Serve out

Like the odds and ends that accumulate in the 'fridge, sometimes you need to serve up the bits of Internet flotsam and jetsom that you have stashed away. So lunch is served.

These guys are timely

I've said this all along - now I have proof.

Dude! It was on the calendar!

How to store and organize cats -

The chart below is of four perfectly round circles. No, look again!

More problems with nature photography.

 Just saying...

There's a story here. We just don't know what it is.

I knew that.

And this may take a moment (and it's best if you expand the picture). After you acknowledge what's going on with the hearse, check out the guys in the red circle on the left.

Monday Meanderings - March 29

Ah bliss, thy name is a brand new shopping cart at Wal Mart. Smooth wheels, no whompa, whompa, whompa, no shimmy shimmy coco bop. When pushed, it went in a straight line, when turned, it went where you wanted it to. Sigh. So, of course I put it in the back of the car to have next time.

Some time ago I speculated that it would be a week before some of the orchid pods in a posted picture bloomed. No, it took three weeks before they all finally opened.

I have nothing to add to this

In the good old days...

My mother and her sisters kept up with each other and the happenings in their families with a chain letter. You know, you wrote a letter about what was going on with your family, added it to the letters your sisters had written and forwarded to you, removing the letter of the sister you are mailing the packet to. Simple. Sure. Slow. If there was important news they wrote each other directly.

Telephone calls were rare until much later in the family history. For one thing, they were expensive; in 1955 a 10-minute daytime long distance call could cost as much as $7.08, not counting all the fees and taxes. Now there's a whole generation out there unaware that long distance used to cost extra. I wonder if my children even remember that there were "station-to-station" calls and "person-to-person" calls. They do know about different rates for different times of day and weekends - at least my daughter does, because of the cost of calling from overseas. As I recall, before they left Prague our international rate was down to $1.00 a minute.

I cannot tell you how important E-mail was to us when Julie and Jason were overseas. It didn't happen easily at first; Compuserve was about the only service available to them and it initially required an international call for them to connect with a server. Remember dial-up modems? Later, they could connect through Charles University and later still to local numbers in Prague (by the way, I was startled to see that Compuserve is still in business).

Email was a daily occurrence;  we came in from work and checked for the days message; we wrote back each evening. They picked up our messages first thing in the morning and told us of the day's activities each evening. If we went three days with no email they knew they were going to get a phone call.

Now the chain-letters are blogs, or Facebook comments, or Gmail. We post, we publish, we chat, we text. We see pictures of the weekend. We hear about dining experiences within hours; we check out the latest craft project in progress. We even get glimpses from the posts of people we don't know; Disneyland looked like a hoot, Jericho. Glad you enjoyed the retreat, Julie.

And of course, if all else fails, we pick up the phone. No additional cost.

Monday Meanderings - March 22

Well, after 48 days of wonderful relaxed retirement, I go back to work tomorrow. I have known all along that there was more to do - a lot more, but somehow I was hoping... As you might expect, this news brought on differing reactions between me and Barb. When my boss called, I told him to expect a check in the mail from Barb.

Note to self; skip Buffalo Wild Wings (our current favorite wings place) during NCAA playoffs. My ears are still ringing and I was there a very short time. It was, however, interesting to see the games being delivered by at least 3 different connections. On adjacent screens the same thing was playing but about 30 seconds delayed on each successive screen. With instant replay, you could see the same shot 6 different times.

After years of delay and millions of dollars of cost overrun, the Capital Metro Commuter Train is scheduled to begin operations today. No, really! For at least a couple of years the Chronicle has been raising and lowering a gate to reflect the progress - or lack thereof - in a weekly "Waiting for the train" cartoon. At one point, they showed the arm as fallen off.

Speaking of which, the current buzz around town is about the traffic arms coming down - and staying down - when there is no train coming. Cap Metro says "Two minutes, max." On the news the other evening, a TV cameraman stuck at a crossing, reported that after 10 minutes, a guy got out of his car, literally tore the arm off with his bare hands, and then drove on to the applause of his fellow detainees. The guy caught it on tape but refused to show it so the dude wouldn't get in trouble. Cap Metro was not amused. I'm pretty sure the Chronicle is going to start keeping a count of car/train accidents at this point. Mom gives it three days before the 1st accident.

The amazing thing about all of this is that this is not light rail, but a commuter train designed to get people from the Ceder Park area to the Convention Center. Wait! Shouldn't that be to downtown? No. To get to your downtown office from the Convention Center you will have to - - wait for it - - catch a bus!

Spring break, SXSW and I don't know what else is over and done. Go home! And I guess everyone is trying - yesterday afternoon it took me 40 minutes to drive from Braker Lane north on IH35 to Hwy 79 in Round Rock. I never got above 35 mph. Coming back an hour later I covered the distance in 10 minutes but the north-bound lane was still creeping along.

Good news. The Bluebonnets are here in abundance now.  And I leave you with a pun.

Yet another story for my grandchildren

a

Although I'm not sure these stories are actually getting passed on. I have it on good authority that the story about me and the box was deliberately excised in a certain household.

Nevertheless, the rodeo is in town this week (along with SXSW and UIL basketball - but that's another story) and last night on the news they showed the little kids riding sheep bareback. Maybe riding is the objective but these kids were lying face down on the sheep, clutching slippery wool and trying (unsuccessfully) to hold on for dear life.

And that reminded me of my career as a rodeo clown. Yes, it's true. Back in Breckenridge in my high school days I signed on as a clown for the Junior Rodeo. I wore baggy clothes, painted my face in clown features, glued a red rubber ball on my nose and went out and did stupid things - not all of them involving animals.

Admittedly, the largest animal we dealt with was a yearling calf, but if those suckers stepped on you while they were trying to get away from my classmates stupid enough to try and ride them, you hobbled for a while. Not to mention the fact that you could get slimed. There is a reason my mother called Reddi-Whip "calf slobber."

To be truthful, I don't remember a whole lot about the rodeo itself. I do remember the parade down the main street of town to promote the thing, and that my dad, in a spur-of-the-moment thing, hopped in a little red wagon and became part of the parade. The really memorable part was how upset my mother was at that. She explained in no uncertain terms how that jaunt lacked the decorum she felt a man of his age should maintain.  See? I come by these things honestly.

I also remember that after I got my face painted and rubber nose glued on, none of my sister's (or her sister-in-law's) kids would have a thing to do with me. That probably was a wise choice - bet they wish they could have stuck with that in later years.

So, for my bucket list, I can mark off  "Be a rodeo clown." 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9422878@N08/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Spring Planting

I mentioned last week about working in the yard during these wonderful, sunny days (Please, please rain!). Saturday we made a couple trips to the Home Depot nursery department (actually one trip each to two different HDs) and acquired the plants needed to rejuvenate the front flower beds, add some color to the beds around the new trees, and of course, some tomato plants.

The problem with bringing 37 plants home is that you need 37 holes in the ground to put them in (Is that a cloud in the sky?). Okay, I confess - 24 of the plants were from a flat of marigolds, and Barb made short work of those holes with nothing more than her hand trowel. And sure, three more were tomato plants that she put in pots, but hey, I had to hold the pots while she mixed up the potting soil!

That leaves 10 shrubs that really and truly needed serious holes. Let me just go on record that Barb  conducted herself with great restraint while I was jumping up and down on the shovel trying to get it to go into the ground. She didn't even laugh (much) when I fell off the shovel. I think she was too concerned about driving me to the ER. But we did get the holes dug and successfully planted 6 Dwarf Nandinas and 4 Youpon Holly bushes. (I think I felt a drop of rain!)

Okay, bush may be too pretentious a word; maybe they are bushlets. But, hey - they want a lot of money for the big-boy versions of these shrubs. We'll just have to live with a snaggle-toothed garden for a while. We had big-boy versions of all these replacement plants, but between the drought and the freeze we had a little natural selection and only the hardiest survived. (That's it! The temperature is dropping! Quick, get indoors before the we get buried under two feet of snow!)

Now all I have to do is transplant about 30 more linear feet of monkey grass (Sunstroke! Too much sun; Must go sit in shade!)

If you look closely, you can see the marigolds around our bare naked trees.

And our snaggle-tooth plants -

Monday Meanderings - Mar 15

Phew! We survived the confluence of Pi Day (3.14) and Daylight Savings time. I'm surprised no one made a big disaster movie, like 2012 (the last year of the Mayan calendar). We celebrated with a free slice of pie at - where else? - Marie Callenders.

Ran into Jeff and Jackie the other evening. Jeff was the Youth Minister at Brentwood who introduced Trek to the youth of Brentwood (and to our family). If you are unfamiliar with Trek, it is a camping outing in Colorado culminated by climbing to the top of a 14,000 foot plus mountain. It is the Death Climb - not to be confused with the Death March. Jeff said he was going as a parent/chaperon this summer. That should be an interesting experience for him - - and for the current Youth Minister.

Update on my 1st airplane ride - I mentioned that I couldn't remember going anywhere specifically. Turns out, according to an old newspaper clipping, we flew from Breckenridge to Abilene and back!  Now that means that the airline of record for that era - Trans Texas Airways (also known as Tree Top Airlines, Tinker Toy Airlines and Try, Try Again Airlines) stopped in Breck at one time. That seems so unlikely now that it is probably the reason I couldn't remember. I've searched a lot of Internet trying to prove TTA once served Breckenridge but have no proof yet.  BTY, I also ran across a picture of Bill and a young girl in a wheelchair on the occasion of the March of Dimes flights at Meacham Field that Pat referred to in her comment.

Saw quite a display of wildflowers along the road on the trip to Port A - but no bluebonnets. The word is that we should have a spectacular wildflower showing this year, but they are much later than usual. I finally saw a few token bluebonnets this Saturday. If there are no bluebonnets where you are, you can check out the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Bluebonnet Cam (assuming they finally bloom there). By the way, if the screen is black it's because the sun is down in Austin. Now who couldn't figure out a thing like that? Umm, well.

Inanimate animal #1 - The other day we were enjoying the lunch special at Tres Amigos when we heard something that sounded like...well, like cats being strangled! Sort of a Meower-urk-urk-urk! Turned out to be the tortilla machine. Every time someone ordered a dish that came with fresh tortillas we were treated to a chorus of Meower-urk-urk-urks for each tortilla made.  Sort of took the edge off an excellent dish of chicken? enchiladas.

Inanimate animal #2 - Same day, on the way to church on jammed Braker Lane we kept hearing a dog bark. Turns out that every time the panel truck beside us braked it made a barking sound. Didn't affect my appetite, however.

On the subject of animals, I struggled to come up with a caption for this picture - other than Yikes! How 'bout it? What title would you give this picture?

I've been thinking about my father lately

My father worked for the telephone company for 44 years, 6 months and 26 days, and at the age of 65 he retired. Then, the family jokes, "He really went to work." There were things around the house to be done, church buildings to take care of, city councils to run, Rotary meetings to attend, and then of course, there was the lake cabin.  Docks to build, waterfronts to clear, porches to screen in, rooms to build, water tanks to haul in; the list was endless and the hard work continued well into his 80's.

I think of these things now, because there is a lull in my contract work and I have turned to retirement work to fill my days; the front flower beds need a lot of work, trees need to be trimmed, borders need to be placed around our new trees, gutters need to be cleaned. I have my own long list and these beautiful days beckon for me to get out and do them. There is only one thing wrong. THIS STUFF IS KILLING ME!

I dug up 3 linear feet of monkey grass to transplant and I couldn't walk for two days! I cut down 3 small hack berry trees and needed an arm transplant! I need to dig 28 feet of a dinky 4" trench - nay, trenchlet - to put a border around the trees and at the rate I'm going the trees will be mature before I'm done!

I have long admitted that my father could out-work me at any stage of my life but these last few days have been humbling. Three linear feet of monkey grass and I'm done for the day? Sad. Sad.

Now, where did I put my Tylenol?

Monday Meanderings - Mar 8

If you blog from your laptop while at the beach do you have to run it through a car wash like you should do with your auto when you leave the coast? IMWTK
 

Spring Break is right around the corner - the reservations desk at the condo where we stay was busy fielding calls when we checked in: "No, I'm sorry, but you must be 25 years of age to make a reservation here in March. No, it makes no difference that your parents stay here often; we will check and if you are not 25 you will be turned away."  All the tee-shirt shops, bars and clubs are stocking up. One motel sign said "Waffles, WIFI and WII" What more could you need?

However, the town and beach still belong to the snow birds (or "Winter Texans" according to some signs) this week. I believe there were more out-of-state auto licenses on the island than Texas plates this last weekend. We cruised through the Park and Marina areas and we saw plates from New York, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, Colorado... if it is a northern state it was represented.

Speaking of WIFI, my thanks to Rick Miller for sharing his wireless connection during our stay. I don't know Rick personally, and I didn't exactly ask if he would share, but since the condo charges for WIFI and Rick's connection is hanging out there with no password required it was a no-brainer.

Chatting at the break with my new director at Recording for the Blind last week, I asked what she did in real life? She said she was a "Remedial Minister" for the Lutheran church.

What?

She said that she is an interim minister when a there is a gap at a Lutheran church; minister leaves but another is not ready to take that place. However, because of her training in corporate psychology, they only place her where there is a need to mediate problems or heal wounds. "Remedial" is her term - the church calls it something else. Said it was interesting, but tough work. Hmmm.

And since I have been on a snow kick recently, I thought I would share proof that some areas received two feet of snow:

Saturday Special

I ran across this wonderfully conceptualized, beautifully executed public service ad.

At last!

I've been eagerly anticipating the new blooms on the orchid plant - for a long, long time. The stems grew so rapidly you could almost see them grow, but the blooms - like the new leaf - take their own sweet time.

This is the first bloom of 10. Some of the flower pods are so small it will be months before they blossom. I'm guessing that the pods to the right won't flower for at least another week.

I'll remember this

Randy Harris was one of the keynote speakers at the Renew Conference hosted by the College church in Fresno a couple of weeks ago. I was listening to a CD of one of his sessions and felt compelled to share part of it with you. Randy gives attribution to Marcus Borgman (I think - I couldn't quite hear the name and have not been able to find this individual).

Nevertheless, the part that I want to share is the statement that "If your life is going to be meaningful, you need to have moments that happen frequently, about which you can say the following four things:"

"There's no place else I'd rather be."

"There's nobody I would rather be with."

"There's nothing I would rather be doing."

"I will remember this."

He continues, "If your life doesn't have just a whole lot of those moments, you might want to work on your life."

I have experienced those moments in the past; perhaps less frequently than I could have, but at this stage in my life I find myself often thinking that I love where I am, and what I'm doing, and who I'm doing it with. And even with my increasingly unreliable memory, this is what I will remember.

Monday Meanderings - March 1

Clear sky flying to and from Fresno afforded sweeping vistas of...snow. As far as you could see as we crossed parts of New Mexico, northern Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California - snow, snow and more snow. And that's not where it has snowed the most this winter. The Nebraska baseball players kept looking out the window at DFW, commenting on how green it was. We looked out the same windows and saw nothing but the dead brown of winter. All things are relative - to the amount of snow on your ground.

We were shocked on Friday morning to turn down our street and see that the house on the corner of August and Braker had burned during the night! Rob will remember this house as where the man gave him all the model rockets. We heard a lot of sirens Thursday night, but didn't get the sense it was close to us. That house has been on the market a long, long, long time. If I were the Fire Marshall I would be immediately suspicious. However, the news reported that it had been ruled accidental, caused by a water heater. Who keeps a water heater on in a house that has been empty for two years?

The other night we could hear an owl in the neighborhood. If owls are hooting, they are seeking companionship; pitching "whoo" as it were.That leads to suspicions that our owl motel has become a "No Tell Motel."

Wal Mart had some of those high thread count sheets on sale the other day; Barb bought a set and they sure feel great. The only problem is that if you are not careful you can slide right out of the bed!

I've been reading Pat Conroy's South of Broad. Every time I read Conroy I am reminded that anything I write is "See Dick run" in comparison to his wordcraft - never mind that I have to keep a dictionary by my side. I am also reminded how grateful I am that ours is not like any of the dysfunctional families and characters that fill his pages.

For you coffee drinkers, let me recommend Community Coffee's Cafe Special, my new very most favorite for home coffee. Wal Mart in Austin has Community.

Discovered that Austin has a Curling club. They are making hay with all the interest in Olympic Curling and are having "open" sessions for the next two weekends. Come one, come all. Do you think I.... Nahhh. But it  sure is fun to watch.

And I ran across a great video the other day. Enjoy.