We Have a Smart Dog!

We were watching reruns of Frasier last night, and there was a skit in which Martin had heard that you can tell how smart a dog is by throwing a towel on his head. The faster he removes the towel, the smarter he is. Eddie (the dog) of course just sat there with the towel on his head.

I’m here to tell you that (according to the skit) our dog is smarter than a Border Collie (7 seconds) or a Poodle (12 seconds). Our dog Rascal removed the towel in 2 seconds!

So he must be very smart!

-Popgun

Today is my Sister’s Birthday

Today I celebrate the lives of my sister and my mother, in this small way.

Today (October 29) is my sister’s birthday. Four years my senior, she would have been 60 today, if she had survived. I miss her still, although when she was here, in her later years I didn’t spend a lot of time with her. Sometimes you don’t know what you have, until it is suddenly gone. She died at age 44, of liver failure – she was an alcoholic. Her death was one of the most stressful things that has ever happened to me. I was the second person on the scene at her death – her body was still warm. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.

Then, there is my mother, who passed away on October 30, 2000. I was there at her passing. A heavy smoker, she died of a combination of COPD and dementia; when she died, and for some months before that, she did not know who I was. Her passing, really, was a blessing. COPD causes shortness of breath – a victim usually has a low-level panicked feeling all the time, perhaps a ‘drowning’ feeling. My mother was suffering from this for several years before I found out there was a medical reason for it. During that period, I thought she was going nuts. In reality she was having panic attacks and paranoid attacks that frequently caused her to behave irrationally.   

At this point, I am the last survivor of my birth family. My Dad passed away before my sister did.

Death represents the end of pain. Sometimes, for everybody involved.

If you’re a Christian, that is. Neither my sister nor my mother were what I would call ‘practicing’ Christians – but they were both acquainted with the Bible, and the precepts of Christianity. I do hope they were saved. If so, I expect that I will get to see them again.

A person generally is exposed to more death as he ages. It seems that probably, on average, half of everybody you know will die before you do. As my neighbor says, “Don’t worry about life. You’re not getting out of it alive!”.

A young person doesn’t really perceive that death will happen to him – it is off in some distant future. On the other hand, an older person knows that his time will come. This causes different reactions in different people.

Some people, if you were to throw them out of an airplane at 30,000 feet without a parachute, would scream all the way down. Others would enjoy the view for as long as possible.

I plan to enjoy the view.

Cheers!

-Popgun

The X Games

I was watching the X Games on TV, Sunday afternoon. I was really interested in the car racing, which was on a very tight, half-dirt and half-pavement course with a 70 foot jump in the dirt portion.

In between car races, they did skate boarding stuff. I’m not too interested in that, but it did bring back some memories.

When I was around 10 years old, I asked my Dad for a skateboard. Never mind that where we lived, the nearest pavement was 1/4 mile from the house, and even that was rough blacktop. My Dad, bless his heart, had no idea what a skateboard was, so I explained it to him. For the following to make sense, I should probably mention that my Dad was a welder.

In a couple of days, I had a skateboard. This ’skateboard’ consisted of a rectangle of 1/4″ thick steel plate, with a couple of clamp-on steel-wheeled skates, the sort that you cranked a key to lock them to your shoes, welded to the bottom of it. The thing probably weighed 25 pounds, and if you fell off and got ran over by it, it would probably put you in the hospital. It had square corners, for crying out loud.

Bless my Dad, he tried.

Another time, he gave me a basketball, and welded a hoop made of steel sucker rod he heated and rolled, onto the end of my swing set. I should mention that my swing set was made out of 2″ pipe – sometimes he borrowed it to use as an A-frame to pull engines.

In any case, since we had no pavement, I learned how to dribble on rough ground. When I got to school and had to dribble on a flat surface, I couldn’t do it because I wasn’t used to the ball predictably going straight up and down. I was in high school before I learned to use a back-board.

Once, I made a swing by tying a rope to a limb high up in a pine tree. A bit later on, I ran the rope through the hole in the center of disc off of a plowing disc and tied a knot underneath, to make a seat. If I’d ever swung into the tree trunk while sitting on that, it would probably have cut my legs off at the knees. It was made of steel, weighed probably 20 pounds, and the edges were serrated.

I had a lot of fun, out in the boonies when I was a kid.

So, what stories do you have where your parents cluelessly tried to give you what you wanted?

-Popgun

Synchronizing the iPhone

I just synchronized my iPhone 3G, 16 GB model, with my MacBook Pro. I was noticing all the empty space on the iPhone – like 13.24 GB free; so I decided on a whim to put all my photos on it. I turns out that I have 12,482 pictures. And I still have 5.48 GB left on the phone.

I figure probably 80% of them are my grandkids… what can I say?

J Has it Right

My son J , up in New York, has it right, some of the time – like right now.

Here in East Texas, it is 97°F with a heat index of 105°F. The high is actually 100°F which we will see about the time I go home from work. Riding home feels like swimming in hot syrup. It’s been this way all week. The forecast is: 100°F for the next three days – then it drops to 99°F. Down here, if your A/C goes out, it’s serious!

Metal objects, like your seat belt, become branding irons. Buckle your seatbelt and scream. The criteria for selecting a parking spot has more to do with the location of shade than it does with how close you are to your destination. CD’s wilt in your car. It sprinkled where Texas Grandma was yesterday for a few minutes, and she said you could hear the sucking sound as the ground pulled it in. Oil actually comes to the surface of the black-top roads. There was a guy in a motorcycle accident the other day, who almost fried before the medics picked him up off the road. NOBODY goes barefooted outdoors on pavement.

I hope it rains someday. Not for me, so much, as for my Grandson, who has never seen it.

On the other hand, in New York City, it is 71°F, heat index 71°F and the high is 77°F for the day. If I could teleport, I’d take a break in Central Park.

On the other other hand, there are times when New Yorkers have to wade through freezing slush to get to the nearest subway. When they’re doing that, I’ll still be riding my motorcycle to work…

Climate is what you want. Weather is what you get.

-Popgun

Thoughtful…

He’s a Rascal.

-Popgun

Number 34

Yesterday was our 34th wedding anniversary.

In this day and age, this seems like a record. But it wasn’t hard at all. If you come to understand deeply that “the two will become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5), then you have the answer.

Sometimes your hand fumbles and drops something – but you don’t get mad at it – it’s part of you. You might get mad at yourself for making a mistake, but you don’t get mad at your hand.

In the same way, you develop true forgiveness for each other’s foibles. You love your entire spouse, not just the best parts. You both know that whatever each of you does, you’re in it together, so you deal with it and go on. This concept also means that you actively try not to do anything that would hurt the other; the same as trying not to hit your hand with a hammer. You do everything with an understanding that it affects your spouse as well.

It takes understanding, patience – and love.

In this respect, I have been truly blessed.

-Popgun

Joseph

When I was around 13 or 14, we had a dog named Joseph. I don’t know what breed Joseph was, but he was short-haired, about knee high, with perky ears, reddish tan colored, and very smart. Joseph was my constant companion, except for the week when he got sprayed by a skunk.

Back in those days, we lived out in the boonies – I could shoot my .22 in any direction, and if I missed the house, I really didn’t have to worry about hitting anything or anybody. So Joseph was free to come and go, inside and outside, as long as he could get somebody to open the door. He slept indoors, usually on my bed. Except for the week when he got sprayed by a skunk.

We had noticed for about a week that he’d go down in the woods in the evenings, and we’d hear him barking down there several hundred yards from the house, and then he’d show up for bedtime. So after a week or so of this, one night we didn’t let him out.

My family and I were all sitting around the kitchen table that evening, shortly after dark, when we heard a thumping at the door. So of course, we got up to see what it was.

It turned out to be a possum. So we opened the door, and Joseph took off. He and the possum ran down into the woods, side by side as they disappeared into the darkness. And a few minutes later, we heard that barking start up again down in the woods.

Joseph, apparently, had found a friend to play with.

Life really is amazing, if you pay attention.

-Popgun

Mother’s Day Revisited

We had great fun this Mother’s day. We finally managed to really surprise Texas Grandma.

J flew in from New York, and Texas Grandma didn’t have a clue. We had set up a Mother’s Day luncheon on Saturday in a local restaurant, and arranged for his brother R to bring him in from the airport (three hours away). It went off without a hitch. Everybody at the table (seven adults besides Texas Grandma) was in on it.

Needless to say, Texas Grandma had a great Mother’s Day.

Thanks, sons, for being so caring of your Mother. It was a lot of trouble and expense for both of you to pull this off, and it made her very happy.

-Popgun

Accidental Blessings

Once upon a time, a long time ago when I was a young man, I was riding my Honda XL-350 dual purpose bike to work, about 3:30 PM in the afternoon. The weather was great, it was a good day to ride, and I was young and maybe a little cocky.

I was having a good time, and I decided to take a short cut across an open field near an intersection, cutting across an open triangle of land to re-enter the road a bit further up. This was not necessary; I was just fooling around.

I made three mistakes – first, I wasn’t as good a rider as I thought I was; second, my equipment wasn’t as good as I thought it was. And finally, I missed one vital point of information that I really needed to know.

You see, there was a small ditch running fairly close to the edge of the field nearest me. The grass had grown up some, and when the field had been mowed recently, whoever did it straddled the ditch with his mower. This gave the illusion of a level field in that area, because the grass was cut level. In fact, there was a hidden ditch. It was only a foot or so across, and six inches or so deep. But it was enough to ruin my day.

I left the road going nearly 60 MPH, trying to do that motocross thing. I almost immediately hit this hidden ditch – and the rear end of the Honda tried to pass the front end going over the top. We call that an ‘endo’ – which stands for ‘end over end’. The front wheel crossed the ditch nicely, but the back end was over-sprung and under-dampened; basically, it bounced when it hid the side of the ditch. I went over the handlebars and cleverly used my face to plow a furrow probably 20 feet long. I was wearing a helmet, with a duckbill visor on it; this probably saved most of my face, but my glasses were broken, cutting my nose.

When everything stopped moving, my mouth was full of dirt, my glasses were gone, there was blood all down my front, and my right arm wasn’t working. The first thing I did was put my left hand in my mouth to see if I still had my teeth; the fact that I had to do that may give you some idea of my state. I had one of those nifty leather jackets motorcyclists wear – the accident ripped the right sleeve right off of it, on the right mirror, I believe. That’s probably what damaged my shoulder.

I’m here to tell you that things can go from being just peachy to very bad indeed, in about a tenth of a second. If you don’t understand this, you should not be driving.

To make a long story short, other than trivial collateral damage, the worst of it was that my shoulder was dislocated. I didn’t know this at the time, I just knew it wasn’t working. Because it took me some four hours to get it treated, the tendons stretched and it became chronic.

This was a humbling experience; nothing funny about it at all, and it’s hard to see any good coming out of it. But I did learn a bit about staying within my limits, and making sure you know the terrain before you ride. I was some time recovering from this; quite a bit later, I had to have surgery to ‘pin’ my shoulder to stop it from spontaneously dislocating.

I told you that one so I could tell you this one.

Because I was off work for a time, with nothing much to do but heal, I found myself able to go on a church trip to Six Flags Over Texas that I normally would not have been able to attend.

I’ve always been a bit of a loner, so I didn’t know many people on the trip. It probably didn’t help that I was (and am) always reading. I’ll admit it – I’m addicted to the printed word. This has a bearing on what happened next.

The church group, in several vehicles, stopped at a store about half-way to Dallas to let everybody stretch their legs and use the bathrooms. There was a group of teenage girls standing in a circle talking, and I noticed a small patch on the bottom of one of them. So I bent over to read it. It said “Love me, squeeze me, take me home.”

Then I suddenly realized how rude it was, to read a patch on somebody’s behind (in a church group!!), so I quickly straightened up and walked away. The girls were giggling about it, and the girl who’s bottom I had read didn’t see me – although the other girls pointed me out to her. And a few days later, I asked her out on a date.

And a fair bit after that, we got married. I “loved her, squeezed her, and took her home”. It worked out pretty well – 34 years, two fine sons, a great daughter-in-law, and two grandkids later…

And that’s the story of how I came to be married to Texas Grandma. The Accidental Blessing – if I hadn’t had the terrible accident that day, I may never have met Texas Grandma. So that wreck was really a blessing in disguise and a turning point in many lives.

Sometimes when thing go wrong – just maybe, it’s not so bad as you think.

-Popgun