was purchased. The stems just shot out; the blooms are slow to develop and the new leaf? Forget it. Sometime next year at the rate it's growing.

And if you are one of the guys that drives Google's street-mapping cars, you have probably seen a lot of strange things. But would angry Norwegians in scuba gear chasing you down the street be one of them?

Saturday Special

Random thoughts gleaned from the Internet (and you thought I was just wasting time) -

1. I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.
3. I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.
4. There is great need for a sarcasm font
5. How the heck are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
6. Was learning cursive really necessary?
7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on #5. I'm pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
9. Bad decisions make good stories.
10. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren't going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.
11. "Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means this will never get washed -- ever.
12. I think the freezer deserves a light as well..
13. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Miller Lites than Kay.
14. More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.

More "Why Women live longer than men"

MMs - Feb 8

How bout those Saints? Nice to have a good game for the Super Bowl. What did you think about this year's commercials? Seemed a little bland this year. At least the ones I understood.

While we sat glued to the TV, like most folks, I remembered  an article in the Wall Street Journal that said "... the average amount of time the ball is in play on the field during an NFL game is about 11 minutes." That's from the snap to the whistle. "...the average telecast devotes 56% more time to showing replays. So what do the networks do with the other 174 minutes in a typical broadcast? Not surprisingly, commercials take up about an hour. As many as 75 minutes, or about 60% of the total air time, excluding commercials, is spent on shots of players huddling, standing at the line of scrimmage or just generally milling about between snaps." It goes on to say that 3 seconds are spent on cheerleaders. That's just not right, folks! Cheerleaders ought to get  much more time than that!

Now these stats were based on research conducted in "normal" games. I'm pretty sure the Super Bowl skews every statistic - except the actual amount of time the ball is in play. It may have been even less than that this year.

Note to self: Pay more attention to the time difference between Texas and California. It is not a good thing for your California-based daughter to receive an early morning text that says, "All is good. We are on the way home" BEFORE she has a chance to check Friday's blog to see what we were on our way home from.

And speaking of my "procedure" - I have pictures! And for a reasonable sum I will not show them to you. Let's start the bidding!

Somewhere I saw reviews of several of the "As seen on TV" products that are often seen on late night TV. This review said "Don't waste your money" on the Bumpits Volumizing Hair Inserts, Slap Chop, and Wearable Towels; gave a less-than-warm "Works, sort of" to other products, like the PediPaws and Bottle Tops (for cans), but they liked the Shamwow and raved about Debbie Meyer Green Bags. I've not seen ads for several of these, including the Green Bags, but the reviews were so positive I checked the Internet and found there are many "green bag" style products out there.

We checked at Central Market and they had "Peak Fresh Produce Bags" so we got a box see if we could solve our banana problem. You know, when the bananas get all brown and mooshy before you get around to eating them. Well, they do at our house. Bought some green bananas, as is our custom, popped them in one of the plastic bags, and when I ate the last banana nearly two weeks later it was still unblemished and crisp! Wow!

And here are some plastic bags that do just the opposite - "age" your food artificially. No more lunches stolen from the break room.

Saturday Special

I had lots of time at home yesterday to sit and surf.
I found this. I think a good caption would be:  

OMG! Grounded for a year! Don't txt me!

No blog today

Sorry, I'm busy this morning, doing other things.

Exactly what they are, you don't want to know.

Well, okay. Here's a clue.

Have a good day!

A story with a lot of unhappy endings

Part of growing older is telling the stories of your youth - never mind that everyone has heard the story before. Humor my advancing age.

On the news the other night there was some film footage of the consequences of the recent rain deluge in Abilene - namely cars half-submerged in a flooded street. If you've ever lived in flat West Texas you know that there is no drainage; when it rains, there is no place for the water to go, so it fills every low-lying area and depression.

There is a railroad that divides north Abilene from south Abilene, and while there are some ground level crossings, on many north/south streets the city fathers in their infinite wisdom dug underpasses, thereby creating wonderful basins to collect rainwater. In all fairness they have tried and tried to adequately drain these underpasses - digging and re-digging to install yet larger and larger drains, but whenever it rains like it did last Thursday it is a lost cause. Us old folks call those rains "frog stranglers." I used to work in the building that sits on South 1st and Pine, overlooking one of these man-made sometime-lakes, and when they would start to fill, we would all go look out the windows to gawk at the dramas that were sure to come.

One afternoon after a hard rain, we saw a pickup truck with a man and a woman hesitate at the barriers that the police swing into place when there is a chance for flooding. They had been shopping - there were already-wet sacks of groceries in the back of the pickup, and the wife was no doubt unhappy about that and in a hurry to get home so we could see her telling her husband to drive on, and bless his hen-pecked heart, he did exactly that and got about 20 feet further before the truck flooded out.

After he caught grief about that, she sent him to our back door to call for help in getting the truck out. Meanwhile, the water continued to rise - and rise - and rise. We saw the woman shift her position so that she was crouched with her feet up on the seat (all the while yelling at her absentee husband), but that was only a short reprieve. In just a few minutes the groceries were afloat and water was over the front of the truck. A police officer had arrived at the scene, and he was yelling for the woman to get out NOW and the husband joined the officer and and added his voice, but the woman only plopped back down into the now-flooded seat and continued giving her husband what for.

Finally, the policeman kicked off his shoes, took out his wallet and left it and his belt with all his trade craft items on the hood of his cruiser and waded into the water - now up to and pouring into the truck windows - to rescue the woman. He approached on the passenger side, she scooted over and got out on the drivers side, and immediately disappeared from view under the water. In a few seconds she popped back up and headed for higher ground, completely drenched, leaving the policeman searching the truck for the missing woman.

In the end, the unhappy policeman wrote out a citation - no doubt for crossing the barrier - to the unhappy husband, who, on top of drowning his truck and losing his groceries, could look forward to going home with his unhappy wife (you've heard the expression "mad as a wet hen"?) and later on unhappily paying a large fine. Oh, and and also paying an unhappy tow truck  driver who literally had to dive in the muddy water to attach a cable to the truck.

And that's what I think about when I see that it has rained a lot in Abilene.

Monday Meanderings - Feb 1

"The U.S. Embassy in Lima said [last week] the train to and from Cusco and Machu Picchu has been canceled since Saturday [week] because of landslides, and the roads in and out of Machu Picchu have been closed. One bridge has collapsed and the other is under water."

Technically there is only one road out of Machu Pichu - a winding, twisty switchback that goes from the peak down to the bridge that crosses the river into the little town of Agua Callientes. If the bridge is out, you can't get to the town. If the rail line is out, you can't get back to Cusco from the town. The numbers vary, but by one account more than 1400 tourists had to be evacuated by helicopter. Now that would have been more excitement than we bargained for had that happened during our visit!

I wonder why I faithfully scan all the pictures of people at formal events here and are published on the Society page of the newspaper? I don't go to those parties, and I don't know anyone who does. But I still look. Maybe I'm hoping that I have a secret life that nobody (including me) knew about until my picture ended up on the Society page.

The birds should really learn to pace themselves. If they empty the feeder they should know that it is going to stay empty until the temperature gets well above freezing and the wind stops whistling. Or learn how to refill it themselves.

Here's a link to some really, really cool mugs.

And another example of nature photography gone bad: