Now I Understand

When I was a kid my mom always made pigs in the blanket for New Years dinner.  Now I'm not talking about those little sausages wrapped up in Pillsbury dinner rolls.  I'm talking about cabbage rolls made from cabbage leaves and stuffed with meaty goodness.  Mom was still doing that when I moved out of state in my thirties.  As she grew older though, Mom started cutting back.  Pretty soon she was no longer making pigs in the blanket, sour cream cake and cottage cheese rolls for New Years.  Then she started using frozen pies instead of her signature chocolate, apple and lemon meringue.  In the last years of her life she was pretty much down to frozen entrees, pizza and KFC. 

Although my wife is a great cook, I notice that she is no longer real eager to attempt things, like pigs in the blanket, that take awhile to make from scratch.  This year I got really hungry for those cabbage rolls so I decided to make them myself.  It took some effort.  First you have to boil or steam a head of cabbage in order to get the leaves to peel off in one piece.  Even then it was quite a job to get them off intact and I hadn't looked real close when I bought this ginormous head of cabbage so I missed the fact that the first six or eight leaves had holes in them because the harvester or the supermarket produce guy had made a big slice in the head.  That made it even trickier to get the leaves off in decent shape.  While the leaves are steaming you have to get the filling ready.  That means making some rice (easy) and letting it cool.  While that's going on you also have to dice up some onion and bacon and saute them until the bacon is crisp.  Then you mix ground beef and pork together (Mom's recipe calls for meatloaf mix, which you could get at the local supermarket when I was a kid, but they don't have that where I live), add the rice, onions and bacon (drained) and squish all that together with a bit of salt and pepper.  After that you put some of the mixture in each cabbage leaf (which you have already painstakingly peeled off the head of cabbage, trimmed out the tough central rib and cut into pieces that are more or less square, or at least rectangular) and then roll them like little burritos before laying them on top of a bed of sauerkraut that you have previously prepared in a baking dish.  Usually you have to hold them closed with toothpicks.  At least I had to.  I think Mom did that too, but I'm not sure.  If you are really skilled at all this, like Mom was and my wife is, you get nice uniform little rolls that sort of look like egg rolls or dolmas on steroids.  If you are unskilled, like me, you get something like this:

Not real uniform, but sort of folk artish. In any case all that's left to do is to cover the baking dish with tinfoil and bake those little piggies in the oven for two hours at 350 degrees.  Oh, I forgot: you have to preheat the oven before shoving them in there.  Oh, and also, you have to wash out the hundred and forty-seven bowls, knives, spatulas, frying pans and other implements you have used to make them if, like me, you didn't realize that your wife has a dutch oven that could have been used to do the sauteing on top of the stove and baking inside the oven as well.

This was a three-beer-recovery project.  While I was sucking down my second Guinness in front of the Texas-California game in the recovery room my head began to clear and I realized why Mom, and my wife, stopped making pigs in the blanket and why Mom stopped doing the baking as well.  It is a heck of a lot of work to make that stuff from scratch.   I don't know how the hell Mom and my wife got through all that every December because neither of them ever was a drinker.

By the third beer I started thinking about some of the other things that my parents and/or parents-in-law did that used to make my wife and me shake our heads but we find ourselves doing now.  For instance, my mother-in-law and father-in-law used to carry paper towels in their pockets and use them to open and close doors.  They would NOT touch a single doorknob.  Weird, right?  I used to think that; but now my wife and I always carry a bottle of generic Germ-Ex in our pockets and practically wear out the outer layer of skin on our hands un-germifying them whenever we touch doorknobs or menus, pump gas at the local Quickie-Pickie or do anything else that requires our sensitive epidermis to come into contact with anything but air.  Sometimes we use it just because we've walked through an area that makes our skin crawl, even if we haven't touched anything.  I don't even want to tell you what we do when we are faced with eating finger foods while reading a library book. 

And a corollary to the paper towel/Germ-Ex business is the silverware on the table thing.  My inlaws would never put their silverware (or plasticware or whateverware) on the table at a restaurant.  They would unwrap it from the napkin and then hold it up with the butt ends about a quarter of an inch from the table until their plate came and they could put the silverware there.  This used to annoy my wife so much that one time when we were out with her parents and her mother did the silverware totem pole thing, my wife took the utensils out of her mom's hands and rubbed them all over the table.  As soon as the food arrived her mother asked for a new set of silverware.  Of course, here we are twenty-five years later and do we let our silverware touch the table in a restaurant?  Nooooo!

The silverware quirk wasn't the only food-related idiosyncrasy our parents had.  My mom washed eggs before she cracked them.  And my mother-in-law always threw away the ends of a banana.  When my wife and I were young we were never worried about germs on eggs or anything else for that matter.  Nor did we worry about something wicked hiding in the end of a banana.  Of course now we get it.  I did mention the Germ-Ex thing didn't I?

Then there was the window blind routine.  My mom had this habit of closing the blinds as soon as the sun started to sink.  In fact, in later life it seemed as though she started closing them by mid-afternoon.  My wife and I used to get a laugh at that.  Until recently anyway.  Now I find myself closing the blinds as soon as the sun starts to get a peek at the western horizon.  Hey, I don't want to be on display.  Not that anyone would want to see in the house, but I'm just sayin'.

As we age my wife and I find ourselves doing more and more of the things that made us shake our heads when our parents did them.  I guess it's just part of aging.  Or maybe just plain common sense.  I know my Mom would agree with that.

Whatever Happened to ...

My wife and her 90+ father and I were reminiscing about Christmases past the other day when someone mentioned tinsel.  When I was a kid we strung this tinsel on the Christmas tree that looked sort of like it was made out of lead.  Even though it must have been pretty inexpensive we laboriously separated each strand and hung them individually on the tree and then, when the holiday was over, we carefully placed each piece of tinsel back on the card it had been stored on and slipped it into the box so we could reuse it next year.  We started wondering whatever happened to that magical stuff and that led us to wonder about other things from the not so distant past.  For example, another thing we used to do at Christmastime was to dye GlassWax with food coloring and use stencils, that I think came with the GlassWax, to decorate the windows with wreaths, candles and other Christmasy things.  When was the last time you saw that?

One of my favorite Christmas presents was a genuine Hopalong Cassidy cap gun set with two six-shooters, two matching black holsters and a black gun belt with cartridge loops.  I had great fun shooting those cap guns and making the whole house reek of gunsmoke.  The kids in my neighborhood used to love playing cowboys and indians (guess that's not PC these days, but cowboys and native Americans just doesn't have the same ring to it) or cops and robbers with cap guns.  We'd play that for hours, but it just wasn't the same if you ran out of caps.  Another thing you could do with caps was to put a couple in this thing that was shaped sort of like a hammer.  When you pounded it on the sidewalk the caps exploded and shot a thing that looked sort of like a badminton birdie up into the air and, usually, onto the porch roof.  That was fun, especially when you got to crawl out of the bedroom window to retrieve the feathered missile from the roof.  What happened to those rolls off caps?  I guess they don't make them anymore because I can't remember the last time I saw a roll.  And whatever happened to those sort of bull roarer things that had a crepe paper streamer and you could swing it through the air and whirl it around until you were dizzy?  I guess it was the girls who liked those things, but I can't remember the last time I've seen one of those either.  Another toy I liked was slot cars.  When I was in my late teens and early twenties they were as popular with young adults as they were with kids.  You could sink a lot of money into a slot car, which you would then take down to the local hobby store where they had a slot car track set up so you could race them against the cars of other nerds.  They were a lot of fun.  I guess maybe video games have taken their place these days.  They're pretty realistic, but just not the same. You can't smell the rubber and oil like you could with the slot cars and you can't get creative and find ways to make them go faster and hang tighter on the turns.  Oh well, at least Slinkies are still around.  Of course, now they are multi-colored and I think the springs are plastic or something; but at least they aren't extinct yet.

Between the smoke from cap guns and soot from coal-fired furnaces the wallpaper in our house used to get pretty dirty.  So every spring the whole family would be enlisted to clean it with wallpaper cleaner.  That's something I haven't seen in years either.  It was kind of like Play-Doh.  It was usually either pink or green when you started using it.  By the time you finished kneading it and wiping down the wallpaper it was a dirty gray, like the last slushy snow of spring before the sun wins out over Old Man Winter and makes it hibernate for another year.  People still have wallpaper but I guess the fuel we use to heat our houses these days is so clean that there's no need to clean the walls.  Or maybe folks just paint over them when they get dirty.  So bye-bye wallpaper cleaner.

When you wanted to clean yourself after a hard day of scrubbing wallpaper there was always soap-on-a-rope.  Of course you only needed that if you had a shower instead of a bathtub.  Because when I was a kid, at least in my neighborhood, if you had a shower it was something you rigged up yourself in the basement.  Soap-on-a-rope was a bar of soap that had a piece of string or rope through it so that it would hang over the shower head.  That way you didn't have to worry about dropping a slippery bar of soap and then trying to retrieve it from the shower floor.  I guess maybe shower gel has replaced it these days.  In any case, I haven't seen soap-on-a-rope in ages, although I did Google it before I wrote this post and discovered that it's still being made.

A couple of  handy items we used to have were a kitchen matchbox holder and a sink strainer.  Every house had a matchbox holder on the kitchen wall to hold a box of those big wooden safety matches.  You needed them to light the burners on the gas stove after the pilot light crapped out.   Sink strainers are those triangular-shaped, perforated pans that you sat in the corner of the sink.  You put your table scraps in them so that the liquid would drain out before you put the garbage in the trash can.  I haven't seen either one of those items outside of an antique store in so long that I thought they had gone the way of the dodo.  It only took a quick Internet search, though, to reveal that they are still around, though hard to find.

For those who were too busy to bake their own bread or milk their own cow, and couldn't get out to the local A&P to pick up milk and bread, there was home delivery.  The milkman stopped by every other day and dropped your milk off in a specially-designed, divided wooden box on your front porch.  Bet you haven't seen one of those in use in a long time.  The bread man didn't leave his stuff on the porch.  He brought fresh bread and baked goodies right to your door.  But not anymore.  Home delivery of bread and milk is one of those things you only see on old reruns of Mayberry RFD these days.

After dinner you could take some of those baked goodies into the living room and nibble on them while you watched the black and white TV.  In our town there were only three stations and the broadcasts came from different cities that were in different directions from the house.  That meant that the antenna, which was mounted on an aluminum tower on the side of the house (another relic of days gone by) would only pick up a strong signal from one or two stations.  If you wanted a strong signal from the other station, you had to climb up the tower to turn the antenna, or you could buy an Alliance Tenna-Rotor, which let you use a box inside the house to turn the antenna with a little motor at the top of the tower.  State of the art for 1950, but long gone now.

Well, enough whining for now.  Still, I can't help wondering whatever happened to drive-in movies, Topo Gigio, Black Cow candy, fuse boxes, party lines ...

Random Acts of Decoration

This post started out to be a a whiny, “Bah, humbug, Christmas isn't any fun anymore” thing.  I was feeling kind of down thinking about how great it was on Christmases past when our whole family got together for dinner on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and how that has changed as the grandkids got older, jobs took kids out of town and my wife and I often end up kicking around by ourselves on holidays.

So I was all grumbly a few days ago when we took a shortcut down an almost two-lane back road and ran across this little cedar tree that someone had taken the time to dress up for Christmas.  It isn't in anyone's yard or on someone's rural property.  It's just there by the side of the road where it has been struggling to survive the record-breaking drought we've had this year.  It happens like this every Christmas in our neck of the woods.  The Christmas elves sneak out under the cover of darkness and commit random acts of decoration for no other reason than to cheer up holiday grumps like me.

 After we saw the cheery little cedar we started taking note of the Christmas decorations that have been springing up all over our area since Thanksgiving. This old farm truck is sort of an institution on that same back road.  Most of the year  we hardly notice it sitting there and rusting away but I just couldn't keep my grump on when I saw it all dressed up in its holiday finery.

This water tower where Santa has stopped to let his reindeer have a drink before heading out for the big Christmas Eve trip is in front of a storage facility down the road from our house.  Every holiday and change of season brings a new tableau.  I have to admit that my favorite was the one this summer that featured a cowboy taking a dip in the water tower, but I like the Christmas scene too.

Of course all the local stores, hotels and other businesses are getting into the holiday spirit this time of year.  Our grandson performed with his highschool jazz band at a historic hotel in Austin earlier this month.  The main lobby was decorated in Victorian holiday style with a huge Christmas tree and lots of twinkling lights.

Another downtown hotel had a display of gingerbread houses depicting iconic Texas structures.  The houses will be sold to the highest bidder to generate some money that will be used to brighten the holidays for folks who are down on their luck.  Gingerbread houses are everywhere this season.  One of the local libraries had a holiday gingerbread house contest with entries from kids of all ages.

So, even though Central Texas doesn't really have a good environment for growing traditional Christmas trees, we manage to find things to decorate for the holidays.  This huge live oak in a small town a couple of miles from here is one of my favorites.





After seeing all the holiday decorations, whether random or formal, there's just no way to avoid the spirit of the season.  I know I'm enjoying it.  So, no matter what holiday you celebrate this season, I hope you have a happy one; and if you get a chance to engage in a random act of decoration, why, that will just pass the spirit along and put a smile on the face of even a grump like me.

What a drag

The Stones were right.  It is a drag getting old.  You don't sleep as well as you did when you were younger and it seems as though some part of you is always hurting, even when you try to eat right and get regular exercise.  Activities that might have caused temporary discomfort when you were younger now result in permanent aches and pains that drive you to the doctor who sends you out for a whole serious of expensive, torturous and humiliating tests and then tells you that nothing showed up and you're just going to have to live with your problem.  Then  you get to do battle with Medicare and your insurance company to try to get them to pay their share of the mortgage on your doctor's vacation home.  You start to plan your travel routes more carefully to ensure that you're never too far from a clean restroom or out of cell phone range.  You find that a lot of your friends don't want to do anything anymore except sit around and talk about their own aches and pains and hospital visits and who died recently and who is probably going to kick off soon. 

Yeah, old age can be a drag, but the way I see it, it is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.  Sure, you could let yourself get depressed when you realize, like I did recently, that you've probably already lived four-fifths of your life and you're never going to be healthier than you are today.  On the other hand, you could just let that drive you to the realization that, if you don't have a whole lot of time left, you'd better make the most of what you do have.

I see a lot of older people that appear to me to fall into the extremes of the spectrum.  Some seem to be old before their time.  Those folks tend to stay home a lot and they're the ones who want to sit around and talk about all their troubles, complain about Social Security and Medicare and depress you with a long, detailed list of all their ailments and the particulars of every visit they've made to doctors, labs, hospitals and physical therapy facilities.  Others seem to want to pack as many things into their remaining time as they can.  I think of them as bucket-listers.  They volunteer for any outfit that will accept them, travel constantly and try to experience as many things as they can.  It seems to me as though a lot of them get enjoyment out of the individual things they do, but they always seem pretty harried as they try to cram more activities into their lives than there is time to really appreciate them.

My wife and I have taken kind of a moderate approach.  We've decided that we're not going to let aches, pains and chronic problems keep us from doing the things we enjoy, but we do allow ourselves some time to relax and savor the memories of things we do.  So, if we have planned a day trip and one of us has an attack of IBS or we have overdone some physical activity and have an annoying pain to deal with, we suck it up and make the trip anyway.  That might mean we have to opt for the grilled chicken breast sandwich instead of the ancho chile tequila lime shrimp fajitas and micro brewery sampler or maybe just take a picture of the 375 steps to the top of a historic monument instead of making the climb, but at least we made the trip, experienced the flavor of the site and have some neat photos to look over the next week when we are home taking it easy.  It also gives us some good memories to focus on the next time we are trying to keep a hospital gown closed while some nurse or technician installs a port or inserts a probe into an embarrassing place.  So there's that advantage.

A lot of the older folks I've met lately appear to focus on the negative things that might happen if they get out of the house and away from their familiar haunts and do something new.  I guess it's just too much trouble for them to deal with the unfamiliar.  I hear things like “Oh, I don't want to eat at a one-off cafe because I have dietary restrictions and they might not have anything I can eat”  or “I've heard that that town has a lot of crime so I don't want to go there and maybe get mugged” or “I'm not feeling all that well today so I'm just going to stay home and not make the field trip with the club”.  Fortunately neither my wife nor I have ever been the kind of person who viewed life as a spectator sport.  So we're willing to take a little bit of risk in order to have a new experience.  Yeah, sometimes those little one-off cafes end up having lousy food, service and hygiene, but lots of times we run into a really good one and get to meet some interesting local characters there as well.  I have to admit that we do exercise some caution when we are traveling in an area that might be a high-crime area.  Sometimes we don't stop if we get bad vibes about the place or at least we try to maintain a low profile.  Generally, though, we just stay aware of our surroundings and watch out for each other.  When we recently did the grand tour of Texas Independence historical sites, we had to drive through a few neighborhoods that looked pretty unsafe to us.  We bit the bullet and pushed on through to our destinations, although we decided to hold off stopping for lunch until the neighborhoods looked a little safer.  Then we stopped at one-off places and had a great lunch in every one of them.

The point I'm trying to make with this rambling diatribe is this:  If you don't have a heck of a lot of time left compared to the number of years you've been around to date, then it seems to me that you should concentrate on the positive things you can still do and try as much as possible to ignore the negative things and enjoy your golden years.  Sure, you can play it safe and try to hold onto the rest of your remaining years by sitting home and thinking about all of the bad things you're avoiding by not going out; and you can worry about your health and focus on the fact that you can't do the things you'd like to do if you had more money and a younger body.  Or... you can ignore all that negative stuff and make the most of your remaining years by doing what you want to and can still do.  It's easy.  My approach is kind of like the Burt Campbell character on the old sitcom "Soap".  He used to cross his arms, click his fingers and make himself invisible.  I just do that and make all my worries and troubles disappear so I can enjoy life.  You can do that too.  Burt and I grant you that power.  It's yours to use.

Getting your ducks in a row

It's been, what, over three weeks since I've written an article for this blog?  That's way too long, especially since I intended to write about twice a week when I started this thing.  I don't really have an excuse.  The real reason that I haven't written for so long is that I just let myself get overwhelmed with all that is going on in my life these days.  I've had so many things on my plate that the blog thing just fell off the edge.

I know this is just whining, but what happened was that I got this thing going on with my teeth, or maybe it was my sinuses (it's not fixed yet and I still don't know what it is), that kind of threw me for a loop.  I was in constant pain and I still can't drink or eat anything cold.  Not to mention that if I go outside and there is the slightest breeze blowing it makes the side of my face ache like hell.  So that has been going on.

While the teeth/sinus/face thing was at its worst I couldn't do much master gardener stuff because most of that is done outside and I couldn't go out in the wind without bundling my face up like I had elephant man disease or something.  I did do some web site and Facebook work for the master gardeners but I couldn't really get my hands dirty, which is what I like to do.  On top of that there was a big political upheaval in the local master gardener organization and I got stuck taking up the slack in the demonstration gardens when the two people who had been in charge of them left suddenly.

The grandkids had some stuff going on during this timeframe too, so of course my wife and I couldn't miss out on that.  Then my old gal had some health appointments, some of which I tagged along to.  After that the weather turned cold and then hot again and then so cold that it froze the water in the birdbath.  So I had to put up my temporary greenhouse and put all the tender potted plants in that and cover the tender plants in the ground.  Oh, and some damn varmint ruined half of the peppers on the only bell pepper plant that had survived the drought, spider mites and what have you this summer.  So I had to pick all the peppers before they were ripe, which annoyed me no end.  Then I had to prepare the garden and put in the winter crops, while doing the John Merrick impersonation, of course.

So, yeah, I've had a lot of balls in the air over the last month or so and I just let things get out of control.  Then this afternoon while my wife and I were walking in the park I saw this string of ducks and I realized that I just needed to get my own ducks all in a row.  Usually I do that naturally without even thinking about it.  When I worked I was the go-to guy that could multiplex like nobody else and handle any crisis that came up.  For some reason I almost forgot how to do that now that I'm retired.  Maybe I'm just out of practice.  In any case I've resolved to not let that happen again.  I'm going to prioritize the stuff on my plate and make sure that I start writing regularly again;  maybe not twice a week, but definitely weekly.  So watch this space.  There is more to come.

Hello, My Name Is ...

It has finally cooled off a bit here in central Texas and I've managed to extricate myself from a heat-induced stupor long enough to write a few lines. 

To be honest, Ellie and I reached the point where we couldn't stand the heat anymore so we went for a little sojourn in the heartland.  We had kind of a multi-purpose trip:  We did some real vacationing, visited with relatives and picked up some memorabilia to add to the genealogy materials we have been accumulating the last several years.

I've always thought that one of the advantages of being retired is that you can vacation just about any time you want to.  That wasn't the case when we were working.  Back then it seemed that we were only able to get away for vacations when every other family in the world was on the road.  There were some advantages to that when our kids were small.  Motels are prepared to deal with families with children during that time of year and there are so many on the road that, even if your kids act up, no one really notices because they are part of a churning, ever-moving throng.

As we aged, though, we saw that there were a lot of disadvantages to being on the road during the peak vacation season.  For one thing, room rates are higher and fewer of them are available, so it is somewhat difficult to get the room you want.  Since motels tend to cater to families with kids in the prime vacation season, the front desk doesn't really want to hear that someone is jumping on the bed in the room above you (at least I think that's what was going on) or that soaking-wet kids are running up and down the hall by the indoor pool and leaving wet towels at your doorstep.  Nor are they interested when the parents let little Johnnie and Mary ( or I guess these days maybe it's Trace and Tiffany) take up space in the breakfast room at their own table for four, happily grabbing handfuls of breakfast rolls and donuts, glomming up the waffle maker and leaving trails of orange juice and Cap'n Crunch all over the chairs and tables while Mommy and Daddy read the only remaining copy of USA Today and sip the last two cups of the special roast Columbian as you try to find some uncontaminated food to take back to your room before heading out for the day.

When we retired, Ellie and I vowed never to travel during prime vacation time again.  So we joined AARP, AAA and as many motel chain loyalty clubs as we could find and began to travel during off-peak season when all the rugrats were back in school and room rates were low.  When we booked rooms using our loyalty cards we got great rates, and free stuff.  We got the best rooms available and lots of perks besides.  We were happy campers (well motel guests at least) until the first time we ran into the dreaded tour groups. 

Of course we had seen tour buses on our travels before.  They're usually parked out in front of a Cracker Barrel with the only decent restroom for 100 miles in all directions.  You never see them in front of the rest stops with pit toilets.  No, you get to use those while the umpty-seven doddering old folks on the tour bus queue up at the Cracker Barrel. 

So one morning when we looked out our motel room window before heading down to the lobby for the “free” breakfast (that we had really paid for as part of our room rent) and saw a bus labeled "Electric Blue Hair Tours" blocking the main entrance to the parking lot, we understood why, even though we are platinum members of the loyalty club, we had ended up the night before with the room at the far-r-r end of the first floor hall with the window that doesn't latch.  By the time we reached the lobby, dodging the suitcases piled in the hall all the way, the room was filled with old folks with “Hello my name is Gladys” pinned to their “Welcome to Amish Country” shirts and the last of the apricot Danish smeared across their faces.  Of course there was no coffee left by that time and the waffle maker was hopelessly mired in spilled batter.  We managed to snag the last two boxes of Cocoa Krispies (the Raisin Bran was long gone) and a couple of rubbery hard-boiled eggs in their very own child-proof (and apparently geriatric-proof) shrink wrap before casting about for a place to sit.  No luck there.  Although half the chairs had no one in them, they were filled with purses, jackets and boxes of Depends because the tour people in the breakfast room were saving seats for their new found friends.  We had noticed, however, that the motel had opened up the conference room for the overflow from the breakfast area.  So we ate there right next to a couple of tour group members from Moline who spent the whole time grousing because they weren't able to find a seat in the breakfast room.

That scene has been repeated several times during our travels.  So now one of Carl and Ellie's Rules of the Road is:  Never book a room in a tourist area during the senior tour season.

We've developed a few more rules that might help the unwary traveler to avoid situations like this.

Avoid motels if:

• there is a sign in the lobby that says: “Lock your car, dead-bolt your door and don't leave the room after dark.”
• there is a college home game within fifty miles and there are cars in the parking lot with team decals or flags, especially if they are surrounded by beer cans and there is a strong smell of urine.
• there is a tour bus in the parking lot.
• the motel shows up in the  Bedbug Registry

Ask for another room if:

• it's closer than four doors to the elevator or ice machine.
• your room is on the pool side and the pool is open past 10:00.
• the room is less than three doors from the lobby (unless you really like hearing the night clerk chattering with her friends until the wee hours of the morning.

Move to another motel if:

• your room is on the first floor and there is an ash tray on the outside window sill.
• it's evening and there is an 18-wheeler idling outside your room.

Oh yes, and run like the wind if you run into someone in the lobby who's wearing a tag that says “Hello, my name Is ...”

End of the Quest

This week Ellie opened the adventure book and we set out to visit another site that was part of the story of the Texas war for independence from Mexico that was fought 175 years ago.  As I've mentioned in previous posts we have been using the  Texas Independence Trail  passport as a guide and following the trail of sites that were significant to the war of independence.  At each site we got our passport stamped to show that we had been there.  When all of the stamps are collected you are supposed to send in the passport to get a commemorative gift. 

This week we decided to take a run to San Felipe De Austin , the town that Stephen F. Austin founded when he began to establish a colony in Texas.  It's about 150 miles from our house so we thought it would make an easy daytrip.  In a couple of hours we had reached the site, which was well-kept and easy to find.  The only down side was that there wasn't a lot to see.  The town had been burned by the Texas army when they retreated to points east during the war.  Apparently some archaeological digs have taken place, but unlike the Alamo, the town has not yet been rebuilt.  So we got our passport stamped, toured the museum and were treated to a well-informed tutorial from the two folks working there.  By lunchtime we had seen the entire site and were on the lookout for a place to chow down.

The folks at the museum suggested a good place to eat in Sealy, the closest town to San Felipe.  We had lunch there at Annie's Deli and Garden Cafe  which turned out to be a little gem, although it would have been hard to spot if the ladies at the museum hadn't given us great directions. 

By about 12:30 we were finished with lunch and, as there didn't seem to be a lot shopping or anything else of interest to us in Sealy, we debated about whether to head home or go somewhere else.  I guess I should have mentioned that our anniversary was this week so we were in one of those prom weekend modes that Ellie likes so much.  So, even though we had been celebrating our anniversary for nearly a week, we were not in the mood to end it and head home.  Ellie pointed out that we only had one more stamp to get: the one for the  San Jacinto Monument in La Porte, 73 miles away on the other side of Houston.  We had planned to hit San Jacinto later in the year in conjunction with a long weekend in Galveston, but since we were so close we decided to run over there and pick up that last stamp.

We had to drive straight across Houston to get to La Porte but it was early afternoon and the traffic wasn't too bad.  Our GPS was in a cantankerous mood so we ended up taking the wrong freeway at one point, which probably added twenty miles or so to our trip, but we reached the San Jacinto monument at a reasonable hour and had plenty of time to visit the museum, which is in the base of the monument.  The monument itself is a 570-foot tall stone column.  That's 15 feet taller than the Washington Monument, which is supposed to be the tallest obelisk in the world.  I'm not sure why the Washington Monument is called an obelisk and the San Jacinto Monument is called a memorial column, but ours is bigger and that's the truth.  Like the Washington Monument the San Jacinto Monument has an elevator inside and observation areas at the top.  Ellie and I decided not to ride it because she doesn't like heights and the monument is near the Houston ship channel and tank farm area so we thought the view might not be all that spectacular.  The battleship Texas is also moored at the San Jacinto site but neither Ellie nor I are into WWII ships, so we didn't tour it.  We just collected our stamp, checked out the museum and headed home.  Our daytrip ended up being a 423-mile journey.  It was a long ride but we enjoyed both the San Felipe De Austin and San Jacinto museums. 

We've driven between 1350 and 1400 miles this year to visit the major sites on the Texas Independence Trail.  That's a lot of time to spend in the car but we have had the opportunity to meet a lot people who are passionate about the history and heritage of Texas and we've learned a good bit about the events that culminated in the formation of this great state where we have made our home for over thirty years.

We're going to send in the fully stamped passport this week.  Can't wait to see what the commemorative gift is.  After all that driving I hope it's a gas card.

Heavy Petting

My wife and I like animals.  Over the years we have had lots of pets.  When we moved to Texas, it seems like a lifetime ago, we did it in a van filled with us, our kids, a dog named Woodstock, a parakeet named Pickles, two anonymous gerbils and a slew of houseplants.  We looked like a cross between Noah's ark and the Partridge Family.  Although we've had a cat, a lizard, fish and other animals,  we're mostly dog people and, since we consider them to be social animals, our dogs lived in the house with us.  For thirty years there was never a time when there wasn't at least one pooch in the house and sometimes there were as many as three.  I'm clumsy and don't like having an animal running around the floor that is so small that I might hurt it if I stepped on it, so most of our dogs have been around 80 – 100 pounds.  They've also mostly been labs, which means that they were really active and therefore big eaters.

About five years ago were down to one dog, Buck, a lab that was about eight years old.  He contracted the canine form of AIDs and passed away on July 3, 2006.  We were terribly sad because we both loved that dog.  Buck faded for nearly a month before he went, though, and he was in such misery that we should have had him put down.  We didn't do that because we couldn't stand to let him go at such a young age and we kept hoping that he would come around.  So it was really a blessing when his suffering ended.  Also, even though labs are hunting dogs, Buck was deathly afraid of the fireworks that  usually shatter the air around here on July 4th.  So at least he didn't have to go through that another time before he died.

After Buck was gone the house felt empty.  He was always underfoot, of course, because that's part of the family dog's job.  We never sat on furniture with our feet on the floor because we had this big, warm, furry footstool cozied up to the couch.  Whenever we came home from running an errand we were greeted with boundless joy and enthusiasm and the hope that there might be some goodies wrapped up in a napkin.  Buck didn't beg, though.  When we ate supper he lay on the floor quietly waiting until we were finished in hopes of getting some tasty leftovers and he was rarely disappointed.  We never worried about a break-in in the middle of the night because Buck slept on the floor near our bed and his sharp ears would pick up the sounds of someone outside long before ours could.

It felt so strange to us to no longer share our house with a dog.  So after grieving for a few weeks my wife and I started mulling over the question of whether or not to get another one.  We briefly flirted with the idea of a cat but both of us decided that we didn't like the fact that, unlike dogs, cats usually get up on furniture and counters.   No, a cat was definitely not in our future.  If we got another pet it would have to be a dog.  We debated about whether to get a small dog like some kind of terrier or miniature schnauzer or something, but we were so used to larger dogs that we gave up on that idea.  We quickly realized that what we really like are labrador retrievers so it would have to be a lab or nothing.

We already knew all of the positives about owning a lab.  We had never really listed the negatives, but some of them were pretty obvious to us.  For one thing, labs are extremely active dogs that need a lot of interaction and exercise.  They have lots of enthusiasm and play rough.  That wasn't a problem when we were younger.  In fact we liked roughhousing with the dogs way back when, but we are not really up to that now.  So we thought that it would not be a good idea to get a lab puppy because we just couldn't give it the attention it deserved and that wouldn't be fair to the dog.  An older rescue lab seemed like a more viable option.  Whether we got a puppy or a rescue lab, though, we knew we were talking about some significant expense.  I had calculated at one time that we spent between $1000 and $1200 per year on each dog that lived with us.  That included food, medicine and vet bills but not extra toys and goodies that we might buy for them.  Nor did it include kennel fees for those times when we took extended trips.  Another downside, and the one that finally made us decide not to get another dog, is that an inside dog can reasonably be expected to hold its bodily functions in for a relatively short time.  That makes it more or less impossible to take really long day trips or to turn a day trip into an overnighter.  We have found that we like the spontaneity that living without pets supplies.  So in the end we decided to live petless from here on out.

This is a question that a lot of retirees have to face.  It is comforting to have the companionship of a pet, especially a cat or a dog, as one gets older.  This is especially true for those whose spouses have passed away.  I can't quote any sources but I'm fairly confident that someone-or-other has pretty much proven that people who have someone or something to care for live longer than those who don't.  So, from that perspective at least, having a pet to share life with is a good thing.  There are those downsides though.  No matter what kind of pet you have, you will have to spend money from your fixed income to feed your pet and to maintain its health.  In addition, many dogs in particular are high energy animals that require a lot of exercise and probably a lot of interaction and toys to keep them from getting bored.  That can be hard to provide as you age.  If you have a big dog the problem gets worse as the dog ages.  It is pretty easy to lift a twenty pound terrier into a car for a trip to the vet, but it is a different story if you are dealing with a 100-pound lab with bad hips.  Then, of course, there is that time in the pet's life when it has aged to the point where it is in pain and discomfort much of the time.  Eventually most pet owners are going to have to make the choice to put the dog out of its misery and I can speak from personal experience when I say that that is a really difficult thing to do.

So I guess the bottom line here is that, if you are a person who is aging and who shares his life with pets, you might want to think about the pros and cons of owning them before replacing a pet that has recently passed away.  Big dogs live around 12 - 15 years and small dogs and cats and live to around twenty pretty easily.  So if you're in your sixties or seventies and thinking about getting a new pet, please make sure that you can handle the downside for the life of the pet or at least make some arrangements for some else to do that for you if you should suddenly be incapacitated and can't take care of it.

Exercise

Exercise.  I hate it.  It always seems like such a waste of time to me to do some exercise just for the sake of exercising.  I mean, I don't mind getting exercise when I'm doing something productive.  For example, I mow my own lawn rather than using a lawn service, even when the highs are in the triple digits.  Of course, our lawn is so small that it only takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to mow, trim and blow the chaff off.  Still, that's productive exercise as far as I'm concerned.

Even though I don't like exercising for the sake of exercising, I still do it.  My wife and I try to walk at least three times a week.  We prefer walking in a park or somewhere else where there are interesting things to see, but we will walk at the mall or on a treadmill if it's too hot to walk outside.  So why do we do this when we both acknowledge that it's something we hate to do?  The reason is very simple: we've decided that in order to live you have to keep moving.  We've had some pretty good examples of what exercise can do for a person as they age and what happens if you don't get enough exercise as well.

My parents rarely exercised for the sake of health.  My mother was a stay at home mom who did a lot of housework in a two-story house with a basement.  She had to go up and down the basement stairs, carrying a laundry basket full of clothes, probably twelve or fourteen times a week in order to do the laundry.  Then too, she spent at least one day a week cleaning that big house.  She did this right up into her late eighties, although when she was about 80 years old, she told my wife and me that she didn't really do such a great job of cleaning anymore.  We were both amazed that she still cleaned at all, although I guess we shouldn't have been because Mom was the Energizer bunny incarnate. The point I'm trying to get to here is that Mom lived in and worked around that two-story house every day until six months before she died of cancer three days short of her 89th birthday.  My dad, on the other hand, didn't do much to exercise after he retired.  To be sure, he had spent thirty years or so a letter carrier, walking a route with a satchel full of mail over his shoulder for eight hours five days a week.  When he was working age he also mowed his own lawn, at least until we boys were old enough to mow it, and did the rest of the yard work himself.  After he retired he had to have an aortic aneurism repaired and his doctor told him he should exercise every day to keep his heart in shape. He did that for a few months and then pretty much gave it up entirely.  He died of a heart attack at 77.

My wife's parents started out with good intentions.  They both retired in their sixties and for awhile they both walked five or six days a week at the track at a local park.  To begin with they both made a couple of laps around the track.  Then my mother-in-law got to the point where she would walk one lap and then sit in the car and read the paper while my father-in-law walked his second lap.  Later on she walked about a quarter of a lap and then walked back to the car to read while my father-in-law finished his two laps.  Eventually she just sat in the car while he walked. My mother-in-law sort of gave up on housework too.  My father-in-law would make the meals and do the laundry while she read the paper or watched TV.  They lived on their own until she got sick and had to move into a nursing home at 80.  She died there about six years later.  My father-in-law is 91 and even though he has to use a walker to get around, has cancer and is permanently attached to a catheter, he rides an exercise bike for half an hour five days a week.  In fact, he was recently in the hospital for nearly a week to check on the status of his cancer, receiving chemo while he was there, and on the afternoon of the day he came back to the assisted living place where he lives, he rode the bike for half an hour.

OK, I know that some of this could just be good genes, but I see the value of exercise here.  So Ellie and I try to get exercise in at least three times a week, in my case, and five in hers.  We plan to keep moving until the lights are turned out and and we can't move again, hopefully way into the future.

The Keys to the Safe are Under the Doormat

I am not a social person.  It's just not my nature to seek out interaction with other folks and share all the gory details of my life with them.  So when social networks like Facebook and Linkedin became popular I pretty much ignored them.  As a former software developer I expect new applications to be a bit buggy and, given that the whole purpose of social networks is to get you to share information about yourself, I thought they were likely to be rife with privacy and security gaps.  I was convinced that they were something to be avoided, at least by me.  Unfortunately, a majority of the few folks with whom I would like to have some social contacts tend to communicate through social networking sites.  That includes our kids.  So when my wife came to me and told me that her sister, who was on Facebook, had some news about our kids that we hadn't yet heard, I had to agree with her that we should take the plunge.

Once we got on Facebook I became ever more amazed at how much personal data people put in their profiles and posts.  People who, I am sure wouldn't leave their front door unlocked when they go away, will use their cell phone or laptop to post that they are out on a day trip or grabbing a cappuccino at the local beanery.  That is sort of an open invitation to any tech-savvy burglar to stop by and run off with the new flat screen they posted about on Facebook earlier in the week.  The reason for that is sort of twofold.  On the one hand a lot of data that people put on Facebook is available to people whom they might not intend to have it.  In addition, there are a lot of companies who make a living by aggregating data from various sources and selling it to anyone who wants it.  That can make for an interesting and really insecure situation.

Just to make sure that I'm not laboring under more than my normal degree of paranoia here I ran a little cyber-stalking experiment today.  It went like this:

I got on the Facebook wall of someone who is one of my Facebook friends (we'll call this person, F) and scrolled down through the posts until I found a comment from someone who is not one of my Facebook friends.  This person (whom we will call X and refer to as the neuter he, which doesn't necessarily imply that it is a man rather than a woman) is one who frequently posts location info that is often commented on by F.  Ordinarily I wouldn't have access to X's posts unless I specifically searched for X using Facebook's friend search function, but when X comments on a post that one of my Facebook Friends has made, or vice versa, Facebook let's me see X's profile information as well as the posts on his wall.  Another way to get that kind of information is to run a Facebook application.  To the best of my understanding, the Facebook application APIs will allow an application to get at most anything in a person's profile.  Here's an article  with some more information about social media APIs.

In any case, X's birth date and city of residence are listed in the profile, so I picked up that info from there.  I also picked up some information about X's immediate family.  Next I Googled X's first and last name and city and state of residence.  This turned up a wealth of data.  For one thing, X belongs to an organization that has a Facebook page.  On that page I found out that X is a chairperson for a certain group.  I also found out when and where the group will meet over the next several weeks.  So now I know some times when X will be away from home and, in one case, I know that he will be holding a meeting at his home. 

Another item that came back on the search was a page from a data aggregator.  This page contained even more information about X, including a picture of his house and the front part of the name of the street where he lives.  There was also information about X's spouse and children, his past residence locations and other spellings of his name.  The site offered to sell me a full report with all the information the company had about X for a small fee.  I looked at pages from several other aggregators and got similar information and offers of a full report, in one case for an introductory price of ninety-nine cents!  One of the aggregator's listed the last part of the name of the street where X lives.  So by putting together the two parts I had received from the two aggregators I was able to get the full name of the street.

Had I chosen to buy the full report I would not only get information on X's full address and current phone number, but also current income and place of business, complete list of relatives and any public record information concerning life events such as marriages, divorces, etc.  There's more information about this subject in this article from the Vancouver Sun.

The way it appears to me is that a tech-savvy burglar, using the information gleaned from X's Facebook profile and the information from the location posts that X puts on Facebook,  could clean out the house while Mr. and Mrs. X were out having a double latte some evening.  If any curious neighbors challenged the thief, he would know more about the Xes than the neighbor knew and would be able to allay their suspicions long enough to get away with the goods.  All of this, at least in my mind, is tantamount to putting the front door key under the  mat.

So what can you do to make it a little tougher for burglars to rifle the family jewels?  For one thing you can start by putting as little information in your social networking profiles as possible.  Of course you'll need to put enough info there so that someone whom you want to find you can do that, but you should keep it to a minimum.  Remember, all I needed to get the data I've mentioned here was first and last names and city and state of current residence.  Other information, like family relationships, city and state of birth, schools attended, etc., just makes it easier to steal your identity or to verify it when dealing with a data aggregation site.  Another thing to avoid is posting your location when you're not at home or the fact that your spouse is away for an extended period of time.  The former might allow someone to burglarize the place and the latter might cause you to get an unwelcome visitor.  A third thing to avoid is social networking site applications, especially games that require you to volunteer information about yourself or one of your friends.  They are just there to feed the databases of data aggregators.  In fact, it is a good idea to disallow the application APIs altogether so that nothing can run against your id.

Doing these things won't guarantee that you won't have a problem, but they'll make it more difficult for someone to steal your identity, or that new flat screen.

Clueless Drivers, Rude People, the Dorky Hat and Other Drivel

I know how grumpy old men get that way, cuz I”m one of them.  Here's an example of how that happens.

A couple of weeks ago I was on my way to do a volunteer project at the Master Gardener Demonstration Garden.  I was going to enable one of the raised beds for folks who are too handicapped to bend over to weed the garden and things like that.  This was on a day when the high temperature was expected to be 106 and it was probably the 40th day of 100 plus degree highs we had had this summer and maybe the 25th in a row.  At a quarter till nine it was already in the low nineties and, despite the fact that it hasn't rained here since Sam Houston died, it was humid as hell.

As I pulled up in the left turn lane to tun onto the main street of the little town that is our county seat, I saw that an eighteen-wheeler was about to turn right in order to go the opposite direction from which I was headed at that time.  So instead of pulling right up to the light, where the big rig would have to drive over the left front fender of my pickup in order to make the turn, I stayed back a few car lengths from the light until the truck got around the corner.  As soon as the truck was past me I pulled forward to make the turn, because the light was now green for me.  As I  moved forward a thirty-something woman in an SUV with the gas door hanging open and a kid about to fall out of a child seat in the back cut in front of me so close that I couldn't see the back of her car.  I'm not sure what she was driving with because she was talking on a cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder, putting on makeup with one hand and working on her pompoms or something with the other.  Just at that moment the light turned red for our lane and a big pickup cut across her bow on the cross street so she had to stop.  At this point Ms. I'mWayMoreImportantThanAnyoneElseInTheWorld looked in her rear view mirror and gave me a dirty look like I had done something to keep her from zooming through the intersection as she had planned.  At least to the extent that she was capable of planning anything.  I, of course, responded by manually reminding her that her IQ was 1.  Yeah, I know I was on a humanitarian mission here, but benevolence only goes so far with me.

So the light finally changed and the clueless wench got around the corner, but then she drove at about fifteen miles an hour while she searched the roads on her right looking for the spot where she wanted to turn in.  Of course when she made the turn she didn't signal.  I know, I know, I should have passed her, but I was going to turn right not too far up the road and, because she was driving so slowly at that point, all of the cars behind me where zipping into the inside lane and I couldn't get around her.

I have always felt that in situations like this you should be able to get something akin to a hunting license that would have a tag on it like you get with a deer license and you could use that any one time you choose during the year to accost a lousy driver, take their keys away and staple a tag to their ear that says “Driving while dumbassed" and their license would be suspended for the rest of the year.  Of course, there are times when someone might want to use one of those on me so maybe that's not such a good idea.  Never mind.

OK, so here's a place where one of those licenses would still be a good idea and it doesn't even involve driving.

My wife and I took a BOGO coupon to Baskin-Robbins last week to get something cold because it was another 100 plus degrees day.  The joint was packed so there was no place to sit and eat the ice cream inside.  They did have two or three tables outside though, so we decided to brave the heat and eat our sundaes there. 

Now this B-R is in a strip mall outside the entrance to a subdivision.  The rest of the mall is populated by real estate offices, Vietnamese man-pedi places and your friendly independent insurance agent.  There is a restaurant at the other end of the strip but the Baskin-Robbins is clearly the only place in the strip that has outside eating. 

After we sat down we smelled cigarette smoke and noticed that this old we-live-in-an-expensive-retirement-community-looking dude was smoking outside a liquor store about twenty feet upwind from us.  Fortunately the wind was kind of gusting, so we didn't get enveloped in a cloud of fumes, but we were still getting second-hand smoke.  I was going to say something to him but after a couple of (not very) discrete coughs from my wife, the guy moved further up the strip where his smoking wasn't as much of a problem.

Just as Ellie and I were able to breathe an untainted sigh of relief a thirty-something woman (starting to see a pattern here?) who was so skinny she looked as though she must subsist totally on “reds, cocaine and vitamin C” (apologies to the Grateful Dead) and who had some sort of tattoo that started at one ankle, twined around her bony leg, and emerged from her tube top somewhere near the opposite shoulder before wrapping around her scrawny neck, pulled up in some kind of Japanese faux Jeep with out of state plates.  She had a cell phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder (more patterns), a freshly lit cigarette in one hand and with the other hand she dragged a small child of indeterminate race and sex that never stopped whining up and down in front of the B-R while she blabbed away on her phone and smoked that whole damn cigarette.  I'm not sure Ellie and I even got second hand smoke from that one because she was so close that it was almost first hand.

Meantime a blue-haired woman came out of B-R with a couple of cones to go and got in one side of an H-2 while the smoky old dude from up the strip got in the other.  So it turns out that he had to have a quick cigarette before his ice cream cone, just like the illustrated woman with the whiny kid had to have one more cigarette before she took him in to get his ice cream fix.

I'm not so sure that the hunting license/tag thing is the best cure for inconsiderate SOBs like those two.  I'm thinking maybe a Winchester Defender loaded with three-inch magnum buckshot.  After all, they were killing Ellie and me with all that cigarette smoke and, this being Texas, I should have been within my rights to shoot them in defense of self and family.

Speaking of family: at times that's another source of irritation for us grumpy old galoots.

I think I mentioned once or twice that it has been gawdawful hot this summer.  OK, I realize that Central Texas, where I live, is farther south than northern Mexico.  It's farther south than the south coasts of Mississippi and Alabama and about at the same latitude as the south coast of the Florida panhandle and not much north of South Texas, which is farther south than any part of the continental US except for the very southern tip of Florida from Miami on south, and that's probably going to be under water in thirty years anyway and then Texas will be the southernmost state in the continental United States.  So it's always hot here in the summertime.  These days, however, we are on some kind of warming trend and the prediction I've heard is that Central Texas will be as hot and dry as West Texas in thirty years or so. 

The bottom line here is that you really need to protect yourself from the sun when you go outside, and Ellie and I are outside a lot.  Normally I wear a gimme cap when we go out.  This summer, though, I've had a problem where the tops of my ears have gotten sunburned because they aren't covered by gimme caps.  So I picked up this sort of Palm Beachy thing that has a brim that goes all the way around.  Ellie is loath to have me wear it when she is with me because she says it looks dorky on me.  She's right; but then I look dorky in any hat.  Come to think of it, most of the time I look pretty dorky whether I'm wearing a hat or not; but for some reason she thinks this particular hat is way dorkier than most.  On me.  It would probably look good on that guy in the commercials on TV who pushes XX cerveza and says “stay thirsty my friends”.

I tend to favor function over form, so I don't much care whether I look dorky in that hat.  It keeps the sun off me and keeps my ears from getting sunburned and that's all I care about.  So I wear it.  Still my wife and I have a big debate over it every time I bring it along.  At least we did until a couple of weeks ago when I was wearing it while we toured Presidio La Bahia.  As we walked along the fort walls a thirty-something woman with a phone pressed between her cheek and shoulder passed us in the opposite direction.  As she came abreast of us she smiled and said “Nice hat”.  I'm pretty sure she wasn't being sarcastic; but I was kind of grumpy the rest of the day anyway.  I'm not sure why.  I think it was the heat.

Time Warp

There are pluses and minuses to just about everything and retirement is no exception.  On the downside, most people retire when they are up in years and not able to physically do a lot of the things they could when they were younger and most retirees have less money to spend than they did when they worked full time.  On the plus side, however, some kind of Einsteinean time warp happens when you retire.  You don't have a lot of commitments anymore and the days of the week cease to have a lot of meaning.  In some ways the weekdays and weekends become reversed.  You find yourself staying home when all of the working folks are out shopping or hitting the recreation areas and then you run your errands during the weekdays when all the workaday folk are in their cubicles.

Some people have a hard time with an analog life that isn't governed by the clock and calendar.  I guess for some people it is sort of like being lost at sea with no reference points in sight.  Once you get used to it, though, it makes life a lot easier.  Take last week for instance.

Ellie and I had decided to hit the Texas Independence trail again.  We planned to take a Friday run to Goliad to see Presidio La Bahia, one of those consecrated in blood sites sort of like the Alamo.  We had been planning the trip all week but as the week progressed it began to look more and more as though tropical storm Don had its sights trained on Goliad and the prediction was that it was going to get pelted by five or six inches of rain Friday afternoon.  We decided that that didn't sound like fun to us.  In fact it would be adding insult to injury since Grizzledgalootland has been in the grips of a record-setting drought all year.  Since we're living in a time warp the storm didn't really cause us a problem though.  We just switched the trip from Friday to Thursday and spent the day climbing the parapets of Presidio La Bahia and paying homage at the shrine dedicated to the 400+ members of the Texas revolutionary army that were massacred there.

That's the neat thing about living beyond the clock and calendar.  One day is the same as another, so you can slide your schedule all over time and back and do what you want to do whenever it's convenient.

Today was another example of the advantage of living without a schedule.  The powers that be have been working on the road behind Casa Galoot for over a year.  Apparently they have ramped up the schedule in an attempt to finish it by the time school starts and buses begin to rumble down the road because, at four freaking o'clock this morning, we were awakened by the sound of road-building equipment clanking and growling so close to the house that it sounded as though they were in the backyard. 

We both woke up at the sound and lay there like zombies for half an hour or so until we realized that they weren't going to quit anytime soon.  So we got up, poured ourselves into a pot of coffee and sat around trying to work up some degree of consciousness for an hour or so until we were able to see something besides floaters.

We were both kind of hungry by then and Ellie mentioned that a local one-off all night restaurant had an early bird special breakfast from four o'clock until seven.  So we followed the old proverb “when life gives you broken eggs, make migas” (I think that's some kind of Tex-Mex proverb) and hied ourselves to the Kerbey Lane Cafe (which, as it turns out, isn't on Kerbey Lane; at least, not the one we went to) and chowed down on a couple of eggs and a couple of raspberry pancakes each, with bacon for her and fresh fruit for me (all for $3.45 apiece), washed down with about a gallon of coffee until we were more or less coffee-logged.

After that we drove to a 24-hour Wal~Mart and killed some time until the local mall threw open the doors for the crowd of septuagenarian strollers that usually gathers there at that time of day and joined the group for a mile and a half walk in the A/C.  (It was about 90 degrees by then and humid as, well Bon Temps, Louisiana, I guess.)  We had planned to make it a two-mile walk but the coffee had worn off by that time and we were kind of sleepwalking so we decided to head home to get some yard work done before the temperature got up into the triple digits again.

On the way home we realized once a gain how lucky we are to be able to live in relative rather than absolute time.  Yeah, sometimes you hit a boring patch, but it's great to be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it instead of trying to fit everything in on the weekend or after work.  Now, being able to afford to do the things you want to do when you are retired ....   Well, for most of us that's a different story.

Global Warming? or Aliens?

You decide.

Normally it gets pretty hot here in central Texas during the summer.   So my wife and I tend to stay inside a lot more than we do in nicer weather.  This summer it has been gawdawful hot so we've been inside more than usual.  One of the things we do to pass the time is watch the birds that come to our feeders and waterers.  During this hot weather there is always a bird or two in either the birdbath or the fountain.  Up until a month ago we used to have a pond and waterfall and, when we had them, the waterfall was a favorite spot for the smaller birds to bathe and get a drink (and poop as well; birds are actually pretty disgusting when you think about it; which we don't).

So the other day we were watching a humming bird scarfing up nectar from some of the plants we put in just for that purpose when my wife pointed out some tiny finches that were bathing in the fountain.  Now we often get house finches here and they are fun to see because they have red heads and bellies and add some color to the yard.  This finch was smaller, though, and it was kind of olive green.  We saw a few more of them over the course of the week so we decided to run down to our friendly neighborhood Tractor Supply Company and pick up a sack of thistle seed, which finches really get off on.

I hung the thistle seed up near the fountain and the first thing we knew it was covered with little olive greenish finches.  Then we noticed that one of them wasn't olive green.  It was bright yellow in places.  So we realized that what we were seeing was goldfinches.  That was a real surprise to us because, if you check out this map, you'll see that goldfinches don't spend their summers in central Texas.  Oh no, they are Yankees born and bred.  They only hit central Texas in the winter when it's too cold for them in their normal digs.


We've been pretty mystified ever since the goldfinches arrived.  It's not just one or two stragglers that are hanging about.  There is a whole mini-flock of six or eight females and one or two males.  At first we thought that they might be confused because it is so warm in the north right now that they maybe didn't realize that they were still in Texas.  After all, it is  a pretty big state.  That didn't really seem to make sense to us, though, because you would think that the heat in the North would drive them up into Canada.  The only thing we can figure is that maybe they tried going north but couldn't get out of the hot weather so they decided to came back to Texas because people are so friendly here.  Or maybe aliens abducted them last winter and just dropped them off where they picked them up after they discovered that it is four and twenty blackbirds that are supposed to be in that pie.  I guess it is possible that they are South American goldfinches and central Texas is the north for them.  I think I heard one of them chirp “hola!” so maybe that's it.

I don't know.  I'm just pretty mystified.  I guess I'll open another Guiness and ponder the problem some more.

Prom Weekend

Since we retired Ellie has been in the habit of only opening the Adventure Book during the week when most of the world is at work or school.  During the weekends we usually stick around the hacienda in order to avoid the mad crush of the pre-retired.  In the summertime, however, we sometimes open the Adventure Book on the weekends because, hey, with everyone on summer vacation, everyday is like a weekend, right?  Sometimes, when we've been cooped up for too long, but we don't have the wherewithal to do a real long weekend mini-vacation, we just have Prom Weekend.  Well, maybe it's not exactly the same as high school prom weekend.  After all, at our age we need to catch a few zzzs between adventures.  We just start out running on Friday morning and spend the whole weekend having cheapo fun.

You could say that this prom weekend started the weekend before.  Our highs have been in the triple digits for a long time now so we had been hibernating except when I went out for Master Gardener volunteer stuff.  Ellie was mostly hanging around the house and by the end of last week she was starting to get cabin fever.  So the Friday before last we Googled “quaint Texas towns” or some such thing to try to find some town within a day's round trip that we hadn't been to a zillion times.  As it turned out we found a little town which, wonder of wonders, we had never visited before.  From the web site it sounded like there were plenty of things to do so we decided to jump in the road car and make the two hour trip to check it out. 

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens when you do research on the Internet the reality didn't live up to the hype on the website.  We ate at the only restaurant we could find that was open.  It seemed like the place to go in Fayetteville because it was packed with people, all of whom knew everyone in the restaurant, except us of course.  The food wasn't bad but the facilities were ... how shall I put this?  Unflushable about sums it up I guess, and that's not a good thing, Martha, after you have driven two hours in 90+ degree heat and then swilled down a bucket full of iced tea to cool off.  Fortunately, before an emergency occurred and something disgusting was afoot, we found out that there were some public facilities on the square which, while they weren't pristine, were at least working for their intended purpose.  So after lunch and taking care of business we tried to do some shopping.  Of all the shops listed on the web site we discovered two that were open.  One of them even had some interesting stuff so we made a purchase there.  After driving for two hours to get there, we were a little disappointed that in about forty-five minutes we had had lunch and shopped all the shops that were fit to shop.  So we drove home through some other little towns that we hadn't been to in awhile.  Even so, we had that “Is that all there is?” feeling when we got home.

Last week I did a lot of volunteering with the MGs, so Ellie was on her own a good bit that week too.  Needless to say, she spent much of her free time perusing the Adventure Book.  So this past Friday we started Prom Weekend by taking our Texas 175th anniversary passport down to San Antonio to get a couple more stamps from historic sites that were important in Texas' War of Independence.  It was about lunch time when we got to San Antone and we were both hungry.  Ellie had done some research on the Internet and found a place less than a mile from the Alamo called Mad Hatter's Tea House and Cafe that was alleged to have some healthy food.  It turned out to be a great place with beaucoup varieties of tea and coffee as well as some terrific salads, soups, wraps and sandwiches.  We had a great, and healthy lunch, and then headed to the Alamo to get our first stamp.

Now, summer time is tourista season in Central Texas and we would normally avoid going to iconic tourist attractions like the Alamo, but that is one of the stamps you have to have on your passport in order to get whatever it is that they give you for getting all the required stamps.  The passport said that we could get the stamp at the Alamo gift shop.  So, even though we've been there a bajillion times, we headed down to Riverfront Mall to park the SUV, trekked through the labyrinthine shop-til-you-drop supermall, cut through the Marriot (one of those shortcuts you learn by your 177th trip to show out of towners the cradle of Texas' independence, or its most famous massacre, depending upon how you look at it ) and went straight to the gift shop, bypassing the 50,000 or so (my estimate; might be a tad high) camera-toting, cargo-shorted, Wafarered tourists lined up to enter the shrine.  There were only a few people in line ahead of us so it only took a couple of minutes before got a chance to present out passport to the annoyingly cheery woman behind the cash counter who told us that no, the gift shop did not stamp the passports, but the guide at the desk inside the shrine would be happy to do that.  So we wended our way back through the sweaty throng (notice there is an “r” in there; didn't want you to get the wrong idea), lined up with all the other svetties, smiled for the obligatory photo at the doors to the shrine, and went inside to get our stamp.  After that we headed out the exit door as fast as we could, zipping past the exhibits, failing to pass “go” and generally beating a hasty retreat back through the Marriot and the riverfront restaurant next door and then followed the bread crumbs for what seemed like an hour until we reached our car.  One down, one to go.

The second passport stamp we needed to get in San Antonio was one for the San Antonio missions.  There are several of them strung out all over the south side of town but the stamp was supposed to be available at the visitor's center, which is a couple of miles south of the Alamo on the grounds of Mission San Jose y Miguel de Aguayo.  Try to say that after your fourth or fifth margarita.  We didn't really know how to get there, and San Antonio can be an interesting town to find you way around in, given that the roads seem to have been laid out by slinging leaky sacks of corn on the backs of donkeys and then building roads wherever the kernels dropped.  Except, of course, where the river intersects them.  At those places there are usually bridges and anyway, they turn the river off and on whenever they want to clean it, dye it green or whatever, so you probably really don't need the bridges much of the time.  Just to be sure we made it safely to Mission San Jose y Whatever, we had plugged the address of the visitor's center into Tess, our trusty GPS, before we left Casa Galoot.  Tess had no trouble guiding us right to the visitor's center door.

I was kind of looking forward to seeing the missions so I was a little disappointed that only the Mission San Jose was on the grounds that the visitor center shares and also that the actual church is currently off limits because it is being restored.  An activity which, if you can believe the plaques on the wall, has been going on since 1933!?  In any case, the Mission thing was kind of anticlimactic.  We spent about an hour there in the by now 100 degree plus broiling sun and then headed back towards home.  Mission accomplished.  I know, but I just couldn't pass it up.

When we got back to town we were both dying of hunger so we used a BOGO at a local Mexican restaurant and pigged out on mole enchiladas, pollo asado, barracho beans, guacamole and sopapillas.  Yeah, we should probably have had Mexican food in San Antonio, but that's the way it goes.

Saturday we were up with the chickens.  Actually it was a raccoon that was tearing up the veggie garden in the backyard, but we were up early in any case.  Even though we had walked a good bit yesterday, we hadn't done an official exercise walk which we usually do on Fridays, and since it was so early we decided to go to a local mall to put in a couple of miles in the A/C before it opened to shoppers.  There is a big farmer's market at the mall parking lot every Saturday morning and we thought we would drop by it when we finished walking because our own garden is not too productive right now (due in part to the $%^&* raccoon and mostly the weather).  So we spent half an hour or so buying some produce and listening to a jazz trio performing live to about five hundred people who were more interested in showing off their dogs than listening to the music.  After that we went to a diner that is sort of a local institution and had an unhealthy brunch to balance out our healthy lunch from Friday, although I suppose the dinner we had that night had already tipped the scales in the mainlining ldl direction.

On the way out of the restaurant we cruised through our old neighborhood, made cutting remarks about the people who had bought our old house and marveled at the value that Zillow places on it these days.  Then we headed up to a little town not too far away where a woman we know owns a Texas foods store.  We visited with the owner, bought a few items and then, because there was some kind of centennial celebration going on in town that day, we got some free Bluebell ice cream at the Texas foods store and then went next door to a gift shop where we got some free cake and Ellie bought some Poo-pourri.  So I guess we had all bases covered.  Several anyway.  After that we headed home to rest up a bit.

Sunday we kicked around the house all morning but by lunch time we were on the road to another little town nearby where there was to be a free live music concert in the afternoon.  I'm not sure that concert really describes the event because it was one old guy with an acoustic guitar and about a dozen harmonicas, but that's how they billed it. 

The library has a decent little deli so we decided to eat lunch there.  I had a mango chicken panini and Ellie had a chicken salad sandwich.  It took awhile to get served so it was about 1:30 when we finished lunch.  The concert was supposed to start at 2:00.  We've gone to several of these concerts at the library and have learned a trick or two.  They are always held in the first floor lobby.  They just set up some uncomfortable folding chairs for the audience.  There is one of those fifty plus developments not far from the library and it seems as though the front three or four rows of folding chairs are always covered with residents from that place holding places for eight or ten people by laying most of their clothes and belongings, and sometimes body parts, all over the chairs.  Truthfully I think some of them have spent the night in the library restroom or something in order to reserve a good seat for these performers who are sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but nearly always totally unknown, even to the American Idol set.  However, on the second floor of the library there is a sort of mezzanine that looks down on the area where the acts usually play.  Around the opening of the mezzanine there are lots of comfortable chairs and end tables.  So we usually go up to the mezzanine, snag a couple of chairs with a good view of the acts, and spend the time we are there listening to the concert while simultaneously reading magazines.  Can you get anymore efficient than that?

This Sunday, however, some planning genius at the library had decided to have an art exhibition, complete with a reception for the artists on the second floor mezzanine, at exactly the same time that the old guitar dude was doing his thing on the first floor.  Since the mezzanine is open to the first floor, and the reception was filled with tag-wearing, wine-swilling, cake-eating artsy-fartsy types sprawling all over OUR comfy chairs, not to mention trailing cords for the audio hookup for their awards presentation all over them, it was damn hard for us to find a seat where we could see and hear the guitar guy who, as it turned out, was pretty good.  When you could hear him over the crowd noise.  As a result of this planning fiasco the concert wasn't anywhere near as much fun as it should have been.  We stuck around for the whole thing, outlasting the A/F types and even buying a CD from the old guy so he could have enough gas money to get home, but it just wasn't what we expected.  After that, we headed out to Which-wich for a build your own sandwich, browsed around Big Lots where we used a 20% off coupon to buy a bunch of stuff that we convinced ourselves we really needed and would have bought without the coupon and then headed home to declare an end to Prom Weekend.

Personally I'm kind of exhausted after this weekend, but I caught Ellie on Travelocity this morning so I think she may be planning on opening the Adventure Book again before the month is out.