Lost in a world awhirl

A lot of water under the bridge...

2011-07-18T13:33:00.002-05:00

since I last made it here!

Literally...figuratively...

I spent June working 5 day weeks, picking up an extra day to cover someone who was out injured. I thought I was putting money ahead for our 4th of July party; instead I ended replacing a hot water tank. We still had the party and dinner (fireworks are still legal here); though things are "tight" I'm glad to be back to a 4 day week! Though I'm down 40 pounds and a lot of inches since I rejoined the work force, it takes one to feel like doing anything after 4 and 5 left me still aching when I went back after 2 off, lol.

There is much to do around here still before fall finds its way to the Plains as well, though with the current heat wave I'll be doing it in early mornings and back in by noon. Right now it's 100F. (37C.) on the north side of the house in the shade...the humidity adds about 10 to that right now and I don't deal with it like I used to! (There was a time I'd have gone out and fished all day when it was like this and not even noticed...of course, that time was about 100 pounds ago!)

So for this afternoon it's inside projects...there are always enough of them as well!

I hope life is being kind to each of you!

alan

The months fly by...

2011-06-01T10:27:00.002-05:00

and the whirlwind keeps on spinning.

Since I was here last, my son and his family sold one house after a lightning round of repairs after the inspection; moved into temporary "digs" with my sister, splitting all their belongings out into 3 storage facilities; then bought a house. That latter meant that spare time was moving their stuff a pickup or vanload at a time for 3 weeks, followed by a final 26 foot U-Haul truck to clear the last of the storage places.

My work weeks take a lot out of me; juggling the rest of my life is about all I've had time for of late. I never intended to let 6 months slip by without finding a few moments here; the only reason I made it today is I had to get up early to take care of a few other things that went more quickly than usual.

I hope that life and the world are being kind to each of you...

alan

Keeping my nose to the grindstone...

2011-01-26T18:09:00.002-06:00

has paid off; I was asked to become "permanent part-time" instead of being a "seasonal" employee the other day.

I'd have never thought working 4 days a week could shoot such a hole in my life (with some 5's thrown in through the holidays)! Dottie and I finally had our first day off together between our schedules since before Christmas this last Sunday!

That said, we got through the holidays, managed to make all the family parties and survived both our birthdays, along with a couple of seasonal bugs and rounds of anti-biotics. The 5 year Delco battery in her Malibu died on schedule, replaced of course, by a Die Hard Gold...we've shoveled as much snow so far this winter as we got all last winter...

Life is pretty much keeping on keeping on!

One nice thing about the holidays being over is I have to take hour lunches now instead of 1/2 hours, so I'm taking books to work to read. I put away a history of Chicago Jazz from 1904-1930, a book that didn't just deal with King Oliver going up the river and Louis following him, but the socio-political-financial stew that made it take hold and grow before it migrated off East to New York as the "social reformers" and gangsters battled it out for control of the city.

That led me into a well written biography of Glenn Miller, because Miller, along with the Dorseys, Benny Goodman and others all played there in the days before Swing became King. I'm 2/3 done with it, and my Amazon list is growing accordingly...

Now it's time to put together some potato/bacon soup for dinner. Sorry I let things here sit for so long before I found my way back...

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

That "Day of Infamy"...

2010-12-08T15:34:00.004-06:00

is always a hard one for me.

In early December of '73 I stood on the flight deck of the Kittyhawk as we pulled into Pearl Harbor; the ghosts dancing in my head as I tried to envision that terrible morning. Hundreds of photos, newsreels and all of the movies from then and now have only added to the spectres, but not like one piece I read a few years ago. An interview with an "Arizona" survivor.

A man who, luckily enough, was below deck and aft when hell was unleashed. Though shaken and deafened, he made his way topside and was trying to help others off the ship as he made his own escape.

He saw a shipmate he knew who seemed completely dazed and in trying to guide him, grasped his elbow.

The arm crumbled beneath his fingers, the skin and muscle flash-charred to ash...his shipmate dead but still walking.

Nothing will ever lessen our loss that morning! The passage of time; the loss of those who lived through it; the refusal of our modern corporate media to discuss it; the number of supposedly educated who have no idea what the date was, where Pearl Harbor is, or the living breathing ship pictured above that became an instant tomb for so very many that horrible day.

The movie "Pearl Harbor" from a few years ago shows them using cargo nets to retrieve the bodies from the harbor...it wasn't something they made up!

The years and the dwindling numbers of those who lived through that hell on Earth have done nothing to lessen their sacrifice. With the 70th anniversary of that attack and our entry into WW2 approaching, please look around you at anyone you see who is in their mid-80's and thank them! Whether military or civilian, all gave something to the effort that allowed us to be here, whether it was an active military role; the industrial outpouring that supported them; the scrap and food drives and rationing that supported all!

And as you listen to the voices of today proclaiming "me" and "mine", wonder along with me if that effort would ever be possible again!

"Remember Pearl Harbor" is a cry that needs to never be allowed to die!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Photo is from the Navy Archives; the USS Arizona in the late 1930's, blue toned by me.

2010-11-21T14:44:00.003-06:00

The clusters of teachers huddled in the hallways as we came in from recess were nothing new. That they stayed there so very long after the bell had rung had happened before as well. Last time they had whispered to each other; the words inaudible but the tone of worry obvious.

But the stifled sobs were something we hadn't heard before...the wiped tears as our teacher came into the classroom and dismissed us for the afternoon. There was no doubt for any of us that something was wrong.

Last time I had walked to our babysitter's house to find her husband there, slightly snockered, telling her how we were all going to die from the radioactive fallout of the missiles that were going to hit the SAC base at Omaha, Nebraska and the Air Force base at Topeka, Kansas. I didn't really understand the Cuban Missile Crisis at 6 going on 7, but the fear of every adult in my life was palpable.

This time I didn't know what to expect...

But the last thing I expected was to walk in the front door of the babysitter's to see Walter Cronkite removing his glasses as he announced the death of John F. Kennedy. The lump still rises in my throat these many years later, and the tears still well in my now old eyes.

I told someone not long ago that sometimes I think I've lived through too many events like this. Too many times the vise has gripped my heart and extracted its price. Still, though you'd think I'd be smart enough to steel my heart against the horrors wrought by human against human, I've never been able to.

Not so many years later, I was invited to attend a summer band camp at the University of Kansas. My first extended trip away from home, my mother lectured me all the way there about do's and don'ts and not "disappointing" my parents. As we arrived she finally stopped and I turned on the radio.

The announcers were discussing the death of Robert Kennedy, early that morning. In my luggage was his book "To Seek a Newer World", my first "venture" into modern political thinking. Fueled by all I was seeing on television of the Vietnam War and the protests; the race riots both on television and at home in Kansas City following the murder of Martin Luther King, I had heard Kennedy reading a bit of one piece of it and was spellbound by not just his voice, but by the words he spoke; by the heart that spoke through them.

I've written before of that feeling of a bright burning flame that was dimmed to a flicker that day. Of the spirit of "can" and "can do" drowned out by the voices of selfishness; of greed; of dividends and tax-cuts.

I've seen the America I grew up believing in reduced from a country that was "ours" to "mine". A place for "everyone", to a place for "us".

I've watched as those I served with gave their all off the coast of Vietnam; I've mourned as they died in their barracks in Lebanon, on rescue missions in the desert of Iran, or while in peaceful harbor aboard the USS Cole. Never "ours to question why", history will judge some of those who spilled their blood much more harshly than they could ever dream.

I've watched as the nation that (justly) pursued, prosecuted and executed war criminals for waterboarding civilians turned her back on history; on all that was good and just about her self, and did the very same thing to others...

On this sad anniversary, I look back and wonder how different things could have been...

And I wish, sometimes, I could close my eyes, for just a little while...

I'm tired of seeing train wrecks!

May the week be kind to each of you!

And on Thursday, whether you celebrate the holiday or not, I'll be giving thanks for each who find their way here!

alan

Discovery...

2010-11-16T10:40:00.003-06:00

of so many things has occurred since my last entry here...

Discovery that having given up the assembly line in 1999 and gone to a mostly forklift job at GM left me very unprepared for spending 12 or 13 hours on my feet, climbing steps, climbing ladders and constantly walking, most of it "with a sense of urgency".

My job is much the same as it was at GM those last years; unload it, or put it away; find it and deliver it; find it and schedule it's delivery. The forklift has been replaced by my legs, along with dollies and pallet jacks; the RF monitor that was on the forklift the last few years replaced by a "gun" that has at least 7 or 8 screens I've found or been told of so far, only 3 of which can you be "logged into" at any one time.

I've filled part of a little notebook with how to make "the gun" do this or that; each day it seems I learn one more thing, especially when I work with someone I haven't worked with before. None of the hours of training I went through dealt with any of this; that was all about dealing with customers, or benefits, or some of the paperwork for shipping things...mostly things I never deal with.

I do deal with customers sometimes when I deliver a "rush" to it's intended department or the front of the store to await the customer's checkout. Usually it's a "can you tell me how much this is" or "where can I find...". I know how to get the price out of my RF gun now, and some things I can give a vague idea of location, though usually I try to use the "walkie" on my belt and get someone who works in the department to help them.

I'm being a bit vague because given the "conservative" bent of my employers and the knowledge that I'm not (in most things, anyway) I don't want to identify them or them to identify me here.

Between training, then following people in the warehouse around for 3 days on half-shift, then pulling three 8's in a row, it took 3 days for my legs to stop aching the first week. The 2nd it was two; last week I did 4 and the 3rd night was miserable. That last day I remembered something from the body building magazines and added a teaspoon of Glutamine to a glass of Quik and 3 hours later my legs hurt less than they did that morning when I got up to go to work...I'm hoping I'm onto something here!

My weight is dropping rapidly; about 15 pounds in a month; I've punched 3 holes in my belt in that time...

All in all, I think this is going to work out.

Sorry about the lack of time to update of late, let alone for Facebook or Twitter...'til I hit on that Glutamine, it was several days before I felt like doing anything but sitting (or lying) and by the time I recovered I either had things to do at home, or it was time to go to work again.

Time to go buy an oil filter for my truck...running it on Mobil 1, it's been 18 months since I changed it, though barely 4,000 miles. The Silverado has some kind of sensing system in it that decides when you should change it, and the other night as I left it said "it's time". Funny, it still looks almost new, though I know it's probably the moisture it's picked up from the short trips it usually is driven. In the manual it says it might come on at 3,000 or at 15,000...had it been anything but synthetic I'd have changed it at 12 months even though the mileage wasn't there yet.

I'll be here more often now, given exceptions for Dottie having some vacation days coming up and the Holidays...

Not sure how I'm going to like my first "Black Friday" in "retail" since 1972...

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Back to the future...

2010-10-01T09:52:00.007-05:00

Among the many irons in the fire of late, I've been rekindling my knowledge of trumpet related things. I lent my grandson one of mine, and having not been able to play for the last 20 some years because of my teeth, I'm amazed at some of what's changed in two decades...

First was the band book he came home from school with...including DVD.

This week I've learned there are no truly "full line" music stores here! They can all order this or that and have it in 3 days, but don't expect to walk in and get a mouthpiece today unless it's the very basest average of beginner models. Not to mention that the prices out of New York have doubled, but locally they've tripled or quadrupled if you call around.

You used to be able to go buy 2 or 3 to try and return the ones that didn't work for you. You still can out of New York; up to 15 of them...if you have the credit card balance to cover them all.

Not locally!

When I lent my grandson a beginner trumpet (more a matter of smaller bore than quality) I lent him the shallowest mouthpiece I could dig up to go with it. My own, the jewel it took me years to find "back in the day" is much deeper and has a wider rim because of the lips my Dad used to refer to with an ethnic slur that still bothers me.

Dillon doesn't have that problem and what I lent him is a bit much to make it easy on him...

I finally came up with the Bach 7C last night, the one I should have sent with him the first day, 3 weeks later, stuck somewhere it shouldn't have been (like many things around here). If I could find one locally I'd also have him try a "10 1/2C" (even shallower, makes higher notes easier, better for "thinner" lips and smaller lungs).

In my on-line explorations and reading I've found out that some of the idols of my youth used a mouthpiece I'd never heard of, a "Parduba 'double-cup'" that has a shallow cup for upper register, but at the bottom of it is a 2nd deeper cup to allow more air to fill in the tone throughout the range. Louis Armstrong used one through the 40's and later. It also turns out that Dad's idol, Harry James used one from '35 on. James had grown up playing in his father's circus orchestras and the legend had it is that all the playing and practice were what had built his range and tone...

My hope (fingers crossed) is that I can try a pair of those and find one that will let me pick up the horn again and play enough to satisfy "the urge" without putting so much pressure on the porcelain bridge I've already blown up once ($2500 in 1989) that I have to replace it again! (Both times I begged the dentist for a full plate I could "glue" in, knowing many of the old-timers had made that work and was told that this was so much better an option. For eating, yes, it has been, but there is more to life sometimes...)

Even better is that, pending background screen and such, I have a job starting in a few weeks, so I should be able to order those and not have to feel guilty about it! Part-time, 3 days a week...I had hoped for 4 but we'll see how it plays out. They said if I survive the holidays I'll become a "part time" employee instead of "seasonal"...I plan on surviving!

Other things I'm finding that amaze me are the forums available on "the net" that cover instruments, technique and such, along with fully written out transcriptions of some of the solos I spent hours taking apart spinning 33 and 78 rpm recordings of...Dad would have really been upset had he figured out how many times I spun some of his old shellac discs before I got my first cassette recorder and wired it into an old turntable so I only had to spin them once and could then wear out the tape I made!

In the mid 80's, when I had that first "bridge" and started playing again I was still spinning 33's to play with because so much was unavailable on CD. I'm looking forward to playing with some of those now, as 33's changed pitch as they played, starting out flat as the needle rode the outside edge of the disc and slowly going sharp as they spun faster when it moved inward on the album. (Sadly, during that stint in the late 80's, I used enough pressure as I worked into the upper register that I snapped the steel posts out of the root-canaled teeth supporting that porcelain bridge and not only had to have it rebuilt, but now it has even less support than it did then.)

If I get my desktop running again (driver issue) I'll fire up Deezer and see what mp3's are like as well...

Having that outlet was always a means of expression that came easily...so many times it was much easier to "bend a blue note" than to find the words for whatever was bottled up inside me.

Through all these years, I've never stopped "hearing" the music "in my head"...hearing what I'd have played to solo or counterpoint any given thing at any given time. My fingers still run through the fingerings as my mind flies...

Perhaps letting some of that loose will make way for more practical things!

May the weekend be lovely and kind for each of you!

alan

Watching the wheels go 'round...

2010-09-08T16:30:00.007-05:00

So many posts I've written in my empty head these last weeks, though never getting them transcribed...

My son's house is on the market finally- for what it is and it's price I'm confidant it will sell quickly, though there are a few odds and ends that still need doing. The sign went up in his yard a week ago, and after a day to recover I spent the next one taking care of the lawn and gutters I'd neglected during all the other chaos going on in my life. Today I'm glad as the rain from Tropical Storm Hermine is just south of me now and we're supposed to get up to a foot of it in the next 36 hours or so.

What spare time I've had, snatches of a few minutes here and there I've been reading a memoir. "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace" I heard about in an NPR interview before I retired and bought it last holiday season with a gift card I received. Transcribed from diaries saved by the intelligence officer told to burn them, it is the diaries of a lady doctor serving her country in the combat zones of Vietnam in the late 60's until her death in 1970. I can't help but think of the doctor killed in Afghanistan, Karen Woo. In reading her blog (reference is a link to the story, her name is a link to her blog) I feel guilty sitting here in the relative comfort of my living room...

Dang Thuy Tram's memoir is especially poignant for me as a few years later I was off the Vietnam coast on the Kittyhawk, serving with pilots who probably overflew her and that she refers to in her writing; most certainly with aircraft that did. Her references to "us" have a lot of the same rhetoric I hear being used to describe others by many of "us" today...less than human terms...terms that not only imply a lack of understanding, but a lack of intent to ever understand.

I am always awed by the intolerance of this world...be it by one religion for another...one race for another...awed and sickened!

A beautiful artist I know through this blog world has recently been asked to leave a venue she loved because of someone else's intolerance for her. She has a knack with brush that touches my soul, yet someone can't see the beauty in her work and has decided that she has no right to show it.

I see the news of religious intolerance in New York and Florida...

Churches burning in other states...

Tea Party people asking for instruction manuals for "Wyoming displays" ...

The "enlightenment" I thought was beginning two years ago...a great age of tolerance and understanding that would lead us to great things is being overshadowed by those who fear losing their grip on power, be it the power of money or the power of "control". Those who would rather drag us kicking and screaming back to the 19th century instead of entering the one we are in.

Finally bringing me to my own point of intolerance!

Because I refuse to let them do that...to me, to you; to my grandkids or yours!

"Over the last three years, most victims of terrorism have been Muslim. So there’s not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between extremists and moderates of all the religions. ... What is important is not to live in fear. The most dangerous [thing to do] is to give up and lose hope. The main enemy is not terrorism or extremism, but ignorance"

Queen Rania of Jordan

That applies to so much in this world!

Or, in the words of someone wise beyond his age:

"We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others."

Will Rogers-1924

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Re-education...

2010-08-03T17:05:00.002-05:00

seems to be confronting me from all directions at the moment. Skills I've let lie dormant are being called forth to do battle with things left behind by others who either didn't have them or didn't care...so far, mostly, with good results.

My son is getting his house ready to market, on a fairly short timeline and there has been much to do to get it ready. I'm lucky he operates well on less sleep than I without falling apart mentally or physically. I'm also very lucky that he learned sheet-rocking from my brother-in-law, as I didn't really learn it from anyone and it's always turned into more of something along the lines of auto-body work for me!

His wife has been busy painting anything that stands still long enough; over the weekend my wife even got in on that part of things as we were fitting and hanging doors. Today has been an "off" day for me as he has my truck so he could pick up plywood to take to someone else to make cabinet doors for him. I voted this morning, then took a nap (I've come to look forward to those of late) then spent some time in my little gym.

Yesterday I saw my doctor and was told that I'm good for another twelvemonth and that he'll see me then, something he's picked on me about in the past. (Only seeing him when I'm healthy...)

Last night we all took a night off to go watch my youngest nephew get his Eagle Scout award from the Boy Scouts. His older brother and their father having been Eagle Scouts makes it a very special rarity, from the way it was explained. Tomorrow he goes back to college, where along with working on his teaching degree he managed to adopt a Cub Scout troop last year and plans to continue with them this year as well. My oldest grandson is now in my nephew's "home" troop...I hope I'm around to see him get his Eagle award as well!

As I write it's 102F. (39C.) with a heat index of 110F. (43C.) on the shady side of my house. Our warmest day in 3 years according to the local weatherman. I'm glad I'm inside, listening to the window-unit air-conditioner cycle! When I think of the times I'd go fishing for 8-10 hours on afternoons like this I wonder what was wrong with me! I sure don't deal with it well now!

I've been spending minutes of my "slack time" as I find it reading a book of essays by Amy Tan...one that has really struck me discusses how our languages lock us into our viewpoints as well as our societies. I'd like to think us wise enough to see beyond that, but sadly know that has to be something we work at; something that doesn't come naturally.

It's primary day in Kansas and shark week on Discovery Channel...there's a correlation there that should be a warning to some of those with their names on the ballot! I've done the best I can for today and will have to wait for November now, with somewhat a sense of dread as our we haven't managed to elect a Democrat for a Senator since 1932...I'll be glad to see Sam Brownback go, but not sure I'll like his replacement any better!

On the national level I'm still astounded at the abundant hatred that finds its way into the rhetoric on every issue and on every level. It's as though it had been bottled up somewhere behind a dam for the last 40 years and now, given a chance to burst forth into the sunlight that should have made it wither in the light of understanding, it instead is being fueled by the bloodlust of intolerance.

A mongrel product of this nation and its melting pot; I can point out ancestors from most of Europe. I also know that others, from other places are mixed in as well, along with some who met their boats when they got here. I had ancestors on both sides of the "War Between the States", or as some would have called it "The War of Northern Aggression"; one of my grandfather's grandfathers died in his butternut wool (Confederate) uniform in the hills of Tennessee a very few years before a re-united Congress passed the 14th Amendment that seems to be the newest point of attack on the agenda of those who think that every person they hear speaking a foreign language is an illegal immigrant.

It's truly sad to see the "worst in us" encouraged instead of the best...

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Letting sleeping dogs lie...

2010-07-14T13:00:00.003-05:00

Much like my old dog, though I haven't been doing more sleeping or lying about than usual (actually less), I have been lying low.

Dottie took two weeks off around the 4th of July, some to get ready for the family 4th we held here again this year (fireworks are still legal); we had planned on fishing some (thanks a lot for the 8" of rain in June and 3" so far in July) and getting the house exterior ready to paint (see note about rain above).

Instead, some things inside got done; my nephew came to visit for 3 days for the first time since before he left for college and we went out to 3 movies in 2 days, besides the ones we watched here. "Karate Kid" (Jackie Chan better get an Oscar); "A-Team" (not George Peppard's crew anymore, and though I remember them fondly, it was a nice update); and the newest "Twilight" (nicely done...wonder when Bryce Howard will be letting her kids watch it).

Nephew got history lessons in watching "Twelve O'Clock High" with my narrative and me pausing it each time he started texting...(I believe if you are going to watch a movie, watch the movie) and the sequel to "American Graffiti", "More American Graffiti". Of course, he wanted to re-watch the original first; the 2nd is actually a pretty good documentary of the "late" 60's...Scott Glenn and Candy Clark steal the show...yes, that Scott Glenn; the one from "Silverado".

My knee has finally, after 7 months, eased or healed enough I started walking on the treadmill again for the first time since I partially tore the quad and bruised my femur last December. After 10 days of slowly building my time, speed and incline, I finally started lifting weights again as well and already feel better than I have in months. We shall see if I can re-engineer myself into something I don't mind looking at in the mirror now...

The photo I led with was taken the night of the 4th; it was Angel's best 4th ever (she's pretty close to deaf now). With two intermissions for rain we had everything done but the sparklers when the 3rd deluge began about 11. We saved the sparklers for a week, John, Noel and the grandkids came back for dinner last Saturday and I cooked honey stir-fry, then we finally concluded the fireworks. In the 50 years I remember, this is the closest we've ever come to a "rain-out".

I hope life is being kind to each of you!

alan

As the losses mount...

2010-06-28T15:48:00.002-05:00

for all of us, but especially those who live along the Gulf, this clip speaks to the ones that haven't been thought of yet:

The reports keep coming in of workers not being allowed protective gear; not being allowed to seek outside medical attention without being cut from the payroll...

I worked with a lot of dangerous chemicals for part of the time I was at GM, running the phosphate coating system for the bare metal between the body and paint shops. There were known carcinogens you weren't supposed to breathe; there were other chemicals that would be immediately absorbed through your skin before you could wipe it off if you weren't wearing rubber gloves. Most of the time I was very careful about taking every precaution advised as I did my job.

I am grateful I was allowed to!

Between the EPA, OSHA and our President, you'd think someone could make sure these workers are allowed the same opportunity!

Just recently there was a huge settlement to pay the rescue worker from September 11 who were poisoned by the collapse of the buildings that terrible day. The military, far too late for far too many, is finally owning up to it's poisoning of our soldiers in Vietnam with Agents Orange and Blue.

How long before these workers, trying to save an eco-system from a modern day "robber-baron" the likes of which the world has never seen, are fighting to have their needs taken care of while their poisoner returns to paying dividends?

July 4th approaches, along with our annual celebration of our independence. Perhaps we need to declare our independence once again, from corporate tyranny!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

A bit of credit...too little too late!

2010-06-17T12:50:00.003-05:00

Information Pioneers: Hedy Lamarr from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

I had read mention of this years ago, but this is a better explanation of the technology. Like so many things through the years, she deserved better at the hands of our government.

I remember reading of the government refusing to pay Nicola Tesla royalties for his patents, saying they were in dispute by Marconi; then when Tesla died in '43 they told Marconi that Tesla's patents were in order and he had no claim...

It would be nice to think they wouldn't do things like that now, but I have my doubts!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Time for a break!

2010-06-15T17:11:00.002-05:00

I've been so caught up in the world's tragedies of late, both current and past, that it's time for a mental break! Besides the Gulf and reading up on Minamata disease I've been studying a lot of WW1 documentaries; suffice to say it's amazing how many of our current problems in the world can be traced back to "The Great War" and it's ending. I always knew that the lines drawn on the maps back then had come back to haunt us; I didn't realize how much politicking had gone on behind the scenes to create them.

A man of the time observed that "the United States had never lost a war nor won a conference"!

Seems old Will (Rogers) was right again!

3 weeks ago my wife went on vacation for 2 weeks; we did some things here, some planned some not, and finally got the boat out for the first time this year, to the delight of the grandkids who got to ride and take turns driving.

When she went back to work my daughter-in-law left for a concert jamboree and my son decided that was a good time to tear out their one bathroom, to the subfloor and the studs. When I didn't have the grandkids Dottie did and I went to help him; it's back together now and in much better shape than it began.

Since then it's been catching things up around here, trying not to float away in the rain and watching far too much news.

A photo of Jean Harlow on a friend's blog today made me realize it's time for an escape, so wen I sign off here I'm digging out "Red Dust" or "Bombshell" and slipping away for a while...

May the world be kind to each of you!

alan

The Black Lagoon...

2010-06-03T03:11:00.002-05:00

sadly, one no creature could live in!

British Petroleum's oil was 9 miles from Pensacola, Florida when I got up yesterday...

Last night it was in a wildlife refuge just a few miles outside New Orleans, 2/3 of the way through the wetlands lying between the city and the ocean.

When those wetlands die (and they will die from this poisoning) that means the next hurricane the sets her sights on the city that Katrina couldn't kill will have miles of a head start.

And like that iceberg that sunk the Titanic, what we can see is only an "nth" of what lies beneath...though British Petroleum would like to deny that their dispersant agents are causing the oil to "suspend" beneath the surface, the Jean-Michel Cousteau has posted footage of it and much more since.

If you'd like to read more or see more footage, here is a link.

I've mentioned before my Grandmother passing along the belief she learned from the Native Americans when she and my Grandfather were on the reservations; the one that says before you decide anything you should consider how it will affect not just your generation, or your children's, but the next 7 generations who will live with the consequences of what you decide right now.

I fear more than 7 generations will be dealing with the decisions that led to this and the ones being made in their wake! This afternoon I was watching footage as a reporter turned over the rocks at Prince William Sound, Alaska and the tarred rock still lying there was exposed so many years later...Exxon has plowed right on, but they sank the lives of an entire ecosystem as they fed their greed. I don't believe, in the end, British Petroleum will be any different.

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

W. Eugene Smith

2010-05-21T16:28:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago someone on Twitter asked how much sushi they could eat without worrying about mercury. My reply was to ask if they'd ever heard of Minimata Disease.

I spent a lot of time when I had my first computer looking up people I had admired through the years; I still do as new information pops up all the time.

When my Dad and I first started playing with photography around 1967, we knew someone who was a member of a black and white "salon print" club, started attending meetings and then joined. Among the many names of the photographers they all admired I kept hearing of W. Eugene Smith. If you've seen WW2 photographs from "Life" magazine, you've most likely seen some of the work that made him famous.

In the early 70's he and his wife moved to Minimata, Japan as he worked on a photo essay about the effects of the Chisso Corporation's dumping of mercury in their wastewater from 1937-1968. The disease named for the city, first diagnosed in 1956, was the result of the mercury accumulation in the fish and shellfish that those surrounding the bay lived on. Though the deaths had gone on for more than 30 years the government nor the company did much to halt them.

Smith tried to use the power of the photo essay to make the world take notice of the plight of the villagers. His reward was a beating at the hands of company employees on January 7, 1972 that was so terrible that his sight in one eye deteriorated, his health was permanently damaged and slowly worsened until his fatal stroke in 1978. Their attempt to stop his work, however, failed as he still finished his essay, including a photo called "Tomoko Uemura in her Bath"; the most famous of the series, showing a mother bathing her crippled daughter. Though withdrawn from circulation by Smith's widow Aileen at the request of the girl's family after her death (she gave the copyright to them so they could decide when and where it could be used) a Google search will still find it. Barack Obama has cited seeing it in a textbook as part of what has influenced his view of environmental issues.

The photo I'm going to include here is "Tomoko's Hand", from Wikipedia and credited to the Aileen Archive. Smith's widow Aileen has continued his fight to bring the attention to Minimata disease. His prints are yet again on display at a museum on the East Coast right now; his wife was just in Japan for a commemoration of the anniversary of the date the disease was tied to the mercury discharge from Chrisso's plant.

Chisso had paid small settlements even before WW2 began for other chemicals they had released into the fishery; as this began they deployed water treatment systems that didn't really treat the water; legal maneuvering; minimal financial settlements...their tactics seem to have been a blueprint for other companies all over the world, ones we've become all to familiar with.

They continue to this day; there are still lawsuits, still "spin" going on (one of the newest is referring to "Mad Hatter's Disease" instead of calling it "Minimata Disease" to disassociate themselves from it).

As I look out into the Gulf of Mexico and see all that is transpiring there; as I think of the $500,000 acoustic shut-off valve that would have shut the well down immediately when the "blow-out preventer" the company had "altered" from it's original design and left with dead batteries in it (the acoustic shut-off that is required elsewhere in the world but exempted for all wells in the Gulf by Mssr's Bush and Cheney); as I see the almost million gallons of a dispersant that's been illegal to use in Britain for 10 years because of it's toxicity; as I see those who had their hands on the throttle as the train left the tracks allowed to say what can and can't be done towards clean-up and mitigation...

I sometimes wonder if we ever truly learn from anything!

May the weekend be kind to each of you!

alan

Who will be next?

2010-05-17T14:49:00.004-05:00

Not what I was planning for my next post, but when the link popped into my Twitter stream this morning, I had to share. Something I wasn't taught in high school and didn't learn of 'til I'd come home from serving in the Navy; something that led to a lot of examination of other aspects of "our" history (and others) that continues through today.

Something that convinces me that no matter how high we hold our "torch of freedom" it can be gone as quickly as "a candle in the wind"!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

So many irons in the fire...

2010-05-12T16:42:00.003-05:00

and all of them gnawing at my innards!

Watching BP deny that no matter who they hired to set their rig up, it's their lease that's ruining the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico...

Watching more and more come out about the "Magdalene Laundries" and their victims, along with the other abuses of "organized religion" that rate higher in the news; those who abuse alter boys; those who hire rent-boys...

Watching those who would like to re-write our history try and alter our textbooks to censor the things they'd rather not know...

For days these have all spun and whirled in my mind; half-mentally-written blog posts flood my thoughts. Today I found a link that reminds me that even in the darkest of moments we have to cling to hope...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126557553

I wish I could embed that so you got the first photo instead of just a link! It's an NPR story about the art that was created by the American citizens we locked in detention camps at the beginning of World War 2.

Were I still working, I'd have heard that story on my radio as I was an "NPRaholic". Today it turned up in a Twitter link from a Japanese writer I've been following as I catch up on Minimata disease and other news from beyond our borders. I'm thinking of trying to write about Minimata as I stumbled into it through photography and what happened to one of those I idolized as he covered it.

Thunder is shaking the house now and my weather alert radio is going off; I should shut this down now so I don't take a chance on a lightning strike!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Don't it make my blue eyes red!

2010-04-30T16:59:00.004-05:00

Watching as we yet again destroy a large portion of our food chain; the livelihoods of millions; and the worst part; the ecosystem that billions of lives depend on...hearing RFK, jr. on CNN explaining that the acoustic shut-off valve that would have plugged this well the minute the platform was no longer connected and is required everywhere else in the world was exempted on all platforms in the Gulf...

all I can hear echoing in my head are the words "when will we ever learn"?

That, pitted against the goings-on in Arizona; seeing racism and hatred legislated into law instead of out of it for one of the second time in less than a year... Though they backed off a bit this afternoon, re-writing a bit of it, I still wonder when they'll start pinning the little yellow stars on people; when they'll decide they don't like old bald guys with freckles...am I next?

Since I have little bits of everything in me, are we going to send my arms back to France and my legs back to Ireland? Does my nose get to stay for the bit of Indian blood in me?

I've been tired for a long time of those who assume every Latino/a they encounter must be an illegal...or every time they see an Vietnamese or Hmong that they must be a "boat people".

There's very damn few of us in this country who's origins are "from here"! Mine are from France, Ireland, England, with some Native American and probably some African mixed in. Each time I hear those words "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" that are etched on that beautiful lady in the harbor who greeted some of those ancestors of mine, I'm grateful to the one who put them there; his neighbors probably wanted to lynch him!

I worked for someone once who was 2nd generation Polish-American. His grandparents had immigrated here just before the turn of the century to escape religious persecution in Poland. With children born both in the old country and the new one, the children were quick enough to pick up the new language, though Mom and Dad never learned enough to be fluent. They managed to pass their citizenship test, but my foreman told me no one spoke anything at home but Polish as he was growing up.

During WW1 they operated a bakery and grocery store; more than once the bigots in the small Kansas town they lived in broke the windows out and painted racial slurs on the front of their storefront, not realizing that Polish and German wasn't the same thing...

How far are we from that again?

How far are we from the interment camps we put American born Japanese in during WW2?

Shall we just start burning those we don't like, like we did at Salem?

When will they decide I'm next on their list?

May this beautiful spring weekend be kind to each of you!

alan

So much for that!

2010-04-16T16:45:00.002-05:00

Cruise control didn't last long...I've just been ignoring it since it "kicked out"!

Mowed for the first time last weekend; after the terrace and the side-hill next to the driveway, on top of clearing gutters (lots of trips up and down the ladder and a fall when I missed a rung at one point) my knee was unhappy enough I had to ask Dottie to mow the "flat" parts of the lawn for the first time since she had her hip and knee replaced. Perhaps I'll be splitting all that into 2 days the next time it needs done, at least for a while! Perhaps next time I'll remember the sunscreen on my bald head as well; though it was only about 3 hours outside, I'm peeling...

That was after two days of wrestling with a clothes dryer; I'd never worked on one, didn't have a book, and though I managed to replace the belt and get it running again for just over $20, I spent a lot of time vacuuming lint out of places I'd never thought I'd find it, along with push pins, paper clips and other things the shouldn't be running around loose where I found them. I've cleaned french fries out of defroster ducts in cars before, and crayons out of seat belt reels, but didn't expect that!

This week has been spent filling out more job apps, getting things ready for a family birthday barbecue this weekend and finally, for the first time in ages, experimenting a bit in the kitchen. I hadn't really felt like it for a long time, but finally got out some of the books I'd bought before I retired and tried stuffing chicken breasts and grilling them on the George Foreman. The original recipe called for asparagus, tomato and fontina cheese, but not having fresh asparagus on hand, or the fontina, I subtituted Colby Jack and it turned out nicely!

The birthday barbecue mentioned above is the annual we usually hold for both sons; the younger, John, is 31 today. Last year it was so hard to get the family together that my sister had my nephew's birthday party late at the same time; this year, with him in college, he'll be sharing again.

This will be the first time our older son, Bill has missed his birthday. At 32 I know we're lucky it's taken this long; I wasn't home for my 18th. Still, it won't quite be the same without him, though I understand that he can't slip home from DC for all the family events. So far his Mom isn't saying much, but I know it's weighing on her.

May the weekend be kind to each of you; may some unexpected joy find you along with a smile or two!

alan

Life is on cruise control...

2010-04-07T17:20:00.002-05:00

and it's not that things aren't "going on" but after that last post, one of the nicest pieces of writing I may have ever done, it seems wrong to come back to the "mundane"...

May the days be kind to each of you; may your nights be filled with those you love!

alan

(De)Commissioning our history

2010-03-22T14:40:00.015-05:00

(USS Lexington, CV-2, passing Culebra Cut, Panama Canal, early to mid 1930's)

As I watch Texas try and excise the history it doesn't like from textbooks, it has brought to the fore a longheld belief that they aren't the only ones who have been doing so.

Growing up I watched the aircraft carriers USS Wasp and the USS Hornet pick up our astronauts as they returned from space. Vague memories of a little boy, his first ones of our modern Navy. Later as I read history, both in school and on my own, the names "USS Wasp" and "USS Hornet" came alive to me, along with others like "Saratoga", "Lexington", "Yorktown", "Ticonderoga", "Bon Homme Richard", the "Ranger" I made a short cruise on and even the "Kittyhawk" I WESTPAC'd on derived their names from the history of our country; reminders of her heritage, of her victories and triumphs. Even the "Langley", the first carrier, was named after an aviation pioneer (albeit one our government had funded and then later promoted in order to fight the Wright brothers patents, much as they played Tesla and Marconi against each other to duck paying royalties).

Later, newer battles and victories were added to the roster. "Coral Sea", "Midway", named for the 1st carrier victories of the war in the Pacific; "Tarawa" found her way into history, and someone remembered "Valley Forge".

"Lexington" replaced "Lexington", "Yorktown" replaced "Yorktown"; the famous names were kept in circulation. But things were slowly beginning to change...

A carrier was named for the secretary of defense who had most strongly advocated them, James Forrestal. A few years went by with "Constellation" and "Enterprise" finding their way back to active duty while history did much to change our country. It was decided that a president, fallen while in office, was deserving of the tribute of a carrier named after him and the "USS John F. Kennedy" was commissioned.

The next keel laid was named after the admiral who oversaw and won the naval war in the Pacific, Chester Nimitz. Following was a keel named after a politician who spent the years between the World Wars advocating the Navy and rebuilding it after the disarmament treaties that ended WW1. He also was a champion of the first nuclear carrier commisioned, the USS Enterprise, and his name was remembered on the USS Carl Vinson.

Next came the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the USS Abraham Lincoln, the USS George Washington, then another naval advocate, John Stennis had his name immortalized to travel the world in steel.

All through this period, the old names were retiring, being decommissioned, some being scrapped, some being sunk, a lucky few being purchased to be made museums to the men who served aboard them and gave their lives to defend them.

Sadly, though the old names are all gone now, save the "USS Enterprise". Though I won't say that Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, or George H.W. Bush (the names on the last 3 carriers built) don't deserve memorials or to have things named after them, my own feelings are that presidents have libraries for that, and no matter which political party is in power at the time, trying to immortalize their idols in U.S. Navy steel is not nearly as fitting as allowing the Navy to continue its own traditions. The ones that have served us since our Revolution, when John Paul "I have not yet begun to fight" Jones lost the "USS BonHomme Richard" and then commanded the first "USS Ranger"...since the USS Hornet landed U.S. Marines on the shores of Tripoli...or a later USS Hornet launched Jimmy Doolittle's B-25's in the first raid to attack Japan's home soil during WW2.

How wrong is it that our politicians would erase our history while even "Star Trek" remembers?

I'm grateful to the Marine Corps for keeping some of these names alive on it's LPH's, but I grow weary of seeing history erased in favor of political legacy...

(The very first link above will take you to a U.S. Navy website listing all of the carriers in commission order, the dates they served and their "disposition". Clicking on any of their names will take you to another page with a more detailed history and some photos of each. For more photos, http://navsource.org/ is a site I've spent countless hours exploring. The other links take you to Wiki entries or some of the ship museum websites.)

May the week be kind to each of you...

alan

"Sometimes you're the bug...

2010-03-17T15:07:00.004-05:00

and sometimes you're the windshield!"

I heard Neil Bonnett say that once years ago and it's one of those perfect metaphors for life.

My wife not being a fan of Steve Martin or Alec Baldwin, we spent Oscar night watching a nominee from 1950 that she thought she'd seen but hadn't. A newly mastered DVD version with some extras, I was delighted to revisit it with company for once.

"Twelve o'Clock High" I read in my teens, before I ever saw the movie, though I grew up watching the series when I was a "tween" and it was in repeats. It's one of the influences that led to my love of airplanes and mechanical things. The authors, Sy Bartlett and Beirne Lay, Jr. were there in different capacities in the 8th Air Force and the story is a compilation of characters and groups they served with.

When I finally saw the movie I was impressed with all of the portrayals, none more than Dean Jagger who won his Oscar for it. Knowing the "flying history" behind it made it all the more personal for me.

Going back now and watching it brought all of those early emotions back, plus those of thinking of all the lives affected by the war and fighting it; the lives of people I know today, here and on the "other side of the pond".

Shocking was getting to the documentary part and hearing someone say that the U.S. Marine Corps lost 20,000 men in the Pacific in their campaign across the islands.

The 8th alone had over 26,000 killed out of 47,000 casualties; these were half of the Army Air Corps casualties for the entire war.

After watching the movie I dug in one of my bookcases to come up with some books I bought through Powell's a few years ago. One was Beirne Lay, Jr.'s account "Presumed Dead" of being shot down over Europe after he assumed command of his own air group mid-war. The 2nd I found was a biography of Paul Mantz, who flew the B-17 that "bellies in" early in the movie, sliding into tents etc. The movie company tried to get the then re-named Air Force to do it and were told "no way"; Mantz agreed to do it, flying solo. As he set her down, he figured out he could still steer her with the "toe brakes" although the landing gear was up and that was how he managed to snag the tent without doing any other damage downfield.

The 3rd I still haven't found, a paperback copy of the original book "Twelve o'Clock High".

"Presumed Dead" I consumed in my spare time in 3 days, unable to put it down when I could get a chance to read. Concise, but beautifully written, it's added to my love of the French countryside.

It also shocked me at one point. As they are transitioning from training to England, they flew a southern route considered safer because of the weather at that time of year over Greenland. On landing in Marrakesh, Lay writes about the last crewman leaving the plane, tossing the DDT bomb through the hatch and closing it...

No wonder so many of those of our "Greatest Generation" are fighting cancer! DDT was still in use by the Navy in '73 when I was on shipboard; the olive drab cans that I sprayed around my bunk to stop the roach invasions (which didn't even slow them down) had it painted on the cans. But tossing a "DDT bomb" into the aircraft who's oxygen system I'd be breathing from, where I'd be living and fighting and dying takes on a whole new meaning all these years later (as does lying in a bunk I'd sprayed entire cans around and in the locker of).

(BTW, the way we finally stopped the invasions on shipboard was to line the edges of our racks with 400mph tape, sticky side out, after taping every seam and joint closed, then waking up in the morning and roasting our catch with butane lighters!)

Beyond all that I spent one day last weekend watching my son and grandson outwork me as we helped my sister's mother-in-law move. The next I spent recuperating as my knee was not happy with me at all; it's still grumbling a bit 5 days later. I've also been fighting what is either the last cold of winter or the first cold of spring...whichever it is, I'm tired of it!

Monday I helped my son pick up more subfloor and underlayment along with trim for his house. Dottie was off yesterday and I was coughing too badly to go see a movie she wanted to, so we ran errands instead, getting the last of the fishing licenses and boat permits for the new year; finding some corned beefs she can fix for a belated St. Patrick's Day dinner this weekend, and since she felt sorry for me being sick, she bought me a slab of ribs for dinner that I'll also be eating for lunch and dinner today. We also went by the apartment that Mary Ruth moved to last weekend so Dottie could see it and helped her sort some of the things that went into her storage unit. A beautiful apartment with a brook and waterfalls outside her patio doors, I envy her a bit!

So it's now Wednesday afternoon and I'm still waiting for WalMart or Sam's Club or someone to call say that I'm worthy of their employment. After I eat something, I guess I'll try filling out an app for Home Depot, though I've put that one off because I somehow feel disloyal to GM if I go to work for someone that campaigns a Toyota in NASCAR...silly guilt button, I wish at times I could disconnect it!

May the week be kind to each of you!

Riding the range...

2010-03-04T15:46:00.003-06:00

As I drive around my "home turf" I often feel the ghosts of those who were here before me...I've thought of writing about some of them and hope perhaps they intrigue you.

When I make my shopping run to Wal-Mart, I head west on I-70 then pick up I-435 south and cross the Kansas River. Visible from the bridge as I cross the river Mill creek flows into the river from the southwest. Somewhere through the years I've read that was the site of one of the Chouteau brothers original trading posts back in the days when beaver hats were "king".

As the road climbs from the river and I get to Shawnee Mission Parkway, I'm traveling beautiful rolling hills that once held a township named Monticello. It was there that a young man first wore a constable's badge and first tried his hand at law enforcement. He voted in the 1856 presidential election there. To know I'm sharing the same country that James Butler Hickok once rode always induces awe in me. You might have heard him called by another name; "Wild Bill".

It wasn't long after those experiences he met up with a kid muleskinner from a few miles to the north of here; one who would probably become one of the most famous "Westerners" of all time; William Frederick Cody. At 11 Cody lost his father to the "Border Wars" that consumed Kansas through her territorial days and continued through the Civil War, culminating in the 2nd burning of Lawrence, KS by William Quantrill. Cody and Hickok rode together in the Kansas Militia, leading both of them into scouting for the military and their other pursuits.

A few blocks north of me is the old Fort Leavenworth Military Road from what was then Westport to the Federal outpost that still exists. As he traveled to Leavenworth not long before the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman in his memoir wrote of spending the night at the Shawnee Indian School (now called the Shawnee Indian Mission), then rode west and crossed the Kansas River at a ferry owned by a white man and his Indian wife. That would be Moses Grinter; I've written of "The Grinter House" before, the first permanent house in my county. The house still standing replaced the cabin he and his wife had lived in for the 20 plus years before it was built. During the battle of Westport someone aboard the afternoon steamboat headed for Lawrence cut the cable on Grinter's Ferry, killing one of his hired hands; it was thought to be the work of one of the James boys trying to slow the troops from Fort Leavenworth reinforcing the Union troops. Later, after the railroad tracks that still parallel the river there were built, they were also said to have stopped a train or two.

The family of one of Hickok and Cody's friends from the militia days owned a tavern/rooming house called the "Six-Mile House" given its being six miles from the river on the Fort Leavenworth road. In a local history written by a school teacher she wrote of the shooting demonstrations that Hickok and his friend Theodore Bartels would put on after the war. Usually won by Hickok, she wrote of seeing him trot his horse down the lane, his revolvers pointing across his body, knocking bricks off the rail fence on either side...never actually taking aim.

Next to the downtown public library is the Huron Indian Cemetery; when the Wyandotte Indians were forced to relocate to Oklahoma Territory, they deeded over their land and buildings on the condition that the graves there would never be disturbed. In that same history I spoke of above, there is the story of what happened when the City Council decided they could take that land as there weren't any Indians left here to object. The aunt of Zane Grey, the writer, moved into the cemetery, with a shotgun and held off the sheriff while the City Council tried to evict her and legal proceedings were brought against them to enforce the original agreements. I've been told that my great-grandmother has a relative buried there...

A few blocks past the library, though the building is long gone, is where the "Free State" constitution for the state of Kansas was written (as opposed to the "slave state" constitution written earlier and never adopted). A couple of miles to the north lie the ruins of Quindaro, a settlement that had much to do with the transport of slaves to freedom via the Underground Railway. The high bluff they sit on was conducive for marksman to sit with their rifles, waiting to drive away the bounty-hunters trying to cross the river to recover those lives someone else considered their property.

The guerrilla Quantrill I mentioned earlier was a schoolteacher before the war, in a little town south of here named Maryville. What was left of Maryville was flooded by Hillsdale Lake as it filled, one of the lakes we fish.

My sister and her family live in Lawrence; burnt twice through the "Border Wars", the last time with much loss of life. When Quantrill and his raiders arrived they sent lookouts up Mount Oread to watch for dust clouds in case the military from Fort Leavenworth should come to the town's aid. 183 men and boys were executed; anyone old enough to carry a rifle up to the age of 90 lost their lives. The logos on the doors of the Lawrence police cruisers show burning buildings.

Mount Oread was where the University of Kansas was founded two years later, in 1865. It's where my oldest son and his wife both graduated from...

Those are only the ghosts from "my" side of the river...many more walk the Missouri side in the echoes of the music of the 20's and 30's...the echoes of the Pendergast political machine...the Union Station massacre...

I often wonder as all these ghosts gather 'round how many of those in the cars about me even know they existed? People always think "history" is somewhere else...that you have to "go somewhere" to find it...

But the ghosts wait everywhere, only waiting a chance to speak!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

The treadmill to oblivion...

2010-03-03T18:20:00.005-06:00

Besides the name of a book I've been meaning to acquire for ages (Fred Allen's autobiography, if that name rings a bell for anyone), it means that finally after almost 2 months I've found my way back downstairs.

I survived 1/3 of the monthly shopping run yesterday (only casualty was my pride, as I drove further to a different wholesale club to get the Hershey's Dark Chocolate bars my wife loves as mine quit keeping them; got out of the truck and put my bifocals on so I could read the list and realized I didn' t have the checkbook). I was waiting for Costco to mail their coupon book to do the rest...it seems to come later each month. I'll be going there on the way home from the osteopath's tomorrow.

The knee ached a bit last night, but it wasn't "pain". So today after I'd been up a bit, eaten and taken the anti-inflammatory and let it have a bit to "kick in" I went downstairs and donned the "new" shoes I keep next to the treadmill and started walking...slowly...

I wasn't trying to set any records, only ease back into things. I made it 11 minutes pain free, at 12 it twinged once (possibly I took too long a step) and at about 14 it started to hurt with each step. I stopped, shut things down and after a few minutes to make sure it was OK I came back upstairs.

It's the first time in almost two months the steps haven't hurt coming up. I'm still wary going down; Saturday I went to do laundry and wasn't quite "awake" yet, led with my left and "jammed" it, feeling the bone bruise that's slowly been healing these last few months.

At the Supercenter on Monday (the first 1/3 of the payday trip) I had stopped at the magazine rack; I can't afford them anymore, though every other month I can't help myself and buy one ("Hot Rod Deluxe", with photos and cars I remember from the issues I saw 40 years ago). It wasn't there, but I picked up a copy of something else that caught my eye and stood there while I skimmed their article on men's knees. It spoke of ACL's and the other usual injuries, then had a section on arthritis. It told people about the "partial knee replacement" that Dottie had a few years ago; said to be wary of "scope" surgeries (?) and then ended with a piece that said no matter what, even if it hurts a bit, you have to keep moving because that is what "lubricates" the joint.

So, tomorrow, after the doctors and Costco, we'll see if I can make it to 15 before the "twinge" kicks in.

I haven't really gained since I hurt myself, but I hadn't really lost in over a year, since I hurt my back the last time...my best intentions got caught up in summer and other things and also, I think one of those laws of physics came into play...

Something about objects at rest tending to remain at rest!

It's time for some defiance...

A friend wrote this a while back and it has been weighing on my mind as well; having fought my way from 300 to 200 several years ago and yo-yo'd back to 340, I know well the demon he writes of! I made it down to 270 the 2nd time before I hurt myself a year ago December and have been rather stuck since within 10 pounds of 300...

Where's Excalibur when I need her?

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Watching train wrecks...

2010-02-24T17:55:00.002-06:00

was the phrase used a bit ago to describe watching the news. Normally, I can keep my perspective, but today was not such a day!

Hearing an executive try to tell Congress that his is an American company and that the cars in question were American cars was the beginning...I am grateful that they are assembling some here and sourcing some of their parts here, but the design and engineering came from "home" and that is where the profits go...back to his country...the one that our military defends. My old ship was homeported there for her last 11 years as deterrent to China and North Korea; now one of her newer sisters is, along with crew and families and a helluva a lot of our tax dollars.

As the man realized he was upsetting the Congress people he tried to explain; it started to sound like he was blaming the workers when another Congressperson went after him.

Got in the truck to run errands and heard someone from Wellpoint explaining that they had to raise their rates 39% to cover their costs. When she was asked about her salary she said she got $1.3 million a year in salary, $8.5 million in stock options and another $73,000 for something else.

Geez, we didn't make $73,000 last year...both of us together!

Then I get back home and turn on CNN to find out that a "killer whale", held in captivity despite having killed twice already, had just killed it's 3rd trainer. While I'm not "anti-zoo" and I realize that there are some creatures we wouldn't have in this world anymore were it not for captivity and breeding programs, etc., I don't think Shamu is on that list!

I'm sure tomorrow I'll get up and start my day with the Weather Channel and MSNBC and CNN again, along with my news page and Facebook and Twitter and a half dozen other places I go looking for things.

But right now I'd like to climb in a barrel and pull the lid on after me!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Sharing the wealth...

2010-02-16T16:59:00.002-06:00

My oldest grandson spent the weekend plus his Monday holiday. After playing video games and watching movies and parts of Daytona and the WinterNationals, by yesterday he was ready for something different. I lit the furnace in the garage and after a couple of hours we went out and I started clearing more of my workbench; him putting things in the tool cabinets or the trash; me sorting other ones into the "20 year drawers" beneath.

As we got to the back there was an old Rochester 2 barrel carb, in pieces, that I had robbed pieces from a few years ago for something else. Being able to see all of its "innards" led to explanations of "idle circuits" and "pullover enrichment" and then finally "being on the mainjets" with him able to see how they all interconnected, along with the cautionary stories about needles and seats and what happens when they "stick" (a deluge of gasoline spewing out of the carb top usually followed by an engine fire).

From under the bench I pulled out an old Rochester "Quadrajet", the 4-barrel "performance" carb from that same era; when he saw the 2 1/4" back barrels in comparison to the little pair in that 2-barrel he suddenly understood a lot more about "hot rods" and horsepower and gasoline comsumption!

I promised him a few months ago that if one of Dottie's "Powerball" tickets hits, we can build a "deuce coupe" using some of the other things I have stashed away in various corners and some of the multitude of parts you can buy now. I'm kind of hoping that in the next year or two things work out and we build something anyway...he's a lot more intrigued by mechanical things than his Dad or his Uncle ever were and it would be nice to pass some of the knowledge along instead of taking it with me!

(Not that this has anything to do with my last post or anything!)

For now though, he's more concerned about getting the boat cleared off before spring comes!

Me too!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

February 13...

2010-02-12T16:56:00.003-06:00

keeps coming back around, much as I wish at times it wouldn't!

Dad would have turned 83 tomorrow, and for all the baggage there was between us before I left for the Navy, we made up for it after I was out and moved home and his grandkids were born. That one son has no memory of him and the other only has the slightest ones is one of the sadder things I ponder altogether too often. 26 years disappear for me each time I touch his tools, or his old Ambassadeur 5000 (baitcasting reel)...it's yesterday again and he's chiding me about his "educated thumb" being the reason he can cast 15 feet further than I, with the same reel, rod and line.

Little did I know 'til I took his apart for the first time after he died how educated that thumb truly was; he had taken the brake cylinders completely out of it!

Know you were and are still loved Dad...and missed terribly!

May the weekend be kind to each of you who find your way here!

alan

Across the years...

2010-01-27T15:05:00.002-06:00

"The Berlin Stories" have illuminated much. How anyone could have claimed "they didn't know", or "they weren't sure" in the late 30's is beyond me; people were telling Isherwood in '30 and '31 "just wait until they get them in the concentration camps".

With his words evoking the people and their times, I dug out a disc I bought a few years ago of Ute Lemper's called "Berlin Cabaret Songs". English translations of the original tunes playing in the clubs there when Marlene Dietrich was headlining...when Louise Brooks was lighting up the screen...

From the first track on the disc, 3rd verse:

"Politicians

are magicians

who make swindles disappear

The bribes they are taking

the deals they are making

never reach the public's ear

The left betrays, the right dismays

the country's broke and guess who pays

But tax each swindle in the making

profits will be record breaking

Everyone swindles some

so vote for who will steal for you

Life's a swindle..."

from "It's All a Swindle" written by Mischa Spoliansky and Marcellus Schiffer.

I'm guessing I shouldn't read anything into the fact that the composers, born in 1898 and 1892, died in 1931 and 1932...

Each day I hear people proclaim they aren't trying to take away my rights, only those of someone else. That I'm entitled, but someone else isn't. They step behind their masks of religion; they hide behind a flag and don't realize; I've seen it all before, if only in the history books, in literature, in poetry.

If the revolution is lost, now (and I fear it is) then it's only a matter of time before the knocks on the door start coming...

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Old loves...

2010-01-21T12:55:00.015-06:00

While in Vermont this last summer, we visited the Shelburne Museum. Among the standard displays there (well worth a visit in themselves) they had two special attractions going on as well. There was a Tiffany exhibition (more later) and a motorcycle show, with not only some Arlen Ness "dream" bikes, but some of the loves of my youth.

I was lucky enough 36 years ago to meet an old gentleman in San Diego who was supplementing his retirement by selling basket case motorcycles he had spent his lifetime acquiring. He had been a machinist, a tool and die man in the aircraft industry; he used to say he never married because his job was so critical he wasn't allowed to enlist during WW2. He was the lead inspector at Rohr Aircraft; they were building engine nacelles and other things related to the war effort. He said that during the war all the girls wanted a hero; right after the war they wanted a returning one and then, suddenly, he was too old for anyone to want.

He was the first "Anglophile" I ever knew; his mechanical loves in this world were Triumph and Ariel motorcycles & British motorcars. Born in 1910, he had attended machinist school at Ryan in San Diego the year after they built the "Spirit of St. Louis".

In 1936 he bought his first motorcycle, a Royal Enfield. It had it's share of mechanical deficiencies and in '37 he sold it and bought a new Triumph Speed Twin. He was still riding that Speed Twin when I knew him, though he had pulled the original girder front end ("two sheets of paper with an axle bolted between them" was his description) in favor of a later set of hydraulic forks, and bolted a sidecar on it. He used it as his parts chaser and it was ridden almost daily, up until the day he died.

During the war he acquired an Ariel "one-lunger", a 500cc single cylinder bike for the economy during rationing. They became his second love and he had 3 different models of the singles while I knew him, along with two of the "Square Fours" that have gone by in the photos thus far. I was lucky enough, having worked for him a bit to earn parts, to have him let me ride his '56 Square Four to a show for him one day when he was taking the Speed Twin. It was a treat I've not forgotten!

After the war as everyone traded their "rigid" Triumphs for swingarm ones, he bought them; as the "non-unit" bikes were traded for "unit" construction ones, he bought them as well. He did machine work "on the side" and did some race tuning along with a lot of riding, including some with a group of "desert rats" that included Keenan Wynn and Steve McQueen back when you rode the same bikes off road you rode on the street. I have an accessory "oil bath" he made that was intended to keep sand from getting into the motors; apparently he made a good little fortune selling them. Later, after he retired he also was doing Smiths speedo and tach work and rebuilding magnetos and generators, as well as assembling engines and transmissions.

Though he really didn't approve, a lot of the knowledge I acquired from him was applied to BSA's and a few Norton's I ran across through the years. He had no use for Harleys at all- "tractor engine in a cultivator frame" was his description of them.

I bought three basket case Triumphs from him. Mine was a stocker, a 1958 TR-6 4-speed. The one I bought to put together for my wife was also a '58 and looked stock, but had later model 750 internals and a 5-speed (some of that machine work he was so good at was involved in relieving the engine and transmission cases). The 3rd was a '47 500 rigid. To this day I regret parting with them during a long lay-off from GM when my boys were small...

So with all the fond memories the Ariel above brought me, for me the Crown Jewels of that display were:

(a World War Two flathead Triumph messenger bike)

and

(a 1952 Trophy model racer)

We had always talked of buying a bike again once the kids were grown and gone (and every now and then I can't help but go price a new Triumph) but the reality is that with her hip and knee replacements she'll never dare get on one again and so I can't really bring myself to be selfish enough to ride when she can't...

After we had moved here, in the early 80's I got a phone call from someone I had introduced to my friend as they were looking for Triumph parts. During one of those awful Santa Ana days his emphysema had finally gotten the better of him and someone found him in his shop.

I was told his nephew was going to sell the parts off along with the machinery and keep the technical stuff for those he knew to use as an open library. I hope he did; there was far too much knowledge there for it to end up in a landfill somewhere!

Dwight Dean, it was an honor to know you and to call you friend!

I hope you and Lou Kaiser and Jimmy Phillips and Wynn and McQueen are all out somewhere having a helluva good time!

May the week be kind to each of you (especially if you made it all the way down here)!

alan

(a click on each photo will enlarge it. They have pretty good detail for handheld 1/8th and 1/15th exposures at 200 ASA setting...wanted to go back the next day with a tripod, but there wasn't time!)

The Doctor says...

2010-01-19T15:02:00.002-06:00

keep doing what you're doing; if it hurts, stop doing it, at least for a bit!

He showed me the MRI slices; the bone bruise on the upper legbone that is still healing, the partially healed extent it started out at; the swelling around the partially damaged MCL ligament that "gave" and started this all; the fluid around the rest of the joint.

He also told me there is arthritis under the kneecap that was aggravated by all of this, but it's not something that needs surgery until much further down the road.

He told me not to start the therapy his assistant had written me the scrip for 12 days ago (was kind of avoiding that 'til I had the MRI results). He said I can go downstairs and start walking on my treadmill when I feel like; if it aches to get off it and let it rest.

They faxed me in a 90 day prescription for the anti-inflammatory, Meloxicam, they started me on the other week.

So that's the health update...time for some late lunch and maybe a nap!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Awareness...

2010-01-14T12:35:00.006-06:00

Not so many years ago, in reading Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" I was astounded by her calling out of the treatment doled out by "Americans" to the native populations that were here when they arrived with their "manifest destiny". After all, an 18 year old, writing in 1816...her awareness of what was going on in another "world" far removed from hers was quite amazing to me.

Last night, partway into "The Berlin Stories" I've had another such moment. Christopher Isherwood bringing up the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria with the ensuing murder, rape and pillage as he was writing in Germany during the Weimar Republic just before Hitler's rise to power. (In doing a bit of reading this morning, I just ran across a Time Magazine article from 1932 about a small part of that invasion and the "accidental" beating of an American ambassador by Japanese troops.)

I realize that nothing on Earth ever occurs in a vacuum; that there is always some news "out there" for those willing to look for it.

I also realize, having lived through the time of the Balkans and Rwanda and Darfur, that seldom are things like this ever halted before the wreckage of lifetimes is scattered. The toothless "League of Nations" of that day; the inadequately funded and under-empowered United Nations of this one aren't so very far apart in their abilities.

That so many generations have passed since Mary Shelley called attention to the plight of the Native American and yet 200 years later they are not given their due, or given apology, but have to fight in court against the government that has robbed them at every turn...

That so many years after our "War Between the States" to have a Senator stand up and say that had the "Dixiecrats" elected Strom Thurmond president in 1948 we'd all be so much better off now...

That so many years after "The War to End All Wars" the bullets and shells still fly...

That at this point that should be the pinnacle of human existence there are those who feel that they can vote away the rights of anyone they disagree with; they may imprison them in law as surely unjust as any prison camp...

That they may be executed or imprisoned for life if some of the "new laws" under consideration in some places aren't stopped!

Will we ever realize that every life is just as precious as our own?

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

"No use permitting those prophets of doom...

2010-01-11T12:52:00.003-06:00

to wipe every smile away..."

Lines from old songs haunt me; like the headers on a page, they set the tone or summarize; they cajole or commiserate.

I was playing music from "Cabaret" 40 years ago, in band at school and along with Armstrong albums; I knew a bit of the mythology of the story. It was many years before I would see the movie; even more before I read of "The Berlin Stories" that first the stage play "I Am a Camera" then the musical "Cabaret" were sourced from. On my "bucket list" of reading material ever since, I finally caught up with Mr. Isherwood last night and am delighted.

So now I'm having a hard time convincing me to go out and chip the icicles off the facias and such and do some of the other things I'd been putting off while gimping around this last month. T'would be so much easier to escape to the Berlin of Sally Bowles and Lulu, Peter Lorre and Marlene Dietrich...

"Life is a cabaret, old chum..."

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Beginnings...

2010-01-06T16:16:00.004-06:00

It's been hard to come here and write of late; I've been "living" on hydrocodone a lot of this last month as I blew something up in my left knee four weeks ago. In the beginning I thought I could give it a week and it would be better, but that has not turned out to be the case and I have an appointment tomorrow morning so someone can figure out whether it was one of the cruciate ligaments I blew out, or something worse. It's not much good like it is, or me along with it!

I hobbled through the holidays; everyone else's were great! The grandkids, the boys and their wives; my sister and her family. Bill and Laura made it home to D.C. yesterday after a detour through North Carolina for a rockslide the wiped out the Interstate highway they were on as they trekked east. After an afternoon's rest in Charlotte, they got home about 1:30 Tuesday morning.

I've not been sleeping well, so falling asleep sitting in my chair reading, trying to watch TV, sitting here at the keyboard, playing a video game; they've all become new experiences for me. Part of my excuse for not blogging...waking up as you rock forward in the chair because your knee is saying "don't do that, dummy"! isn't fun!

May the rest of the week and may this month and this New Year be especially kind to each of you!

alan

Postscript: Thursday afternoon...

X-rays inconclusive; they don't show anything wrong, only the things that should be there...MRI tomorrow.

At least I know now it's not cancer! Not everyone's first thought, but my favorite jazz saxophone player went in 15 years ago for some knee pain, found out he had bone cancer and was gone in 6 weeks...as much as my family has been decimated by so many different kinds of it, it wouldn't have surprised me!

alan

New Year's Eve...

2009-12-31T09:50:00.004-06:00

strains of Guy Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne" remembered from my childhood playing in my mind...

Off to my sister's in a bit for the family birthday/New Year's Eve parties. My nephew (Christmas Eve), myself (the 29th) and Bill's wife Laura (Jan. 30th, but, hey; while she's here)!

I've often spent this last week of the year in a funk of reviewing and lamenting (see my last post) but not this year. I refused to wallow in it and have actually succeeded, though I'm not sure how much is due to my own free will and how much is due to how busy things have been.

Last year I said I was going to try to keep things here on a more positive note; that ended up with my not saying things at times because there just wasn't anything positive to say and my feeling guilty when I wrote things that weren't; neither was much good for me. So this year, I'm just going to write and let it fall where it falls.

I've made many wonderful friends here; each of you has touched me in ways that have helped me, guided me, healed me...I owe you all so very much!

So I'll hope that tonight finds you somewhere you'd like to be; that tomorrow you are still somewhere you'd like to be and that both of these days, the weekend and the New Year that begins tomorrow are all very kind to each of you!

alan

The day before...

2009-12-28T15:48:00.002-06:00

always abounds in 2nd guessing and other musings; rather like reliving your life in short order...

What if?

Should I have?

Would it have been better?

The voices all whisper and this time I'm going to fight them off, because I know, deep down, that none of what is past can be changed by any amount of giving in to them!

This time, I will look forward not behind!

Ahead lies the time that is left me; the only things I can change are "now" and "the future".

So bring on 54 and we'll see how it plays!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Christmas Eve...

2009-12-24T12:16:00.004-06:00

and after a madcap week of shopping, cleaning, rearranging the house for guests, wrapping and more shopping it's all come down to these last few hours.

Bill and Laura and Obie just got here after a 19 hour drive straight-through from Maryland. Obie apparently did well on his first road trip, especially for a shelter dog who was so very sick when they adopted him. He's made friends with Angel and peace with Frankie, so that bodes well for the human's holidays!

What the poor dog doesn't know is that the rain they drove through for about half their trip is starting to freeze right now and we're in for some of that good old Kansas ice before 8 inches or so of snow comes down over it. Apparently he wasn't very happy with the blizzard they had last weekend in D.C. and here they've driven him into another one for Christmas!

Dottie works today and then since she just had her annual review, a slight pay increase and a warning that it's very hard to use up 4 weeks of vacation so she should spread it out, she turned around and said "OK, what about next week while my son is here?". Her boss said that would be great and (so far) none of the higher-ups have rescinded it so we're hoping she's off until New Year's Day!

So that will be a treat for the whole family...

I hadn't planned on her being off on my birthday (the 29th) and had planned to bake my own cake, along with maybe sneaking off to an arthouse movie that I know she wouldn't have liked; instead I'll be trading my movie for her making her Mom's chocolate cake, the "Miracle Whip" one that has been my favorite chocolate one since the first one I ever tasted...I remember observing that if they buried the Pharoah's with things for their next life, she needed to bury me with one of those cakes! That was before I settled on cremation; there's no way I could waste one of those cakes that way!

I am adding all that because with extra houseguests and my antiblogging spouse at home, the chances of me getting here are slim to none!

May Christmas find you near to those you hold dear, in your hearts if not in person. I hold each of you that way; you have all come to mean so very much to me!

And may 2010 be the Happiest of New Years for you all! We are all due for some bluer skies and maybe that silver lining I keep hearing of...

Though in truth, the silver lining is here...with each of you!

May your days be Merry and Bright!

alan

Another day, another letter...

2009-12-07T13:45:00.002-06:00

I wrote my Senators last week (that word "my" is kind of sticking in my craw at this point; they sure as hell don't represent me) asking them to support the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell". I even started my letter with "I know that next week I will receive a letter from you saying how much my thoughts on this matter mean to you, and then you both will proceed to tell me you support the status quo"!

Which is exactly what showed up a bit ago...

Mr. Brownback wrote to tell me how much my thoughts matter, then how wonderfully the current policy has worked and how "he'll listen to the military" when it comes to making policy...

Had Harry Truman listened to the military 60 years ago it would still be segregated!

The laws of inertia are that a mass in motion will continue in the direction it's going unless it's acted on by some outside force.

That "change from within" is impossible would be evidenced by the fact that during the Revolutionary War the army WAS integrated, as it was during the War of 1812, yet by the time of the Civil War it became segregated...outside forces had their influence and it stood for over 100 years!

I remember the rants in the 70's that there would never be women on carriers or their escorts; that there was just no way that could ever work. There was no way you could put women on ships that were going out for 8 or 9 months and have it not cause a problem.

Yet today women fill every billet in the Navy, just as they should.

'Tis truly sad that good lives are being ruined by those who reap political hay!

Didn't mean to start the week with a rant...

May the week be kind to you each!

alan

"Silver Bells..."

2009-11-28T15:17:00.003-06:00

a bit of Christmas time from the city...

I was doing dishes at my sister's the other night as my wife packed up and my camera was on top of her pie safe. They found it yesterday afternoon and brought it when we did the traditional day-after-Thanksgiving "family movie". Walking back from where they were parked to where we were parked I shot a few frames, handheld, 1/15th wide open aperture 100 ASA setting.

I hope each of you who celebrated had a lovely Thanksgiving; may the weekend be kind to each of you!

alan

Oh to be a mouse...

2009-11-24T15:32:00.002-06:00

inthe corner of this wonderful room...

or a trumpet player growing up in love with music...

New on my Christmas list:

"The Jazz Loft" by Sam Stephenson; photos by W. Eugene Smith! Like the author of the Vanity Fair article, I can only hope someone starts editing down these tapes for release!

W. Eugene Smith had already been a leading light at "Life" magazine; during WW2 he island-hopped across the Pacific with our troops. He is attributed by many to be the originator the "photo essay" which he used to help bring world attention to Minamata disease, a horrific form of mercury poisoning named for the city in Japan where the chemical was dumped into the bay, poisoning the food chain. Smith and his wife moved there in 1971 to help document the ravages of the disease; for his trouble he was beaten in 1972 by those who wished to suppress his work. He lost part of his vision in one eye and never fully recovered.

I'd like to think that perhaps these memories of an earlier happier time finding their way into print would please him!

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you! May those who gather 'round tables the day after tomorrow be blessed by those you care for most; may those who will be other places in the world know that each of you will be counted among my blessings!

alan

"Slip slidin' away..."

2009-11-20T14:20:00.008-06:00

Another week rapidly disappearing "over the hill"...

but while scanning and Photoshopping things for that project I mentioned my sister working on, I took some time to go through some of what I shot while we were in Vermont in August.

Each trip we try and work in sightseeing as well as spending time with family; this time we managed a family trip to "The Shelburne Museum". I'll put some other photos up soon, but when I saw these I was as awed now as I was then.

I read this exhibit card and think of all the hours I've spent sitting in front of the TV or surfing online...

(Click to enlarge and please forgive my handheld 1/8th and 1/15th exposures, and the lack of a polarizing filter to kill the glare on the glass case? Next time I'm going back with a tripod!)

High wire acts, bicycles...the Wild West show...an amazing creation for the hands of one man!

Coming later...motorcycles...Tiffany lampshades...a paddlewheeler transported overland from Lake Champlain...

Well worth a visit if you ever get a chance to!

May the weekend be kind to each of you; may it be warm and dry (especially for those of you floating away in the UK) and for those who get to celebrate next Thursday, may your preparations for Thanksgiving be filled with love and knowledge that I'll be saying thanks for each of you next Thursday!

alan

One of the best photos I ever shot...

2009-11-13T18:58:00.003-06:00

I've been scanning some old things for another project and though I couldn't get this one out of the "sticky" album it's been in for almost 40 years (it started to tear) I scanned it anyway...

Old Rolleiflex, Plus-X Pan developed in Edwal FG-7 and printed on #3 contrast Kodak paper.

I've tried to get this effect a dozen times in the 38 or 39 years since I shot this and never ever managed to...yet!

May the weekend be kind to each of you!

alan

Happier things...

2009-11-11T16:11:00.002-06:00

Dorothy and Toto; an aerialist wanna-be; and the Man from Brown...

Somewhere there's a photo of a little boy on his way to kindergarten next to that tree; I need to find that!

Hoping that no matter what's going on in your world, somewhere there's some kindness in it!

alan

How the other half lives...

2009-11-04T13:31:00.002-06:00

Not what I had planned to put here today...had planned on putting up a Halloween pic of some grandkids...

It really saddens me to see how much delight some of our electorate takes in disenfranchising others. Elsewhere this morning a wag pointed out that had abolition been subjected to popular vote in 1866 it would have lost as well...

I think it's time for me to start collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to ban ice storms!

No doubt I can get the necessary signatures; I am sure it would pass with a number that would stagger the pundits, pollsters and politicos! It would become the law of the land and every major winter storm could be touted as illegal from then on!

That it wouldn't change a damn thing doesn't matter, I'd still get to gloat over my victory!

May the rest of this sad day and the rest of the week be kind to each of you...

alan

Excuse the dust...

2009-10-27T14:50:00.002-05:00

as I settle back in here, please?

The time away from here was interesting and not just the "net withdrawals" though they were in abundance, along with the worrying and wondering about each of you. Between a very sore wife sleeping on the couch in the living room and a very sick dog not understanding why her body was letting her down, the first two weeks were especially rough. Having to scoop the dog up with a sheet and carry her outside once she could sit up again after what I still think was a stroke was awkward for both of us, though she was grateful not to be "messing" herself and having me trying to clean up her and our (thankfully bare) floor.

She has gradually regained about 85% of her use of her hindquarters, is very stiff turning one direction and her head still lists as she gets tired; I'm very much hoping we don't get much ice this winter as her hips roll one way or the other without warning and I fear her "going down" on the ice like the German Shepard we had that had belonged to Dottie's Mom.

Dottie finally moved back into our bed last week, fearing if she slept on her side before she was mostly healed the "mesh" they sewed into her would not heal evenly. She was very grateful to be off the couch when she finally did and with the arthritis that has settled into her back, very grateful to be off of it! She returned to work yesterday and came home very sore, but OK.

There was a lot of quiet time that first few weeks when she would "nod off" for a while and so I started a book I'd had put away for many years, having spent more time reading shorter and lighter things. I stayed up on "current events" by leaving the TV in our bedroom on as I cooked and cleaned and such, with it set on "closed captions". Some of what I was reading intersected with those current events in ways I never dreamt of!

"The Reconstruction Finance Corporation is made up of fine men, honest, and mean well and if it was water they were distributing it would help the people it was meant to help. For water goes down hill and moistens everything on its way, but gold or money goes uphill. The Reconstruction loaned the railroads money, medium and small banks money, and all they did with it was pay off what they owed to the New York banks. So the money went uphill instead of down. You can drop a bag of gold in Death Valley, which is below sea level, and before Saturday it will be home to papa J.P. [Morgan]."

Will Rogers, 1933

Whether you look at the money that was supposed to take care of refinancing the homeowners losing their homes to foreclosure; the auto industry bailouts; the credit card companies raising our rates and such; the billions of dollars profit that the health care industry is making while they fight any change to the status quo; the Wall Street companies paying bonuses to their execs...old Will seems to be pretty spot on!

I was thinking last night that the last time we saw real "for the people" changes come from Congress it was what L.B.J. called the "Great Society" legislation. Perhaps if we called healthcare reform "The Healthy Society Act" or something similar the it might be more palatable to that "upper crust" who think they're the only ones entitled to society...it's so funny to hear them screaming that healthcare reform might change Medicare when they fought tooth and nail to keep Medicare from passing all those years ago!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

A house full!

2009-10-18T08:08:00.003-05:00

Dottie's feeling enough better she asked for all 3 grandkids this weekend. Giving up the couch for the first time since her surgery meant she's actually sleeping in bed again...not comfortably, as she's still on her back, but at least in bed.

So it's 8am on Sunday morning and I'm sitting here with 2 of them watching "Snorks" on Boomer while she's gone to the store with one of them to get some "Children's Tylenol" for the one that woke us up crying with a fever. Glad I got my flu shot last week!

Hope all is well with all of you! Miss bloghopping and keeping up with you all!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Quick note...

2009-10-13T12:37:00.002-05:00

4 weeks out now, Dottie is healing slowly. She still can't sleep on her side, so she's still on the couch, but the outside parts of things are healing and we're hoping everything inside is as well. That she can "feel" the mesh at times is worrisome...

Angel is back to about 80%, maybe 85% of where she was before her stroke/ear infection/brain tumor struck. She's finished all her meds, still wobbles and falls sometimes as she walks and her head lists more the tireder she is through the day. Bill made it home last week to spend 4 days with her and really brightened her days! He always considered her "his" dog anyway, though she lived here with us...

Winter is setting in, I've had to vacuum and light furnaces the last few days, along with patching another limb-punch in my roof. Had I worked this last summer I'd have replaced it as it's 25, but next summer will have to do...

Sorry for my lack of time here of late; rather closely supervised right now!

:o)

May the days be kind to each of you!

alan

14 days...

2009-09-29T16:56:00.003-05:00

and Dottie's checkup today was fine; she hadn't "coughed" anything loose and the surgeon said that everything seemed to be right where he left it, despite the cold that lingered into a 2nd round of antibiotics.

Angel is stronger and walking further each day; though her head is still at a 30 degree list and her balance is very "off", she walks to the front door now and only wants a finger on her collar to steady her as she goes down the two steps to the yard; yesterday she walked the 100 feet to the backyard for the first time and wandered around her favorite haunts, then back to the front door.

Of course, eating canned dog food for the first time in her life seems to be her favorite part of the whole thing! (That and dinner rolls with her meds in them...)

Dottie is on the phone now talking to her sisters and updating them; thus my chance to do the same thing here...

May the week be kind to each of you! Thank you for all the well wishes and warm thoughts!

alan

Walking the dog...

2009-09-25T23:57:00.003-05:00

though I still have to carry her outside, she's walking/staggering about now; walked at least 60' today and other functions have started again as well! I'd have never thought an ear infection could strike so suddenly or lay someone so low!

Fingers crossed, things are looking much brighter today!

May the weekend be kind to each of you!

alan

Strange days...

2009-09-24T10:30:00.002-05:00

Dottie's surgery went well and she finally got her drain out yesterday. Sadly, the day before our dog of 14 years collapsed, showing all the signs of a stroke. We got her to the vet yesterday, who came out to my son's van and spent a 1/2 hour checking her over and then drawing blood, etc. and he said he hopes it's just an ear infection throwing off her balance and with her already weakened back legs (arthritis) that that's the reason she can't stand or walk. He started her on antibiotics and steroids...he also said if it's a brain tumor the steroids would help with it for a while then things will start slipping again.

Meanwhile, she's eating, drinking and loving all the extra attention.

Gotta go because if I walk away she'll crawl to try and follow me and Dottie's gone right now (the minute the drain came out she was ready to be "out and about") to pay the vet and pick up some canned food for her since she can't seem to deal with the dry she's always eaten and we've been cooking burgers for her on the George Foreman.

May life be kind to each of you!

alan

She's home...

2009-09-16T16:39:00.001-05:00

very grumpy, very sore, but happy to be "out"!

alan

Krzysztof Kieslowski...missed so very much!

2009-09-14T11:57:00.002-05:00

Those of you who "know" me know I love film; you also know how easily I fall under the spell of people and things.

When I used to read the "New Yorker" at work I would read the film listings and saw rave reviews for a retrospective of Kieslowski films ahead of the release of his "new" one at the time, "The Double Life of Veronique". There was only one "art house" here at the time and with the hours I worked, getting there was pretty much impossible. Luckily, it wasn't all that long after I noticed on Cinemax that "Veronique" was playing. I recorded it, caught up with it not so long after and was completely spellbound. The film; the story; the music; the cinematography...a perfect magical package!

When I discovered a local video rental that handled foreign and early cinema, I was in heaven. I started exploring some of Krzysztof's earlier works. The brothers that ran it told me that had just ordered "The Decalog" and that I really needed to watch it. When it came in, 5 volumes of two pieces each, they were constantly out and I only got one tape watched before they lost their lease on the theatre they were running. Thankfully, they've moved up and onwards and now run the best "arthouses" in Kansas City, but the video club never began again.

In the meantime I acquired DVD's of the film trilogy he did; "Three Colors: Blue", "Three Colors: White" and "Three Colors: Red"

So when my younger son gave us a Netflix subscription a year ago last Christmas I was delighted to find a lot of the old silent cinema I'd been unable to find locally, along with Kieslowski's ouevre and so many others. (My queue is 384 movies at this point.)

These last few weeks I've been going through "The Decalog", in order 1-10 and find myself captivated and replaying them in my mind while doing other things. Loosely fit to the "10 Commandments", I got to "Decalog 8" last night and have no doubt that I will be haunted by Kieslowski's poignant "ethical hell" for the rest of my life...

Knowing Dottie would be wanting to come to bed soon (I was watching in our bedroom), I watched some of the extra features on the disc. One was "100 Questions", a group of film writers in an interview with him.

Several times the great man insists that he doesn't believe in the power of cinema to change people or society; that if people see a film and "choose to reflect" on it and then change, that is their choice.

I'd like to think he left them no choice but to reflect...

If you don't mind subtitles, these are all wonderful; both the movies I mentioned and "The Decalog" as well!

As an aside; I've never heard film music more wonderful than the scores by Zbigniew Preisner! I first fell in love with the score he wrote for "Veronique"; it has echoed in my soul since the first time I heard it...

Dottie goes in for surgery in the morning then she's on sick leave for at least 6 weeks, during which I'll be going back to work to keep us "afloat". I don't know how much time I'll have here, given her "anti-blogging" stance, but will post an occasional update while she's in the shower or something.

May the week and the ensuing weeks be kind to each of you!

alan

Slip-sliding away...

2009-09-09T13:28:00.002-05:00

The year...life...my leisure...

I've finally shaken "the cold", grateful to have it "gone" but worried as Dottie is starting to cough and she has surgery next week. Hopefully her constant exposure to things at work will protect her a bit.

In the moments I had where I felt good last week I managed to drill the garage floor and bolt down the new air compressor; wired it; spent some time drawing a manifold system for it (air distribution) and made trips to Lowe's and Harbor Freight to accumulate the pieces for it. I assembled most of it yesterday and discovered I was one $1.08 piece short of finishing it; I've already been out today to get it and am waiting for the rain to subside so I can move the boat out enough to move my roll-away and assemble the last bits and leak check it. Having watched pipefitters do this kind of thing for 30 years at GM paid off handsomely. Having always worked at the long end of too much air hose at home, perhaps my "lug gun" will actually break the ones on my truck now instead of me doing it by hand!

Not much else going on at the moment...

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Wheezy...

2009-08-30T11:08:00.004-05:00

Having caught a cold from the guy I slept with while "on the road" for the funeral (my son) I've been more than a bit under the weather these past few days. Not the usual, perhaps because it's a late summer bug, or early winter given our temps, the mucus isn't the problem, it's just the cough from hell that won't stop until you get halfway through the bottle of syrup...I've been sleeping on the couch (much to my cat's dismay) so I don't disturb Dottie; by the time she gets up I'm "liquored up" enough on Tussin DM to sleep about 2 hours straight in our bed before I wake up and start coughing again. Annoying is the little "squeaky toy" wheeze that wakes me at the end of each breath 'til I get there...

My air compressor blew a hole through the tank 2 days before I left for Vermont; inherited from Dad, it was a 28 year old "Sears Best" that they no longer stocked parts for (the regulator had been leaking for about 5 years and I couldn't get them anywhere else either). Before he died Dad had been assembling a collection of air tools to do bodywork, jitterbugs and air files, etc., that even that 2 horse 220/volt wouldn't quite "pull". If it didn't have other problems I'd have tried to weld the tank up (couldn't make it any worse, lol).

So in a last binge of deficit spending before I return to the workforce, I caught a Craftsman Club sale and bought a 2.5 horse, 150 psi vertical (stands up like your hot water tank) with a 60 gallon tank. I brought it home last week, getting John and Dillon to help me unload it as it weighs more than I do (and that's getting up there). Yesterday, while slipping out for cough syrup, I bought a cord and new outlet to wire it with because I couldn't match the old plug.

I also have to build a manifold system for the "out" side of things; rigid pipe still being cheaper than the fancy plastic systems they sell, I'll pick that up this afternoon after I eat something and down some "non-drowsy" cough syrup. I picked up a filter/water separator and a regulator, as I don't think I have a bit of hose newer than 30 years old and one regulator is cheaper than replacing 150 feet of air hoses right now should I blow them up at 150psi.

Later I'll add a 2nd "drop" and a dryer for spray guns; I painted a few cars "back in the day" and grew up watching Dad do about one a year, if not for himself for someone else, on top of his own touch up work.

He got his first compressor when I was 4. My Mom was pregnant with my sister and had decided she had to learn how to drive (she was 29). While he was at work, she took me and his pride and joy '55 Ford Fairlane to the courthouse for her exam. Somehow she passed it, then on the way home turned a corner "short" and raked it from front wheel to rear on a set of concrete steps...he couldn't afford to pay someone to "do it right" so like so many other things, did it himself. According to her the only reason she came home was because she was pregnant and knew he wouldn't kill her...

Through the years I watched him paint the '47 Studebaker truck he put together from the wrecking yard ($25 with a blown engine) and used to dig the basement under this house I'm sitting in; watched him 2-tone a '55 Chevy for a neighbor's son because he liked the kid and liked the car. I watched him rebuild and paint a '59 Rambler for a nephew he felt was being deprived. He put the front of that same '55 Fairlane back together after he sold it to Mom's Mom after she learned to drive and got hit by someone running a red light. Having promised it to me when I got old enough to drive, I think he felt guilty about having to sell it and had hoped she'd keep it 'til I could drive; it didn't work out that way.

After he moved to that bigger compressor and a bigger spray gun, I used his old ones and painted several myself, my own and others. Though my knowledge is passe at this point (you can still buy lacquer and enamel, but not many people use them because the newer finishes survive abuse so much better), there is still a place inside me that wants to learn how to spray a set of flames...I've got a nephew that can and if I can't learn on my own I may have to twist his arm a bit...

Which is rather funny actually, because not long ago I was cursing because I couldn't lay a straight line of masking tape on a window I was painting!

:o)

Enough prattling from me...

May each of your Sundays be amazing and the coming week be kind!

alan

Reflections

2009-08-26T15:21:00.003-05:00

It's been a few days now since I returned from the funeral. Seeing Uncle Bill was great and my cousins as well. I never knew the rest of my Dad's side of the family as well as I did my Mom's or my Dad's Mom.

The service was in the "small" chapel of a "mega-church". Though beautiful, I couldn't help but wonder how many of the little churches my Grandfather had pastored would have fit inside and what he or Uncle Walter would have thought of it. Grandpa's last church, the one he wasn't supposed to take after he retired, had 13 regular members on the Sunday we attended...

Thinking of the 62 years Uncle Bill and Aunt Frances had together is cause for much reflection. Him at 85 and her at 84, Dottie and I will be almost the same ages should be "make it" that long. Right now at 33 years together, that number seems impossible if only from the viewpoint of longevity!

My parent's 60th would have been next year had cancer not claimed Dad in '83. I'm not sure what he'd have done when Mom's MS progressed to the point it is now...at least Uncle Bill got to keep Aunt Frances at home despite the Alzheimer's she had developed.

Uncle Bill lost a kidney a few years ago to kidney cancer; now it seems his remaining one is shutting down and he has to decide whether he wants to spend 4 hours a day at the hospital 3 days a week for dialysis as he isn't a candidate for doing it at home. Though healthy in every other way and seemingly in good spirits, I fear learning what his decision will be.

The trip to Oklahoma and back was interesting; they are replacing the old 2 lane state highway with 4 lane. Much of it lies parallel to a railroad right-of-way still in use. In places the old telegraph poles still run alongside the rails, wires drooping or on the ground in places, poles listing like drunken sailors after a long voyage as they rot away, some lying all the way down, others held in mid-air by the wires they were supposed to be holding, the glass insulators so prized a few years ago still atop them. The tracks are 2-4 feet above the old highway surface; standard practice to save a railbed in case of flooding.

The new highway is 2 to 15 feet above the railbed!

If that southeast corner of Kansas ever floods high enough to need that elevation, there will be a new Great Lake in the Midwest! As flat as it is (the rolling hills don't start 'til north of Chanute) 3 or 4 feet of water will spread for miles...

The juxtaposition of old against new was much in evidence these last few days...old windmills long forgotten along with barns, fences and silos against the newer rural water towers and newer homes in places.

Old row motels abandoned along with service stations...

Santa Fe #1079 sitting at Coffeyville for all the world like she's just waiting for someone to wake up and quit burning oil...

I wonder what my grandkids will see if they retrace these steps in 40 years?

May the week be kind to each of you...

alan

Settling and unsettling...

2009-08-21T16:38:00.003-05:00

With the errands close to caught up, the laundry almost done and put away and the dinner menu figured out, I'm catching my breath for a minute...

My "little" sister turned 50 while I was on the road; at first determined to delay her party for a while as "she wasn't in a rush" she's now decided that "she'll always be older than me" and therefore we started trying to work things out for this weekend.

Yesterday as I got back in my truck at Sears I found a text from her saying "call me"...

"Uncle Bill called a little bit ago; Aunt Frances died this morning."

My Dad's only surviving brother, I never saw that much of him until a few years before my Dad got sick; when my Dad was dying of cancer, Uncle Bill was a rock. Always there, always the right words or the right story...his wit and smile were a great comfort.

We're still having Cindy's birthday party but it's been moved up to tomorrow; Sunday I'm driving to her house and we'll be driving to Oklahoma to spend the night. The funeral is on Monday and we'll return after. My younger son is planning to join us...

Dottie and I had been talking all summer about trying to put together a 3 day weekend to go down and see them...Aunt Frances had apparently been fine 'til the last two weeks when pneumonia "got ahold of her" and refused to "let go".

Instead of putting off the "local" relatives for the "long distance" ones, now I get to regret not doing things the other way 'round!

If you have a chance to make a phone call, write a card, or visit someone; do it while they're in your thoughts...you just never know!

May the weekend be kind to each of you!

alan

Road Warrior...

2009-08-19T17:16:00.002-05:00

After 14 days "on the road", for the first time ever I felt "jet lag" when we got home last night. Actually, before we got home; yesterday we spent trading drivers every couple of hours and napping when we weren't driving.

I-70 to Maryland was a run...until Dayton, one we're used to; from there it was unfamiliar territory. Tunnels in West Virginia, some short and some much longer; construction back-ups that went on for 10 miles in one instance, thankfully for the westbound lanes instead of ours. It's the first time I ever saw people actually out of their cars talking to each other, they were backed up for so long! We decided then we were going home a different route!

We unloaded Mr. Penske's truck on Friday and returned it, very grateful to him for it's use, it's V-8, it's CD player along with the AAA discount he gave us. Bill actually paid for the truck, giving us cash in return for renting it which funded the rest of our trip.

Originally we had hoped he and Laura would get to ride to Vermont with us, but he had a meeting to attend on Tuesday and Laura wasn't sure she could get away from work. We drove up on Saturday, about a 12 hour run at the pace we do things, about 20% over the MapQuest time, with our bellies full and our legs stretched. We got into Shelburne about when we had figured and found things just as our brother-in-law said they'd be, grateful to be there and for the loan of his house while he and Dottie's sister Jane were at their cabin on Lake Champlain.

Sunday we arrived at the lake at the designated time; Ed had wanted us to come and surprise Jane and we pulled it off. It was supposed to be "family day" and he hollered into the cabin that one of her sisters was here and was even on time and she was saying something about which one she thought it would be when she came through the door and saw us...

Jane has always been very active, sports, skiing, etc.. Several years ago she had to have an ACL reconstructed; now the cartilage in one knee is gone and she's in a brace part of the time. The surgeons keep telling her to fix it; she keeps stalling until it's worse...it's starting to "get to her" and that's part of why Ed wanted to arrange something to cheer her up.

Dottie's other sisters, Verne and Deb arrived a bit later with families in tow and a great afternoon was had by all.

Monday we spent at the lake as well, though it was a bit of a dreary day; much like most of the year has been in the Northeast from what I gathered.

Tuesday started that way, but cleared by noon; the temps rose and Ed wanted to take his Sea Ray out for the 2nd day all year (he and Jane love the water and boating). We got out for about an hour and a half that afternoon, stopping part way through so I could tighten a pump bracket that was "buzzing" that his mechanic hadn't found in a year of looking.

Ed's daughter took the boat out for a bit after that and came back with it sounding like an unmuffled stock car; what we thought was a blown exhaust manifold gasket turned out to be a head gasket when he took it to the shop the next morning. The boat was "done" for the week...

Bill and Laura flew up on Wednesday; we picked them up at Burlington and though Laura had to do a couple of teleconferences while we were there we still found time to get she and Bill together with all the families and do some of the "touristy" things as well. (More about those later, along with pictures...)Shelburne Museum, Smuggler's Notch...lots of fun for all!

Saturday we made the rounds on our way out of Vermont, saying goodbye to Jane and Ed when they got home from the lake at 9AM, then Verne and her family; driving to Northfield to say goodbye to Deb and so Laura could see where Dottie grew up. From there, out through the "gulf" where I've asked for my ashes to be spread when my time comes, then back onto the interstate to Springfield to meet up with Dottie's sister-in-law Irene and her family. We left there at 4 heading over the mountains through Bennington to Albany then retraced the route we took going up, going back through Scranton and Harrisburg to avoid Philadelphia and New York City. We were back to Bill's at 3AM on Sunday so they could get up and get their pets out of the kennels early. We spent that day a bit lazy, sorting circuit breakers in his house (labelling them) and wiring a doorbell, then went to bed "early" so we could start our journey home on Monday.

Deb had called to remind us we should take the Blue Ridge Parkway south as we left; taking it then coming across on I-64 only added 70 some miles to the route and actually knocked several hours off because there was so little construction. I never thought I'd hear my wife say the mountains were making her claustrophobic, but the passes in West Virginia did...

We spent the night in Kentucky, then drove the rest of the way in yesterday. Our cat spent the hour we used unpacking the car to tell us exactly what he thought of us; we went and picked up Angel at John's and though a bit gimpy, she seems OK. Today neither of them particularly wants me out of sight.

Off to move laundry and figure out what's for dinner...glad to be home!

I missed each of you...

May the week be kind!

alan

Slick trick!

2009-08-01T14:51:00.002-05:00

I was looking for some W. C. Handy blues for a friend, because (for me anyway) one of the best cures for the blues is a dose of them! I ran across this, though and have watched it a half dozen times now.

I've seen "modern" drummers with 97 drums and 35 cymbals and assistants that can't do what this man does with a standard trap-set with one extra floor tom and one added cymbal. (Of course, he or Krupa could do it without those additions I'm sure, along with a short list of others like Louis Bellson!)

So while I get things ready to hit the road for a couple of weeks on Wednesday, I'll leave this for your enjoyment:

May your weekend be as fantastic as Mr. Rich's solo!

alan

Inspired...

2009-07-30T11:18:00.004-05:00

by Ange's comment below:

"Education is in need of an overhaul. It's scary, the budget cuts, but on the other hand, the human mind will not be held back. Lincoln read by firelight. We have Lincolns among us. Tomorrow's great minds will crave and appreciate the knowledge they've gained BECAUSE it was more difficult to come by."

I recalled a similar thought by another great mind:

"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth." Will Rogers

Thank you both for the smile!

May the weekend be wonderful for each of you!

alan

Sorting out a lifetime!

2009-07-27T14:36:00.003-05:00

Since my oldest son moved east last fall, he's bought a house and asked for some of the things he left behind here when he left. Textbooks, notebooks, furniture and the treadmill he left at his in-laws. We've been sorting things for weeks now on Dottie's days off to find them all, as they had taken residence in different closets and corners of the basement.

This weekend in the midst of yet another tote-full of notes and notebooks she called to figure out if he wanted all of them, or only the physics and astronomy texts, she called him. He decided he only wants the college physics and astronomy ones for now because "a lot of the physics I learned in high school was wrong"!

He went to one of the best science and academics schools in the state...

That sentence has given me pause in the two days since it was relayed when my wife hung up from talking to him. Pause because he's had to unlearn things that were wrong; erase the data and replace it; much harder than the initial learning, or it always has been for me. I usually remember, for now, the things that have been that way for me; it's another reason I always go back to "the book" for a torque on things even if I'm sure I remember it. The Navy taught me well there!

I'm also given pause knowing that he and his brother attended that school at a time of economic plenty; new books, smaller classes, new computers...the world was their oyster. Given that the State is slashing money right and left and the easiest target is always education, I fear for the things the kids there now will have to unlearn!

My grandmother, having spent much time on the reservations through her and Grandpa's 40 years "in the ministry" said she always thought the Cherokee had it right when they said that the result of every decision should be pondered not for it's immediate result but how it would affect those 7 generations from now.

Wisdom lost or wasted, I fear!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Annual inspection...

2009-07-22T11:03:00.002-05:00

I had hoped to put off my physical until after Dottie's vacation, but my prescription for my blood pressure med was exhausted and I'm not down to a weight where I'm comfortable going without it. My little excursion into the front yard last winter and the resultant back injury not only cost me what progress I'd made since retirement, but the ensuing depression over it all and watching the demise of all I'd poured my heart and soul into for 30 years along with worrying at every step about it's result on me had me seeking sunshine and other things and I haven't made any real progress towards dealing with it since!

That said, all the "numbers" were good except for the one from the weight scale; after they drew my blood last week they faxed in a prescription for my bp med. I got him to write two extra scrips, one for the cream the dermatologist prescribed for my eczema and one for the eye drops the ophthalmologist had prescribed last year as they had both expired and I couldn't afford the office visit to the dermatologist right now and have lost my vision care along with my dental.

The prescriptions that last month would have cost me $11/5/11 now cost $25/10/25; I'm grateful the bp med is a generic or it would have cost me $50.

2 years ago we had gotten 5 office visits a year paid for; when I retired last year they took those away from the retirees but told us that "your max annual out-of-pocket is $328" and that when we met that they would be paid for. My wife heard from the wife of another retiree the other day, one who has been trying to get things that were supposed to be paid taken care of, that they have changed that as well but haven't bothered to mail us the fine print. I guess that $300 bill we got for Dottie's office visit to the surgeon last month may be mine in it's entirety! I can't imagine what I'll owe by the time she's "put back together"!

Yet the Republicant's in D.C. think "stopping Obama" is much more important than stopping my financial bloodloss!

I keep getting letters back from my Senators telling me how much they value my opinion and that they will keep it in mind as they vote, then they proceed to tell me that they have concerns about "this" or "that" and that they are going to go right ahead and vote the way they intended to all along. My choices for representation in the Senate seem to be to move or move...

I know many of you are tired of the vitriol; tired of the words; tired of the pleas. But if you stop listening, stop writing, stop calling then nothing is going to change!

Please, keep an ear to the ground...if you live somewhere where an e-mail or a letter or a 2 minute phone call can change some Senator's mind, please; I'm begging; take the time!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Bandage free, at last!

2009-07-13T10:20:00.003-05:00

Though not healed completely, my leg finally is closing and as long as I avoid shoes most of the time I'm getting by. Never thought I'd be working in the garage wearing flip-flops!

Yesterday I put the lattice work over the last window on the garage, the hubcaps back on my truck after re-torquing the lugnuts for the 3rd time, then John came by and changed the oil in both his vehicles as the hazardous waste drop off is this next Saturday and I didn't want 4 gallon jugs of engine oil hanging around for the next month (I already had one from Jordan's Galaxie and will catch Dottie's Malibu one night this week when she comes home to change it before our trip).

One of the benefits I "lost in the shuffle" was the 5 free office visits we had won in the last contract; they actually took those away last year about a month after I retired. With our slowly sinking financial status I've been avoiding the clinic ($55) or the doctors office ($65 and up) except under the direst circumstances. Tomorrow will begin a round of that as I need to refill my blood pressure medicine so have to go in for my "annual". The one "they" don't like to pay for...

Timing being everything, at least the bill won't come in 'til after Dottie's vacation! When I bought the manual for my truck last week the guys at the parts house made sure I left with a job app and though it's further than I'd like to drive, I won't be quite as worried about leaving at closing time as I would be in my own neighborhood.

We're still in the "rain cycle" here and since it's been dry for about 36 hours and the next batch is about 2 hours west of me, I'm heading out to mow...

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Regeneration...

2009-07-06T10:48:00.003-05:00

of hide is coming along nicely, thank you all who were concerned. It was itching so badly yesterday that after Dottie re-wrapped it I took a couple of Benedryl, slept 6 hours, woke up and took 2 more along with a melatonin and slept 'til 9 this morning. Something like 18 of the last 24 hours...I needed to as I was pretty burnt out anyway!

I had some JP-5 burns (jet kerosene) back in my late teens as I was the smallest jet mech in my squadron and when we had a bunch of fuel cells leaking (coffin-sized rubber bladders under the deck of the helos I worked on) I ended up being assigned to change them as I did a couple that didn't leak afterwards (should have known better) and didn't mind the "buzz" that came from breathing the fumes for hours on end. They assigned a metalsmith to pull the deck, an electrician to pull the wiring and me to pull the lines, the pumps and the bladder itself. The Maintenance Chief also offered up a case of beer for each one we changed that didn't leak...the two guys assigned decided that they'd rather work than do their 15 minutes and sit and listen to me rattling around underneath the deck for a couple of hours, so we started pulling them 3 at a time.

The helos had been defueled, but that doesn't get all of it and the "sump" in the bottom of the bladder always had a bit in it. The first time I came out with a silver dollar sized spot on my dungarees the Chief told me to spray "Right Guard" on it as the aluminum chorhydrate would keep if from blistering and therefore peeling.

Had I only thought of that last week before I went to bed!

It was so hot last week (heat index in the 110's) that when I felt my ankle start to burn, I knew I was 2 hours from done for the night and just ignored it. I should have gone and washed my leg off, but in that heat I wasn't thinking clearly...that was the culmination of too many days in a row in that kind of heat and I really wonder if one's brain doesn't start to cook after a while!

Instead my 2 hours turned to 3; I finished and showered, figuring out it was blistered, but the burn stopped. I went to bed while my nephew and wife sat up watching movies, got up and dressed the next morning without thinking about it and two hours later felt the burn even worse as the top of my sock had taken all the hide off the blister, the skin under it now raw and being ground up by the elastic and the sock rubbing away each time I moved.

I still managed to mow and get things ready for the family 4th celebrations; yesterday was the first day I've managed to avoid socks since this began and plan another for today.

I hope all is well with each of you and none of you are ever so foolish as to not go wash something off when you feel it start to sting!

May the week be kind!

alan

DEET and me...

2009-07-03T09:37:00.003-05:00

Things continue at their usual pace here, even if I'm only at half warp...

I had mentioned elsewhere I had a bad reaction to some bug spray last Saturday while working on my nephew's car; the fuzzy photo is from 5 days later...

Since then even more hide has come off and the bandages grow bigger. I finally got my wife to relent yesterday and let me use Neosporin on it instead of zinc oxide (her favorite) and am hoping it heals a bit faster now.

The Galaxie went home on Sunday afternoon, running pretty well. Think it needs a set of plugs and I still have an oil leak to hunt down once it's been degreased. Sorry I didn't get any pictures of it; the heat index was over 100 and I was lucky to be thinking at all...

Off now to help John cut up some brush and haul it before the 4th; I just wanted to apologize for my absence and wish each of you who gets to celebrate tomorrow a very Happy 4th of July!

alan

The hurrier I go...

2009-06-25T13:20:00.003-05:00

I've slowly dug my way into the garage further than I've been in years...3 corners I've repossessed, as I shelve and organize and try and find things and get them more readily "to hand" than they've been.

Tomorrow my nephew arrives with the 42 year old Galaxie I've spoken of before; having driven it for two years, he's getting ready to take it off to college but it hasn't been a "highway driver" all that time; no one has checked all the things that need looking at before it goes "on the road".

(Ball joints, tie rod ends, steering arm, idler arm, drag link, motor mounts, transmission mount, u-joints, shocks, brakes, front wheel bearings, hoses, water pump, fan clutch, belts, marker and parking lights...I have a page long list at this point.)

Of course the cool front we were promised didn't break and it will be 99 tomorrow as well...

Hope I'm forgiven for not getting around as much as usual; I've been trying to flip my hours and be outside before I'm usually even up to "beat the heat".

May the weekend be wonderful for each of you!

alan

27 years ago today...

2009-06-21T09:41:00.003-05:00

my Dad and I planned to go fish a powerplant lake about an hour south of here. Instead of taking his pretty new bass boat (the one now in my garage), I talked him into letting me bring the old 14 foot V-hull and the 1954 Sea King 12 horse outboard he had bought new; the rig I grew up fishing out of with him. He said that although the seats were "too low" and bothered his back and knees that since we needed to be home by 1pm at the latest, that would be OK.

So I picked him up, and on a beautiful Father's Day morning we fished together as we had for so many years, neither of us knowing that by the next year he would be terminally ill and already in the hospital, slowly withering away from pancreatic cancer that would claim him in October.

We fished that powerplant lake a lot as it hadn't been open to the public very long, there wasn't a lot of pressure on it and the largest bass he had caught since Bull Shoals in the 50's had come from it. Indeed, the largest fish in the state seem to come from it each fall...

Just like the weather cycle we're in this year, electrical storms were popping up frequently and fast. We launched and headed about 20 minutes or so north to fish the area where the cooler water from the river flowed in and if we weren't particularly "loading the boat" with fish, we were both enjoying being "away" from the cares of our lives for a bit; me with GM and the constant boom-bust "overtime/layoff" cycle and worrying about having a paycheck; him about his own job, the photography business that consumed his spare time, my mother and her constant antics...

As we fished our way down a bluff bank that turned back toward the main lake, we realized it had "blown up" into whitecaps and also heard the rumblings of thunder, though it still seemed quite a ways off. I asked should we head back; he said no, let's fish a bit more.

So we did, starting down one of the many "rip-rap" walls he loved to fish with a fluorescent "Bomber" crankbait. As we did the boat was getting harder to handle; between the two of us and our tackle, the trolling motor batteries, etc., we were far over the Coast Guard weight placard in the old 1964 Lone Star.

Finally when he realized I wasn't getting in any casts at all, only trying to run the trolling motor (a stern mount) and keep the bow into the wind he said perhaps we should go...

I pumped up the 6 gallon fuel can he had adapted to the old Sea King outboard when I was Dillon's age and pulled the rope; he had done the last tune-up on the outboard before he gave it to me 2 years earlier and she fired on the first pull, just like she almost always did.

As we motored around the point and into the current of the main lake, it was waves running about 3 feet, wind in the mid 20's or so and the first bolts of lightning hit the powerplant side of the lake as the clouds opened and the deluge began. He and I had discussed before that the powerplant seemed to "draw" lightning and as I tried to keep us into the waves heading into the gale; as we were soaked completely through despite the rain gear we had slipped on; as the old Lone Star started to fill with water; we watched strike after strike "walking" down both sides of the lake, knowing we were the tallest thing for 150 yards east or west and as the lake widened we were an even better target.

When the water started to overflow my shoes I reached down and unscrewed the transom plug just as he had told me I might have to someday to drain the boat as it ran down the lake; the water started going down inside and he sat in the front seat completely soaked looking as miserable as I'd ever seen him in my life.

I throttled back a bit, to be able to speak over the noise of the old outboard (from before they started exhausting through the prop) and said:

"Happy Father's Day, Dad!"

He looked at me kind of funny for a second and then started to smile...

I'd give anything to fish that lake with him again, or see that smile!

Happy Father's Day, Dad! I miss you!

May day and the week be kind to each of you; if you are a Dad I hope your Day is wonderful; if you have a Dad, treasure him...you just never know...

alan

Duck and cover...

2009-06-17T18:09:00.002-05:00

Working in the backyard today, stripping the masking from a window and heard two shots, followed by a 3rd that was fainter, but I think the same caliber. I think they were on the cross street below me. Saw the cruiser come down the hill before I had the garage locked...

Give things 20 minutes to settle down; go back out and start in with a razor blade and here 8 in a row, fast, a bit further away.

I had hinted that my neighborhood was "slipping" again; a while back the bridge two blocks down was tagged; then there started being clusters of boys with their "britches" around their knees hanging out in the next block and blocking the street and such.

Then a few weeks ago the break-ins started. Thus my interest in securing my unattached garage while we're going to be away...or even when we're just going out for an afternoon!

We've been through this before and the cycle generally lasts about 8 months 'til someone gets in enough trouble they move on. Meanwhile, I'll be keeping my head down!

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Straight flush!

2009-06-15T13:31:00.003-05:00

Having given up all hope after their bankruptcy filing and resigned myself to cutting even more corners than we already were, I received a check in the mail on Saturday that re-imbursed me for the tax penalty I paid in March in full. GM actually paid an overage to cover all the taxes and other deductions to make sure I cleared the $4500 they owed us.

Now accepted by the bank and deposited without any flashing lights saying "Tilt" or anyone chasing me down the street aftewards, a huge sigh of relief is breathed!

Part of this will go back to the card it was placed on to reduce our monthly bills; part will make up our monthly shortage for the next two months so that Dottie will end up with the vacation we've been trying to plan for months now, that way I can continue the "life of Riley" until we're back and then find a job.

Thank you each for the good thoughts and best wishes that somehow must have made this happen!

May Monday and the week that follows be kind to each of you!

alan

On a lighter note!

2009-06-10T12:48:00.003-05:00

From an e-mail I got this morning from a gal I used to work with:

"The first testicular guard (Cup) was used in baseball in 1874 and the first helmet was used in 1934.

It took 60 years for men to realize that the brain is also important! "

About right!

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

Tomorrrow we (hopefully) get Dottie in to see the surgeon; Friday I'll be in Lawrence swapping out the vacuum advance in the distributor of my nephew's Galaxie (kicking his gas mileage up about 40%). The weekend may or may not be filled with grandkids, so if I'm not around know I'm thinking of each of you!

alan

Bankruptcy papers...

2009-06-08T17:54:00.004-05:00

arrived in the afternoon mail from GM's appointee; 3 envelopes full. After reading, thinking and re-reading, I think it's probably safe to say I'll never see that $4500 for the tax penalty they slayed me with!

So on a very low note, I sat down here to escape for a bit before I go back out to paint and clicked a link that made the sun come out despite everything!

Thank you Ange and Jack!

alan

Updates...

2009-06-06T11:12:00.002-05:00

Thursday morning as Dottie was in the shower getting ready for her appointment the doctor's office called to cancel her appoinment as he had been called into an emergency surgery. Since her days off during the week are the ones he's out of the office, we're trying to figure out how to get her off this next Thursday for the rescheduled appointment.

So she called work after they hashed through the reschedule and ended up going in and working over to make up the time, then had her regular day off yesterday. Of course I was already obligated to work on my nephew's car in Lawrence, so the afternoon we lost there, then came home and we caught up on other things 'til dinner.

So life is in a holding pattern at least 'til Thursday...again!

I'm going out to mow before it rains and then "putter" 'til Dottie comes home...

May the weekend be kind and wonderful for each of you!

alan

The Follies...

2009-06-03T12:13:00.002-05:00

Trying to get the monthly errands all done in the rain in a single cab pickup without a shell yesterday didn't pan out so well; after I go put a coat of topcoat on two windows I have to return one item from yesterday and finish the rest of it.

The windows jumped up my priority list because someone came to the door last week, claiming to be from GE and telling me four of the houses in the block below me had been broken into last month and they had just sold an alarm to one of my neighbors ("you know Bill from down there, don't you"? "No, I don't...") and offering to pay me to let them put a sign in my yard if I didn't want an alarm...? That still doesn't make sense to me...

Anyway, my single unattached garage sits 37 feet behind the house, two windows on the yard side that I can see along with the front door, one on the uphill side I can't. Through the years 4 of the panes of glass had been cracked between my kids and others in the neighborhood with BB rifles; I hadn't worried about it much and just taped them...until now.

A year before I retired I had to take a detour for a few months and saw someone else with a similar set-up had screwed "lattice panel" like you might use around a porch over his windows; no it won't stop someone determined, but it will frustrate the lazier and send them elsewhere, just like my double key deadbolts. So that's my plan for now...I have far too much invested in tools to start over and there's a boat full of tackle out there, along with the lawn mower and trimmer and such.

Dottie goes in tomorrow to see about her hernia; Friday I am supposed to go try to fix a waterleak in the trunk of my nephew's Galaxie in Lawrence (depending on what they tell my wife tomorrow) so I hope you forgive me as I get a bit "caught up in the whirl" of life again for a bit!

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

The axe has fallen...

2009-06-01T13:08:00.004-05:00

the die is cast and perhaps the candle flickering at the end of the tunnel will burn bright again someday...

The crux of the meeting for me the other day was that when the new improved concession contract was approved that retirees would lose their dental and vision care; prescription copays would go from $11/20 for generic/namebrand to $25/50; there would be no more funding of ed drugs or pumps for acid reflux (thank goodness neither of those affect us personally). There are other changes, but they are smaller; those are "the big pills".

I'm still hoping to see some kind of health care reform that not only makes these points moot, but addresses all of our needs; 'til then I'll be muddling through grateful for what I have.

That contract was approved, btw, by about 72% and by all the plants, even the ones that knew they would be closed; it isn't like there was an alternative. By approving this before the filing of bankruptcy this morning, we were told that the judges can't alter the agreement and that we will get to keep our pensions.

The funding for our medical will be contingent on what the stock prices do as instead of the cash that GM was supposed to pay into the fund, set up in the last contract, for it to be taken over by the Union next year so GM was no longer liable for retiree healthcare has now been replaced with stock.

I spent yesterday walking among steam engines and reapers and other old farm machinery, taking a head count of how many it used to take to do things that are now done at the push of a button; I've watched those same changes transpire in my own life. I know I won't be the last.

I don't know the answers to it all! Do they lie in population control, better education, new technologies...?

I hope my grandkids see a brighter future than I do right now!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

p.s. For those who click on the photo, if you happen to notice "John Milner's Deuce Coupe" on Dillon's t-shirt, the irony isn't lost on me...

New days, new deals...

2009-05-27T14:01:00.002-05:00

Off to the Union Hall in a few minutes to listen to the details of the "new" concession contract...less than 1/4 of the way into the 4 year concession contract we approved last year. I'm hoping to glean some details about what happens to the retirees; there aren't enough of us to outvote the active workforce anyway!

Still stuck in my "craw" is the "Prop H8te" decision that came down yesterday; now that the "majority" has managed to take away the rights of other citizens to marriage, what's next? Since I'm not a Bible thumping church-going God fearer, do I lose my right to vote? A fair trial? Which inequality will they decide to force on someone next?

I realize the court could only rule on the the questions presented and there will be appeals; I hope this travesty is overturned in one of them. If not, then someone needs to draft a new ballot measure, one written to withstand the inevitable challenges, and then not only make sure that everyone with a vested interest is registered to vote but actually gets there! The vote was too close to stand if everyone who knows someone disenfranchised by this casts a ballot!

Dottie seems to be doing OK, though there's some "taking it easy" going on that isn't her usual forte. We made it to "Angels and Demons" yesterday and both enjoyed it. She's very enamored of the books and had made a point of finishing that one last Thursday night before our planned viewing last Friday, before we woke up and found that hernia.

The liberties that Ron Howard took with the book she was very happy with; I won't spoil anything for anyone with details.

Lots of good previews for things coming out this summer; hoping that our gift cards hold out for the best of them!

Now, to go stand under that sword of Damacles...

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Memorial Day...

2009-05-25T14:32:00.005-05:00

Dottie is at work and as I catch up with Monaco and Indy from yesterday I can't help but think of the generations past. My Dad and his enlistment at 17 during WW2; his 2 older brothers, one in the Navy, the other in the Army Air Corps, shot down and hidden by a Belgian farmer to keep him from capture. My Mom's Dad enlisting in the SeaBees because the Navy said he was too old; her Mom's 3 brothers enlisting, one to never come home again, one to die of cancer when I was 2, the 3rd captured and held as a POW in Germany, starved from 180 down to 80 pounds and never in good health again. Grandma and her sisters building B-25 Mitchells in the plant I would later hire into after GM bought it from North American.

Dottie's Dad, unable to enlist because he'd had "yellow jaundice" and you coudln't enlist if you couldn't give blood, giving up the Green Mountains of Vermont to go to Boston and work in the shipyards building sub-chasers and mine-sweepers. Her Mom, Marion, a mechanical engineer hired by Pratt and Whitney to lay out assembly lines and staff them for their various plants.

Marion's Dad, a mechanical engineer as well, enlisting during WW1 and serving in France; I have an aircraft identification book of his from during the "Great War". My Dad's Dad, fresh out of telegraphy school for the railroad, enlisted and sent to join the Signal Corps as a telegrapher in the trenches where he was "gassed". He had heart and lung problems that plagued him for the next 46 years 'til they finally claimed him. His brother, Jesse who served in the Navy during WW1- I have a letter he wrote Grandpa from a VA home in 1962 telling him whatever he did he didn't want to end up there, that the screams at night were horrific. Some of their older siblings were in the Spanish-American War, though our family history gets a bit hazy as it spreads out.

Their grandfather, Hiram, dead of measles contracted during the "War Between the States" in Tennessee in 1864. In the Confederate Army...I know from my Mom's Dad that he had family on the other side of the lines then, though I don't have names to put with it.

On the wall in the house Dottie grew up in in Vermont is the Union Army discharge certificate for her Dad's namesake, his grandfather.

I'm sure for each I know of there are others...I am sure many of you have just as many in your families who have served; some forever!

Please, collect the stories you can, where you can and pass them on to those who will be here when we aren't?

From a Vietnam era sailor married to another Vietnam era sailor; the names, the stories, the sacrifices are too important to let fall away; we can't let this become just another holiday!

May this week be kind to each of you!

alan

"Never count your chickens..."

2009-05-23T02:19:00.003-05:00

could pretty well apply to the last couple of days!

Thursday, having saved some old window sashes for their glass when I replaced the ones in the house, I spent some time chipping out a broken one in the garage, having re-puttied all the ones that didn't need glass, then even longer carefully chipping a 24x36 out of it's sash to make a 24x24. Never having had luck cutting my own, I eschewed Dottie's Dad's cutter along with my Dad's and used a brand new one. Nicely scribed line; supported the "keep" side the length of the cut, tapped it...I had about 10" of straight line then it angled away from the cut. Tapped it again to try and "clean it up" and blew up the entire edge.

As I was sitting on the tailgate of my truck hearing all those "sailor words" in my vocabulary "in my head", smiling because they weren't out loud, I decided I was buying glass for that one and the other two.

Friday morning, up a few minutes before Dottie I started the kettle for coffee and slipped in here to check e-mail and check in with some of you. Put a note on Facebook to explain our plans and that I wouldn't be playing WordScraper, then I heard Dottie call me.

She started to get up and it hurt, not badly, but just a "something's not right". Lying on her back everything was fine, but the minute she stood up there was an obvious knot on one side of her lower abdomen, normally symmetrical. About the diameter of my fist, as thick as my hand.

We are assuming at this point it's a hernia.

7 years ago she had a kidney and her gall bladder taken out; they split her from almost her sternum to a handwidth below her naval. The surgeon left a resident to staple her up; he overlapped the layers and gave her a wicked scar that has caused problems ever since. When I saw her postop she looked like she had a zipper...

Phone call to our doctor; he's busy, leave a message, wait for the phone call back; if there are any of a number of other symptoms, go to the ER, otherwise, call the surgeon. Call the surgeon, no openings 'til June 4th...if there are any other symptoms go to the ER...

So now it's noon; we should be coming home from the movie and I have one sash in the garage with no glass in it. I went and got the 3 pieces I needed cut, came home and got the one in in case the rain started early. Then it was time to pick up her paycheck and run a few other errands.

She told her boss she wouldn't be doing any transfers (moving patients who can't move themselves; she's not supposed to have been doing them since her joint replacements) or moving tables and chairs 'til we know what is going on and was told "Good" because her boss thinks some of the others leave things they don't feel like doing because they know she will.

Meanwhile, knowing that most likely GM will file bankruptcy on the 1st, I wonder if I'll even have insurance...I "know" somehow that I will, but that nagging fear is still there.

Dottie works tomorrow and then is off on Sunday for my nephew's high school graduation. I'll be watching Indy off tape for the first time in many years; I usually time shift Monaco, but watch Indy beginning to end.

Go Danica!

May each of your weekends be kind!

alan

My last...

2009-05-19T17:01:00.002-05:00

was much more about the rest of the world than my own little corner...wishing I could deliver hugs and chicken soup and some car repairs for those who could use a bit of help. I am after all, someone who always tries to "fix" everything and despairs when he can't!

Though somehow a nice Italian dinner sounds much more "the ticket" than chicken soup right now...

alan

If I weren't bald...

2009-05-18T15:34:00.003-05:00

there are times I'd rip my hair out, I swear!

Having been forbidden from blogging before I ever began (by several years), this haunt has been a secret for many years now. It's not that my sons, my sister and my nephews don't know; I even shared the URL with a trusted few from work what seems like ages ago now. I don't think any of them have been here in years...my sister let something slip about my Facebook page a while back and I expected to hear more about it, but there was a grimace and silence...so far...

Keeping secrets from the one who knows you best is frustrating! Trying to keep a lid on the emotions when someone you care for is going through something, no matter whether it's small or life-threatening; when you know that were it a different life you'd be "there" at the drop of a hat (or a plane ticket).

So when asked what's wrong you say "nothing"...or cite something else.

Wish it weren't that way, but I'm not about to pull the plug on this or my friendships or my heart. So, I'll deal somehow...the double edged sword of regret flaying me the whole time...

Not what I was planning to write today; forgive me!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Nice guys...

2009-05-11T12:35:00.004-05:00

the first words that popped into your mind are exactly where we're going, sadly...

A few months ago my older nephew moved to western Kansas for what he thought was going to be his dream job. It fell through, though he immediately found another. He's had a "gift" for mechanical things and his education at WyoTech has stood him well; he can troubleshoot things on the fly, fabricate, whatever he needs to do.

Raised well by my sister and her husband, he's always been one to help anyone he can, no matter what it took. An Eagle Scout, in every sense of the word and as nice a guy as you could ever hope to meet, let alone be related to!

This "other job" he took was partly as a mechanic and partly maintaining the equipment for an assembly line. A month or so ago the 2nd shift manager asked for a key to his toolboxes because when he goes home they had no access to tools; he was promised no one else would be in his tools.

It didn't take long before he found things lying out when he came in to work, but didn't complain about it. He didn't complain when things weren't brought back for a day or two...then suddenly the keys went missing.

Still trusting, he left them unlocked, trying to do the right thing, to help keep "the line" running. (Something I remember all too well!)

Last Friday they laid him off. He went through his boxes and told them that about $400 in tools were missing and asked for the tools or the money. He was told it wasn't their fault if he couldn't keep track of his tools and that he had no way of proving he hadn't lost them instead of the company!

We talked on the phone when he called to wish Dillon a "Happy Birthday" at the party on Saturday and I got him to tell me what he really needed that was missing; they had taken every wrench he had from 3/4" up and most of his screwdrivers. The other things that were missing he had duplicates of and still had his sockets and impact wrenches.

He was going to the unemployment office on Monday (today) and to try to start job hunting on Tuesday. I talked to Dottie and went through ads and the online sales and figured out how to replace his wrenches and screwdrivers and call them early Christmas and birthday presents and since he'll be here for his brother's graduation next week he can take them home with him instead of me shipping them. I even managed to buy Craftsman through the sale ads and the "Craftsman Club" ad, so he'll get the warranty.

It's really sad to have him treated that way, though an open toolbox is always a magnet. I was lucky because when I hit my squadron in the Navy your box was issued, every tool was marked not only by engraving but by reflective tape in color codes as well. If they found one of your tools in a jet intake, on the flight deck, or anywhere except in your toolbox you were up for "captain's mast" (non-judicial punishment)!

So you didn't loan anything to anyone unless you really trusted them or you stood right there with them to get it back when they were finished!

At GM things were so bad that just using the locks built into the boxes didn't work, so they would have extra brackets welded onto the boxes for long locking rods and padlocks. It wasn't that there weren't ways to open them still, but it took so much effort they were usually left alone. When we shut down the plant and contractors were working inside, they would load them all into trailers and have them taken away from the plant 'til we came back to work!

I grew up at the end of the days where you could leave your windows open, or a car unlocked and not worry about what you'd find when you returned. When a handshake meant something; when if it wasn't yours you didn't take it; when if you borrowed it you returned it in the same shape or better than you got it!

There are many ways in which I love "now", but there are some that truly sadden me!

For my nephew a lesson learned, hopefully; yet sadly, a bit of trust extinguished.

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

For lack of a nail...

2009-05-06T11:28:00.003-05:00

I've let a week slip away since my last missive; I've started to write something more than once, but thought better of it.

I still have enough standing water behind the garage that I could plant rice, but it's too wet to try and grade it to make it drain and more rain is inbound. In a bit I'm going out with a hoe and try to trench it just a bit. After 5 days since the last heavy rain, it's finally quit draining down the hill and across my driveway. I mowed, except for the swamp next to and immediately behind the garage; as I finished the landlord up the hill sank his tractor in the center of that yard on his first swath through it. We pulled his Cub Cadet out and he decided he'll pay his grandsons to mow it by hand this weekend...I don't envy them!

Dillon's 10th birthday party is on Saturday, a joint affair with his best friend Andrew. Perspective has me thinking lots about him turning a year older than I was when I lost Dad's Dad and 5 years older than my oldest was when he and his brother lost my Dad; anytime I start to get depressed, that is enough to make me know I'm lucky!

Having watched a minority share of bondholders throw Chrysler into bankruptcy, I don't have much hope for GM avoiding it. I'm not sure that killing Pontiac will leave GMC and Buick viable on their own, though perhaps if they bring them in under the Cadillac dealerships they can pull that part off. When they say that 42% of their dealerships are going to close through this whether they go through bankruptcy or not, it sure doesn't bode well for a lot of jobs...let alone the factory and supplier jobs!

I look at the railyards each time I head south; the largest switchyard in the midwest, knowing it used to bustling, almost all the rails full, seeing it half empty kind of tells you where the economy is, along with all the empty billboards around town!

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Sometimes...

2009-04-29T14:47:00.004-05:00

I forget that the smarter people in this world don't follow the news all the time. There was a point at which I didn't either, but 30 years in the auto factory drove me to NPR because between the commercials and the continual cycling of 100 or so songs on mainstream radio, I just couldn't take it anymore! Plus, having jazz as a first love led me down to the left end of the radio dial as well...

So I apologize for the vagueness of my last post! Knowing I'm not the smartest guy in the room, I tend to assume that if I know something the rest of the world does as well. Whether it's the horrific beating to death of Angie Zapata with a fire extinguisher, or the women of Zimbabwe that are in such fear of the stigma of having a "legal" abortion that they are instead showing up at doctor's with sticks broken off inside them, or ground glass, or battery acid. Whether it's the lady in Dallas yesterday, waiting 2 hours in the doctor's office with a 103F. fever because she's 8 1/2 months pregnant and fears she has "swine" flu, or the ongoing lack of real body armor for our children in Iraq and Afghanistan I figure that by the time it trickles down to me, the rest of the world already knows.

For those of you who don't, I'm glad! I'm glad you don't feel the ache that haunts me as I listen to the stories or read them; I'm glad you don't wake up wondering what you might have done to change things, or shed the tears of empathy for the victims. I've tried to "wean myself" away from the radio and the TV and the things I read on-line and actually have cut down since I retired, but like the moth and the flame, I just can't stay away. My addictive personality has found yet another way to let me down...

In the old days when I worked the assembly line I kept a little notebook in my stock rack and when things got to be too much words would find their way into it...

From those years:

“A Life Lost”

“Shiny brown hair
strewn over the snow,
her eyes staring
sightless
at the sky”
Says the article
in the New Year's
“New Yorker”.

Someone's daughter?
Sister?
Wife?
Mother?
Kosovar freedom fighter?
Serbian rebel?
Another sacrifice
on the altar
of ethnocentricity...

How many millennia
have we left to learn
that teaching tolerance
brings life and
happiness
for our loved ones;
teaching hatred
reaps death!

_______________________

Words fail me more often now. Whether it's their futility, my lack of reading of late failing to expand my vocabulary and my thoughts, or the onset of cynicism and old age, I wish more and more often now I could just pick up a trumpet and bend a blue note or two...

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

At last...

2009-04-22T19:23:00.002-05:00

After too many deaths...

too many snickered jokes...

too much pain...

justice!

Rest in Peace, Angie!

alan

Sinking curveballs...

2009-04-20T12:45:00.002-05:00

This was "the weekend" for the family birthday party we usually throw for our two sons. We rent a shelterhouse at one of the local parks, take the grill, the bicycles, play baseball...those of you who have been around a while have seen pictures from some of those outings.

With our oldest living in DC now, we hadn't counted on him getting home. That's the 1st time in 31 years he hasn't been here for his birthday; we've gotten pretty lucky to get this far into life before it happened.

Saturday my oldest grandson had a car entered in a Cub Scout "Pinewood Derby" for the first time. He and John had spent an afternoon here last week cutting and shaping it then took it home to paint. Dottie was off, and Noel and the other grandkids went and it was quite an affair.

Since their troop holds it at the GM plant I used to work in, an affair in more ways than one. It was my first time setting foot back in the door since I retired; though it wasn't a production day, I saw a lot of Union officials I hadn't seen since then, along with management, some currently employed, some who had been forced out last fall but were there because of their involvement with Boy Scouts. We got to see the final production ready version of the new Buick that we were getting in parts for the preliminary builds for as I retired; it looks very good and if the quality we've always built with holds then between it and the Malibu the Fairfax plant's future should be assured as long as the corporation's is.

Though Dillon's car didn't do as well as we'd have liked, for his first time entering he was happy and we learned much of the technical stuff we need to know for next time. He had a great time and was still carrying his car around yesterday at the family birthday party to show it off.

Saturday evening we cooked a birthday dinner for John and his family and gave him some of his presents. Though we've cut our spending we shopped well and he seemed delighted with our choice of Wii and DS games.

We had rain Saturday morning, then thunderstorms Saturday night with a real deluge we didn't need. When John put his dogs out Sunday morning he lost a sandal in the mud things were so soaked and Dottie and I woke to water in our basement again, though we caught it before it became a major issue.

On top of that, the temps had dropped into the mid 50's with a 30mph north wind, so the party at the park got revised into a party at my sister's house in Lawrence. The only things that really changed were us not having to take a grill or crockpot and baseball got changed to basketball in their driveway late in the afternoon when the wind died down and the sun finally came out for a bit.

Since they had bought a Wii "Fit" to go with their game machine, we watched the grandkids attempts at snowboarding and soccer while cooking brats and such...quite interesting, lol!

Saturday my sister had taken my nephew to Emporia to enroll in college; he is all set, classes picked, ID/debit/key card made and ready to go. She on the other hand isn't ready to let go and will cry at the drop of a hat if you mention it. I keep reminding her that at his age (19 now) I had already been halfway around the world; she doesn't want to hear that either!

So now it's Monday and I'm running laundry and getting ready to wander back out to the garage to try and sort some more and organize things. I should mow, but think that with the water still draining down the hill I'll give it at least until tomorrow or Wednesday just so I don't tear up more than I cut!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

I guess it really is Spring...

2009-04-15T16:04:00.005-05:00

though it feels like it's been drug kicking and screaming into being!

After more rain than we've seen all winter (we're actually ahead for the year now) they called for another frost on Monday evening. These are what I had before...I really figured they were so wet that covering them wouldn't help, but did anyway.

So when I uncovered them yesterday, unable to even stand up, I wasn't sure they would open, but when the afternoon sun came around the corner of the house and down the driveway...

Angel has wanted to be outside every minute she could; at 14 she has one hip that bothers her a lot and has been on MSM for it for over a year now. In the beginning it rolled the clock back to where she was like a 5 year old again, but now she has good days and bad days like any 100-something human would. We already clipped her fur because she was panting a lot more than she used to and would always feel "hot" under it when you patted her, so she may get clipped 3 or 4 times this year instead of the usual spring and summer ones.

Things are ramping up for the annual trek to the park for the spring birthday party this weekend. It used to be we split the difference between Bill and John's birthdays but with Bill living in DC this year, we won't have him home on his birthday for the first time ever. Guess we're lucky we got to 31!

My nephew was in Orlando with his choir, singing at Disney World when his birthday went by in February and with his preparations for graduation, college and job we haven't managed to slow him down enough to have his yet so he'll be finally having his this weekend with John.

Of course, after these last two days in the upper 60's, they're saying 56 and showers for Sunday...

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you and some glimmer of green brighten your spring as well!

alan

Just a fly-by...

2009-04-14T16:22:00.002-05:00

to say I'm on the mend. Slept on the couch Sunday night because I was coughing so badly and didn't want to keep waking Dottie up, but had to get off the cough syrup and the drugs as they weren't helping anymore.

I slipped outside and took a photo of the 3 tulip buds yesterday before I covered them yet again as we went back down to 34F again last night, about 1 above Celsius. When I uncovered them today they wouldn't stand anymore...I'll get that photo uploaded in the morning as I've been picking up limbs and running errands today.

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Spluttering Saturday...

2009-04-11T15:58:00.002-05:00

I'm still trying to fight off Dottie's cold...a few hours good then a few hours miserable. I get to where I almost feel like doing something then I'll cough myself into a splitting headache and decide not to...

I mailed that paperwork off Priority with a return receipt to make sure it was there by Friday afternoon. I've done my part and now will sit back to see what happens!

Tomorrow Dottie is off for the holiday and we'll be spending the day at John and Noel's, watching the grandkids hunt Easter eggs and such. Hopefully we get the egg hunt in before the rain begins again.

I'm giving up on my tulips for the year; last year I had over a dozen, but this year they've been covered so much that only 4 buds had come up and one of them snapped off under the cover in the wind the other night. It's supposed to freeze again tonight and perhaps again later in the week...perhaps next year!

I saw someone's photos of flowers in her neighbors yard, ones planted by his wife and now she's gone and he's in a nursing home and no one was there to enjoy them. I acquired my tulips that way...the women who owned the house up the hill from me gave almost everything she had to Jim and Tammy Faye "back in the day". I had kept her car running for her and such, helping her mow on the hot days and doing what I could without intruding too much. When she died and the house was sold, the next tenant didn't care a bit about the flowerbeds and such, so finally I asked if I could transplant the tulips and did. Each year I think of Mabel Rose and wonder if anyone else does...

The house has been through a half dozen tenants since then and been vacant the last 3 years. I'm sure no one but me remembers where those flowers came from, but I'm glad they aren't mowed under like her iris bed was!

May your weekends each be wonderful!

alan

I got a letter from GM today...

2009-04-08T16:26:00.002-05:00

that said the Union negotiated language into the "Special Attrition" agreement to cover those of us who were under 55 and penalized like I was when we took the "buyout". It said if I mail them copies of the right papers, I will be reimbursed as long as I do it before June 30th.

With all the bankruptcy rumors flying, I'm on my way to the Post Office now!

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Election Day...

2009-04-07T16:30:00.003-05:00

Though it's only local issues, some of them are looming very important over the heads of all who live on "this side" of the river.

Largest among them are the shenanigans at our local "public utility" as outlined in this summary I found online when I "Googled" up the keywords:

BPU's Challenges Could Boost KCK Electric Bills

We have been hearing these stories for quite a while now; two weeks ago one of the indicted in the State probe of the missing $400,000 took his own life. Then there are the mentioned millions in EPA fines the utility is liable for...In the run up to the current election one of the sitting board members said that the board members aren't responsible for what goes on at the utility!

Needless to say, he didn't get my vote!

If they aren't responsible then why are we voting for them?

The evening news should be interesting!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

The view from here...

2009-04-03T16:18:00.008-05:00

The other day when I checked and found I had managed to get one more pension check "before the end of the world" I said something about it on my Facebook page prompting an e-mail exchange with someone who said afterwards I should post something like it here.

I try not to climb on the soapbox too often, as we all have enough people who feel obliged to do that in our lives and I'd rather not be a part of that club!

Yet with all that's gone on of late, perhaps some of you might find parts of it interesting, so I'm pasting and doing a bit of editing...

My friend, seeing my Facebook note, wrote and asked if I thought Obama was doing the "right" thing by the auto industry, or was he going to make things worse. My reply:
_________________________

"We all tend to fear for ourselves, for our own best interests, myself included. I beat myself both mentally and physically for 30 years in return for a promise, one written and signed and supposedly guaranteed. One that others gave up payraises to get in the generations before me so that there would never be another generation to go through what theirs and the one before had gone through. (The Great Depression)

People gave up dimes and quarters in an era when that was 30 minutes pay for those benefits; that some judge can wipe it away as though it it were nothing is somehow not only terrifying, but wrong. When the airline industries went through bankruptcies these last 30 years many of their workers, given the same promises I was, ended up receiving $1 on every $4 they were owed. Many others have ended up with far less. My wife's father, 30 years in a woolen mill in Vermont, got a severance check and told:

"Sorry, new ownership!" At 64, his world come to an end, he sat down on the porch, started drinking and never stopped.

Why should the banks and the creditors "get theirs" first, other than their control of the levers of power?

Through my years I've known so many people. I knew the man that was the highest paid employee at Consolidated Aircraft at the outbreak of WW2. He was an inspector who had worked his way from machinist to tool and die maker to the most important hourly man in the plant in San Diego. He was considered critical and though he tried to enlist was told he was too important. He made $.40 an hour...

I knew several that hired in in the first group when GM took over the old North American B-25 plant where my grandmother and her sisters had worked during the war. They hired in in 1946 at $.47 an hour...

When I hired in I got $5.44 and came up to scale at a tick over $7 at the end of 90 days in 1978. At that point our insurance covered us immediately, including my already pregnant with our 2nd son wife (now it's 18 months after you hire in) and also covered office visits and most everything else; prescriptions were $3.

So to have Richard Shelby or anyone else tell me that I was or am the problem is like throwing gasoline on a match. We were within a dollar of the same wages and benefits as his non-union Japanese transplants before this last contract was opened up yet again! The entire industry was "off the hook" for retiree health care, paying only part of it's estimated cost into a trust fund to be managed by the Union. Now they are trying to get out of paying even that by substituting stock instead.

For years if Chevrolet came up with something that sold, management diluted the market by changing a bit of trim and badging Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac variants. They created Saturn and diluted the market so badly they killed Oldsmobile, a name that had stood for over 100 years. Yet like AIG execs getting their bonus checks, they already took their money and ran, leaving the workers to pay the price.

I am sure that Obama had good reason for asking for Rick Wagoner's resignation. Probably to do with the fact that they still weren't killing entire divisions of products and eliminating the dual and triple badging within them.

Yet Wagoner was the first one to knock down the levels of "white shirts" within the plants, let alone the layers between us and them. He did away with thousands of salaried jobs for the hundreds assembly jobs that left, the first time I had seen that. We went from 1 white shirt in the plant for every 8 to 10 hourly people to about 1 in 15, a step in the right direction...though those offices in Detroit and elsewhere seemed to have a knack for hiding their friends out in "temporary slots" out in the factories, so that they didn't show up in the census of management/hourly ratios.

When I hired in in 1978 there were 5,000 of us on 2 shifts to build 549 cars per shift. When I left there were about 1500 of us building the same number of cars. The number of white shirts never reduced as dramatically as our ranks did until Wagoner took the reins.

Though he tried to reduce those numbers, there were good salaried people that were forced out so someone's buddy or wife or relative could have their job...these cuts weren't always done by merit. So we ended up with mid-level people from the Detroit offices or elsewhere trying to manage line workers when they had never built a car in their life and us building cars despite them. Some of them have since been forced out as well, others I'm sure are making other lives miserable still!

With all of that going on, the Malibu and Saturn won back to back Car of the Year awards, something never done by another assembly plant. Ever! The Buick they were getting ready to bring on line as I retired has apparently done the same.

The man who headed the design team for all of these, Bob Lutz, is also retiring and that worries me because he did have a knack, much like Harley Earl in the years gone by.

I read a Wall Street Journal story night before last that illustrates a lot of my frustrations:

"Malibu Shows Road to Revival Is Bumpy"

It was hard not to look up that man's address in the phone book!

For the same reason that it was hard to swallow my pride and quell the ache in my heart when my older son's wife went and paid cash for a new Hyundai a few weeks go because her Dad told her GM and Ford were going under...

I told Dottie I'd never speak to him again...I can't do that to my daughter-in-law, but don't think I could let it in my driveway! I'd walk or call a cab before I rode in it, I swear!

It's not like I haven't ridden in them before, I even rented a Volvo once to see what the fuss was about!

I told my son that it's not about her buying a foreign car, but that she bought one built in Korea, right now, when keeping as many dollars here as we can is more important than it's been in 75 years! If she wanted a Toyota or Honda or whatever, at least buy one built there that paid American workers instead of the couple of longshoreman and truck drivers that unloaded and delivered it!"

_____________________

Since I wrote that the Union has offered to accept stock in lieu of the money the companies were supposed to have paid into the VEBA fund on condition that the government offer to warranty it as they have the cars themselves...I haven't heard of anyone approving that idea yet.

I hope none of you take offense at this...none was intended!

May your weekends be kind!

alan

4 Minutes of Magic!

2009-03-29T10:35:00.004-05:00

Please, if you can spare just under 4 minutes...

A while back I listed one of my favorite films as being "The Black Imp". When most think of Georges Melies they think of his "Trip to the Moon" but for me, this and "The Cook in Trouble" are both delights. Made less than 10 years after the Lumiere Brothers first films; made before there were computers or even a standardized camera/film system, his feats are amazing!

When I had my first VCR many years ago I recorded a PBS show called "Matinee at the Bijou" one afternoon on a whim. I was lucky enough to end up with a Harold Lloyd film called "Dr. Jack". The next week, even luckier, I discovered "Safety Last".

I was so impressed by these I unwired my VCR and took it to my Dad's to show them to him...to him they were just things he'd seen growing up...

A few weeks later I was treated to "The Thief of Bagdad" in a print restored in Britain by a gentleman named Kevin Brownlow.

A trip to the local library turned up "The Parade's Gone By", Brownlow's book on the "silent era" (the movies were never silent and a good many weren't black and white) and cinema became an ongoing love that continues. Some of you remember me posting about watching Mary Pickford movies just after we joined Netflix, things I couldn't rent locally. That local library has a cinema buff working in it's AV department who has made a point of acquiring things through the years; through him I first saw the films of Georges Melies on VHS many years ago, mostly unrestored as that is something that costs much less now in the age of the computer and DVD's than it did even 15 years ago.

I've spoken before of how easily I fall in love, not only with each of you who find your way here, but also those who have touched me through the magic of film. Abel Gance, Chaplin, Keaton, Pickford, Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, Louise Brooks...the list is not only most likely endless but still growing.

This all comes up now because just before I retired I heard a piece on NPR about a book: "The Invention of Hugo Cabret". The book, about an orpaned boy living in a Paris railstation who meets an old man running a toy store there...Georges Melies! In the interview they said that when it was nominated for a National Book Award a whole roomful of normally very staid librarians stood, clapped and cheered!

It was the last hardcover book I bought before I retired, hoping it might set my grandchildren on a course to love those same films that I have so dearly. (They have already watched Chaplin's "The Kid" spellbound and talked of it for days after.)

Dillon was already reading the Harry Potter books at the time, but since his parents hadn't heard of it, they said one of them had to read it first. Since neither of them had, I borrowed it back when they were on vacation last week and on Friday I started it at about 3:30 as we left to go to Lawrence for my nephew's last musical program before he graduates.

The book, written by someone who has illustrated other things, combines the illustrations into the narrative in a manner he compares to film. You read "scenes" then scenes are illustrated over the course of 10 pages or so, then the narrative picks up again from the last frame of illustration.

534 pages, by the time the program started at 7:30 I was down to the last 25...sitting in a room full of students and parents along with my wife and sister, having to raise my bifocals to wipe tears from my eyes. An amazing book!

A teacher I met through ICQ many years ago told me that "The Little Prince" is not really a children's book, though everyone thinks it is. I went to the library and found it (in the children's section) and read it for the first time since kindergarten or 1st grade...Ana was right!

This one, "The Invention of Hugh Cabret" may be a children's book to some, but if you've ever loved film...if you've ever had your heart stolen by someone in print or on the silver screen then perhaps it's not a children's book after all, or perhaps you have enough child inside to give your heart once again!

So as I wish you all and warm and kind "rest of your weekend" and a Monday that is kind as well, I'm off to pop a restored collection of Melies films in the DVD player courtesy of Netflix...

alan

P.S.- For those who may wonder, I didn't put a link to Melies "Trip to the Moon" because I couldn't find a YouTube or Google version that was the full 13:48 runtime that didn't have someone narrating it. I don't need someone to explain to me what I can see (unless perhaps it's "Memento" or something similar) and the narrative is so distracting I just couldn't...

36 years ago today...

2009-03-23T11:48:00.003-05:00

I enlisted. I was 17, 2 months short of graduating high school and knew that there was no way I was staying home another minute.

Having been told by my Dad that I couldn't accept the full paid music scholarship to a university 180 miles from home because it was too far for me to be from home at 17, the Navy recruiter that had been picking me up to go play "Taps" at the Navy funerals for 2 years had a pretty easy time of it. Originally I had planned to enlist for 4 years and go to the Navy's music school, but at 17 I had to have my parent's permission for that as well and Dad wouldn't sign for a 4 year hitch.

So I ended up signing up for 2 years active duty and 4 years as a Reserve, intending on re-enlisting at the end of 2 and trying to get in the music school then. Christmas of that year found me in the Phillipines.

Things changed of course! The freedom to "be" I found led me through a lot of changes, a lot for the better, a lot that weren't as well. None I regret, even those that probably cost a few brain cells.

Though "the path not taken" always beckons, I can't look at my sons or my grandchildren and have regrets about the one I chose!

May Monday be kind and the week as well!

alan

Outnumbered!

2009-03-19T19:34:00.002-05:00

When Bill moved we took in Laura's cats, two 8 year old males, until they can afford a house. In D.C..

We of course, already had an old dog and a 2 year old male cat of our own.

Last week one of my projects was putting a screen door on a bedroom because it was that or buy another 110 window unit air conditioner for that room and pay the bill. The door was cheaper...

Because one of their cats will eat anything in sight, cat food, dog food, the trash. The other one likes to hide and we feared him getting in the basement and not being able to find him.

Also, Frankie doesn't much care for either of them. So he has the run of the house, they have the run of the front bedroom and in the evenings while Frankie's napping on our bed, we let Alley and Willow run loose after we cover the dog food and shut our bedroom door (keeping Willow out of the basement).

I pan for cat turds twice a day now because her cats are huge and they are sharing a litter box...and feed them twice day, holding Alley's food dish so he doesn't eat too fast and make himself "yak".

So, I was about petted out to begin with.

John is taking Noel on a trip for their 10th anniversary. My sister has all 3 kids right now, we'll have Dillon over the weekend and Cindy will be moving to their house on Sunday to get the kids off to school on Monday (they're on break this week).

So he brought their two dogs over this afternoon. A full grown shepard and a knee high something-or-other. So now in addition to the screen door I have two kiddie gates on either end of the kitchen to control who gets to Angel's food and to control who is near the back door to go outside. (One lead and the yard isn't fenced.) Of course that means we get to put them up and take them down each time we need through, or we get to vault them...

And we get to drive to their house twice a day to feed their two cats!

I'm glad I'm already pretty much bald!

May Friday be kind and your weekends be wonderful!

alan

The day after...

2009-03-18T17:28:00.003-05:00

the only thing better than St. Patrick's Day is the corned beef leftovers!

:o)

In trying to tighten things up where we can, we hadn't been to the store since the 1st and didn't buy corned beef on that run. Yesterday, with Dottie off after working the weekend, we needed milk and Sam's had corned beef in the cooler. She kept saying no, but knowing how much her heritage and the holiday both mean to her (she makes a point every year of sending cards to the kids and grandkids; she still has a grocery store shamrock I bought for her 20 years ago that goes out in the summer and comes in in the winter) there was no way I could not, so I told her she could pick or I would. Of course I was told where my taste is...but at least she picked what she wanted.

The rest of the day was spent with her cooking and me puttering. It was 80 Farenheit yesterday, the windows were not only open all day but all night. Now it's 55 and cloudy and I've closed the windows and re-lit the furnace, happy that they aren't predicting another freeze!

And to loop back to my opening, besides the corned beef sandwich I ate for lunch, I'm truly looking forward to it and leftover potatoes for dinner!

Dillon is supposed to spend the weekend this week and he's very ready to have some time away from his siblings. They are so close in age (2 years apart) I can't blame him, everything is a compromise when he's at home.

I plan on getting another post up before then, but just in case I don't, I'll hope that the rest of the week is kind to each of you and that your weekends are warm and wonderful and turning to thoughts of spring!

alan

Sunday musings...

2009-03-15T14:08:00.002-05:00

Uncovered the tulip bed for what I hope is the last time this morning. Yesterday I drained and cleaned the humidifier so it can dry for a few days before I bag it and put it away. The grass is starting to green up and the dog wants to spend every minute she can outside as long as someone else is out there; I don't know if she's worried about her hips or that she can't see well enough to know if she's safe or not. Going on 14 and not a small dog, we know we're on borrowed time and my heart aches thinking about it!

I've spent some time yesterday and today trying to dig my bench out from a winter's accumulation of things it was too cold to sort or put away because I need to make use of it. (Things to work on that are too messy for the kitchen table, lol.) I've been filing job apps and soon enough someone is going to call then all the hours I spent doing other things I'll wish I'd spent making better use of!

I did pick up the county lake permit for our boat on Friday, so that's the last of the state and county licensing for the year. Hopefully I get enough time to make it worthwhile...

So, with that, time for a latte and pb&j then back to the garage!

I hope you are all having wonderful weekends and that Monday is kind to each of you!

alan

Better lucky than good!

2009-03-10T12:40:00.003-05:00

We've been trying to use some of the older stuff out of the pantries and for the first time in a long time I'd felt a bit like experimenting with new things. I'd had a jar of oil-packed sun-dried herbed tomatoes hanging around for a while; the jar of capers that went with them had been purged in one of Dottie's "if it doesn't have a date it's going" rampages.

I went through my recipes and couldn't find the one that I originally was going to make...searched on-line and found something close. Modified it a bit, fixed it on Sunday and it was OK enough Dottie wanted it again last night (so the tomatoes that weren't used could go in the trash today since they were dated '07). Last night I hit it pefect:
____________________________________

Baked chicken and sun-dried tomatoes

For two:

Two thawed chicken breasts

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning (original called for marjoram, didn't have it...)
2 tablespoons water
10-15 oil-packed sun dried tomatoes, sliced or chopped

Line a 9x9 glass pan with foil (because this burns a bit) then rub the foil with olive oil.

Place chicken breasts in pan

Mix vinegar, seasoning, water and tomatoes in a small mixing bowl; pour or spoon over chicken

Bake 25 minutes at 425 degrees or until chicken reaches 160 internal temperature.

Serve with the tomatoes spooned back over chicken...
____________________________________________

Sunday night I sided it with some angelhair pasta and garlic bread; last night it was baked potatoes, which bake at the same temp, so it was an really easy meal.

The original recipe called for using a 9x13 pan with the 1/4 cup mix but that cooked up a bit dry; using the 9x9 last night it came out moist and perfect!

I hope the week is being kind to each of you!

alan

“Not Women Anymore…”

2009-03-05T15:10:00.002-06:00

A friend posted this story on her blog and I had to borrow the link...you can click on the header above or here to read the story

So many times in bygone days I would hear a story on NPR or the BBC or one of the international magazine shows on my radio at work, all the way back to the 80's when we were first allowed radios, that would reduce me to tears. A lot of verse was written back then fueled by those stories. Occasionally someone would make the mistake of asking what I was upset about and I got to share something they probably hadn't heard of; that the never dreamt existed.

We all become so focused on our own little world, on what we have to deal with in our own lives that it's very easy to forget that there are those who have less...that the dark powers that control parts of this world would rather we forgot...that only when raise our voices together and say "no more" will it be stopped!

Please click the link...write a Congressman or Senator if you are blessed with one who will listen...please?

May the rest of the week be kind to each of you and may your weekends be filled with joy!

alan

Awhirl...a swirl...

2009-03-04T14:19:00.002-06:00

Some of you might remember the plumbing issues that were ongoing until I dug up the sewer line and we had a massive amount of tree roots cleaned out of it. Before that they had pulled the toilet to try and clean it out; afterwards there had been a slight leak and I changed the "wax ring" at the base, which seemed to take care of it...for a while...

Last week we noticed a few drops on the basement floor again, I tried tightening the base bolts again, but didn't get much of a turn on them. I thought I was going to have to pull it and replace the ring again, figuring I had damaged it when I tried to swing the toilet into it's space by myself.

Over the weekend, while cleaning, I figured out that the back of it was wet below the tank. At 43 years old, I didn't figure there was much chance of getting parts, so I started doing some research, as I have heard too often of problems with "low flush" ones.

I learned of a rating system that's only been in place a few years, "MaP units" that I then went back to try to use as I narrowed my choices.

One that professed to be "high efficiency" and was less than $100 only rated 475 on the scale; the articles said you should consider 500 to be a minimum. I found two for under $200 that rated 1,000, the maximum on the scale. One was actually just under $150, but I sprung for the one that was just under $200 because it has a better finished porcelain that is supposed to stay cleaner...

Dottie was off yesterday so after breakfast we went and bought it, brought it home and took the pieces (it was unassembled) out and found the directions. After one last round through the bathroom, we pulled the old one, assembled the new one and had the water back on in just over an hour. Though it doesn't seem like it could possibly use enough water to work (it is 1.6 gallons, the old one was somewhere around 5, being 1966 vintage) it has each and everytime so far. It will refill before you can get in the shower and turn the water on...the old one you were waiting what seemed like an awfully long time!

By then it was past lunchtime; we ate and then did the shopping together. Since my retirement checks come once a month, we've been trying to buy most everything for the month in one trip, that way her checks (bi-monthly) can pick up the bills that come in later in the month. It also helps cut down on the impulse buying.

I'm beginning to think I'm going to have to give up on finding a part-time job and take a full time one, at least for a while. I have passed over ones I could have probably had because I didn't want to screw up our time together, but I'm almost out of options.

I hope the week is being kind to each of you...

alan

The heat of the day...

2009-03-01T13:07:00.003-06:00

from earlier in the week when we were pushing the 70's (almost 20C.), to right now it's 20 Farenheit (-7C.). Last night it was 6 above O on the old scale, or -14C. without the never-ending wind.

Added to that is the 4-5 inches of snow that fell between Friday night and yesterday afternoon...

Dottie was off on Friday, working the weekend. John needed a babysitter for all 3 kids on Friday night so we kept them, one in here on the bed, one on the couch, one on my exercise mat on the floor (made up with "Cars" sheets, of course). He came and got them about noon yesterday and I spent my afternoon shoveling and transcribing family military service history back to the "Civil" War for my nephew who is applying for a VFW scholarship. Getting all of the oral things I was told through the years written down was probably a good thing, so I printed an extra copy and tucked it away for future generations. I know it's not complete, but the families have spread out so widely through the years that I have no idea about anyone beyond "first cousins". I have a letter one great-uncle wrote my grandfather about the "old soldiers home" he was living in in the early 60's telling him horror stories and that no matter what happened he didn't want to end up in one; I found out yesterday that great-uncle's oldest was a Japanese POW aboard an "exchange ship" in 1944 when it was accidentally sunk by the Americans.

I can't imagine...

Today I'm running laundry and catching up other odds and ends here. Like the proverbial rabbits, they never seem to diminish.

It seems our Governor is the next choice for a cabinet post; she's done very well for us on so many fronts, I hope she fares well and can do the same for our country!

I dread losing her, though because of term limits we'd have lost her in 2010 anyway!

May Monday find you warm and dry, employed if you need to be and happy no matter what!

alan

Invasion of the cookie snatchers!

2009-02-23T13:41:00.002-06:00

It was strange having two of the grandkids here together after several months of taking them one at a time. The younger sister and brother who used to be inseperable are growing apart it seems and much less understanding/forgiving/accepting of each other!

I've been very glad we saved the SuperNES and the original Nintendo machines, as when sharing the games they usually play together becomes impossible, one of them can usually be tempted by playing a game that Daddy had when he was their age, lol!

If only to say "wow, that's awful"! (The "Intellivision" actually gets that more often than the SuperNES.)

It got warm enough they played outside some yesterday afternoon and helped Grandma cleaning up the yard while I puttered at other things. After some fresh air they seemed to get along a bit better, plus by then it was dinner time and time for her to go home as she had school today.

The youngest is still here, as his Dad was off again today and they had one last day together to celebrate their 10th anniversary. So far it's a been a day of "Boomer" and drawing and playing with stencils...very quiet by comparison.

Time to fix him a glass of Quik for dessert!

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan

Friday falling...

2009-02-20T15:27:00.002-06:00

rapidly towards dusk.

I've spent the last two days doing some early "spring cleaning". When Bill and Laura's cats moved in with us the took over one bedroom, as one of them can't be trusted to stay out of the trash or any other food he can find; the other has a penchant for hiding and we fear if he gets in the basement we won't see him for a week.

The things that were stacked up in one corner of that room awaiting shelves and sorting hastily moved into the 2nd bedroom and in the throes of whatever has been dragging me down of late, I hadn't felt like dealing with it.

This weekend is John and Noel's 10th anniversary, my sister is taking Dillon and we have Talia and Caleb, so I needed to finally "caffeine up" and "get to it". I'm done now except for the final vacuuming and waiting for my sinuses to settle a bit before I start.

No good news concerning my last post; I don't really expect any and am assuming I'm just going to be "out of pocket" and grateful I'm not there going through the misery those I left behind are. If I don't hear from the apps I put in this last week by Wednesday I'll start putting in some others.

I read a piece about "surivivor's guilt" associated with lay-offs and such a few months ago. I never thought I'd understand it, but I do! As the young still there lose their jobs and the older ones do more work on the same jobs for less, knowing I got out and (so far) am collecting my pension and retaining some semblence of health care gives me great cause for gratitude and guilt.

I don't know where this will all end up; perhaps with a collapse worth of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", perhaps with those smart enough forming their own collectives or co-ops to survive. An underground economy of barter, perhaps?

I do know I'm not going to "go" quietly! I'm not going to just "lie down" and give up...

So for what it's worth, may you each have a lovely weekend and may life somehow be kind to each of you!

alan

Death and taxes...

2009-02-16T12:32:00.002-06:00

(other considered titles: "The Sword of Damacles", "Gnawing my leg off...")

Friday, Dottie's day off as she worked the weekend, we had our annual appointment with one of H&R Block's associates. The wife of a former coworker, downsized out of her job when a national chain bought the local bank she had worked in for 20 years, she is very good at what she does and has helped steer us in a "better direction" several times through the years.

It wasn't a good day to begin with, as it would have been Dad's 82nd birthday and it's still very hard going into this 26th year without him not to be a bit resentful thinking of all that might have been.

Nonetheless, since we finally had the last of the paperwork Dottie really wanted to get this done. We expected about $1500 back from the Federal and were hoping to use it to pay what we knew we were going to owe the State...

We knew we were going to owe them because when I took the "buyout" from GM last year they took out the Federal taxes they were supposed to, but conveniently and despite my having asked them to, forgot to withhold the State taxes. I caught the error and figured out the proper amount, opening our first savings account in 30 years with it.

What I didn't know until Friday was that since the "buyout" was paid out of our Union retirement fund, the Fed treats it like an IRA and since I'm not 55 I was liable for a 10% penalty for "early withdrawal"! So not only was I not getting back the $1500, but owed another $3000 besides! To go along with that, the lines that transfer to the State return meant that instead of owing the $2400 I had figured, I owed them an extra $700 as well. My former co-worker's wife is now very worried about what they may have in store for him because he along with many others are considering taking the current buyout!

When my son moved last fall he had two households going at the same time and there was a "limbo" period between his last check from his old job and his first on a twice monthly pay period at his new one, plus moving and start-up expenses, etc.. I lent him most of what was in the savings account on condition that I needed it back by April 15th. We had hoped to pay the State with what we got back from the Federal and what was left in the savings account and take the pressure off him...

I had used that buyout money to pay off 4 credit accounts, one of which we kept for the unexpected. The unexpected plumbing bill last fall...most of Christmas...now the big "hit" for this Federal tax penalty as there was a discounted "transaction" fee for paying it through Block, or so they thought...right up until you click "send"!

I always knew I was going back to work, in fact I had tried to pick up a job late last summer though for some reason it "fell through". Dottie kept telling me to wait until after the holidays, etc., because so many other things pop up and each day something unexpected still seems to arise.

Now it seems it's time to begin a job search in earnest, in fact I filed an app on Saturday I haven't told her about yet for fear it will fall through like that last one did. After I start some laundry I'm going to read up on a couple more and perhaps file them. I'm trying to avoid her days off so we don't lose our time together, which may be overidden by the necessity to start bringing in "some green" sooner rather than later.

Things are still "tight" for my son and his wife, especially now that she has moved back to D.C. with him and enrolled in graduate school. They are hoping she picks up a job soon and things will ease for them. If it doesn't, that card will be maxed again soon.

The lady at Block sent me home to make phone calls before she filed that, hoping that between the people that handle our benefits, our Union and GM someone would have decided they needed to do something about this. Fidelity said they told GM there was a problem before it was ever done; the Union said that there were rumors that GM was going to do something about it and gave me a GM number to call; GM says they will issue information in March or April...

I'm not holding my breath!

We had already agreed, knowing that we needed to "tighten our belts" anyway, that we weren't doing anything for each other for Valentine's Day. Friday we splurged and bought a "cheap" tray of steaks ($10 for four) at Sam's and a small tray of mushrooms when we bought milk for the week. While she was at work on Saturday I dug out a heart-shaped baking pan I had bought years ago and made a tray of brownies for her.

We will get through this, somehow, though it never seems like it in the beginning.

Don't know why George and Paul are echoing in the back of my mind now...

"Let me tell you
How it will be.
There's one for you,
Nineteen for me,

'Cause I'm the taxman.
Yeah, I'm the taxman.

Should five percent
Appear too small,
Be thankful I don't
Take it all..."

May the week be kind to each of you!

alan