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.

Transitions

So now that I'm no longer eating gluten free Ellie and I have spent the last couple of weeks more or less free basing gluten and reveling in our newly re-found ability to eat what we want where we want.  The first week I was back on gluten our granddaughter came over for a sleepover and it was great to be able to take her out for dinner and only have to worry about her food allergies, instead of mine as well.  We've kind of been over-doing it, though, I guess because we felt like we should get back on the BOGO bandwagon.  We're going to have to tone it down pretty soon or we'll be back on a diet, but this time it will be a weight loss diet.

I think part of the reason we've been going out to eat a lot lately is that this is the summer doldrums in central Texas.  Our summer started earlier than usual this year.  We normally have about thirteen days of 100+ degree highs each year, but they don't usually start until mid to late summer.  This year the triple digits started about May so we are pretty sick of them by now.  We only do outside work in the early morning and then spend the rest of the day somewhere where the A/C is working well.

We've done a few indoor projects during the hot weather.  The latest one is making over what used to be the grandkids room.  When they were smaller the grandkids would often come over for sleepovers so we had dedicated a room to them, installing a convertible bunk and twin bed set and setting the room up to be shared by a couple of small kids.  Now that they are both teenagers we rarely have a sleepover and then only one grandkid at a time.  So we just don't need the bunk beds or the separate room anymore.  They just stay in the guest bedroom like any other overnight guest.  So a week ago we knocked down the bunk bed set and donated it, with all the bedding, to a home for abused girls. 

I have to admit that, even though the bunk beds were going to a good cause, I had a little trouble giving them up.  It sort of marked the end of an era for me.  Of course the grandkids didn't use them anymore, but I remember taking them on a hunt for the bunk beds about ten years ago when our youngest was so small that I had to carry her and lift her up so she could see the top bunk.  The grandkids were really excited about the new bunk beds and the prospect of sleeping waaay up on top.  They've outgrown all that now, though.  So even though our youngest did come over to spend the night a couple of weeks ago, it seems like sleepovers are pretty much a thing of the past.  I had to agree with my wife that it was time to donate the bunk beds and make the room over for some other purpose. Still, it made me feel kind of sad and about twenty years older to do it.  I guess it really is true what they say about kids keeping you young.

These days our oldest grandchild is taking driving lessons.  So of course, when I saw him last week, I had to tell him about how my dad gave me my first driving lesson.  While I was spinning that yarn I was thinking back to when his mother was the age he is now and I took her out to practice driving in the parking lot at my company on the weekend when no one was there.  I guess that's just one of those cycles that runs through the generations. 

So this summer we are facing the heat and drought that seems to come with every Texas summer but we are also going through some transitions.  Life is full of them but sometimes they can be a little tough to take.  Ah well, time marches on and the older you get the faster it seems to march.  I don't want it to march too quickly, but maybe this long, hot summer can move just a little faster.