A Steaming Pile of Irony
Unhappy people look down on me every day.
Continue reading →Some Famous July 1 Births
Sydney Irwin Pollack (July 1, 1934 – May 26, 2008[1]) was an Academy Award-winning American film director, producer and actor. Born in Lafayette, Indiana to Russian Jewish immigrants, Pollack studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, where he later taught acting. He began directing television shows in the 1960s before…
Continue reading →Adding “Tree Surgeon” to My Repertoire; or Night of the Lopper
After taking Abby to the doctor for a check-up, she and I had a fairly down afternoon. It was hot out, and Abby was off her feed, so we napped, and I burned a few DVDs. As evening approached, however, I started feeling the need to be useful, physically active, and outdoors. I grabbed the limb…
Continue reading →God?
“Going to church doesn’t make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car.” –Laurence Peter
Continue reading →Analysis Shows…
Our attempts to explain why my cucumber wouldn’t shatter under the explosive force of the legendary M-80 July 4 firework bomb have been fruitful, as shown in this simple graph…
Continue reading →Absolute Loyalty
I am not one of those people who blithely stumble through life taking it all for granted and simultaneously thinking my dumb little life is the center of it all. I know you know these people; their stories crop up after some crisis shatters their dystopia. They had been “happy” in their lives until a…
Continue reading →Strictly for Dog Lovers
If you don’t love dogs and the cute things they do, please disregard this post.
Continue reading →The Longest Day
I own a disproportionate number of war movies. Furthermore, I watch them more than any other genre. I love war movies, and the more realistic and historically accurate they are, the more I like them. I guess my dad’s love of war movies played an important part in imparting this preference. When I was growing…
Continue reading →Febrile Pyrexia
Both Chihuahuas, Max and Sierra, have tenderness at their injection sites from yesterday’s rabies and DHLP-P vaccinations, and Max has been running a bit of a fever. As a result, he is very lethargic, and hurts all over. It does not, however, make him less cute, as this image of him cowering under one of…
Continue reading →Synopsis of 2008 Abby’s Pneumonia
This item replaces several entries made during my wife Abby’s life-threatening battle with pneumonia. May 11, 2008: Abby is Seriously Ill Update, Sunday night: Abby is still seriously ill, but she is better. They are bombarding her with a phalanx of medications and treatments. There is no timetable as of yet, but I am okay letting…
Continue reading →A Few Interesting TV Tidbits
* Brady Bunch father Mike Brady’s late wife and Carol Brady’s late husband killed each other in a bar fight. * Happy Days older brother Chuck Cunningham never made it back from Vietnam. * JR and JFK were shot by the same assassin. * “Skipper” Jonas Grumby and Willy Gilligan had a suspicious relationship on…
Continue reading →Nature Gone Haywire, or in this case, Peachwire
I didn’t expect to get a crop from my fruit trees this year, since they are brand new trees. But I also didn’t expect to get a ripe peach in May, all by itself on the branch of one tree. But, there it was tonight. I ate it.
Continue reading →My Wife
I know this sounds strange to everyone around me who has been married, but I still find it amazing that I have a wife. Even writing it right now sounds strange. I spent so many years waiting and wishing, trying and failing, wanting to find someone to love. That she is an amazing woman is…
Continue reading →As Green as It Has Ever Been
2005 and 2006 were drought years here, and the 12 acres where we and Dorothy live suffered in that time. The grass and trees thinned, the pond dried up, the garden became despondent and morose. But the last two years have seen wonderful spring and summer rains, and the property is as green as we…
Continue reading →Doppelgångerage!
While watching “Training Day” this week, I kept trying to figure out of whom one of the actors, Ethan Hawke, reminded me. When I saw Wil C. Fry at the state softball tournament in Oklahoma City Wednesday, it dawned on me that it was him, and that I had been trying to figure out of…
Continue reading →A Gopher in Sunglasses
When I was growing up, my mom worked for oral surgeon C. W. Littlefield. In the summer, he hired me to mop the floor, sterilize the instruments, take out the trash, develop x-rays, etc. At the same time, he kept an eye on what was going on inside my mouth, and even did some extractions…
Continue reading →That Sialogogic Year, 1995
In my journal, 1995 was the year of quotations. I was reading a lot of philosophy, and it was an important influence on my life. At the time I was flying a lot, too, which was the other influence. “No one is better than you, but you are no better than anyone else until you…
Continue reading →Relying on Reliable Stuff
My NASA flight controller friend Michelle sent me some pictures of herself, since I asked her to, since her hair is totally a different color now than what it was when she and I were close in 1997. Knowing that she is a flight controller, and that this image was made while she was actually…
Continue reading →She Ran Calling “Wildfire”
Despite taking precautions against frost damage, it appears that Sunday night’s temperatures in an isolated area of the state, here in southeast Oklahoma, dove into hard freeze, killing the tomatoes and bell peppers I planted last week. Such are the fates. I bought new, more mature plants today and put them into the garden right…
Continue reading →The House that Jack Built
In the process of cleaning the old house in Ryan, then hauling home some of the relics, Abby and I are now suffering from congestion in our throats and sinuses. Initially I was attributing it to mowing after we got home yesterday, since I drove the riding mower through some areas of last year’s poison…
Continue reading →All Things Must Pass
Abby and I went to Abby’s hometown of Ryan, Oklahoma this weekend, to help clean and prepare her father’s house for sale in three weeks. Abby literally grew up in this house, in a town where everyone knows everyone else. She didn’t even have to cross a street to walk to school in the morning…
Continue reading →A Really Bad Athlete
As athletic as some of my adventures tend to be (like hiking and snow skiing, for example), I am a notoriously poor competitive athlete. I don’t have champion hand/eye/foot coordination, I’m not very strong in the upper body, and I am dripping in nurdness. Despite this, I have tried to play sports all my life,…
Continue reading →Something for My Wife (or Every Little Kiss)
It was a stressful day for all of us, but for me it went easier because I spent much of the afternoon working outdoors. By the end of the day, with Abby and me home from work, I spent a few minutes unwinding by prowling around the patch, finding kibble to throw to the goats,…
Continue reading →Finally Enough Lava
As my readers know, I got Abby a lava lamp as one of her “smaller” birthday gifts (the larger being a heated, massaging recliner that is back-ordered, pun intended.) There were several bonus items associated with this gift… Unlike the lava lamps in the time of Pink Floyd (when I was a kid), this one…
Continue reading →Eight Things
I got tagged by someone to post eight things about himself that no one, or at least very few people, knew about him. One of his was that he witnessed the murder of a police officer, which is tragic and wicked cool at the same time. So, here are eight things you might not know…
Continue reading →The Moral Ambiguity of Worms
A very good friend of mine at my office was fired yesterday, and in his swirling miasma of rage and hurt, he lashed out at me, in the form of a nasty voicemail on my cell phone. In the middle of listening to it, he dropped the F bomb, and I deleted it at that…
Continue reading →The Wearing of the Green, the Eating of the Hammer
Abby and Dorothy (our defacto Mother-in-law) are in Baltimore this week with Abby’s daughter Chele, who in Baltimore is known by her actual first name of Dawna. (Pay attention now – this will be on the test.) While they are gone, I am increasing my chore slate by about five fold, since I can tear…
Continue reading →Shaft Synchronicity – Shaftronicity
For reasons that are not at all clear to me, I was singing Isaac Hayes’ brilliant Theme from Shaft as I was preparing lunch in my kitchen just now. I was belting it out… “Who’s the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks? (Shaft!) You’re damn right.” “Who is the man…
Continue reading →A Harbinger of Spring
When R.E. and I were in college, he and I drove to Oklahoma City so I could buy cheap tires for my 1973 VW Beetle. While we waited, we walked up the snowy street to grab a bite, and on the walk back, Robert photographed a rusty spring sitting in the snow. The next day…
Continue reading →A Spy in the House of Light
Someone came into my office today to get away from the spitstorm into which an office environment can devolve. My office, which was once the darkroom at my newspaper, is mine alone, and if I want, I can close three steel fire doors between me and the newsroom. He came in and looked at all…
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