Monday Meanderings - 7.15.2013

One of the regulars at Fran's is a fellow everybody calls "Coach," because he was for many years a coach at Reagan High, just across the highway. He has retired from active coaching but evidently his expertise is still in high demand: the other morning he received two phone calls while he was eating breakfast, both were complicated questions - judging from the half of the conversation we heard - about rules and regulations governing the game of baseball.

After he hung up, he said the two calls were from umpires at a youth baseball tournament. I asked him if he could explain the offside rule in soccer. And he could.

July is service month for Barb's Honda. After our visit last week for dealer service, we got new tires, and the other day a fellow from church who has a mobile brake service came by to check her brakes. She's good to go, but then it looks like August will be service month for the Highlander.

Reading at Learning Ally is heating up. I mentioned that I had taken a break while they were trying to get the AC repaired at the studio. Turns out that getting the place cool again is easier said than done. The architectural genius who designed the building placed the main AC unit in an attic space, but did not plan for adequate access to it.

There is not a door to the attic big enough to get the old, broken unit out and a new working unit back up there. To compound the error, the room with the access door to the attic was converted into a server room, and there are racks of computers and miles of wiring strung through the space now.

While they try to figure out how to deal with this double delima, they are limiting readers to morning sessions only. I read mornings, so I returned to duty this week. If you dress appropriately (read: hang a sheet over the window to the booth and slip into something comfortable) and you take frequent breaks, it is doable. Toasty, but doable.

Only 34 more days until Hatch Green Chili Festival, for those of you who are interested.

After setting aside the Attic treasure that we wanted to keep, and sorting out the ten boxes of Goodwill-worthy items, the rest went into the trash, or recycling bin. If you have more trash than fits in your bin, you have to buy "tags" to put on the extra bags or the city won't take them.

So far, in the great clean-out we have used five tags. There is no tag requirement for recycling - just put it out in recyclable containers and flatten cardboard boxes and tie them into 2X2 bundles. The only problem is that they only pick up recycling every two weeks. In the mean time, we have a garage full of items to be recycled. Looking forward to Wednesday!

Found in the Attic treasures -- a to-do list with only two items:

• Take car to mechanic
• Get marriage license

And speaking of cleaning out things, Barb has moved from the attic to the kitchen cabinets. Nothing is safe. In fact, I catch her watching me with a "Do we really need that anymore?" look. I'm getting nervous.

The treasure in the attic has been found!

I mentioned on Monday that my plan to get my children to empty the attic of 45+ years of accumulated stuff in search of some fabulous treasure that might have been inadvertently stored up there was not panning out. I guess I should take pleasure in knowing that my kids are smarter than their old man.

So Barb said Enough! and she crawled up there during our unusually cool mornings last week and dropped handed more than 2 dozen boxes full of stuff down on to me. With the garage floor covered in boxes, we then began the process of sorting through them, trying to determine what was of value and what might be disposed of. Let me just say that after going through a few dusty, crumbling boxes, our standards of what might be valuable dropped to an amazingly low level and we now have an empty attic and a garage full of bulging trash bags!

Goodwill will get a couple of boxes of useable items, and there were some things possibly of value to a teacher of little people, and enough dinosaur material to make up an entire year's curriculum. Barb insists that we did NOT recover any actual dinosaur artifacts, but I'm not so sure.

A number of boxes had old Christmas paraphernalia and Easter baskets and stuffed animals and such. Each item evoked a memory or two, and there were even a couple of misty-eyed moments, but thankfully, these were in the latter boxes and all our nostalgic moments were just about spent, so none of it escaped the trash!

And then there were the boxes of letters and keepsakes and old yearbooks and such. These we have set aside to cull through more carefully. Almost all of it will go into the recycling bin, but it is interesting to look at and comment on. Like pictures of old girl friends. "Why, no, honey - I don't even remember her name."

The big treasure? Okay, I admit that we did not find a long-lost Picasso original, or the violin from the Titanic. But we do treasure an empty attic, and I have a ton of blog material that you will soon see in a new series entitled "Stories from the Attic."

Monday Meanderings - 7.8.2013

After a wickedly hot weekend, last Monday brought low(er) temperatures and very little humidity.We had some running around to do; left Barb's car for service, enjoyed some Eggs Benedict at Mimi's (well, I did, anyway), went by Home Despot to look at some shrubs, and shopped for a 4th of July Tee for Barb. I even spent a few minutes with coffee on the patio after we got home. A fine morning (as long as one could get inside by noon).

With the cool morning, Barb was inspired to go through some of the boxes we have stored in the attic. I keep insisting that there is a treasure worth millions up there - say, a long-lost Picasso painting -  and someone should get all those boxes down and go through them all. So far, the kids are not falling for it, but we will have the last laugh.

Thus far, among other things, Barb has uncovered a stuffed Easter Bunny that belonged to Rob at, oh, about age four, a box of candle wax (no, not candles, just the wax after it all melts in a puddle), and most of the papers she wrote in college. But I'm positive that treasure is still up there!

I have had an extended vacation from reading at Learning Ally. The A/C went out there last week, and the sound-proof booths that we read in are NOT the place to be when the temperatures are in the triple digits. In fact, they are uncomfortably warm when the A/C is working. Repairs are slow in coming - looks like I will have this week off as well.

Barb's car is the original "owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays." Low, low mileage, but getting high in years, so it's a hassle to figure out what kind of service should be performed. Even the service tech had to ask his boss about the spark plugs - replace based on mileage or time?

He told Barb that he had a car back on the lot that a guy brought in to have the plugs changed and it has been more than a year and he hasn't been back to pick it up. Maybe he's saving up his money to pay the bill.

And speaking of autos, just so you'll know, if I had my leg hanging out the window while I drove, it would be because it had become unattached, and I was headed to the ER to have it put back on!

Noticed a small item in the Optimist

Last week in the ACU campus newspaper:

    "A smoke machine in one of the dorm rooms in Mabee Hall caused the fire alarm to go off on Thursday night. ACU Police responded to the incident.

    Jordan Bunch, area coordinator of Mabee Hall said, the smoke machine was included in a party in one of the rooms.

    The ACU Police responded to the alarm at 9:30 p.m. Thursday night and showed up to Mabee Hall before the fire department...“There wasn’t any kind of illegal activity going on other than the fire alarm being activated,” said Chief Ellison from the ACU Police Department.

    There isn’t a rule against smoke machines in the dorm rooms, however, Bunch said the smoke machine itself wasn’t the issue, it was the smoke. ACU is charged $250 every time the fire department is called.

    “It wasn’t that big of a deal except for the fact that the fire department had to come out and we had to evacuate the building because we thought there was a fire,” said Bunch.

    The residents who were involved took responsibility for their actions and wish to remain anonymous.

    The consequences for those involved remain unknown. The incident is still being processed through judicial affairs."

Really? There are so many things of interest in this story, I don't know where to start.

First, the idea of having a party in a dorm room! I lived in Mabee dorm and the rooms are about 12X12. Put 2 beds, a desk and a footlocker or two in there and you could squeeze in about 5 guys. And if it's a party, there's a stereo, oh, and don't forget the smoke machine.

A smoke machine? Just what mood were were we trying to evoke here? I can't figure what a bunch of guys would do in a room full of smoke that they didn't personally create. Do you suppose there were girls at this party? It would make sense to fill the room with smoke if that were the case, but I don't even want to go there.

There isn’t a rule against smoke machines in the dorm rooms? How did that slip by the administration? I think it's in the same section as the nuclear weapons.

They evacuated the dorm because of a little smoke? I can't tell you how many hall trash cans were set on fire during my dorm life. I'm not sure we ever had a drill, let alone evacuate the dorm!

The residents who were involved ... wish to remain anonymous. Really? Everyone on campus knew the names of  "the residents who were involved" within two hours!

The incident is still being processed through judicial affairs? When I was there, I knew guys who were dorm residents at 4pm and were catching the bus home by bed check.

Some time I need to tell you about bowling in the hallways. Real bowling balls, real bowling pins. Now that was a party.

Monday Meanderings - 7.1.2013

You know how, when you place an order at Chick-Fil-A, they ask you for your name so that they can call it when your order is ready? Did you know that in addition to your name they record other information about you?

Yes, I was wearing a blue button-up shirt. The NSA would be proud. BTY, that MlkShk Pch (peach) Lg is totally worth it. You won't find it at Sonic, 25 flavors or no.

You may find it interesting that Apple ear-buds are washable. It is my understanding that iPhones are not. Glad it was the ear-buds I left in my pocket and not the phone.

It was hot this weekend, dear hearts. It reached 106° on Friday and 108° on Saturday. That's hot. The good news, according to the weatherman was that it felt like it was 106° and 108° - none of this phony temperature business. When it's that hot, you do your errands early in the day and then then go home and bunker up. We even flipped a coin to see who had to go out and get the mail.

Spent more money this week on a pair of shoes than I have ever spent on any shoes before - and they were walking shoes. You know, what we used to call "tennis shoes." Found out the hard way that you can't cheap out on your shoes if you are serious about spending time on the treadmill. Barb said, "I told you... oh, never mind."

Almost weekly Austin seems to be on some top 10 list: best place to start a family, best place to start a business, best place to start a list. Saw one recently that listed Austin as one of the top-10 Terribly Overrated Destinations. The author listed popular vacation sites such as Buenos Aires, the Caribbean, San Francisco and Chicago, but placed Austin as the #1 overrated spot, "a city whose entire purpose for breathing is to not be like everything else around it." He then suggests traveling instead to (wait for it) Houston, which he calls an “impressively creative and very fun town” despite being, in his words, “so ugly that sometimes you may be tempted to put a bag over its head.”

Yes. I agree. Visit Houston instead. Please. Then maybe we won't have to stand in line to get good BBQ.