great life

did you know that i can't dedicate more than 48 hours worth of effort to a project before it loses my attention? i can read a book for weeks on end and never get tired of it. i can read a series over and over and find new details in it every time. i've been playing the same character in a computer game for three years now and i'm still interested. a physical project, however? i've got about 48 hours to get it completely finished. anything more than that, and it is doomed to languish on the floor of my office until i become so frustrated with the clutter that i chuck it out, approximately three years on.

i'm the worst DIY candidate you can imagine, for this reason. accordingly, i've had someone in to scrape wallpaper and then apply paint to my bathroom walls. i assure you, if you've not been in my downstairs bathroom (and now it's too late) you would understand the need for this repair. remember "The Drew Carey Show?" remember the character from that show named Mimi? she wore the most awful muumuus in really awful bright colors, and garish makeup to match. if that character had walked into the bathroom of my house and suffered an unfortunate gastrointestinal malady and exploded, that would sorta explain the wallpaper in there. so it's gone now, and has been replaced by a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue. or at least, a nice soothing blue. also going is the extremely dated seashell-shaped sink.

i have no idea why seashells and nautical themes are the default bathroom decor, but i'd like to announce to the world and to interior designers everywhere that I'M OVER IT. thank you. there is no further need to emphasize the hydraulic relationship between a room with water faucets in it and the peaceful ocean. srsly.

the good news is, although i'm short on time, i am blessed to have the kind of good life and good partner who recognizes that our time together is worth more than our money. so we hired the job out, instead of starting it, dropping it at the end of the weekend or as soon as the first fun "let's get dinner!" invitation came along, and resuming it sometime in the vicinity of 2015. it's a good life.

clean country livin'

On Mother's Day, I tooled down to Marble Falls on the bike to meet my mom and aunt for lunch. We found new roads that we'd never ridden before, and the Firewheels were blooming all over the countryside. The rain has been just enough but not too much this year, because some of the fields were literally afire with thick clouds of these little guys dancing in the breezes. And then my uncle fixed up fajitas at the end of it all. A more perfect Hill Country day could not be purchased from the Sears Catalog, I assure you.

After lunch, the neighbors called about a turtle they'd found. There must be some ongoing story with the turtles, but I don't know what it is. My aunt announced that we had to go collect this turtle. My mom chivvied my aunt into living on the wild side and riding over on the bikes. Even when you have grandchildren, you're still the big sister and the little sister at heart! So mom hopped on the back with me and my aunt hopped on the back with Rose and we cruised on down to rescue the turtle. We wrapped him up in a spare do-rag and carried him in Rose's tank bag, around the neighborhood for a pleasure cruise/shock the neighbors tour and then we released the poor traumatized little turtle back into the lake. This sort of stuff doesn't happen to people who live up in town, does it?

fascinating...

I'm still without words. But I thought I'd share this, because I found it fascinating. Read a few of the numbered statements, then skip to the bottom and read the explanation. This actually gives me a lot of hope. The gay rights part of the human rights struggle is going to be won by attrition of old prejudices and the people who espouse them.

MARRIAGE ISSUE JUST AS PLAIN AS BLACK AND WHITE
May 19, 1996
By Eric Zorn

Statement No. 1: Same-sex marriage must be forbidden, said the Republican senator from Wisconsin, "simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong."

Statement No. 2. An organization opposed to gay marriage claimed legalizing them would result in "a degraded and ignoble population incapable of moral and intellectual development," and rested this belief on the "natural superiority with which God (has) ennobled heterosexuals."

Statement No. 3. "I believe that the tendency to classify all persons who oppose gay marriage as 'prejudiced' is in itself a prejudice," grumped a noted psychologist. "Nothing of any significance is gained by such a marriage."

Statement No. 4. A U.S. representative from Georgia declared that allowing gay marriages "necessarily involves (the) degradation" of conventional marriage, an institution that "deserves admiration rather than execration."

Statement No. 5. "The next step will be that gays and lesbians will demand a law allowing them, without restraint, to . . . have free and unrestrained social intercourse with your unmarried sons and daughters," warned a Kentucky congressman. "It is bound to come to that. There is no disguising the fact. And the sooner the alarm is given and the people take heed, the better it will be for our civilization."

Statement No. 6. "When people of the same sex marry, they cannot possibly have any progeny," wrote an appeals judge in a Missouri case. "And such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid their marriages."

Statement No 7. Same-sex marriages are "abominable," according to Virginia law. If allowed, they would "pollute" America.

Statement No 8. In denying the appeal of a same-sex couple that had tried unsuccessfully to marry, a Georgia court wrote that such unions are "not only unnatural, but . . . always productive of deplorable results," such as increased effeminate behavior in the population. "They are productive of evil, and evil only, without any corresponding good . . . (in accordance with) the God of nature."

Statement No. 9. A gay marriage ban is not discriminatory, reasoned a Republican congressman from Illinois, because it "applies equally to men and women."

Statement No. 10. Attorneys for the state of Tennessee argued that such unions should be illegal because they are "distasteful to our people and unfit to produce the human race. . . ." The state supreme court agreed, declaring gay marriages would be "a calamity full of the saddest and gloomiest portent to the generations that are to come after us."

Statement No. 11. Lawyers for California insisted that a ban on same-sex marriage is necessary to prevent "traditional marriage from being contaminated by the recognition of relationships that are physically and mentally inferior. . . . (and entered into by) the dregs of society."

Statement No. 12. "The law concerning marriages is to be construed and understood in relation to those persons only to whom that law relates," thundered a Virginia judge in response to a challenge to that state's non-recognition of same-sex unions. "And not," he continued, "to a class of persons clearly not within the idea of the legislature when contemplating the subject of marriage."

To sum up: Legal recognition of such marriages would offend tradition, God, the sensibilities of the majority and the natural order while threatening conventional marriage, children and the future of our
civilization.

The quotes are culled from a Boston University Law Review article and a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, though I did take the minor liberty of changing the subject of the strangled rage, fear and righteous indignation.

Everywhere I quoted the speakers referring to same-sex marriage, homosexuality and heterosexuality, they were actually referring to interracial marriage and their views of black people, white people and the proper interaction thereof. And yes, that includes statement No. 6, which in original form articulated the old white supremacist belief that offspring of whites and blacks were--like mules that result when horses mate with donkeys--sterile.

The quotes date from 1823 to 1964 and, though the sentiments look hatefully ridiculous to us in 1996, they had sufficient appeal and staying power that 15 states still criminalized black-white marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned those laws in the appropriately named 1967 case, Loving vs. Virginia.

Those whose unaltered words today resemble statements 1 through 12 above, take note. The stench is familiar. The future is listening.

still without words

my heart is still, quiet. things are good here. i'm grateful for the peace, the quiet. there's nothing funny to say about it. my niece is doing pretty well. my taxes are paid, my debts diminishing. i have seen so much of the strident joy and strident opposition lately coming from both ends of the political spectrum that i'm just worn out from it.

the thing i find funniest is that both the left and right devoutly believe (and produce sheaves of information documenting their belief) that the media is biased against their cause. there are some media outlets that are slanted one way or another, i don't dispute that. but it seems, overall, that it's even. i don't have the energy to be up in arms about it all the time.

avalanche

The words have been stuck in my head for weeks now. They carom off the inside of my skull, scream through treetops raising birds and ripping up great rooster tails of leaves. They bound across rooftops and cityscapes, ping against shiny panes of glass, the windows of my soul, but they don't break through. They scream into mountaintops laden with a snowpack of emotions, threatening to start an avalanche, a tumbling solid wall of cold feeling, ripping through the valley and coming out my fingertips onto the keys. But the avalanche doesn't come. These words cannot illuminate, not with the soft glow of a candle nor the acrid flash of lightning. They cannot organize themselves, even as much as the wind can organize enough sharp left turns to make a dust devil. So I'm left with cold, dark, disorganized and gusty words, wreaking chaos in my head. Contained chaos, with no escape, no avalanche, no tornado, no explosive release. Maybe that's why my dreams for the past few days have been all about spittle-flying screaming fits of anger, or furious searches for items that maddeningly refuse to be found. I can't get the words to coalesce into so much as a cloud, and all I have to say is that I have nothing to say.

the bootstrap

Have you ever had to do a task in order to get on with the larger objective, but the task was onerous, or annoying, or out of your routine, so you put it off? Did you put it off for a little while? A long while? I do that a lot. I get so obstructed by the one odd or difficult task that the entire project slides into arrears. Once, I carried a bottle of medicine around in my backpack for a month before taking any of the pills, because the side effects of the pills were more inconvenient than the symptoms they were meant to alleviate. At least, in the short term. Eventually, I made myself take the stupid pills and I was glad I did, but I was also glad I didn't take them during any of those days I was carrying them around.

I would like to NOT be this way, I think. I would like to have an inner reserve of initiative, an ability to bootstrap myself into doing annoying things.

Insomnia = Memories

I can't sleep. So I'm going to tell you a story. And because I could really use it right now, it's going to be a funny story. See how this works? This is another excerpt from my Papa James' autobiography. It's a tale he told on his father, who we all called Big Daddy.

Again, I've corrected bits where it was important to make the meaning clear.

I remember well something funny about Big Daddy: Once in Crowley, LA, Big Daddy went to a bait dealer that a lady ran out of her home. She also sold goldfish & puppies from her female dogs. After counting out our gold fish, Big Daddy gave her a $20.00 bill. She told him to come into the house so she could get his change. He followed her in and she went in the bedroom to get her purse for change. She had a mama chihuahua with young puppies in her bedroom. She asked Daddy if he would like to come into the bedroom and see her little chewawa [sic]. Big Daddy had never heard of a Chihuahua and thought she was offering him sexual concessions! He declined the offer! Later he found out what a chihuahua was. Ha. I can still hear him laughing and telling this on himself, even years later.

And because turnabout is fair play, a memory of me being unsophisticated...

I was about 7 years old the first time I stayed by myself at my grandparents' house. I hadn't really gotten to play like I was an only child since my middle sister was born when I was 13 months old. So, like, never. About that time in my life, I was fighting with my mom about my hair a lot. Maybe all the time, because I seem to recall that by the next school year old ladies at church were telling my mom what a fine priest I would make some day. I knew all the words and had the clean-cut look! Anyway, at this point, my mom was still trying to let me wear my hair long, but it was a daily war zone with crying, wailing, chemical weaponry, blood, entrenched positions, the works. Mom kept us on a pretty tight schedule as kids, mostly for her own sanity, but suddenly I found myself in the bizarre position of being the (extremely spoiled) grandchild in a house by myself with my grandparents' undivided attention. I lapped it up like a cat does cream, and was slinking into the kitchen about 3 days into my visit in my pajamas to see if anybody wanted to make me pancakes. I was only 7, I was entitled to that level of self-centeredness and, in fact, my grandmother DID want to make me pancakes. She had gotten a jar of sourdough starter going pretty good and wanted to use some of it, so logically, pancakes ensued. And as I sidled into the kitchen all barefoot and rumpled and bedheaded, Granny Jessalyn looked up from where she was reading in the green morning light of her kitchen window, and she laughed a deep happy laugh and remarked to Papa James, "Yes, sir! When you're at grandmother's house you can really let your hair down!" Serious and literal and 100% sincere, I responded, "That's right! You don't even have to brush it if you don't want to!" She laughed so hard, and then hugged me so tight, the memory is chipped into the rock of my soul the way it smelled and felt and sounded. She explained about women having to wear their hair put up all the time, back in the old days, and how it was a real treat to be where you could relax and let it down. And ever since, I've associated the Gibson girl with my Granny Jessalyn's kitchen. Then she pulled out the sourdough starter from her icebox and we got down to some pancakes.

The Infamous New Orleans Incident

I posted a meme a couple of days ago listing 25 random facts about me. Item 11 was a blithe statement, lightly made, about where I fall on The Kinsey Scale. Its breeziness belies the deep, awkward, messy journey that led to that clear pool of conclusion. But fear not, gentle readers, I'm not going to drag you down that winding, muddy, thorny path today. Instead, I'm going to tell you one of my favorite stories about that time; one that stands as a bright shaft of light on an otherwise dim path. This is a story of an event so fabulous, so infamous, it wound up on a t-shirt exemplifying "Drama Queen" behavior. This is the story of list item #18: I got an infamous haircut on the porch of an apartment over a fish market in New Orleans at Mardi Gras one year.

I was 24 years old, and had been pretty sure I was gay or bi for about 3 years. I had parlayed that faint thread of attraction I have for men into a string of monogamous, monotonous, and completely mediocre relationships since I was 14. Accordingly, for the first couple years after I acknowledged to myself that I was not straight I was in the middle of being in twoo wuv with a boy from my high school and we were SOOO SRSLY getting married. Right. So that fell apart and I got into what I expected would be a fling with a hot guy from the rugby team just for the sake of a rebound. Well, a year later, he and I were making plans to get married, because I'm kinda dense like that.

That's where I was personally. A few more details to finish the setting: I had this long curly hair that I'd been growing out ever since I got out of the Air Force Academy six years before. I was playing rugby, and there was an annual tournament in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. It was always a good party, and occasionally some good rugby, and definitely a learning experience. I got out of school late on a Friday, picked up my buddies, and we drove all night in my awesome little silver Saturn to get to New Orleans; we stayed with a friend who I think was named Nina. One of my rugby buddies was Betsy, this awesome pre-med dyke who had learned how to cut hair in the dorm at her all-girls college. She had the truest sense of herself of any person I've ever met... deep self-knowledge and confidence that really glowed right out her pores.

Well, Betsy and me and my Saturn-load of people ended up at Nina's apartment, which was on the second story over a small, independent fish market in a turn-of-the-century building with those cool, deep, sleeping porches all the way around. The fish market had a sign out front that consisted of a realistic, life sized marlin leaping out of the building like it was making a break for the freedom of the canal and then the open sea beyond. In other words, it was weird, slightly smelly, and thoroughly, typically New Orleanian.

We got there at 2 AM, I think, because of the late start. And just as we were settling in to our mattresses on the floor, some voices called from the street below... it was some of Nina's friends with beer in milk jugs that they'd brought from a keg party that got broken up by the cops. So they came up and we sat around sharing beer out of milk jugs and socializing. Around 4 they left and we fell into a dead sleep, but by 9 we were at the fields, a little weird, slightly smelly... you know how it goes. Even if you've never been there, and I commend you if you haven't, you've mocked somebody who was hurting on The Morning After.

We played 3 games of rugby that day, and I jumped in with another team for at least one more game, maybe 2. My hair was long, so I had to braid it to play, but it would get messed up during the game. And by "messed up" I mean so disheveled that I could pass for a transient and so full of grass and burrs and roots that if I had been my own horse, I'd have just cut the tangles out with a pocket knife. I had to re-braid it several times during the day to keep it out of my eyes and other people's fists. So we got back to Nina's that night and I was lying, totally exhausted, on a mattress on the floor waiting my turn in the shower. And I started thinking: I'm going to have to stand in the shower for 30 minutes with my arms over my head, picking burrs out of my hair, just so I can go to the bar tonight where it will absorb every whiff of cigarette smoke, so I can get up tomorrow and do this ALL. OVER. AGAIN. The thought just knocked me flat, and my arms would have screamed if they had mouths. That would be weirder than even New Orleans, so I'm glad they don't.

I looked at Betsy, lying exhausted on the couch near me and sporting a blissfully low-maintenance buzz cut, and asked, "Hey, Betsy, wanna cut my hair?"

She perked right up, said, "Hell, yeah! Short?!" I nodded, and she went scurrying for Nina's clippers and shears. We couldn't find them, but she found Nina's 5-year-old's safety scissors (with the rounded tips!) and went out on the porch and got started. The next time the bathroom was free, we found the clippers and hair-cutting shears, so she finished the job up properly. The other girls took my fluffy pile of hair, caught it up in a rubber band and tossed it out on top of the marlin's head. For one night, the fish market marlin had a Rastafarian-looking afro, while I had a more permanent installation of Lesbian Haircut #2.

We went to a bar in New Orleans called The Rubyfruit Jungle and I came home with short hair and Pride Beads. I suddenly understood why grownups were so down on kids making out, because when you're making out with the right people, it could totally turn into the sorts of things grownups don't want kids to do. The aftershocks of that weekend, those realizations, the books I looked to for answers, the people who helped me find them, they all agglomerate in a weird, slightly smelly, and thoroughly, typically New Orleanian gumbo that is my life. And it is thanks to all of them that I kept my balance, made it a few more steps up the path, and came to be able to blithely say "Oh, yeah. I'm a 4 on the Kinsey scale," like it's no big deal.

how does your garden grow?

I was chatting with one of my aunts tonight about gardening. It's not something I do right now, but I've been edging progressively closer to it over the last several years. I've managed to keep alive an iris that I dug up from the front yard of my house in Manchaca when I sold the place. And I grew an avocado tree and an onion plant in my compost pots. I guess that's got me feeling confident in my horticultural skills.

Confident enough that I'd decided to plant a tomato and some strawberries, anyway. I'd like to see how it goes. My aunt was telling me that this is just the time of year for planting... well, lots of things. And I asked her how I would go about finding out when to plant stuff.

She said she just learned from Miss Vannie, but she could pass along the basics. And then she told me a little more about Miss Vannie. She's sorta the stuff of legends in our family... a strong, brilliant, generous matriarch. I've never heard anyone speak ill of Miss Vannie, and if you know how Southern folk do, that's quite a statement. In The South, you can pretty much slander someone from head to toe, flay them, fillet them, and string their bones up for a scarecrow, so long as you say "Bless her heart" or "No disrespect to her memory, but..." before you spit your poison.

My mom wanted to name me for Miss Vannie, at one point. I'm not sure exactly how I came to be named something else, but I spent a couple of years in my childhood planning to legally change my name to Sarah Savannah when I grew up big. Miss Vannie knew all there was to know about gardening, mostly as a matter of necessity. She lived 10 miles from a store and she never once drove a car. She was my grandmother's grandmother, if that gives you any sense of her era. All her planting tips are pretty easy to remember, as they're tied to holidays. Plant this at the end of January, plant that on Valentine's day, and these other things on Good Friday.

Of course, I'm ... mentally challenged by calendars so I'll probably botch that pretty good a couple of times. But I don't live 10 miles from a store and if my peppers don't turn out, I can always walk across the street and pick them up at the market. Sometimes I get a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the urban life I live... The cars and the streets and all the people slammed up cheek-to-jowl and none of them friendly with each other, it really gets me down.

And then I look in the little pot out in front of my house and see that I've helped strawberries find a place to live in the city one more year, and it keeps me going. I bet Miss Vannie would've liked to have a little more city in her life sometimes, for the convenience. It's good to remember that on days when I have to pluck grocery bags that blew away from the store out of my crape myrtles.

Relationship Recognition Action Feb 12, 2009

Dallas's National Freedom to Marry Day demonstration is set to take place on Thursday, February 12th beginning at 11:30 am. The event will start in the Historical Plaza, outside the Records Building at 509 Main St. in downtown Dallas. The aim of the event is to affirm the right of Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual and Transgender (GLBT) people to marry the person of their choosing. Queer Liberaction (also here) and Join the Impact have organized Dallas's demonstration for National Freedom to Marry Day.

Rose and I are going to take part in this demonstration. Do you know someone who cares about relationship recognition? Do you want to see what it's all about? Come on down to the Records Building on Feb. 12 and have a look.

We care because when we travel into Canada, we can fill out one customs form and cross the border as a family, but coming home we have to fill out two cards and pretend we're strangers. And that's just stupid. We care because we had to hire a lawyer to make it so that we're "next of kin" when it comes to medical decisions, insurance matters, and property division. We're not allowed to file joint taxes. When we have kids, we'll have to navigate an uncertain and nerve-wracking legal process to try to get both of us listed as their parents. Only one of us will get to claim our kids as dependents.

We care because, although Texas has a law and a state constitutional amendment stating that there is no form of same-sex relationship contract that the state will honor, let alone create, we're here. We live here because our parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins live here. We live here because we were born and raised in Texas and we love it. But our family is in a legal state of limbo, because some people think that we, their neighbors, (who are already here and already have families, thank you very much!) are a threat of some kind. A threat to the "sanctity" of a contract drawn up at the JP's office?

We're not going to petition churches to change their religious beliefs, we're going to ask the County of Dallas to extend the same rights and obligations to us that they would extend to any other citizen. You know, the way it works in countries that are NOT theocracies...

25 Random Things

I don't really like tagging, because it comes with a sense of obligation. If I don't like asking for a ride to the hospital, you can imagine how much less I like asking anything non-urgent. So, if you read this and feel like doing it, leave me a comment telling me where to find your list. It's a wonderful freezing-rainy-afternoon-waiting-for-a-download sort of activity.

1. I love to cook for an audience. Especially if the whole shebang is impromptu and I have to improvise a menu from whatever is laying around the kitchen
2. I broke my thumb once because I had seen a TV character say "Go sit on your thumb!" and I wanted to know if it was possible.
3. I love teaching. My favorite feeling is the one when I explain something to somebody and they GET IT.
4. I am not a gearhead and couldn't care less about all the stupid letters and numbers attached to vehicles.
5. I bungee jumped out of a gondola once and told my parents about it by having the pictures shipped to their house.
6. I was Jr. Miss Hallettsville and got to be in the parades and everything.
7. I skipped the second grade completely. I went straight from first to third.
8. I have never ever ever in all my years experienced a runner's high or enjoyed running at all.
9. My one and only irrational fear is of suffocation.
10. I believe in reincarnation. I'm also Christian. I don't think these things conflict.
11. I'm bisexual, but just barely. On the Kinsey scale, I'm a 4.
12. Some people have found it easier to think of me as bisexual than as lesbian.
13. I've had at least 13 dogs in my life.
14. The only heroes I have to speak of are my grandparents, although I have some pretty freakin' impressive sisters and parents, too.
15. I don't like to watch any sport unless I know someone who is playing in the game, unless it's the Olympics.
16. I sip my brain and my personality from a coffee cup every morning.
17. I am an engineer, but I started out as a double major in Middle Eastern History and Poli Sci with a minor in Arabic.
18. I got an infamous haircut on the porch of an apartment over a fish market in New Orleans at Mardi Gras one year.
19. I love to edit and am something of a 'Grammar Nazi.'
20. I don't like to think of myself as smarter than anyone else, particularly.
21. I have only once had occasion to put my finger on the trigger of a gun outside of target practice. When I got to that place emotionally, I was ready to kill without hesitation or qualm. Luckily, it was not necessary for me to pull the trigger.
22. If I could send the entire world to "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind" therapy, I would erase drinking alcohol from our collective consciousness and remove it from society entirely.
23. I am a perfectionist and sometimes it's almost crippling because I agonize over stupid little decisions.
24. I love travel and would spend my life moving from place to place if I could.
25. I never put principles over people. Honesty is not always the best policy; kindness, goodness, gentleness, and forgiveness are.

More good stuff than I can stand

I was going to log on this morning and complain about the weather. In an ironic way, of course, because my nasty 40-degree day probably sounds deliciously warm to people living in Ottawa right about now, or blessedly cool to those in Sydney. So even though I was chained to a desk all week while it was lovely out, and the weekend is going to be chill and dreary, I've got a new perspective.

My wife made sufganiyot (aka: Jelly Doughnuts). Yeah, I'm easy to please. But, as I may have mentioned, I'm not the baking type. I've never had a baking teacher (love ya, mom!) who did anything more complicated than cake mix or cookie dough. My grandmothers both made cobblers and pies and bread and stuff like that, but I was probably out trapping squirrels or chasing snakes while they were doing it. It honestly never occurred to me that you could get a jelly doughnut out of your kitchen. I just figured it was one of those things that required industrial jelly-injection technology, as featured on Mr. Rogers, and it was beyond the reach of mere mortals. (Didn't you love that bit about how stuff got made on Mr. Rogers? They have whole TV shows of just those bits these days, God bless cable.)

So my wife volunteered to make sufganiyot for the rugby club's post-game dinner today. We've been puttering in the kitchen since yesterday afternoon, at this very task. Jelly injection technology suffers complete failure when you try to use "real fruit preserves" and a whole strawberry gets stuck in the little injection tip. Also, powdered sugar has its own special kind of food coloring called "petal dust." Who knew?

Anyway, who cares about gray weather when you have homemade, jelly-filled, petal-dusted, hand-kneaded, rugby-ball-shaped, doughy goodness on your counter? I've gotta go take care of my part of this operation: quality control!

where water comes from...

Many years ago, my Aunt Kathy gave to her father a book. It was a mostly empty book, with lots of lined pages in it and printed prompts at the top of each page. The prompts asked simple, generic questions that anybody might ask in a "get to know you" sort of conversation. If you filled out all the prompts, however, you'd have a reasonably good stab at an autobiography. My Papa James, in spite of how intimidating that big empty book was, gave it a serious go in his last few years. Sometimes, he wrote only one word or one sentence in response to a prompt. Sometimes, he had so much to say that he'd write for three pages on one topic, ignoring the prompts on succeeding pages so he could tell his story. This is one of those, and if I say so myself, he's a great storyteller. I hope to grow up to be like him.

Today, I'm a Master's Degreed Civil Engineer with a specialty in Water Resources. I've never lived in a home that didn't have hot running water and modern plumbing and I spend most of my time thinking about how to protect water from the polluting influence of humans. This is my Papa's perspective on water. Change takes time, but -- WOW -- does it happen.
Just FYI, I have corrected misspellings and grammatical mistakes to make the meaning clear, but the text is otherwise unaltered.

Water, A Precious Commodity

When I was very young & even into adulthood, water was not readily available everywhere. If you lived in rural America, most likely your water supply was a well, or if in southern Louisiana, a cistern for rainwater. All over East Texas water was plentiful at about 30 ft. or so. Most people dug their wells about 3 ft. in diam. You could start out digging w/shovel & posthole diggers, but when it got into hard clay & then rock you had to use a flattened point bar & chip away one side while you stood on the other side. Then you scooped up the chips & put in a bucket & handed it up to or had someone else draw it out on a rope. You then got on the other side & did it again. This was a slow process but effectual.
After getting down to the first water, which was usually just a seep or trickle it got real messy, because from there on down the sides were wet clay mud. It was hard work & hot in summer & cold in winter. You needed to keep the walls round & straight, especially if you intended to run concrete tile in it to keep it from caving in later. At night seep water would accumulate & had to be drawn out before digging could resume.
After getting electricity & installing a pump & indoor plumbing, a lot of older wells had to be deepened to either hold more volume or down to another water vein. As long as people had to draw w/a bucket & rope, they were more conservative w/water. Some wells had to be 60 or 75 ft. deep to reach sufficient or good water. (n.b.: The next time you run water, remember these 3 pages)
I had to deepen our well when it got dry one year. It was hard to find someone to go down into a well & work. There was danger of caving & dropping a bucket on them. Humpy Fielder’s well was 75 deep & I helped him clean it out & deepened it a few feet. 5 gal. of mud gets awfully heavy drawing it up that far. Humpy was a trusting soul to work down in that well w/me, a 14 yr. old drawing mud. The hard part was drawing him back up, but by letting the tail of the rope down into the well, he could help pull himself up after he could reach the tail rope.
When water is this precious, you can take turns bathing in the same tub of water. You only use 1 glass full to brush your teeth. You dip your brush into the glass, brush, then wash your brush out in the glass of water, then spit & rinse your mouth w/the same glass of water. It looks kinda gross but your brush just came out of your mouth anyway. You swallow your spit, but if you spit it out into a spoon you wouldn’t want to put it back into your mouth & swallow. Ha. It’s all in your head!
Some people either were too lazy to dig a well or provide water near their home. They carried water from a spring, usually downhill from the house. Some people went to a stream to bathe. A very common practice when I was a small child. All the men & boys went to one hole & the women & girls to another. It was common to see tubs of water out in the sun warming for baths later on that day.
Wash water had to be drawn & heated in a big cast iron pot by wood fire. The clothes were boiled in that pot & rinsed in tubs. That was a chore, especially wringing by hand.
Without water in the house there was no bathroom. Every family had a chamber pot w/a lid to use at night or when someone was too sick to go to the outside toilet. The whole family used that one pot sometime & it got awfully full & smelly by morning, unless someone did the noble thing & went out & dumped it. If you were prosperous, you might have more than one pot. You could really know who was your pal when you were sick & needed your pot emptied.
Besides having to draw water for the family, the animals had to be watered. Even the hogs had to have a mud hole to wallow & stay cool in. A big mule or horse would drink more than 5 gal a day & cows almost as much. Teenage boys usually caught these chores. I almost always enjoyed drawing water except when the rope had ice on it. UGH!
Some people had a specially made bucket for milk to be kept in, down in the well. That way you could have cool milk for supper & it would keep 1 day w/out souring. If it soured a bit you could use it to make butter & buttermilk.
If an animal like a rat or mole or snake or cat got in the well & died the water would smell & taste bad so the carcass had to be gotten out & all the water drawn out. That was a big time job. Usually took hours of constant drawing to get the well empty, as water was constantly running in while you were drawing out. Bleach was then added to kill bacteria & you carried water from somewhere else for a few days. We had 2 wells & that was handy. It saved carrying water very far, too.

christmas shopping

One of my favorite gift-shopping ideas ever is to give my godsons gift cards. I know that's probably a cop out and I should work harder at buying them thoughtful gifts ahead of time. However, I don't shop for anybody, ever. Not even myself. If I'm not shopping for me, I'm damn skippy not shopping for you.
Since I figured out I could invite people over and give them quality time and steak instead of thoughtfully selected stuff-they'll-just-have-to-dust-until-they-throw-it-out-after-a-respectful-waiting-period, that has been my strategy. So, yeah, there's grocery shopping, but it's not as traumatic as Gift Shopping and I'd have to do that anyway.** Okay, so I don't shop and thus, the gift cards are how I handle Christmas and birthdays for the boys. Their parents would probably smother me in my sleep for this, except that I always take the boys shopping myself. This makes it a gift for their parents, too, so they suffer me to live. And it's a gift for me, because watching the little monsters shop is more entertaining than YouTube's search results for "butterfly fart."

The little one looks around a bit, asks what he can afford, and usually makes a selection inside 5 minutes that lets him take home two mid-sized toys. The older one looks around a lot, buys the largest set of Lego or the flashiest Nerf thing he can afford, and then grabs some trinket to use up the rest of his gift card. The middle one? I could do a three-part saga on how he agonizes, asks the prices of every item on every shelf, whines about what an evil predicament it is to have to shop on a budget, etc. He sets his eye on something worth about three times the dollar amount he has to spend, and then wheedles and whines to his brothers, trying to talk them into pooling their funds and sharing a toy. But he doesn't share well, and he doesn't offer any concessions. He's not very good at negotiating, although I suppose his strategy would work if he had a worldwide monopoly on ... anything. I pity the world if he ever does get a monopoly on anything. But considering that he's the only one who ever buys a book with his gift money, it's entirely possible he'll be the one in a power position someday. And I can say I knew him when. Muahahahahahahaha!

** Unless I happen to have a super-awesome roommate who just likes to shop and lets me give him a list and money a couple times a month. :) Thanks, Brody!

is this even the same language?

Some days, Rose and I have more trouble communicating than others. On good days, I'll tell you this is because I think in words and she thinks in pictures and then has to translate. Another way of simplifying it is to remember that I'm a linear thinker and she's a circular thinker. Or I'm an engineer, and she's an artist.

On bad days, I'll tell you it's because she doesn't speak frappin' English.

Tonight, as we were pulling into the parking area of a big-box store where we needed to pick up some dog food and NyQuil and a few such sundries, this conversation took place:

Rose: Don't worry, I'm going into one entrance tonight.
Me: Right, because unless you can suspend the laws of physics, you can only be at one entrance at a time.
Rose: Oooo! That's not what I meant and you know it!
Me: Or, I guess if you could chop yourself in half and survive that, you could go into both entrances, although it might not be truly simultaneous. Depending on how you timed that.
Rose: Aaaahhhh! That's not what I said!
Me: Yeah, I know you meant you were going into one PARTICULAR entrance, so as to minimize your walking time to the shopping objective. But that's not what the words that came out of your face meant.
Rose: Damn literal thinkers.
Me: Yeah, it's awful how I expect you to speak English and all.

Luckily, she didn't run over my heel all night with the shopping cart or "accidentally" lose me in the pharmacy. She even let me ride home with her after it was all over.

sometimes, it's the side trips...

Photo credits are a mix on this one. Some are Rose's, some are Chewy's. If it really matters to you which is which, ask me.

Most of the time, when I'm headed off to have a vacation, I have a pretty good idea where I'm going. I have fairly well planned what I'm going to do when I get there. After all, I might not be passing back that way again soon, and I don't want to miss a gem of an experience because I didn't know it was there for the having. But I never nail my schedule to a solid surface and stretch out all the slack, either. It's a blessed thing to reach a fork in the road and have the luxury of choosing which way to go. Sometimes instinct guides me, sometimes it's the allure of something shiny on the horizon, sometimes it's the promise of beauty passed in a rumor while chatting with the locals. Other times, it's a mundane highway sign, placed there by the good folks at the local transportation department purely for my edification. (Ok, for the edification of the general public, not me in particular. But it seems like they're written just for me sometimes. The universe has an impeccable timing chain, I tell you.) On the last day of my Utah vacation this summer, we rode over to Cedar Breaks National Monument as planned. I had bashed myself in the noggin with some sinus medication, so I stretched out on my bike and took a nap while the crew took these amazing photos. Medicated was better than congested, but it made me easy prey for the sunbeam-laced cat nap that came looking for me later. The vistas at Cedar Breaks are amazing, and really leave you with the impression that a Creator was looking at all those neat hunks of rock and thinking, "What if i just frosted this landscape with Cedar trees? I know! I'll liquefy the seed mix and spread it on like those Chia Pet things! This'll look AMAZING in about 10,000 years..."

Chelli had things at home that needed her attention, so she left Zion in the direction of Hurricane to get a t-shirt and then to point her headlight homeward. And so Rose, Chewy, Sylvia and I found ourselves at Zion National Park in southern Utah, staring at a fork in the road. It was pretty nearly our first unplanned turn of the whole vacation, and we were about 6 days in at that point. It took us to Kanab, UT. We'd been on an ATV tour in Tropic, UT a few days earlier, and our guide had mentioned that there were some old Hollywood movie sets in the vicinity that were used to film some of the episodes of Gunsmoke and several Hollywood westerns. He lamented the fact that another set had burned down under suspicious circumstances. Apparently the locals had recently rebuilt the set used in The Outlaw Josey Wales (and some other classic westerns) to make it safe for tourists to visit and the scuttlebutt said that extremist environmentalists had torched it because they were unhappy with the resulting traffic. This still-standing TV set was only barely holding together. The whole thing was posted "No Trespassing" but that hadn't stopped a few people we saw from sneaking in. I don't know whether Chewy was more disappointed that cheaters were prospering (in that they got close-ups) or that the John Wayne set was burned down. Either way, it was easy to see why they wanted to keep people out. The gallows looked like it was being held together by the wisp of rope that was dangling from the crosspiece, and all the other buildings had the look of using their very staircases as crutches.

Camping in Kanab was just as scenic as everything else in southern Utah. And I think it was staring up at that butte, sipping a beer and polishing off the last of my macaroni and cheese that I finally let go of the need to know where I was. I don't know how or when this need overcame me. I remember reading the map for my mom on long road trips when I was not more than 10 years old and not caring at all where we were. Somewhere in the succeeding 10 years, I turned into a (slightly compulsive) Navigator. In Kanab, I managed to let go of it for a while.

Lots of people have written books and sung songs extolling the idea that life is more about the journey than it is about the destination. On the one hand, I can appreciate that. But I know enough psychology to know that the sorts of people who are inclined to write books and sing songs are the only people for whom that is absolutely and essentially true. For those of us more inclined to consume art than to create it, life might be journey, destination, or some mix of the two. For me, life is HERE and life is NOW, so the destination and the journey are equally important. Yesterday is pretty much irrelevant, tomorrow is an infinite fan of possibilities that cannot be comprehended, while the present is everything. It makes me rotten at pattern recognition, it explains why I'm 10 minutes late for everything, and it makes me great at Navigation. I can limit the field of possibilities by taking a fork today. Knowing where I am in the moment allows me to foresee, insofar as one can foresee, what possibilities I am allowing or denying by making a choice. Plus, something about vacation tends to slip my inner Perfectionist a Valium Martini, letting me make Navigational choices both literal and figurative without agonizing first over whether it is the perfect choice.

So we woke up the next morning in Kanab, and instead of going home as we had planned, we looked at that fork in the road and took it to the Grand Canyon. I sure do love having some slack in my schedule, because sometimes the side trips are the best part.

so far behind i might lap myself...

Last night i had a terrible bout of insomnia, but was not inspired to write anything. "Yea!" is probably what you're thinking in response to that, but I won't hold it against you. Instead, I worked on finally collecting and organizing the photos from my trip to Utah this summer. Wow. My vacation photos from September, and I'm just now getting around to organizing them. Don't ask me about holiday cards. I never got there.

I'm not quite done with the photos just yet. We went on vacation with friends, you see, and there were some complications with getting the photos from them. I'm not going to bore you with technical details, but this would actually have been a little easier if they'd just printed all their photos and sent me doubles C.O.D. Then I could've scanned them and cleaned up the scans and manually entered the camera and date information. That seriously would've been easier.

When I finally get around to writing it all up, you'll see that the photos were, indeed, worth the effort. That should be happening sometime around September of this year, at the rate I'm going. About the same time I get around to doing my Spring Cleaning and making a scrapbook to commemorate my summer in Europe.

Blessed Abundance

I could not be happier or more relaxed than I am right now; not even if I were a 6-week old puppy with a belly full of milk all snuggled up with my brothers' and sisters' puppy breath in my face, lolling under a heat lamp.

My baby sister and I met up with our spouses and our dad and some good friends out at Lake O' The Pines to celebrate Christmas together. We sorely missed our Mom, middle sister and her beautiful family and were sending them our thoughts and prayers moment by moment. It turns out they muddled through and had their own special celebration, for which I'm so thankful!

Those of us who could gathered up at the Lake and celebrated in true East Texas fashion: by cooking and eating anything that would stand still long enough for us to stuff it in a pot. And while I call this "true East Texas" fashion, I've noticed that most groups think this is a unique quality of their culture. I've heard it especially from groups with a strong religious affiliation, like Irish Catholics, or Midwestern Methodists, or German Lutherans, or Chinese Buddhists, or Persian Muslims, or American Jews. Maybe it's because religion always seems to center around holidays and the community that shares them. When you find yourself in the midst of a gaggle of celebrants, someone will inevitably pull you aside and let you in on the secret, "Nobody eats quite like we eat at [insert holiday name] time!" I love it! I've heard it just often enough to know that I am far from having experienced all the holiday feasts I would like to experience. I really hope I get to hear that exact phrase with every imaginable accent before I die. So even though we celebrated in "true East Texas fashion" you can assume that aside from some characteristic spices, this is exactly like the big holiday gatherings that you know.

If, as they say, you are what you eat, right now I'm a glorious mish-mash of:

• boiled shrimp
• shrimp and oyster gumbo made with spicy chorizo para asar
• rice
• grilled steak
• sautéed brussels sprouts
• steamed asparagus
• sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts, made from scratch!)
• pumpkin pie
• key lime pie
• fried crappie (aka: white perch) that our neighbors caught in the lake on Christmas Day
• chips and chili con queso
• more boiled shrimp
• bacon and eggs
• creamy mashed potatoes with cheese
• beef jerky
• homemade deer sausage!!!
• venison tamales
• homemade chili
• fried eggs
• more sufganiyot! they were so popular we demanded a second batch from the baker...
• Mom's King Ranch Chicken, from when she visited right before Christmas
• fried cheddar cheese (you might have to be from East Texas to "get" this one)
• chocolate covered pecans imported all the way from West Texas
• buñuelos
• meringue cookies which we improvised poorly but ate anyway
• beef jerky, did i say that already?
• oranges
• big red tomatoes sliced raw and covered in salt and pepper
• pears
• and one more key lime pie!

This represents ridiculous abundance in my life, and I take it as symbolic of all the goodness that overflows in my everyday existence. Everybody who was there contributed, cooked a little, cleaned a little, ate a lot, laughed a lot more than they ate and had the freedom to have their own best time. You could walk when you wanted to walk, sleep when you needed to sleep, eat when you were hungry, and read as much or as little as you liked. There was always a pot of coffee on, or something bubbling on the stove, and there was a board game in progress more often than the TV was on. I did my job as the gumbo fairy to spread roux through the countryside: we swapped bowls of gumbo to the neighbors for the crappie and everybody came away happy. My dogs are pleasantly exhausted from swimming in the lake every morning and barking out the window at the browsing deer every night. I hope I can take a little bit of this feeling and carry it with me into the coming year, and share this satiety and happiness with everyone I meet. It is this exact feeling that I wish upon every person I meet when I say to them "Merry Christmas!" "Happy Holidays!" or even simply "God bless you!"

you win some, you lose some.

Tonight, I had a SUPERB dinner at Fleming's in Mt. Laurel, NJ. There was old scotch, and there was perfectly seared filet mignon and there was a great red wine. The weird little appetizer of Champagne-infused Brie was surprising, rich, and quite probably is the new love of my life. Except that I'm married. However, if you could marry food, Rose would totally have to armwrestle the Brie for my affections. It's just that good. So that is a win.

Also in the "win" column, and a significantly more important win, is the fact that my niece is out of the hospital. [here is where you must imagine me doing a giant, happy, rejoicing dance. there will be no live demo.] Seriously, this is better than any cheese ever. We still don't know anything, but she's feeling better, moving better, and is cross with her mama over all the poking, prodding, and testing she's had to go through. Mama was there to hold her, and in the 17-month-old-mind, is the agent at fault for all the discomfort. No fair, really. Keep her in your prayers. We all hope for her continued good health and a diagnosis that is easy for us to swallow. Selfish as it may be to ask that, it's what I want.

On to the losses. Monday, the TSA assaulted my dignity again. This time, it was over my freaking Tide pen. Yes, you know, those little gizmos you use when you spill something on your clothes and then have to go look like a reasonably well-put-together person in order to keep your job? Those things WHICH DO NOT CONTAIN BLEACH AT ALL or else you couldn't use them on colored fabrics? Yeah, the TSA lady pulled it out of my 1 quart zip-top bag and concluded that because it said "Tide" on it it must contain bleach and was therefore a threat to national security. Almost every word of labeling had been rubbed off the damn thing by its ongoing contact with said zip-top bag in my thousands of miles of air travel. It wasn't worth arguing over the single item. I wonder, though, if the PRINCIPLE isn't worth arguing over. Whatever I conclude on that score, I'm pretty sure that arguing with one liquids inspector at the DFW airport is not going to significantly impact the policy. And that's what I really want to argue with... not the policy IMPLEMENTERS, but the policy MAKERS.

keep 'em coming...

No news is good news, it seems. My niece is getting worse and the doctors want her admitted to the hospital for further observation and testing. My sister listed their situation pretty succinctly. So if you've got some prayers, kind thoughts, good energy, or healing vibes to spare, please send them her way. Thanks.