Don't Ya Just Hate It?

Every now and then my pet peeve level reaches the point where it boils over the top and runs out of my head like some kind of acid.  My skin starts to itch and burn and the only cure is to share the misery.  So, in order to get the vitriol level back to something that's tolerable, you're gonna get to hear a few of my unfavorite things.

Here's one that always annoys me.  Right now I'm reading a novel called Mortal Fear by Greg Iles, who is normally one of my favorite mystery/suspense author's.  However, this book was written some time ago and Iles made a mistake here that makes the story a little less readable to me.  The book isn't really a period piece or anything like that.  It is set in the here and now, which for this book was nearly ten years ago.  The problem is that the technology that is prominently featured in the storyline is the technology that was extant, and the author seems to think was cutting edge, at the time the book was written.  I'm sure that was a couple of years before it was published and that was nearly ten years ago.  Having earned my bread and butter in the high tech industry for decades before I retired, I know that most of the things that Iles goes into excruciating detail to explain and constantly talks about in the novel were not really that extraordinary at that time.  In fact, some of them were at best passe and in some cases nearly obsolete when the book hit the stands.  Of course now that makes them about as current as rotary telephones.  I hate it when authors do that because it dates what would otherwise be a timeless story.

I mean, if I was reading a Sherlock Holmes story or picking up some noir fiction like The Maltese Falcon, I would want to have the feel of the period.  When I choose to read something that is supposed to be contemporary fiction I want it to sound like it is happening today.  Of course I realize that when Doyle wrote the Holmes stuff and Hammett wrote about Sam Spade they were writing in their present and that's what gives their work the feel it has today.  Still, it would be really easy to write a good suspense novel like Mortal Fear in a way that would make it seem fresh no matter when you first encountered it and there are a lot of authors who do that, whether consciously or subconsciously I don't know, but it sure does make the book a more interesting read when you don't trip over all that out of date stuff.

One of my other major annoyances these days is Facebook.  There's probably some generational thing going on here to begin with, since it is always annoying to see someone young enough to be your grandkid that is rich enough to buy Rhode Island and didn't really pay the dues to get that kind of money.  I think it's more than that though.  First of all, I'm basically an anti-social person except when it comes to family.  So the whole concept of a social network clashes with my personality (such as it is).  I only got on FB because a lot of my relatives are on it and that's the only way I can communicate with them these days.  I'm kind of a private person (I know, I know: this blog will live in some archive forever and anyone will be able to read it, but at least it isn't broadcast to the world, unless I take steps to make it so.) and don't really like everyone knowing what I am doing at every moment.  Some people do, though, and use Facebook and Twitter to live their lives like they were the subjects of The Ed Show or something like that.  I don't even watch those kinds of so called reality shows on TV, so I really don't want to know that my FB friends are sitting in an Oh Boy at the local farmer's market or spilling Starbucks all over themselves on their way to have their hair done or whatever; and I don't want to see a lot of links to articles about how some serial killer found Jesus in prison and is now running a mini storage and home for unwed mothers on the mean streets of Weehawken. 

So when one of my FB friends starts to post a lot of stuff I don't want to read, I set the FB subscription for them to only show me "important" posts.  Here's the problem with that: it is Facebook that decides what is important and what is not.  And they don't appear to want to tell you how they do that.  So sometimes I see posts from friends FB apparently thinks are important but I do not.  Worse than that, sometimes I don't see posts from friends whose subscriptions I have set to show me all of their stuff.  So it seems that FB has decided to consider some posts unimportant even though I haven't asked it to.  And that is damn annoying.

FB does have it's good points though.  These days when people want to resend cartoons and jokes or whatever to everyone they know, they do it with FB rather than email.  So you don't have to download some humungous file before you realize that you really didn't want to look at that picture after all.  That's a plus.

OK, so here's another thing that is annoying:  USAToday had this article the other day about the "dangers" of taking calcium substitutes.  Apparently my father-in-law read it and got all upset thinking that his kids were going to have heart attacks because they take calcium substitutes.  However, if you read that article, you will see that the alleged results were claimed by someone on the basis of one study.  There is no mention in the article about who did the study nor is there any claim that the same results have been reported from other independent studies.  In addition, there is no information about the dosage of calcium supplements that were taken by the people in the study, the amount of time they took them, the breakdown of heart attack deaths by age group, amount of dosage, length of time taken or anything else that would amount to real data. 

It is pseudo-science articles like this that are one of my pet peeves.  It is certainly possible that there is really a danger here, but you can't tell it from that article.  I never pay any heed to articles like that because they pretty much just do a lot of hand-waving and don't really say anything.  IMHOP it is much better to get health information from a source like Science in the Public Interest's Nutrition Action Healthletter which does objective reporting, delivers real facts and names names.  CSPI's newsletter will tell you if a study has been independently confirmed or not.  Their articles also contain an analysis of the situation that spells out the implications.  So, e.g., if the CSPI newsletter reported on the study mentioned in USAToday and, if it appeared to the authors that there was something real there, they might suggest cutting back on calcium supplements until independent studies either confirmed or refuted the results from the initial study.  So I give the USAToday article a thumbs down.

Well, that's enough whining for one day.  I'll try to be a little more upbeat on my next post.  And more timely too.

Ellie Opens the Adventure Book

It has been awhile since Ellie has opened the adventure book, so we have been overdue for a little excursion.  Anyone who knows her is aware of the fact that Ellie likes to stretch her birthday celebration out over a month or so.  She does that with holidays too.  So, since Mother's Day is this month, Ellie decided to start celebrating at the first of May and I'm pretty sure the celebration is going to go all month long.

This past week we took a trip to the area around Canton, Texas.  Canton is known throughout the state for First Monday Trade Days.  This is sort of a big flea market that is held once a month.  OK, it's not really on the first Monday of the month.  It's held on the Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the first Monday.  And it is really big.  The grounds cover about 100 acres.  Some of it is under roof inside pole buildings and such.  A lot of it (the more flea markety stuff) is outdoors.  More on the Trade Days later.

We headed up on the Wednesday before the Trade Days because we wanted to be able to get to the Trade Days as soon as it opened on Thursday.  We first went to Athens, which is a quaint little town about 25 miles from Canton.  It was about lunch time when we got there so we stopped at the Sweet Pea Bistro and Espresso Bar on the square for a light lunch before starting our rambles.  We had mainly come to Athens to see the  East Texas Arboretum and Botanical Garden.

This place covers 100 acres just outside of Athens.  It was a hot, muggy day so we decided not to trek through the woods to see the arboretum proper.  We just spent an hour or so walking through the grounds of the botanical garden and checking out an old homestead that is on the property.  I was interested to see that the Henderson County Master Gardeners Association has a demonstration garden in the botanical garden area.

After we saw everything that we wanted to see in Athens, we checked into our motel.  We had decided not to stay in Canton because we thought that the rates for motels close to the Trade Days grounds would probably be pretty high.  So we stayed in a little town called Mabank, which is about twenty miles from Canton. 

The motel was comfortable although we almost didn't stay there because when we pulled into the parking lot we saw that the whole front was covered by chimney swift nests and there must have been a couple of hundred of them swirling about overhead catching mosquitoes and letting fly with their digested remains on every car in the lot.  The desk clerk told us that the motel is only a couple of years old and when it was built the birds moved from the nearby freeway underpass to the front of the hotel.  They must have liked it because they're still there.

Mabank is close to Cedar Creek Lake, a large reservoir that supplies water to Fort Worth and surrounding areas.  When the lake was built, about fifty years ago, a number of towns sprang up around  it.  One of them is Gun Barrel City, which is just south of Mabank.  Gun Barrel City is a bit larger than Mabank and the strip of highway that runs from Gun Barrel City to Seven Points (which used to be called Gun Barrel Road, hence the name of the town) is the location of most of the restaurants in the area.  A large part of the road is really a causeway that runs across several very small islands in the lake.

At suppertime we cruised the road and settled on a place called the Cedar Isle Restaurant and Club for dinner.  The Cedar Isle that the restaurant sits on looks to be about the size of the place we used to have in the country.  So the restaurant is pretty much entirely surrounded by the lake.  There is a large outside eating area with a great view of the lake and several islands that the state has reserved as wild bird sanctuaries.  It was pretty cool to sit out there and watch pelicans, cormorants and other water birds while we ate dinner.  Lou Somethingorother, the restaurant owner, stopped by our table to ask how we liked our food so we had the chance to hear some of the history of the lake and the area from him.  The beer was cold, the food wasn't bad and the ambiance was great, so we enjoyed our dinner in Gun Barrel City.

Early the next morning we headed up to Canton to check out the Trade Days.  We've been to a lot these sort of things over the years but this one is the biggest flea market we have ever experienced.  There are a lot of buildings which mostly seem to have craft and gift shop stuff in them although some have antiques as well.  There are also food vendors in the buildings.  We had lunch at a great crepe place in the food court area.  The only problem with it was that there weren't enough tables.  So we had to sit on chairs and try to eat our meal on our laps, which was pretty difficult.  I was surprised at the number of people there, given the fact that it was Thursday and the word is that only 70% of the vendors are there on that day. 

The outside area at the Trade Days grounds is the home of about a bajillion flea market vendors selling mostly “American Pickers” type stuff as well as new gloves and things like that.  The place is so big that you can rent grocery carts, scooters and such to hold your purchases and help you get around.  We spent the morning there shopping and having lunch.  Ellie bought a few things but after about four hours she said that everything was starting to look the same to her.  So we packed up her purchases and went back to Mabank.

There isn't a  lot in Mabank but one of the things that is there is Shorty's Soda Shop.  It's a cool little place that is fixed up like a 1940's soda fountain.  Ellie liked it as soon as we walked in because she has our kitchen decorated like an old-fashioned diner and Shorty's is decorated the same way.  I had a sundae and Ellie had a soda while she schmoozed with the owner and told her about our kitchen decorations.  When the woman at Shorty's found out that we often visited in Amish country, she told us about a Mennonite store in Kemp, a small town a few miles from Mabank.  So after we finished our ice cream we headed to Kemp to check out the Heritage Market and Bakery. 

I have to admit that shopping there was a lot like shopping in Amish country.  In fact, many of the brands of pickles, jellies and the like were the very same that we have bought in Amish stores in Ohio.  Since I am the king of condiments I bought a couple of different kinds of relish.  Ellie stocked up on some cooking supplies and lotion.  Then we headed south to another little town called Malakoff where we did some antique shopping before heading back up to Gun Barrel City for dinner.

When we got to Gun Barrel City we decided that it was time to hit a chain restaurant instead of one of our usual one off choices.  So we stoked up on a hearty dinner at Chili's and called it a day.

We decided to skip the free breakfast at the hotel the next morning because it had filled up overnight with lots of noisy First Monday shoppers.  So we headed out early and stopped at the Denny's in Gun Barrel City for breakfast.  Then we headed home.

I guess Ellie couldn't quite back off the extended Mother's Day celebration, though, because the next morning we got out and about early and went to the local farmer's market where we bought a few veggies, sipped hand-squeezed juice drinks and listened to some free live music.  Then, since it was Cinco de Mayo, we stopped by our favorite neighborhood Tex-Mex place for some mole enchiladas and chalupa compuestos.  All in all it was a good start to Ellie's marathon Mother's Day celebration.