.
I thought I would change things up a little today. I will stop thinking of yesterday today. Instead I will think of today tomorrow. Essentially, that will be the same thing as usual but somehow a little different. Today it is in the future. Tomorrow it will just be more of the SOS.
If I was thinking about tomorrow today that too would be uncommon, for me more than a little unusual. It would almost be as if Linda Blair spun her head all the way around. Simply put I would be thinking about the future. The future is always so speculative. I normally prefer the known or previously known when it comes to eras. That way I spend less time contemplating potential errors, a lot like the grasshopper.
Still I would rather contemplate today. Not now… Tomorrow.
I see far too many people too many times too much not in the present. They are off somewhere in the past or future. Usually I am right there with them, spending too much time in the past or the future. Not so much in the future; I usually wait until the future is in the past. Let’s leave the future in the future or to those with DeLoreans. Besides, Lorraine Baines is just not that hot or was not or won’t be.
I will experience today, today. I will then think about it tomorrow. When I think about today tomorrow I think I shall not dwell on missed opportunities. Maybe I will consider what being in the moment was like.
This does leave me with a little dilemma. Not too large a one if I think about it. If I am not thinking about anything special today then I will have that special capacity to experience it; especially if I don’t spend too much time considering what the present moment is like in the present. I will hold off doing that until tomorrow when my present will be my past.
DakotaDawg seems to not spend too much time considering tomorrow today. I think she rarely thinks about yesterday today. Heck, she sometimes doesn’t even consider today, today. She just decides what she wants to do right now. Then unless there is a penalty she remembers from her past or one she fears in her future that she does not want to suffer; she does it. In the present, DakotaDawg is in the present. There but for too much thinking go I.
Right now is quite a different concept than today, tomorrow or yesterday. Similar to them, right now is constantly shifting through time. It is a reflection of nothing else.
It was Clinton that made that crystal clear when he said: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." I had a little trouble wrapping my head around that when he testified... Until the explanation: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true." Shouldn’t it have been what the meaning of are is?
Apparently President Clinton enjoyed being in the present tense especially when he had been in the present with his aide present. He especially also enjoyed being in the present when the present was in the past. He wasn’t or isn’t Slick Willie just for his ability to twist the language. Clinton was also a big fan of recycling. It seemed he recycled some of Ronnie RayGun's nicknames like Teflon Bill and The Great Prevaricator.
My goal today is to just let the present be the present, the past the past and the future the future. I am going to try for the rest of the day to be here where I am and not somewhere I am not. I am also not going to try too much to even consider the present. I am just going to enjoy it.
I must break this principle just once more to consider that I started this thought and blog post yesterday so a lot of it is like this morning’s walk with DakotaDawg. It is now the past.
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." I have to thank our grammarian president for that.
As for me, the rest of today I am going to think about tomorrow. Wait a minute, I mean I am going to be thinking about today tomorrow.
The heck with it; unless there are serious consequences, DakotaDawg and I will just be in the here and now and not think about it.
If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour...
© 06.30.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Hopefully that thing you should never forget is something you want to remember!
.
Maybe this is not such simple reasoning.
The other side of the equation is things you don’t want to remember become the precise and countless things you can never forget. Despite my best efforts this happens instead of the other way around.
It is not so much that either of these are simple suppositions. The questions always remain: Will what I don’t want to remember or what I don’t want to forget become reality and somehow turn out to be what is stored in the memory banks? Possibly neither will happen. Provisions must be made for all scenarios.
Most of the things I should never forget are the exact things I find impossible to remember. They are the things that I really should remember and I suppose just don’t want to quite enough. Many are such little things, like where I put something. The real kicker here is that it is still exactly where I put it so I would remember where it was. I simply don’t know even though it is still safe where I put it.
I treat mail this way. My theory is that if I need something badly enough I will find it when I have to. If not; it really is not needed in the first place. So that I never fail to have something if I need it I have joined that special club that saves almost everything. Mail or otherwise. I have everything stuffed everywhere.
Mail; I don’t usually bother to read when it arrives. And, I don’t try too hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
First Class mail goes in the “to save” pile. This usually is some pile somewhere. There might be a one in ten chance that I will look for it later or even will want or have to. Lots of this material is stuffed under the seats of my Land Cruiser, on the dashboard or in some box with more of the same. I pick the most convenient site and stuff it full. Then, I either move the entire hoard to a bigger site or find a new site where I stack the envelopes by size. Sorting by size is a valid way to handle First Class Mail since bank statements and other important things repeatedly come in larger envelopes.
Most First Class garbage comes in business size envelopes. Personal correspondence comes in smaller and every now and then odd shaped envelopes. Some are even colored depending on whether they reference some holiday.
So it is based on visual clues that I separate the likely garbage from the maybe, probably or definitely needed. One important clue I use is whether the mail even came in an envelope or not. If not then these are then subdivided into two categories: 1) Those visually scanned and/or 2) Those immediately recycled.
A picture of a waterfall with handwritten script normally designates communication from a loved one or an acquaintance that is on vacation. This can either be stored or immediately recycled. If I keep it, it is because I might need to know the next time I talk to them where they went so I can prime the small talk pump and keep running up my billable cellular network minutes. If the picture has more than one logo on it or includes typing or numerous colors of ink it is immediately recycled without prejudice.
The majority that have multiple logos or colors AND typing fall in one of the following categories, whether in envelopes or not: second, third or fourth class mail. Everything identified as not First Class Mail, except magazines or books go directly to the recycle bin. These senders try their hardest to make it impossible to recycle using plastic tape and windows on envelopes. I just cut the garbage off with a scissors and throw away the trash to recycle the paper. I make every effort not to read anything in this category despite time sensitive warnings or what have you. If these messages are red or in bigger type it is a sure identifier of the garbage and something to recycle. Almost all of it will not be that thing I should never forget and/or want to remember.
First Class Mail is a slightly different. Some is very important. Unless it has a handwritten address that identifies me correctly it joins one of the piles. When hand addressed I try to at least scan who it is from and whether or not I want to hear from them. If it is handwritten it is usually from my brother or one of my sisters. This is happening less and less as we talk on the phone and email back and forth more and more. Our family will be the downfall of the Postal System in America. I get very little of this type of mail.
Frequently this information is addressed to someone who doesn’t live where I do or shouldn’t be getting mail at my Post Office Box. Not at this address is always written across the front of these envelopes. They go back into the system where hopefully the second attempt to deliver will not be such a massive FAIL.
If anything looks the least bit “billish”… I am not the one at my address to handle it. It goes straight to the pile on the dining room table where eventually, it disappears.
Astonishingly, many things I need to and want to remember are not mail at all. Several have to do with food. As I get older others more frequently, drugs. I am sure some drugs could be responsible for me not remembering things I should never forget but we are not going down that road. Visualize Bill Clinton.
The food thing has become very important to me. Little things like where the heck is the mayonnaise?
I found it practical for those things that I constantly need to know the location of, to keep them in the same place all the time. I don’t necessarily keep the mayo with my car keys. The keys are always in the cup at the end of the counter. The mayo better be on the second shelf of the fridge unless the jar is empty. Then, the unopened jar is on the bottom shelf of the pantry. The empty jar ought to be with the recycle. From personal experience I can tell you that it is hell trying to find keys when they are on the second shelf of the fridge or in the recycle bin.
The category of things I should never forget that I really want to remember gets smaller and smaller as I get older and older. They’re fewer and fewer. Most of them are things that were said by loved ones like my mother or grandmother. My family and my beloved. Many are things about character, love and friendship. Others are just those people.
Some are things about my dog.
For DakotaDawg it is of utmost importance that I remember some things and want to remember them.
A few include:
1) She can hold it for like forever if it is raining out.
2) She is my best friend if there is a thunder storm somewhere within earshot.
.....A) She hears a lot better than I do.
.....B) She sees a lot better than I do.
.....C) She smells a lot better and more than I do or want to.
3) She is my best friend when it is not storming.
4) She eats when I eat. Simple as that.
5) She has earned two walks a day around the golf course for protecting us and being our friend. See 2 C) above.
6) She enjoys herding the kitties and does not like to be interrupted when she is in the middle of this most important task.
7) She may or may not understand English.
8) She is part of the Neighborhood Meet and Greet Dog Society. See all subsets of 2) above.
There are like a billion more things that I should never forget about my DakotaDawg. Most I want to remember. Most important of all is that it is important for me to remember what is important to her.
© 06.29.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Maybe this is not such simple reasoning.
The other side of the equation is things you don’t want to remember become the precise and countless things you can never forget. Despite my best efforts this happens instead of the other way around.
It is not so much that either of these are simple suppositions. The questions always remain: Will what I don’t want to remember or what I don’t want to forget become reality and somehow turn out to be what is stored in the memory banks? Possibly neither will happen. Provisions must be made for all scenarios.
Most of the things I should never forget are the exact things I find impossible to remember. They are the things that I really should remember and I suppose just don’t want to quite enough. Many are such little things, like where I put something. The real kicker here is that it is still exactly where I put it so I would remember where it was. I simply don’t know even though it is still safe where I put it.
I treat mail this way. My theory is that if I need something badly enough I will find it when I have to. If not; it really is not needed in the first place. So that I never fail to have something if I need it I have joined that special club that saves almost everything. Mail or otherwise. I have everything stuffed everywhere.
Mail; I don’t usually bother to read when it arrives. And, I don’t try too hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
First Class mail goes in the “to save” pile. This usually is some pile somewhere. There might be a one in ten chance that I will look for it later or even will want or have to. Lots of this material is stuffed under the seats of my Land Cruiser, on the dashboard or in some box with more of the same. I pick the most convenient site and stuff it full. Then, I either move the entire hoard to a bigger site or find a new site where I stack the envelopes by size. Sorting by size is a valid way to handle First Class Mail since bank statements and other important things repeatedly come in larger envelopes.
Most First Class garbage comes in business size envelopes. Personal correspondence comes in smaller and every now and then odd shaped envelopes. Some are even colored depending on whether they reference some holiday.
So it is based on visual clues that I separate the likely garbage from the maybe, probably or definitely needed. One important clue I use is whether the mail even came in an envelope or not. If not then these are then subdivided into two categories: 1) Those visually scanned and/or 2) Those immediately recycled.
A picture of a waterfall with handwritten script normally designates communication from a loved one or an acquaintance that is on vacation. This can either be stored or immediately recycled. If I keep it, it is because I might need to know the next time I talk to them where they went so I can prime the small talk pump and keep running up my billable cellular network minutes. If the picture has more than one logo on it or includes typing or numerous colors of ink it is immediately recycled without prejudice.
The majority that have multiple logos or colors AND typing fall in one of the following categories, whether in envelopes or not: second, third or fourth class mail. Everything identified as not First Class Mail, except magazines or books go directly to the recycle bin. These senders try their hardest to make it impossible to recycle using plastic tape and windows on envelopes. I just cut the garbage off with a scissors and throw away the trash to recycle the paper. I make every effort not to read anything in this category despite time sensitive warnings or what have you. If these messages are red or in bigger type it is a sure identifier of the garbage and something to recycle. Almost all of it will not be that thing I should never forget and/or want to remember.
First Class Mail is a slightly different. Some is very important. Unless it has a handwritten address that identifies me correctly it joins one of the piles. When hand addressed I try to at least scan who it is from and whether or not I want to hear from them. If it is handwritten it is usually from my brother or one of my sisters. This is happening less and less as we talk on the phone and email back and forth more and more. Our family will be the downfall of the Postal System in America. I get very little of this type of mail.
Frequently this information is addressed to someone who doesn’t live where I do or shouldn’t be getting mail at my Post Office Box. Not at this address is always written across the front of these envelopes. They go back into the system where hopefully the second attempt to deliver will not be such a massive FAIL.
If anything looks the least bit “billish”… I am not the one at my address to handle it. It goes straight to the pile on the dining room table where eventually, it disappears.
Astonishingly, many things I need to and want to remember are not mail at all. Several have to do with food. As I get older others more frequently, drugs. I am sure some drugs could be responsible for me not remembering things I should never forget but we are not going down that road. Visualize Bill Clinton.
The food thing has become very important to me. Little things like where the heck is the mayonnaise?
I found it practical for those things that I constantly need to know the location of, to keep them in the same place all the time. I don’t necessarily keep the mayo with my car keys. The keys are always in the cup at the end of the counter. The mayo better be on the second shelf of the fridge unless the jar is empty. Then, the unopened jar is on the bottom shelf of the pantry. The empty jar ought to be with the recycle. From personal experience I can tell you that it is hell trying to find keys when they are on the second shelf of the fridge or in the recycle bin.
The category of things I should never forget that I really want to remember gets smaller and smaller as I get older and older. They’re fewer and fewer. Most of them are things that were said by loved ones like my mother or grandmother. My family and my beloved. Many are things about character, love and friendship. Others are just those people.
Some are things about my dog.
For DakotaDawg it is of utmost importance that I remember some things and want to remember them.
A few include:
1) She can hold it for like forever if it is raining out.
2) She is my best friend if there is a thunder storm somewhere within earshot.
.....A) She hears a lot better than I do.
.....B) She sees a lot better than I do.
.....C) She smells a lot better and more than I do or want to.
3) She is my best friend when it is not storming.
4) She eats when I eat. Simple as that.
5) She has earned two walks a day around the golf course for protecting us and being our friend. See 2 C) above.
6) She enjoys herding the kitties and does not like to be interrupted when she is in the middle of this most important task.
7) She may or may not understand English.
8) She is part of the Neighborhood Meet and Greet Dog Society. See all subsets of 2) above.
There are like a billion more things that I should never forget about my DakotaDawg. Most I want to remember. Most important of all is that it is important for me to remember what is important to her.
© 06.29.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Monday, June 28, 2010
When first is second, who’s on First?
. This is not an exercise waiting in long lines to buy an iPhone. It has nothing to do with Matthew 20:16: “So the last shall be first, and the first last.” Hardly ever does that happen and almost never is second first. But very frequently first is second. It has more to do with people or more accurately person. It is a grammar and usage thing.
Even I’m confused now. If you think you are first, second, last or confused, read a few more paragraphs.
This may bring on an Ah-Ha moment for some. Especially married folks, kids, people in long term relationships and of course pet owners. For the pets though instead of Ah-Ha we often end up with “What the Heck?” but we can never be sure. DakotaDawg, possibly not so much. Nevertheless I continue to have suspicions.
Let’s mow the lawn only maybe on the very odd occasion means that everyone in the house is going to run outside, start up the mower and line up behind it taking turns on the north, south, east and west legs of its mind-numbing journey.
“Let’s” is a lot like “We should” or, “We ought to” in a not so Abbot and Costello kind of way. Ask any teenager to translate these first person plural imperatives for you. Almost every time the definitive answer is second person.
So the true definition of something as straight forward as person can depend entirely on context or possibly the person being used by whichever person is using whatever person they are using, no matter how they intend to use it or them. Maybe that is a bit too much Abbot and Costello for this post.
“Who’s Harvey?”
“A white rabbit, six feet tall.”
”Six feet? ”
”Six feet three and a half inches. Now let’s stick to the facts. ”
For the teen, first person plural imperatives become second person singular imperatives or second person plural imperatives primarily depending upon context and circumstances. If a single teen is the only young person within earshot and a parent has just used the “We should”, “We ought to” or “We must” suggestive phrases; for the teen that automatically translates into “You will” in the uniquely singular sense. If there are siblings or friends present when the command guised as a suggestion is posed, normally it is translated in the “You will” plural sense of the command that follows what only the naïve might think is a suggestion. The second can be first here and also second (sometimes as ruled by circumstances and context) if there are several younger people present but the parent is staring directly into the eyes of only one of the kids, especially menacingly. In this case, Robert De Niro would ask, “You talking to me?” which is obviously an example of second being second. This question generally clears up intent and meaning if not malice.
Wiki even gets a little confused simply on the straight grammar of it all not including any nuances, context or circumstances. They try to blame the Romans, then the French or Spanish. These people are at the heart of the romance languages… exactly where a lot of English got mixed up. Our language is in some crazy love affair, a Ménage à Trois or worse. We won’t even bother to talk about Hebrew, Japanese or Mandarin that Wiki tries to drag into things. Or any Nordic languages which Wiki completely ignores. This only complicate factors further.
A spade is a spade. A rose is still a rose. Even so, things are extremely muddled in English. Wiki tries to pass it off in terms of word order and adding the word you. Heck, we are talking about first being second where the word ‘you’ is not even used even if implied. Like so many things Wiki, they just got it wrong or head down some other obscure avenue trying to divert the readers with EOADD or AOADD.
So on first being second; Wiki barely touches the surface. Affirmative Indicative and Affirmative Imperative / Affirmative Prohibitive OR Negative Indicative and Negative Imperative / Negative Prohibitive… seriously, go to the Wiki for Imperative mood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_mood and see if you can make any sense of it at all. I have caught DakotaDawg with the key logger going back to this URL over and over and over. Now I know why she really prefers the Hochdeutsch to any of this nonsense.
For a few days I was trying to work on her pluperfect. On this I threw up my hands and sent away for the Rosetta Stone. Until it arrives I am relying heavily on the Google Gadget on my homepage for translations from English into German.
DakotaDawg though is a big fan of the "Let’s, We should or We ought to" line of reasoning. She says Let’s but frequently means YOU. I didn’t think we should get into that until we had the full set of DVD’s here and several slammed into the different computers all over the house.
DakotaDawg forged ahead. I now know her non-verbal command and its translation for: Let’s have a treat! It is when she sits on ‘her rug’ next to the dining room table and lets her tongue almost drag on the floor. Without Google or Rosetta Stone I figured out that that means: “You go over to the cookie jar and get me a treat.” “NOW.”
When first is second DakotaDawg is on her rug. I have no idea who’s on third.
I just know DakotaDawg is first.
Kommen Sie hier, bitte!
Setzen Sie sich auf Ihren Teppich.
Ich werde Ihnen eine Festlichkeit.
Sie sind ein sehr gutes Mädchen!
Wir sind sehr gut heute!
DakotaDog ist auf zuerst!
Translated back with Google:
Come here, please!
Sit on your carpet.
I will give you a treat.
You are a very good girl!
We are very good today!
DakotaDog is on first!
Very close but no bananas compared to what I asked them to say originally. I guess no matter what, some of it is Lost in Translation.
© 06.28.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Even I’m confused now. If you think you are first, second, last or confused, read a few more paragraphs.
This may bring on an Ah-Ha moment for some. Especially married folks, kids, people in long term relationships and of course pet owners. For the pets though instead of Ah-Ha we often end up with “What the Heck?” but we can never be sure. DakotaDawg, possibly not so much. Nevertheless I continue to have suspicions.
Let’s mow the lawn only maybe on the very odd occasion means that everyone in the house is going to run outside, start up the mower and line up behind it taking turns on the north, south, east and west legs of its mind-numbing journey.
“Let’s” is a lot like “We should” or, “We ought to” in a not so Abbot and Costello kind of way. Ask any teenager to translate these first person plural imperatives for you. Almost every time the definitive answer is second person.
So the true definition of something as straight forward as person can depend entirely on context or possibly the person being used by whichever person is using whatever person they are using, no matter how they intend to use it or them. Maybe that is a bit too much Abbot and Costello for this post.
“Who’s Harvey?”
“A white rabbit, six feet tall.”
”Six feet? ”
”Six feet three and a half inches. Now let’s stick to the facts. ”
For the teen, first person plural imperatives become second person singular imperatives or second person plural imperatives primarily depending upon context and circumstances. If a single teen is the only young person within earshot and a parent has just used the “We should”, “We ought to” or “We must” suggestive phrases; for the teen that automatically translates into “You will” in the uniquely singular sense. If there are siblings or friends present when the command guised as a suggestion is posed, normally it is translated in the “You will” plural sense of the command that follows what only the naïve might think is a suggestion. The second can be first here and also second (sometimes as ruled by circumstances and context) if there are several younger people present but the parent is staring directly into the eyes of only one of the kids, especially menacingly. In this case, Robert De Niro would ask, “You talking to me?” which is obviously an example of second being second. This question generally clears up intent and meaning if not malice.
Wiki even gets a little confused simply on the straight grammar of it all not including any nuances, context or circumstances. They try to blame the Romans, then the French or Spanish. These people are at the heart of the romance languages… exactly where a lot of English got mixed up. Our language is in some crazy love affair, a Ménage à Trois or worse. We won’t even bother to talk about Hebrew, Japanese or Mandarin that Wiki tries to drag into things. Or any Nordic languages which Wiki completely ignores. This only complicate factors further.
A spade is a spade. A rose is still a rose. Even so, things are extremely muddled in English. Wiki tries to pass it off in terms of word order and adding the word you. Heck, we are talking about first being second where the word ‘you’ is not even used even if implied. Like so many things Wiki, they just got it wrong or head down some other obscure avenue trying to divert the readers with EOADD or AOADD.
So on first being second; Wiki barely touches the surface. Affirmative Indicative and Affirmative Imperative / Affirmative Prohibitive OR Negative Indicative and Negative Imperative / Negative Prohibitive… seriously, go to the Wiki for Imperative mood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperative_mood and see if you can make any sense of it at all. I have caught DakotaDawg with the key logger going back to this URL over and over and over. Now I know why she really prefers the Hochdeutsch to any of this nonsense.
For a few days I was trying to work on her pluperfect. On this I threw up my hands and sent away for the Rosetta Stone. Until it arrives I am relying heavily on the Google Gadget on my homepage for translations from English into German.
DakotaDawg though is a big fan of the "Let’s, We should or We ought to" line of reasoning. She says Let’s but frequently means YOU. I didn’t think we should get into that until we had the full set of DVD’s here and several slammed into the different computers all over the house.
DakotaDawg forged ahead. I now know her non-verbal command and its translation for: Let’s have a treat! It is when she sits on ‘her rug’ next to the dining room table and lets her tongue almost drag on the floor. Without Google or Rosetta Stone I figured out that that means: “You go over to the cookie jar and get me a treat.” “NOW.”
When first is second DakotaDawg is on her rug. I have no idea who’s on third.
I just know DakotaDawg is first.
Kommen Sie hier, bitte!
Setzen Sie sich auf Ihren Teppich.
Ich werde Ihnen eine Festlichkeit.
Sie sind ein sehr gutes Mädchen!
Wir sind sehr gut heute!
DakotaDog ist auf zuerst!
Translated back with Google:
Come here, please!
Sit on your carpet.
I will give you a treat.
You are a very good girl!
We are very good today!
DakotaDog is on first!
Very close but no bananas compared to what I asked them to say originally. I guess no matter what, some of it is Lost in Translation.
© 06.28.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Under a Dreamsickle moon!
.
We decided to accept. It is not everyday that someone invites us to go out on a local lake to watch the full moon rise while we are lazing in our kayaks. Of course, Lee was involved in this. I am holding her personally responsible.
Possibly a little background music is appropriate here as I think of the Moody Blues. Cut and paste the links into another tab or you will be wisked away by YouTube, maybe never to return.
The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed 06 Evening_ The Sun Set _ Twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2murynF_kOI
Moody Blues - Sun Set – Twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca8WTdL-jhY
Moody Blues Evening: Time to Get Away: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZKZaWjoV4
The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed 06 Evening_ The Sun Set _ Twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2murynF_kOI
The Moody Blues - Nights In White Satin´67: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9muzyOd4Lh8
Lee even came to pick us up like the airport limo, except a roof rack on her Element. We met two others of our small flotilla back at Lee’s manse and gathered a few things that were needed but forgotten when the vehicles were loaded. They were little things, except for that one life vest short that by law was required in the War Canoe to make us legal. A couple of extra lights for that just in case factor might come in handy. Even with the full moon it might get a little dark. We had thunder storms all around us that afternoon. We expected maybe to be disappointed by the extra clouds still in the sky and on the horizon.
When we got to the city park we off loaded the kayaks from the Element and the canoe from rack on the truck. Bob had the huge aluminum War Canoe and entered the woods before us headed for the launch site. There was a lot of booming and bouncing. I wondered if he had fallen or if he was taking a Nantucket sleigh ride down the hill through the woods to the ramp.
We set the kayaks down and I went through the inkiness of the woods to investigate. Bob decided to drag the War Canoe because it was easier. I think too maybe in an effort to avoid all of the overhead branches.
The path through the woods down to the boat ramp was drab, devoid of all color. It was not barren of insects though. Every exhalation of CO2 brought more and more to swarm around our heads. These bloodthirsty demoniac flocks were no less intent on our demise than vultures on the Serengeti. They attacked with the unswerving devotion of ravens to road kill. Every swat at them was like a car coming down the highway. They would deftly evade and then crash back to their meal. No fewer than four brands of mosquito attractant offered little assistance.
When we were launching it was better to breathe through the nose than swallow large numbers of fanatical parasites hovering around our mouths, intent on sucking every last drop of our blood. These are the vampires of the arthropod world.
Mercifully there was a slight breeze over the lake that chased these carriers of equine encephalitis away. The waft’s cooling vapors were just above the glassine surface. It blew our attackers toward the woods. The light drafts assisted the bats, swooping in their black beauty almost invisible in the colorless sky. When I dipped my hand into the lake it was like bathwater. There were no mosquitoes there but I quickly took it out after thinking for a few seconds.
We got out on the lake just in time. The sun was making its irrevocable exit behind the trees. There were just enough clouds to reflect the last rays of the pink orange glow as it dipped down and disappeared.
Lee’s little kayak accompanied the War Canoe. They paddled in the opposite direction from the sunset toward where the moon would be making its appearance. We hung back a little basking in the last rays of dusk; enjoying a sunset that we thought was at least as beautiful as the moon rise could possibly be.
When it got full dusk there was slight hint that it had been light earlier that day. The darkness was almost absolute as the moon started peeking slowly over the hill of trees at the other end of the lake. Millimeter by millimeter a small bit of that glorious orb made itself known. We clapped after the Grand Finale. It became a full disk in the evening sky gradually getting smaller. There was not a cloud in the heavens between us and the moonrise.
The remnants of the thunderstorms were still off in the north. The electric discharge echoed off the high clouds of the storm. Nature’s Van de Graaff Generator was busy and making a lot of noise. We could hear a boom after each burst of light. Counting between the visible flash and the sound of the thunder I figured the storm was at least ten miles north of us. If it started coming closer we would head back to the cars. I had checked the radar before leaving the house on my trusty laptop. It looked as if the storm would keep its distance.
We heard the approaching train far in the distance warning those that might try to race it through a crossing. It was a long time getting there. We could only see hints of the circling front spotlight as it crashed down the tracks on the north shore of the lake behind the trees and the island that tried to conceal it. We did not have a twofer it was more like a fourfer or fivefer if you counted the company we kept.
The moon was still that magnificent dreamsickle orange. We talked about the Good Humor Man and his bells and the music and tastes of our youth. The contemplation of a dreamsickle made me salivate like the bells had in the past… for me and Pavlov’s dogs.
Pregnant and low over the horizon the moon laid there casting a reflection across the water directly to the bow of my kayak. It looked as if I could paddle right up the moonbeam to its source. It also cast barely enough light to illuminate the large gator that was stalking us. He was quite a BigBoy and we were invading his neighborhood. He crept closer and faded back raising his entire back out of the water into the moonlit nite in his territorial display. Not everybody was happy about this. Certainly the gator was not.
I challenged him once. He withdrew. He again slithered in and got even closer than before. The War Canoe, only slightly longer than AL pressed in for an attack. It was only a bluff but the gator made a huge splash and ruckus. He crash dived to make his escape. It was loud in the stillness of the full moon.
Again he came toward us like a U-Boat with a convoy in its sights making the surface attack. I raced off toward him slapping my paddle against the surface of the calm lake. I thought of some of the sub chasers in WWII that were smaller than their prey. Again he slapped the water with his huge tail as he went under.
“Snap out of it!”
I thought of Cher and the wooden hand. I did not want to abandon our post but more sensibly I did not want to be the prey. We navigated our small fleet slowly, easing off toward the shore. The coconut cream pie colored disc was getting more elevated in the sky. It had lost its orange color.
After the debate we determined it turned from dreamsickle flavored to my favorite pie in the world, all the way to Muenster cheese and then Monterey Jack. Unquestionably the moon was made of cheese. It did not disappoint.
We worked on our moon tans a bit longer until Luna was significantly higher in the sky. None of us seem to remember too much of Seléne despite all the Humanities and mythology in college. We paddled back toward the ramp and the inevitable insect assault.
We got home late and decided that if one of the Minit Markets on the way home did have Dreamsickles that they would in all probability be freezer burned… not at all like the ones we cherished as kids or dreamt of earlier when the moon burst over the horizon. Dreamsickles had to wait either until we heard the Good Humor man or loaded the kayaks for another full moon challenge of that resident ALimerGator.
We stowed the kayaks and I took DakotaDawg out for her last evening visit in the yard. We were pretty bushed. My back hurt a little from sitting in that Kayak. It was certainly time to hit the rack. I got a mosquito bite. Darn those things are itchy.
I got up, made the coffee and went out to get the paper. I got three more mosquito bites. I realized that what someone said last nite was probably quite true. Who needed insect repellant if I was there.
After Sunday breakfast DakotaDawg and I took our morning constitutional around the golf course. DakotaDawg nosed every tree, every possible place where the code messages might have been left for her. Her brain was working like a fine tuned Enigma.
We saw the Saturday nite beloved dropped off in front of their houses, last kisses until next time. The Saturday nite Casanova’s drove by in their pickups. At least Bullitt would get a chance to go inside and could get some sleep.
A bicycle built for two was swept up by the peloton as they pedaled the small hills of our downtown urban forest historic neighborhood. The little girl on the scooter who lives around the corner loudly announced to her mother that that was DakotaDawg. Her mother confirmed the observation as she plodded across the golf course headed for the Country Club pool.
A swallowtail butterfly moseyed around in front of our house near last years volunteer butterfly garden. The just fledged cardinal with his scarlet head hopped from bush to bush.
I unlocked the front door of the air conditioned splendor of our ancient house just as another mosquito nailed me on my right earlobe.
The not So Cute Little Orange Talking Kitty greeted us at the door announcing that someone very inconsiderately had left his food bowl on the counter after vacuuming up the excess kitty and dawg hair that threatened to swallow us up if not dealt with by that loud obnoxious floor sucker and rug beater.
The school of pond fish enjoyed their morning repast thrashing around in joy to see it was not the Great Blue Heron. Jaws snapped up every fish shaped cat food kibble after kibble I offered him.
Only problem is I can’t get the sound of Dean Martin outta my head.
“In Napoli where love is king
When boy meets girl here's what they say…
When the moon hits you eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore.
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore.
Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
And you'll sing "Vita bella"
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantella.
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool
That's amore.
When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
You're in love.
When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not
Dreaming signore
Scuzza me, but you see, back in Tallahassee
That's amore.”
I am sorry for this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtmsIq0-T54
It includes the Jerry Lewis part…
These are the Good Old Days. “That’s amore.” Living under a Dreamsickle Moon!
© 06.27.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
This is a picture of the Gator that I am pretty sure was inviting us out of his pond last nite. I took this picture in January 2007 as he was sunning on the island across from the boat ramp when he was only about 12' long. I think he was waiting for small kayaks he might eat for lunch. Last nite he acted a lot like he wanted a midnite snack. We did not hang around that long.
We decided to accept. It is not everyday that someone invites us to go out on a local lake to watch the full moon rise while we are lazing in our kayaks. Of course, Lee was involved in this. I am holding her personally responsible.
Possibly a little background music is appropriate here as I think of the Moody Blues. Cut and paste the links into another tab or you will be wisked away by YouTube, maybe never to return.
The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed 06 Evening_ The Sun Set _ Twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2murynF_kOI
Moody Blues - Sun Set – Twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca8WTdL-jhY
Moody Blues Evening: Time to Get Away: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZKZaWjoV4
The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed 06 Evening_ The Sun Set _ Twilight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2murynF_kOI
The Moody Blues - Nights In White Satin´67: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9muzyOd4Lh8
Lee even came to pick us up like the airport limo, except a roof rack on her Element. We met two others of our small flotilla back at Lee’s manse and gathered a few things that were needed but forgotten when the vehicles were loaded. They were little things, except for that one life vest short that by law was required in the War Canoe to make us legal. A couple of extra lights for that just in case factor might come in handy. Even with the full moon it might get a little dark. We had thunder storms all around us that afternoon. We expected maybe to be disappointed by the extra clouds still in the sky and on the horizon.
When we got to the city park we off loaded the kayaks from the Element and the canoe from rack on the truck. Bob had the huge aluminum War Canoe and entered the woods before us headed for the launch site. There was a lot of booming and bouncing. I wondered if he had fallen or if he was taking a Nantucket sleigh ride down the hill through the woods to the ramp.
We set the kayaks down and I went through the inkiness of the woods to investigate. Bob decided to drag the War Canoe because it was easier. I think too maybe in an effort to avoid all of the overhead branches.
The path through the woods down to the boat ramp was drab, devoid of all color. It was not barren of insects though. Every exhalation of CO2 brought more and more to swarm around our heads. These bloodthirsty demoniac flocks were no less intent on our demise than vultures on the Serengeti. They attacked with the unswerving devotion of ravens to road kill. Every swat at them was like a car coming down the highway. They would deftly evade and then crash back to their meal. No fewer than four brands of mosquito attractant offered little assistance.
When we were launching it was better to breathe through the nose than swallow large numbers of fanatical parasites hovering around our mouths, intent on sucking every last drop of our blood. These are the vampires of the arthropod world.
Mercifully there was a slight breeze over the lake that chased these carriers of equine encephalitis away. The waft’s cooling vapors were just above the glassine surface. It blew our attackers toward the woods. The light drafts assisted the bats, swooping in their black beauty almost invisible in the colorless sky. When I dipped my hand into the lake it was like bathwater. There were no mosquitoes there but I quickly took it out after thinking for a few seconds.
We got out on the lake just in time. The sun was making its irrevocable exit behind the trees. There were just enough clouds to reflect the last rays of the pink orange glow as it dipped down and disappeared.
Lee’s little kayak accompanied the War Canoe. They paddled in the opposite direction from the sunset toward where the moon would be making its appearance. We hung back a little basking in the last rays of dusk; enjoying a sunset that we thought was at least as beautiful as the moon rise could possibly be.
When it got full dusk there was slight hint that it had been light earlier that day. The darkness was almost absolute as the moon started peeking slowly over the hill of trees at the other end of the lake. Millimeter by millimeter a small bit of that glorious orb made itself known. We clapped after the Grand Finale. It became a full disk in the evening sky gradually getting smaller. There was not a cloud in the heavens between us and the moonrise.
The remnants of the thunderstorms were still off in the north. The electric discharge echoed off the high clouds of the storm. Nature’s Van de Graaff Generator was busy and making a lot of noise. We could hear a boom after each burst of light. Counting between the visible flash and the sound of the thunder I figured the storm was at least ten miles north of us. If it started coming closer we would head back to the cars. I had checked the radar before leaving the house on my trusty laptop. It looked as if the storm would keep its distance.
We heard the approaching train far in the distance warning those that might try to race it through a crossing. It was a long time getting there. We could only see hints of the circling front spotlight as it crashed down the tracks on the north shore of the lake behind the trees and the island that tried to conceal it. We did not have a twofer it was more like a fourfer or fivefer if you counted the company we kept.
The moon was still that magnificent dreamsickle orange. We talked about the Good Humor Man and his bells and the music and tastes of our youth. The contemplation of a dreamsickle made me salivate like the bells had in the past… for me and Pavlov’s dogs.
Pregnant and low over the horizon the moon laid there casting a reflection across the water directly to the bow of my kayak. It looked as if I could paddle right up the moonbeam to its source. It also cast barely enough light to illuminate the large gator that was stalking us. He was quite a BigBoy and we were invading his neighborhood. He crept closer and faded back raising his entire back out of the water into the moonlit nite in his territorial display. Not everybody was happy about this. Certainly the gator was not.
I challenged him once. He withdrew. He again slithered in and got even closer than before. The War Canoe, only slightly longer than AL pressed in for an attack. It was only a bluff but the gator made a huge splash and ruckus. He crash dived to make his escape. It was loud in the stillness of the full moon.
Again he came toward us like a U-Boat with a convoy in its sights making the surface attack. I raced off toward him slapping my paddle against the surface of the calm lake. I thought of some of the sub chasers in WWII that were smaller than their prey. Again he slapped the water with his huge tail as he went under.
“Snap out of it!”
I thought of Cher and the wooden hand. I did not want to abandon our post but more sensibly I did not want to be the prey. We navigated our small fleet slowly, easing off toward the shore. The coconut cream pie colored disc was getting more elevated in the sky. It had lost its orange color.
After the debate we determined it turned from dreamsickle flavored to my favorite pie in the world, all the way to Muenster cheese and then Monterey Jack. Unquestionably the moon was made of cheese. It did not disappoint.
We worked on our moon tans a bit longer until Luna was significantly higher in the sky. None of us seem to remember too much of Seléne despite all the Humanities and mythology in college. We paddled back toward the ramp and the inevitable insect assault.
We got home late and decided that if one of the Minit Markets on the way home did have Dreamsickles that they would in all probability be freezer burned… not at all like the ones we cherished as kids or dreamt of earlier when the moon burst over the horizon. Dreamsickles had to wait either until we heard the Good Humor man or loaded the kayaks for another full moon challenge of that resident ALimerGator.
We stowed the kayaks and I took DakotaDawg out for her last evening visit in the yard. We were pretty bushed. My back hurt a little from sitting in that Kayak. It was certainly time to hit the rack. I got a mosquito bite. Darn those things are itchy.
I got up, made the coffee and went out to get the paper. I got three more mosquito bites. I realized that what someone said last nite was probably quite true. Who needed insect repellant if I was there.
After Sunday breakfast DakotaDawg and I took our morning constitutional around the golf course. DakotaDawg nosed every tree, every possible place where the code messages might have been left for her. Her brain was working like a fine tuned Enigma.
We saw the Saturday nite beloved dropped off in front of their houses, last kisses until next time. The Saturday nite Casanova’s drove by in their pickups. At least Bullitt would get a chance to go inside and could get some sleep.
A bicycle built for two was swept up by the peloton as they pedaled the small hills of our downtown urban forest historic neighborhood. The little girl on the scooter who lives around the corner loudly announced to her mother that that was DakotaDawg. Her mother confirmed the observation as she plodded across the golf course headed for the Country Club pool.
A swallowtail butterfly moseyed around in front of our house near last years volunteer butterfly garden. The just fledged cardinal with his scarlet head hopped from bush to bush.
I unlocked the front door of the air conditioned splendor of our ancient house just as another mosquito nailed me on my right earlobe.
The not So Cute Little Orange Talking Kitty greeted us at the door announcing that someone very inconsiderately had left his food bowl on the counter after vacuuming up the excess kitty and dawg hair that threatened to swallow us up if not dealt with by that loud obnoxious floor sucker and rug beater.
The school of pond fish enjoyed their morning repast thrashing around in joy to see it was not the Great Blue Heron. Jaws snapped up every fish shaped cat food kibble after kibble I offered him.
Only problem is I can’t get the sound of Dean Martin outta my head.
“In Napoli where love is king
When boy meets girl here's what they say…
When the moon hits you eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore.
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore.
Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
And you'll sing "Vita bella"
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantella.
When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool
That's amore.
When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
You're in love.
When you walk down in a dream but you know you're not
Dreaming signore
Scuzza me, but you see, back in Tallahassee
That's amore.”
I am sorry for this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtmsIq0-T54
It includes the Jerry Lewis part…
These are the Good Old Days. “That’s amore.” Living under a Dreamsickle Moon!
© 06.27.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
This is a picture of the Gator that I am pretty sure was inviting us out of his pond last nite. I took this picture in January 2007 as he was sunning on the island across from the boat ramp when he was only about 12' long. I think he was waiting for small kayaks he might eat for lunch. Last nite he acted a lot like he wanted a midnite snack. We did not hang around that long.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
These are the Good Old Days!
.
I was online early this morning. It was 6:06 when WinDoze at long last ran through enough gyrations for me to see the digital display on my taskbar.
An imaginary friend was on last nite. He has some pretty good things going on in his life right now. I am really happy for him. Sometimes it is the right time for someone to catch a break especially if they had been down for a while.
This did not come upon him all on its own. It took a lot of work and a conscious decision to stop doing what he had been doing. To stand up and make deliberate changes that didn’t make things easier until patience and persistence had a chance to work their magic.
The groove he had fallen into was not comfortable because of many things. Thankfully, I do not know all of them. What I did know or find out began to sound like a needle stuck on the record and hitting the same scratch. Repeating and repeating and repeating. I did offer advice even when it might not have been wanted. Friends do that.
Now, it is almost as if a gawky kid or young woman grew into themselves… the swan analogy deal. Unlike the swan and Carly Simon this was not inevitable. He had to slam on the brakes, make a hard left and drive up into the mountains for a while before he could immerse himself in the beauty and recognize it… before he could start to make a descent. A descent instead of a crash and burn.
Carly was one of those kinds of women just as this young man is exactly that kind of man. He is a poet. It took a while for him to recognize it but it finally hit him between the eyes like a ball peen hammer.
It is fun to be around him. In a lot of ways he is a strong adult. At the same time he is still an adolescent. And, he has a great sense of humor if not always timing. I have seen many like him flower and flourish. It is one of the privileges of being older.
It is difficult to remember that these are the Good Old Days. The ones we are living. Breathing through daily. They come creeping up on us but fly right by. You got something there Trace.
Often it is easier to try to make the ones long gone by the best of our lives. Or, the ones yet to come that we scheme and plan for as we zoom through what we are experiencing right now. No, the good old days are the drama of our daily lives that we are living through here and now. These are the Good Old Days. These are the ones we need to long for and cherish. To nourish with all of our will.
Another friend online last nite said something that really lit me up. It was the singular thing that got me started down this road. He made a comment on something that really sticks with me: “Those mountains catch the clouds and don't like to let them go.” I don’t know if he heard this somewhere. I think he might be the first that said it exactly that way. I think he is about the same age as the other poet. His poetry is different though. His verse is how hard he works for his family and making things the best he can for them. I never thought of him as perfect, just close.
If you can get through the Barbara Streisand you might want to check out the YouTube “Carly Simon Mix”. Google will bring it to the top of the list with the right cut and paste. There were a lot of poets back in those Good Old Days. It wasn’t all about war and protest back then.
It isn’t all about war and exploitation of our resources now. There are a lot of Good Old Days we are living and breathing through right here. Right now!
Inhale and let it wash over you. Share it with others. Hope there are enough plants left to convert your waste back into something we know, love and need. Enough honey bees to pollinate those plants and the flowers.
You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you. You're so vain.
I'll bet you think this song is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?
Life Is Eternal as long as you are living it. You’re gonna miss this. These are all songs about me and who I am. It’s all about me and who I am.
I almost can’t believe I am sitting here typing and listening to a Trace Adkins mix. Life Is Eternal.
DakotaDawg, grab your plastic bag. Wollen Sie einen Spaziergang machen?
Well, that’s what Google told me to say.
DakotaDawg go sit on your rug. Isn’t that a fledged winged cardinal sitting on the feeder? He is going to grow up just like Jason. Go in the back and let me brush you. Are you still shedding?
These are the Good Old Days. You’re gonna miss this. Run with it, regardless of the distance. These are the Good Old Days. Some of this is plagiarized.
© 06.26.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
I was online early this morning. It was 6:06 when WinDoze at long last ran through enough gyrations for me to see the digital display on my taskbar.
An imaginary friend was on last nite. He has some pretty good things going on in his life right now. I am really happy for him. Sometimes it is the right time for someone to catch a break especially if they had been down for a while.
This did not come upon him all on its own. It took a lot of work and a conscious decision to stop doing what he had been doing. To stand up and make deliberate changes that didn’t make things easier until patience and persistence had a chance to work their magic.
The groove he had fallen into was not comfortable because of many things. Thankfully, I do not know all of them. What I did know or find out began to sound like a needle stuck on the record and hitting the same scratch. Repeating and repeating and repeating. I did offer advice even when it might not have been wanted. Friends do that.
Now, it is almost as if a gawky kid or young woman grew into themselves… the swan analogy deal. Unlike the swan and Carly Simon this was not inevitable. He had to slam on the brakes, make a hard left and drive up into the mountains for a while before he could immerse himself in the beauty and recognize it… before he could start to make a descent. A descent instead of a crash and burn.
Carly was one of those kinds of women just as this young man is exactly that kind of man. He is a poet. It took a while for him to recognize it but it finally hit him between the eyes like a ball peen hammer.
It is fun to be around him. In a lot of ways he is a strong adult. At the same time he is still an adolescent. And, he has a great sense of humor if not always timing. I have seen many like him flower and flourish. It is one of the privileges of being older.
It is difficult to remember that these are the Good Old Days. The ones we are living. Breathing through daily. They come creeping up on us but fly right by. You got something there Trace.
Often it is easier to try to make the ones long gone by the best of our lives. Or, the ones yet to come that we scheme and plan for as we zoom through what we are experiencing right now. No, the good old days are the drama of our daily lives that we are living through here and now. These are the Good Old Days. These are the ones we need to long for and cherish. To nourish with all of our will.
Another friend online last nite said something that really lit me up. It was the singular thing that got me started down this road. He made a comment on something that really sticks with me: “Those mountains catch the clouds and don't like to let them go.” I don’t know if he heard this somewhere. I think he might be the first that said it exactly that way. I think he is about the same age as the other poet. His poetry is different though. His verse is how hard he works for his family and making things the best he can for them. I never thought of him as perfect, just close.
If you can get through the Barbara Streisand you might want to check out the YouTube “Carly Simon Mix”. Google will bring it to the top of the list with the right cut and paste. There were a lot of poets back in those Good Old Days. It wasn’t all about war and protest back then.
It isn’t all about war and exploitation of our resources now. There are a lot of Good Old Days we are living and breathing through right here. Right now!
Inhale and let it wash over you. Share it with others. Hope there are enough plants left to convert your waste back into something we know, love and need. Enough honey bees to pollinate those plants and the flowers.
You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you. You're so vain.
I'll bet you think this song is about you. Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?
Life Is Eternal as long as you are living it. You’re gonna miss this. These are all songs about me and who I am. It’s all about me and who I am.
I almost can’t believe I am sitting here typing and listening to a Trace Adkins mix. Life Is Eternal.
DakotaDawg, grab your plastic bag. Wollen Sie einen Spaziergang machen?
Well, that’s what Google told me to say.
DakotaDawg go sit on your rug. Isn’t that a fledged winged cardinal sitting on the feeder? He is going to grow up just like Jason. Go in the back and let me brush you. Are you still shedding?
These are the Good Old Days. You’re gonna miss this. Run with it, regardless of the distance. These are the Good Old Days. Some of this is plagiarized.
© 06.26.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Friday, June 25, 2010
Can I get a translator?
.
Lots of times this is exactly how I feel. Since I have some pretty cool nieces and nephews and some grand nieces and nephews in the progression this has not been too much of a problem with KidSpeak.
I feel like Bill Murray except I don’t have Scarlett fever. Well, maybe just a little. I sometimes say something and other people or some DAWG just look at me as if I am underwater with the mermaids of Weeki Wachee, Florida’s City of Mermaids. They can hear some mumbling but can’t quite make out what I am trying to say.
I think I am pretty clear when I am trying to tell someone something important… like I told the neighbor in no uncertain terms that I would rather his dog used his yard to relieve itself. He pretty much got that but there are still those days where I have suspicions but am not willing to pay for lab testing.
Lately though, it is as much a problem of me being understood as me understanding what someone is trying to tell me. Nieces through grand nephews can be no help at all here.
One of these special areas I discussed in the “What would Monty Python do?” blog entry. Today I got three of them at my private email address. This bunch of people speak Russian or some other language that uses letters from that alphabet I don’t even recognize. I am certain it is not Socrates calling me from the dead through the miracle of electronic mail.
I never even try to read these missives and have asked Outlook repeatedly to only put mail in my Inbox that I can read. Like things written in English. Some of the authors have been permanently added to the block senders list but they continue to demand a return receipt. I usually do not send one… DUH!
Outlook since it was a software engineering marvel of MicroSoft, as in most other cases of MicroSoft software, continues to ignore me. I was thinking if I could find a translator that understands the Cyrillic alphabet and he or she would translate some of these emails that there might be instructions from MicroSoft on how to get some of my software to do what I ask it to do.
I am pretty sure that is not the case at all. Maybe these Cyrillic coded posts come from Steve Jobs warning me that my WinDoze machine is going to blow up in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4… waiting, waiting, waiting. No, that wasn’t it.
My best guess is that they are song lyrics. Yes, that must be it. They are the words to American Pie.
From: http://understandingamericanpie.com/
“In the autumn of 1971 Don McLean's elegiac American Pie entered the collective consciousness, and over thirty years later remains one of the most discussed, dissected and debated songs that popular music has ever produced.”
Huh, these coded Cyrillic emails want to discuss and dissect this most debated song?
“A cultural event at the peak of its popularity in 1972, it reached the top of the Billboard 100 charts in a matter of weeks, selling more than 3 million copies; and at eight and a half minutes long, this was no mean feat. But this was no ordinary song, either: boldly original and thematically ambitious, what set American Pie apart had a lot to do with the way we weren't entirely sure what the song was about, provoking endless debates over its epic cast of characters.”
Some of the epic cast of characters sure looks strange to me.
"And these controversies remain with us to this day. But however open to interpretation the lyrics may have been, the song's emotional resonance was unmistakable: McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience—something had been lost, and we knew it.”
Yup, it must be that they want to discuss Buddy Holly.
“Opening with the death of singer Buddy Holly and ending near the tragic concert at Altamont Motor Speedway, we are able to frame the span of years the song is covering—1959 to 1970—as the "10 years we've been on our own" of the third verse. It is across this decade that the American cultural landscape changed radically, passing from the relative optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of these values by the various political and social movements of the mid and late 1960s.”
What cultural landscape? I lived through those years and there was very little culture unless you count the Chicago 8 or John Lennon or possibly the Nixon administration. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, Four dead in Ohio.”
A lot of the young people were yelling but few were listening… neither the young or the old.
“Coming as it did near the end of this turbulent era, American Pie seemed to be speaking to the precarious position we found ourselves in, as the grand social experiments of the 1960s began collapsing under the weight of their own unrealized utopian dreams, while the quieter, hopeful world we grew up in receded into memory. And as 1970 came to a close and the world this generation had envisioned no longer seemed viable, a sense of disillusion and loss fell over us; we weren't the people we once were. But we couldn't go home again either, having challenged the assumptions of that older order. The black and white days were over.”
Was it about Black Power?
Back then I didn’t need a translator. I just plain got it. Thank goodness Don McLean was not just a one hit wonder!
“Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.
Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue, morning field of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.
For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.”
But there is plenty of hope and we can never give up. The hippie in me still cries out Imagine!
“Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one”
There is lots of music from those days that should be played over and over and over for the leaders of the modern world. If they need translators it shouldn’t be that hard to find some.
Maybe we can put some of this behind us and move forward in peace and harmony. It is not as if we need “The Story of the Trapp Family Singers” or Julia Andrews and Christopher Plummer singing Climb Every Mountain to figure out it is time to get this show on the road.
Art and music do not need translators.
Imagine!
Or is it that some powerful people have permanently added us to the block senders list? If necessary let's send the return receipt.
The heck with it, pass the shoe bomb. No one is listening. No one really cares.
“Bye bye, Miss American Pie.”
Come here DakotaDawg… just a second… Hier DakotaDawg kommen. Es ist nur ein kleines Gewitter.
© 06.25.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Lots of times this is exactly how I feel. Since I have some pretty cool nieces and nephews and some grand nieces and nephews in the progression this has not been too much of a problem with KidSpeak.
I feel like Bill Murray except I don’t have Scarlett fever. Well, maybe just a little. I sometimes say something and other people or some DAWG just look at me as if I am underwater with the mermaids of Weeki Wachee, Florida’s City of Mermaids. They can hear some mumbling but can’t quite make out what I am trying to say.
I think I am pretty clear when I am trying to tell someone something important… like I told the neighbor in no uncertain terms that I would rather his dog used his yard to relieve itself. He pretty much got that but there are still those days where I have suspicions but am not willing to pay for lab testing.
Lately though, it is as much a problem of me being understood as me understanding what someone is trying to tell me. Nieces through grand nephews can be no help at all here.
One of these special areas I discussed in the “What would Monty Python do?” blog entry. Today I got three of them at my private email address. This bunch of people speak Russian or some other language that uses letters from that alphabet I don’t even recognize. I am certain it is not Socrates calling me from the dead through the miracle of electronic mail.
I never even try to read these missives and have asked Outlook repeatedly to only put mail in my Inbox that I can read. Like things written in English. Some of the authors have been permanently added to the block senders list but they continue to demand a return receipt. I usually do not send one… DUH!
Outlook since it was a software engineering marvel of MicroSoft, as in most other cases of MicroSoft software, continues to ignore me. I was thinking if I could find a translator that understands the Cyrillic alphabet and he or she would translate some of these emails that there might be instructions from MicroSoft on how to get some of my software to do what I ask it to do.
I am pretty sure that is not the case at all. Maybe these Cyrillic coded posts come from Steve Jobs warning me that my WinDoze machine is going to blow up in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4… waiting, waiting, waiting. No, that wasn’t it.
My best guess is that they are song lyrics. Yes, that must be it. They are the words to American Pie.
From: http://understandingamericanpie.com/
“In the autumn of 1971 Don McLean's elegiac American Pie entered the collective consciousness, and over thirty years later remains one of the most discussed, dissected and debated songs that popular music has ever produced.”
Huh, these coded Cyrillic emails want to discuss and dissect this most debated song?
“A cultural event at the peak of its popularity in 1972, it reached the top of the Billboard 100 charts in a matter of weeks, selling more than 3 million copies; and at eight and a half minutes long, this was no mean feat. But this was no ordinary song, either: boldly original and thematically ambitious, what set American Pie apart had a lot to do with the way we weren't entirely sure what the song was about, provoking endless debates over its epic cast of characters.”
Some of the epic cast of characters sure looks strange to me.
"And these controversies remain with us to this day. But however open to interpretation the lyrics may have been, the song's emotional resonance was unmistakable: McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience—something had been lost, and we knew it.”
Yup, it must be that they want to discuss Buddy Holly.
“Opening with the death of singer Buddy Holly and ending near the tragic concert at Altamont Motor Speedway, we are able to frame the span of years the song is covering—1959 to 1970—as the "10 years we've been on our own" of the third verse. It is across this decade that the American cultural landscape changed radically, passing from the relative optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of these values by the various political and social movements of the mid and late 1960s.”
What cultural landscape? I lived through those years and there was very little culture unless you count the Chicago 8 or John Lennon or possibly the Nixon administration. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, Four dead in Ohio.”
A lot of the young people were yelling but few were listening… neither the young or the old.
“Coming as it did near the end of this turbulent era, American Pie seemed to be speaking to the precarious position we found ourselves in, as the grand social experiments of the 1960s began collapsing under the weight of their own unrealized utopian dreams, while the quieter, hopeful world we grew up in receded into memory. And as 1970 came to a close and the world this generation had envisioned no longer seemed viable, a sense of disillusion and loss fell over us; we weren't the people we once were. But we couldn't go home again either, having challenged the assumptions of that older order. The black and white days were over.”
Was it about Black Power?
Back then I didn’t need a translator. I just plain got it. Thank goodness Don McLean was not just a one hit wonder!
“Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer's day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.
Starry, starry night.
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze,
Swirling clouds in violet haze,
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue, morning field of amber grain,
Weathered faces lined in pain,
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.
For they could not love you,
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.”
But there is plenty of hope and we can never give up. The hippie in me still cries out Imagine!
“Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one”
There is lots of music from those days that should be played over and over and over for the leaders of the modern world. If they need translators it shouldn’t be that hard to find some.
Maybe we can put some of this behind us and move forward in peace and harmony. It is not as if we need “The Story of the Trapp Family Singers” or Julia Andrews and Christopher Plummer singing Climb Every Mountain to figure out it is time to get this show on the road.
Art and music do not need translators.
Imagine!
Or is it that some powerful people have permanently added us to the block senders list? If necessary let's send the return receipt.
The heck with it, pass the shoe bomb. No one is listening. No one really cares.
“Bye bye, Miss American Pie.”
Come here DakotaDawg… just a second… Hier DakotaDawg kommen. Es ist nur ein kleines Gewitter.
© 06.25.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Update… My computer: a microcosm of the environment.
.
I sometimes get a little impatient with my computer as it continually is out on the interweb searching for Updates. Sometimes it is sneaking around doing it. Other times it is beating me over the head with a ball bat telling me it is about to or is or has. Tedious I tell you.
A WinDoze computer can bring a very special and diverse variety of pain. I began leaving my computer on and available to the interweb at night so it can go searching its software’s mothership headquarters for new things to try to fill up my hard drive. I am sometimes astounded how little the computer sleeps during the night because it takes so long to shut down and restart after it continues to rag me to reboot when I greet it every day. Maybe it is just tired and needs some rest. On occasion it is still churning away when I lift the portable’s lid in the morning.
Some programs consistently slow everything down while they search in the background and eat up precious cycles of my computer’s memory or its CPU. Checking the Task Manager Performance tab can be gut wrenching. Some of the other tabs are easily as threatening.
I loathe hitting CTRL ALT DEL to try to figure out what is going on that I as master of my own domain did not direct my computer to do. If the computer seems exceptionally slow I know it is either something hiding deep behind my Processes or something under the Services Tab. Usually it is completely out of my hands. I am left out of the loop.
Generally it is not a program listed under my Applications Tab. Those things are what I asked the computer to do. Hopefully I know what is lurking there! Hopefully, it is at least doing one of those things and they are all listing as running. With all the multitasking the 4 Gigs of memory and the Virtual Memory hiding somewhere in a hidden area of my hard drive are capable of, I usually try to keep these down to one or two active things going on at any one time. I figure that this gives the dual core Intel chip at least a small chance of being able to keep up.
I have a rather large brick fish pond next to the patio of my house. When I go out to feed the fish I am amazed at how this closed system reminds me so much of my computer. I tweak it almost as many times as my computer.
I liken the pump to something that is always operating when my computer is turned on… almost like the CPU. When it is not clogged with leaves or some other organic detritus it keeps on churning away recycling through its heart all of the blood of the system moving the bytes hither and yon, spitting them back into the system, moving electrons around.
In the fishpond I am pleased to know that the particular high capacity pump there works very efficiently if the strainer is not clogged. If there is blockage; the flow of the water through it slows to a trickle. Just like my computer. An advantage in the fish pond system is that I can without difficulty clean the strainer and if necessary flush out the hose coming from the pump.
With the computer this may not be so easy. Many services are like the leaves and the junk that always tax the efficiency of the pump. No matter how hard I try they continue to remain close to the heart of the system gumming things up.
In my computer world this type of debris is listed under either the Processes Tab or the Services Tab. Sometimes I can remove one and get it out of my pond. More often this virtual waste just keeps showing up. Bonjour Service is one of those kinds of things. I don’t know precisely what this is. I have googled it on many occasions to find out how to remove it. It is exactly like MicroSoft Messenger in that as many times as I pull the plug on it; it just keeps saying, “I’m Baaaaack!” as soon as my attention turns to something else. I want to thank Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and their software engineers for these seemingly unnecessary things that continue to assert dominance over my WinDoze Operating System (OS) and my preferences.
There is a lot more stuff floating around in my pond ready to clog my pump. I tire of trying to stop some of them from reloading in front of my OS. Many of these services are updaters that attempt to get out on the interweb to insure that the latest and greatest of the megabytes needed to slow my computer even more are entrenched. The big companies that are fighting for dominance of the computer world are all involved in this conspiracy and are waging their LITTLE war with all its large and small battles inside my computer. Apple, Adobe, Google and MicroSoft fight with Norton and others to load imperative instructional sets hiding in the files they send to me without my invitation. I have tried to limit the number of times this happens and even the time it does happen but feel stymied in my efforts. I have become my own full time IT Department.
Some things have the courtesy to ask if it is alright to interrupt me while I use the computer. Others just forge on and do their nastiness without asking my permission. If asked and I deny them they just keep posting thought bubbles and nags on my computer screen. “Warning Will Robinson”.
When I relent and let them take over; they change everything I have worked so hard to configure, protect or optimize so they can do what they want in the background without my knowledge or having to ask my acquiescence. Norton is master of this. This naughty boy starts bossing me around after it has had its way with me and my computer. It orders me to reboot. It asks me if I want to do it now... Or, if I want to wait five minutes, an hour or what ever. It tells me that something is nefarious. It orders me to back up or run a system scan. Or it just does these things all on its own.
Usually I do have that option to tell most of these nags: Not Now. Inevitably I have to bow to their wishes and click on their preferred option and the radio button. I can find some really obscure things almost every morning before I get to holler “Whoopee!” and reboot.
The fish in my pond are like some or my computer’s services or processes. They gobble down any resource I throw at them. If they are sated because they ate all the fish pellets or cat food kibbles I have dumped in; they are usually ready to try to eat more the next time food is obtainable. The more I feed them the bigger they get and the more they want. It is an endless loop of geometrically growing mass. When I put the resources into the pond the fish are a swirling critical mass consuming everything is sight.
I have pet nicknames for a lot of the fish pets living in my pond. These names are based on what my fish do or how they look. Many of my processes and services just don’t look as great to me. Some I can’t even find a real name for. They keep swimming around gobbling down all of my resources… not giving me much in return. Sometimes they show themselves.
It is not unusual that they stay hidden. They can hide very well when I, the highest apex predator have been stomping around in their network like the Great Blue Heron that visited several times. His most Holy Uninvited ate some of the most worthy and most of the dumbest. Like me he kept coming back for more. I thought he had eaten all of the fish. I did not see a single one for about two weeks. By then the heron must have stopped showing up at the Smörgåsbord or had eaten all of the terminally stupid. I was not so pleased when this happened. It did take the less worthy and lowest on the food chain out of the system. He removed them from the gene pool. I should be so lucky.
I am attempting to tame some of the largest of the fish that gobble up my most of my resources. Exactly like I am trying to tame my resource hogs on my laptop.
Jaws managed to escape the Heron assault. I got him when he was very small but he has managed to survive his attempted extermination. He is a gorgeous mottled Koi with pretty markings and a fluorescent mask across his eyes. I am getting him trained and have him get his food pellets from my fingers every day. He has gotten good at this but will if given the chance latch on to my index or pinkie in an attempt to take more than he is offered. I think of Jaws like MicroSoft WinDoze. He is always lurking there ready to gobble up anything whether it is offered or not. If it is there he is going to attempt to make it his own. He wants to swallow it up and process it through his system and then when done with it, turn it into crap.
I have Hoover and Roomba who are named after vacuums of those names; both remarkably unremarkable larger goldfish. Like Jaws but they are slightly different kinds of fish that attempt to swallow everything they are offered and much that they are not. I think of them as Apple. To me they are not the prettiest in my pond because I continue to wonder if they really belong there but they keep plugging away sucking down anything within sight. They offer some wonderful entertainment possibilities but keep beating up Flash. Flash is a smaller version of Hoover and Roomba. He can be a resource hog when he wants to.
I have Norton. He was a far smaller guy when I put him in the pond but because of his prodigious appetite he has grown almost too big for the confines of my small system. He is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. He shoves others out of his way to get to my resources. He always seems really bossy.
I have Big Moby Dick. He is a beautiful completely white goldfish and he thinks of my hand and the food pellets like they were Captain Ahab’s ship. He is going to crash right in there and break up the party. He is always cruising just below the surface ready to grab any crumb that someone has not yet consumed. A lot like Google does. It doesn’t matter what it is he is ready to gobble it up even if it isn’t there yet or already belongs to someone else. He doesn't seem to care. He is not yet the biggest fish in my hydrographic system but if he continues sating his huge appetite I may have to find him a new home. I heard there might be room for him as an Android or somewhere in the Land of Chrome. I'll have to ask him sometime. Little Moby is exactly like Big Moby. Possibly he is another Adobe of my system. I may replace him with Foxit like I did on my computer
Besides Norton I have one other fish that gobbles down masses of resources. I call him Java. He is always spinning his tail letting me know that he is there. He is a big white goldfish with some large bright orange markings. He is a rather attractive fish and knows a lot of tricks but he seems to get confused a lot.
The last named fish is Spot. He is a medium sized white goldfish with a large fluorescent orange spot that covers the top of his head. He is always ready to let his presence be known. In a lot of ways he is like my computer manufacturer’s processes and services. No matter where I look he is always there. I wonder exactly what he does besides grab everything the others have not grabbed a hold of already.
I can never seem to get an exact count of how many somewhat less descript fish are in the pond. I usually have to break up the kibbles for their consumption. They can be rather monotonous. They all still eat a lot of the resources. They don’t shove everybody around like some of the bigger fish but they are always there eating, eating, eating.
The stuff that is floating around or settles at the bottom of the pond I think of as the ghosts of programs that were uninstalled. No matter how much they are processed or I try to clean them out they always leave evidence of their past existence somewhere in my registry. Mostly just crap.
I also have a Leopard Frog that hangs around the pond. Most of the time I don’t even see him or know he is there. I don't know if he is in the pond or out cruising the neighborhood. I never even figured out where he came from. His name is HTML5. HTLM is the toad that hangs around near the base of the bricks. He doesn’t seem to do as much as HTML5 nor is he as flashy but he is still hanging around.
My little microcosm of the world would be incomplete without some of the animals: the rodents, mammals and marsupials. The squirrels, raccoons and ‘possums are the malicious things they are constantly trying to grab the other few precious resources I have left.
Squirrels despite my best efforts will drain my bird feeders in a heartbeat. I have one leaping acrobatic squirrel. He can launch himself off the top of the fence or from the roof of the house to assault the ‘squirrel proof’ bird feeder barely reachable even with his best standing long jump efforts. He continues to leap after every FAIL until he finally makes contact and grasps the feeder with his nasty little paws. I think of him as my tracking cookies. I hate him but no matter what… he keeps coming back, jumping from high places almost beyond the limits of his capabilities and endurance. He will NEVER give up. He will continue until successful no matter how many times he has been removed from the scene of operations by CCleaner, WinDoze or Norton or even crashed to the ground in a stupor.
The raccoons are constantly standing by ready to destroy anything to break in and get my resources. Leave nothing and they will still find a meal. They work in the dark but are visible when I turn on the lights. They are like the pop ups in my browser. No amount of effort or Ad Blocker can get them out of the neighborhood garbage can. Nothing seems get rid of these pests although some things do work for a while.
The opossums are exactly like the Trojans and viruses that keep trying to get my resources. It doesn’t matter how many times they have been chased from the neighborhood or hit by my car and turned into RoadKill and RoadPizza… they just look evil and keep coming back for more. Every once in a while I will see a mouse or even a rat under the bird feeders. They are smaller versions of the ‘possums but sometimes even dirtier and nastier. They always bring to mind my email spam and the phishing schemes and remind me of Black Death. I remain vigilant and will not let their fleas bite me.
DakotaDawg is like the good side of my Norton because she is the sworn enemy of these beasts.
My next door neighbor’s dog is mostly akin to tracking cookies. He stands ready to call out and let everyone know precisely where I have been and what I have been doing. If he has to he will bury his nose deep in my crotch to find out. No matter how much I try I can not get him to shut up once he has decided he needs to let his owner know. He seems always to be in the yard 24/7.
MsConfig.exe is a little like the Animal Control. No matter how many times I call them to remove various pests from my neighborhood, the pests just keep coming back and disrupting my life.
DakotaDawg is the hero of all, especially me. She stands sentinel to keep any intruder out of the house. She lets me know when they are coming or passing by. She raises my spirits whether or not I need that. She is like the free downloads from Cnet who no matter what stand ready to complete any task they are asked to do. Last year she actually leaped completely over the pond in the pitch black of nite when I let her out. She ferociously grabbed a ‘possum by the neck and shook it until it was disabled. I didn’t even know it was there until I heard all the fuss and had to administer the coup de grace. That Mofer was either fishing or getting a drink of water during the drought. In any case it was after our precious assets. As a team DakotaDawg and I both foiled that. I would have been more like Animal Control and chased it from the neighborhood. DakotaDawg made certain this one pest would never visit us again.
I really love my DakotaDawg… Some of those resource hogging Mofers… NOT so much.
In some ways my computer is an awful lot like DakotaDawg too. It has so many talents. Although sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand English so well. I am still having a hard time with Hochdeutsch. We are all working on our language skills.
Habitually I consider going over to the Dark Side… going completely Apple. It is just that then I would have to keep updating my OS too and it would probably be just too easy. What is the fun in that?
I hope Moby Dick has not crushed the coffin floating around someplace in my pond.
Here DakotaDawg. Can you see if there is anything you can do to this computer? Have you seen that Great Blue Heron hanging around anywhere? Just a sec. Let me go find the English to German dictionary.
Thanx, the darn thing seems to be singing like the birds. The birds are the programs on my computer that I want there. It is beautiful when they are singing. I just need to remember to go out and get another fifty pound bag of sunflower seeds for them. I promise not to forget the DawgFood.
© 06.24.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
I sometimes get a little impatient with my computer as it continually is out on the interweb searching for Updates. Sometimes it is sneaking around doing it. Other times it is beating me over the head with a ball bat telling me it is about to or is or has. Tedious I tell you.
A WinDoze computer can bring a very special and diverse variety of pain. I began leaving my computer on and available to the interweb at night so it can go searching its software’s mothership headquarters for new things to try to fill up my hard drive. I am sometimes astounded how little the computer sleeps during the night because it takes so long to shut down and restart after it continues to rag me to reboot when I greet it every day. Maybe it is just tired and needs some rest. On occasion it is still churning away when I lift the portable’s lid in the morning.
Some programs consistently slow everything down while they search in the background and eat up precious cycles of my computer’s memory or its CPU. Checking the Task Manager Performance tab can be gut wrenching. Some of the other tabs are easily as threatening.
I loathe hitting CTRL ALT DEL to try to figure out what is going on that I as master of my own domain did not direct my computer to do. If the computer seems exceptionally slow I know it is either something hiding deep behind my Processes or something under the Services Tab. Usually it is completely out of my hands. I am left out of the loop.
Generally it is not a program listed under my Applications Tab. Those things are what I asked the computer to do. Hopefully I know what is lurking there! Hopefully, it is at least doing one of those things and they are all listing as running. With all the multitasking the 4 Gigs of memory and the Virtual Memory hiding somewhere in a hidden area of my hard drive are capable of, I usually try to keep these down to one or two active things going on at any one time. I figure that this gives the dual core Intel chip at least a small chance of being able to keep up.
I have a rather large brick fish pond next to the patio of my house. When I go out to feed the fish I am amazed at how this closed system reminds me so much of my computer. I tweak it almost as many times as my computer.
I liken the pump to something that is always operating when my computer is turned on… almost like the CPU. When it is not clogged with leaves or some other organic detritus it keeps on churning away recycling through its heart all of the blood of the system moving the bytes hither and yon, spitting them back into the system, moving electrons around.
In the fishpond I am pleased to know that the particular high capacity pump there works very efficiently if the strainer is not clogged. If there is blockage; the flow of the water through it slows to a trickle. Just like my computer. An advantage in the fish pond system is that I can without difficulty clean the strainer and if necessary flush out the hose coming from the pump.
With the computer this may not be so easy. Many services are like the leaves and the junk that always tax the efficiency of the pump. No matter how hard I try they continue to remain close to the heart of the system gumming things up.
In my computer world this type of debris is listed under either the Processes Tab or the Services Tab. Sometimes I can remove one and get it out of my pond. More often this virtual waste just keeps showing up. Bonjour Service is one of those kinds of things. I don’t know precisely what this is. I have googled it on many occasions to find out how to remove it. It is exactly like MicroSoft Messenger in that as many times as I pull the plug on it; it just keeps saying, “I’m Baaaaack!” as soon as my attention turns to something else. I want to thank Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and their software engineers for these seemingly unnecessary things that continue to assert dominance over my WinDoze Operating System (OS) and my preferences.
There is a lot more stuff floating around in my pond ready to clog my pump. I tire of trying to stop some of them from reloading in front of my OS. Many of these services are updaters that attempt to get out on the interweb to insure that the latest and greatest of the megabytes needed to slow my computer even more are entrenched. The big companies that are fighting for dominance of the computer world are all involved in this conspiracy and are waging their LITTLE war with all its large and small battles inside my computer. Apple, Adobe, Google and MicroSoft fight with Norton and others to load imperative instructional sets hiding in the files they send to me without my invitation. I have tried to limit the number of times this happens and even the time it does happen but feel stymied in my efforts. I have become my own full time IT Department.
Some things have the courtesy to ask if it is alright to interrupt me while I use the computer. Others just forge on and do their nastiness without asking my permission. If asked and I deny them they just keep posting thought bubbles and nags on my computer screen. “Warning Will Robinson”.
When I relent and let them take over; they change everything I have worked so hard to configure, protect or optimize so they can do what they want in the background without my knowledge or having to ask my acquiescence. Norton is master of this. This naughty boy starts bossing me around after it has had its way with me and my computer. It orders me to reboot. It asks me if I want to do it now... Or, if I want to wait five minutes, an hour or what ever. It tells me that something is nefarious. It orders me to back up or run a system scan. Or it just does these things all on its own.
Usually I do have that option to tell most of these nags: Not Now. Inevitably I have to bow to their wishes and click on their preferred option and the radio button. I can find some really obscure things almost every morning before I get to holler “Whoopee!” and reboot.
The fish in my pond are like some or my computer’s services or processes. They gobble down any resource I throw at them. If they are sated because they ate all the fish pellets or cat food kibbles I have dumped in; they are usually ready to try to eat more the next time food is obtainable. The more I feed them the bigger they get and the more they want. It is an endless loop of geometrically growing mass. When I put the resources into the pond the fish are a swirling critical mass consuming everything is sight.
I have pet nicknames for a lot of the fish pets living in my pond. These names are based on what my fish do or how they look. Many of my processes and services just don’t look as great to me. Some I can’t even find a real name for. They keep swimming around gobbling down all of my resources… not giving me much in return. Sometimes they show themselves.
It is not unusual that they stay hidden. They can hide very well when I, the highest apex predator have been stomping around in their network like the Great Blue Heron that visited several times. His most Holy Uninvited ate some of the most worthy and most of the dumbest. Like me he kept coming back for more. I thought he had eaten all of the fish. I did not see a single one for about two weeks. By then the heron must have stopped showing up at the Smörgåsbord or had eaten all of the terminally stupid. I was not so pleased when this happened. It did take the less worthy and lowest on the food chain out of the system. He removed them from the gene pool. I should be so lucky.
I am attempting to tame some of the largest of the fish that gobble up my most of my resources. Exactly like I am trying to tame my resource hogs on my laptop.
Jaws managed to escape the Heron assault. I got him when he was very small but he has managed to survive his attempted extermination. He is a gorgeous mottled Koi with pretty markings and a fluorescent mask across his eyes. I am getting him trained and have him get his food pellets from my fingers every day. He has gotten good at this but will if given the chance latch on to my index or pinkie in an attempt to take more than he is offered. I think of Jaws like MicroSoft WinDoze. He is always lurking there ready to gobble up anything whether it is offered or not. If it is there he is going to attempt to make it his own. He wants to swallow it up and process it through his system and then when done with it, turn it into crap.
I have Hoover and Roomba who are named after vacuums of those names; both remarkably unremarkable larger goldfish. Like Jaws but they are slightly different kinds of fish that attempt to swallow everything they are offered and much that they are not. I think of them as Apple. To me they are not the prettiest in my pond because I continue to wonder if they really belong there but they keep plugging away sucking down anything within sight. They offer some wonderful entertainment possibilities but keep beating up Flash. Flash is a smaller version of Hoover and Roomba. He can be a resource hog when he wants to.
I have Norton. He was a far smaller guy when I put him in the pond but because of his prodigious appetite he has grown almost too big for the confines of my small system. He is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. He shoves others out of his way to get to my resources. He always seems really bossy.
I have Big Moby Dick. He is a beautiful completely white goldfish and he thinks of my hand and the food pellets like they were Captain Ahab’s ship. He is going to crash right in there and break up the party. He is always cruising just below the surface ready to grab any crumb that someone has not yet consumed. A lot like Google does. It doesn’t matter what it is he is ready to gobble it up even if it isn’t there yet or already belongs to someone else. He doesn't seem to care. He is not yet the biggest fish in my hydrographic system but if he continues sating his huge appetite I may have to find him a new home. I heard there might be room for him as an Android or somewhere in the Land of Chrome. I'll have to ask him sometime. Little Moby is exactly like Big Moby. Possibly he is another Adobe of my system. I may replace him with Foxit like I did on my computer
Besides Norton I have one other fish that gobbles down masses of resources. I call him Java. He is always spinning his tail letting me know that he is there. He is a big white goldfish with some large bright orange markings. He is a rather attractive fish and knows a lot of tricks but he seems to get confused a lot.
The last named fish is Spot. He is a medium sized white goldfish with a large fluorescent orange spot that covers the top of his head. He is always ready to let his presence be known. In a lot of ways he is like my computer manufacturer’s processes and services. No matter where I look he is always there. I wonder exactly what he does besides grab everything the others have not grabbed a hold of already.
I can never seem to get an exact count of how many somewhat less descript fish are in the pond. I usually have to break up the kibbles for their consumption. They can be rather monotonous. They all still eat a lot of the resources. They don’t shove everybody around like some of the bigger fish but they are always there eating, eating, eating.
The stuff that is floating around or settles at the bottom of the pond I think of as the ghosts of programs that were uninstalled. No matter how much they are processed or I try to clean them out they always leave evidence of their past existence somewhere in my registry. Mostly just crap.
I also have a Leopard Frog that hangs around the pond. Most of the time I don’t even see him or know he is there. I don't know if he is in the pond or out cruising the neighborhood. I never even figured out where he came from. His name is HTML5. HTLM is the toad that hangs around near the base of the bricks. He doesn’t seem to do as much as HTML5 nor is he as flashy but he is still hanging around.
My little microcosm of the world would be incomplete without some of the animals: the rodents, mammals and marsupials. The squirrels, raccoons and ‘possums are the malicious things they are constantly trying to grab the other few precious resources I have left.
Squirrels despite my best efforts will drain my bird feeders in a heartbeat. I have one leaping acrobatic squirrel. He can launch himself off the top of the fence or from the roof of the house to assault the ‘squirrel proof’ bird feeder barely reachable even with his best standing long jump efforts. He continues to leap after every FAIL until he finally makes contact and grasps the feeder with his nasty little paws. I think of him as my tracking cookies. I hate him but no matter what… he keeps coming back, jumping from high places almost beyond the limits of his capabilities and endurance. He will NEVER give up. He will continue until successful no matter how many times he has been removed from the scene of operations by CCleaner, WinDoze or Norton or even crashed to the ground in a stupor.
The raccoons are constantly standing by ready to destroy anything to break in and get my resources. Leave nothing and they will still find a meal. They work in the dark but are visible when I turn on the lights. They are like the pop ups in my browser. No amount of effort or Ad Blocker can get them out of the neighborhood garbage can. Nothing seems get rid of these pests although some things do work for a while.
The opossums are exactly like the Trojans and viruses that keep trying to get my resources. It doesn’t matter how many times they have been chased from the neighborhood or hit by my car and turned into RoadKill and RoadPizza… they just look evil and keep coming back for more. Every once in a while I will see a mouse or even a rat under the bird feeders. They are smaller versions of the ‘possums but sometimes even dirtier and nastier. They always bring to mind my email spam and the phishing schemes and remind me of Black Death. I remain vigilant and will not let their fleas bite me.
DakotaDawg is like the good side of my Norton because she is the sworn enemy of these beasts.
My next door neighbor’s dog is mostly akin to tracking cookies. He stands ready to call out and let everyone know precisely where I have been and what I have been doing. If he has to he will bury his nose deep in my crotch to find out. No matter how much I try I can not get him to shut up once he has decided he needs to let his owner know. He seems always to be in the yard 24/7.
MsConfig.exe is a little like the Animal Control. No matter how many times I call them to remove various pests from my neighborhood, the pests just keep coming back and disrupting my life.
DakotaDawg is the hero of all, especially me. She stands sentinel to keep any intruder out of the house. She lets me know when they are coming or passing by. She raises my spirits whether or not I need that. She is like the free downloads from Cnet who no matter what stand ready to complete any task they are asked to do. Last year she actually leaped completely over the pond in the pitch black of nite when I let her out. She ferociously grabbed a ‘possum by the neck and shook it until it was disabled. I didn’t even know it was there until I heard all the fuss and had to administer the coup de grace. That Mofer was either fishing or getting a drink of water during the drought. In any case it was after our precious assets. As a team DakotaDawg and I both foiled that. I would have been more like Animal Control and chased it from the neighborhood. DakotaDawg made certain this one pest would never visit us again.
I really love my DakotaDawg… Some of those resource hogging Mofers… NOT so much.
In some ways my computer is an awful lot like DakotaDawg too. It has so many talents. Although sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand English so well. I am still having a hard time with Hochdeutsch. We are all working on our language skills.
Habitually I consider going over to the Dark Side… going completely Apple. It is just that then I would have to keep updating my OS too and it would probably be just too easy. What is the fun in that?
I hope Moby Dick has not crushed the coffin floating around someplace in my pond.
Here DakotaDawg. Can you see if there is anything you can do to this computer? Have you seen that Great Blue Heron hanging around anywhere? Just a sec. Let me go find the English to German dictionary.
Thanx, the darn thing seems to be singing like the birds. The birds are the programs on my computer that I want there. It is beautiful when they are singing. I just need to remember to go out and get another fifty pound bag of sunflower seeds for them. I promise not to forget the DawgFood.
© 06.24.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Winning Losers. Losing Winners.
It is no secret that my go to college team will always be the Florida State University Seminoles.
College football, basketball and baseball are sports I always followed very closely. Part of that might have been that I lived in and was President of the Athletic Dorm when I went to school way back in my college days. College sports never went on strike.
The football players were a little too rowdy back then, even for me. I remember sitting by my window in that seventh floor room watching some of the linemen carry the drunken quarterback up the stairs after curfew the nite before some big games. I did become pretty good buddies with Grant Guthrie the FSU place kicker. I used to long hike the footballs to Grant's girlfriend Leslie who held the balls as Grant kicked them through the goal posts at the high school field that was across the street from the dorm where the track team held its meets.
Dorm life was exceedingly interesting. I had the five starters on the basketball team living in the suite upstairs above my room. I was hardly intimidating at 3AM when I had to go up there to ask the guys to have a little mercy and stop dribbling the basketballs. Their court was the ceiling of the echo chamber where I slept. Dave Cowens, that great center for the Boston Celtics would be sitting on the bed, while his teammates sat on the other bed or standing around dribbled their balls. Dave used to love to dribble the ball a couple of times, palm it and then make that dunking motion or the sky hook shot. Especially at 3AM. He would then start the process all over… Lather, rinse, repeat. Go upstairs again, ask them to knock it off… Lather, rinse, repeat.
Every day during the off season Dave went to Tully Gym and shot basketballs from the top of the key and performed aerial acrobatics dunking the ball or shooting hook shots. Dunking was banned in college basketball in 1967 and the dunking ban was lifted in 1976. Even though he could not do it in college games Dave was getting ready for the pros. Dave knew he was going to play professional basketball. Once in a while he missed a shot but mostly I stood below the rim and caught the ball right after the swoosh.
Cowens led the Seminole five to the NCAA Tournament in 1968 and ’69. As a senior, his Seminoles had a 23-3 record. Dave was the number 1 draft pick of the Boston Celtics. There was a lot of talk about this team breezing though post season play and giving the Bruins their comeuppance. That never happened because Florida State went on probation in end of the season. Dave was not allowed to participate in post season play that year. FSU like many of the other really great sports programs back in those days was always in trouble with some NCAA regulation and up to its ears in recruiting violations. It was a lot like Nixon. Even though everybody did it, we got caught. I am still quite embarrassed by my losing winners.
I also used to go to the weight room in the dorm and spot Dave when he was working out. This was before the mega weight lifting gyms in sports training facilities now on most university campuses. I helped him load the weights on the bar. I was there to help if he dropped the weights when doing bench presses. I seriously doubt that I would have been much help because I could barely lift off the floor what he was doing reps with.
The weight lifting room in the athletic dorm doubled as the television room. In the middle of the night on July 20, 1969 we sat next to each other in that smelly room and watched the men hopping around on the moon while we slammed down Coca Colas in the dark because we had some scam to outwit the soda machine.
I am not sure if Cowens was as talented as he was dedicated. Dave was pretty good at all sports. He was extremely imposing standing at home plate with that giant wood bat in his hands, guarding the plate.
After the basketball probation was over, in my senior year in college, Dave had graduated, but some of the men that were recruited because Cowen’s played for FSU again went to the NCAA Tournament. From Wiki: “In 1972 at the age of 34, Durham led FSU to the NCAA Championship game coaching against Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith and John Wooden in three consecutive NCAA Tournament games. Durham's Seminoles knocked off Rupp's Kentucky Wildcats and Smith's North Carolina Tar Heels. In the NCAA Championship game, Wooden's UCLA Bruins edged the Seminoles to win the title. Wooden, Rupp and Smith combined to win 16 NCAA Championships in their careers.” Kentucky, North Carolina and especially UCLA were the basketball dynasties of that era.
They ‘Noles won 27 games that season and set a team record. They managed to lose the most important game of them all… the last one. They fell to UCLA, 81-76, on the Bruins' home court in the Championship Game. Coach Hugh Durham (an old FSU point guard turned head coach) might have bested John Wooden and his Bruin protégé Bill Walton if Dave was on the floor. It became the eighth championship for UCLA in nine years under their legendary head coach John Wooden.
FSU did win two NCAA Championships under that Dad’GumIt football Coach that had more than enough of his own problems with NCAA sanctions and probations. The football team still seems a little too rowdy for me. FSU recently forfeited 22 games because some athletes preferred to try to cheat the system on tests instead of going to summer school to stay eligible like Dave did. Bobby retired under a bit of a cloud and somehow did not have all of those forfeits deducted from his record. He can no longer compete against Joe Paterno to be the winningest college football coach. That race is over and the winner declared.
Unlike when Neon Deon played football and baseball at FSU... you get the drift. I am still quite embarrassed by my losing winners.
Florida State also has had more than its share of chances in Omaha in the College World Series. Florida State’s home away from home is Omaha. The team has gone to the tournament twenty times. Only three teams have gone to the CWS more times than FSU. Each of them has won the final game.
In 1968 – ’69 Jack Stallings was named head baseball coach. He inherited a pretty good team from former head coach Fred Hatfield, who resigned several months before the new season began to return to professional baseball. Hatfield coached FSU into NCAA postseason tournament play in four of his five seasons and to the College World Series in 1965.
I had gone to high school with Jim Gurzynski, FSU’s first baseman. He was two years older than me and was a senior. He hit a lot of home runs over FSU’s right field green monster. Gurzynski did not live in the athletic dorm because he was married.
A fellow I did know well from the dorm was Craig Richard Skok #33; one of our Southpaw aces in 1969. I liked Craig. He was soft spoken, confident and very talented. Like me, baseball was one of Craig’s first loves. I arranged my class schedule around the FSU home games. It there was a conflict, baseball always won. My German suffered a bit that quarter.
When I think back to Craig I remember two things. I remember what a wicked curve ball he had in college. I caught him several times on the grass in front of the dorm. His first pitch to me was a curve that went sharp right and then hung a hard left as it crossed the plate. That one crashed into my left elbow. I had a hard time trying to decide if the pain from the ball hitting my elbow was worse than the sting of the palm of my left hand still in my old catcher’s mitt when I caught his third pitch. I went inside to the janitor’s closet to get some hard sponges to cushion the next blow. If his curveballs had that much heat on them I was not looking forward to the fastballs. The other thing I remember was how hard Craig always worked when he was on the mound.
IIRC Craig did get drafted after his junior year but did not go high enough to get the signing bonus he surely deserved. He decided to come back for his senior year. He was a workhorse of the pitching staff. Back in the days when coaches thought pitchers ought to all be like Sandy Koufax and pitch complete games, Craig was in the starting rotation, one of the four regulars.
Pitchers took their at bats and tried to contribute to their own destiny. Everyone was supposed to be a designated hitter. Skok batted a magnificent .143. His contribution was mainly on the mound. He fielded his position flawlessly for the entire year. He never had even one E charged to him. Craig had about a 3 to one average of K’s (strikeouts to the uninitiated) vs. Base on Balls.
His season record was six and two. He only had one undecided game. He won all of his games before the length of the season and his pitch count overpowered his ability to deliver victories. He lost his last two games. Craig had pitched three complete games and two 8.1 inning games. He was sore and broken by the end of the long season when twice he pitched only 6.1 innings in the games where he got the L's. Even with those two losses he ended the season with a .94 ERA.
According to the official stats in his last away game at Auburn, he pitched his second 6.1 inning game in a row. Craig left the game when the score was tied. He is listed as the losing pitcher. Baseball is as much a game of statistics as it is a game of tradition. I cannot understand how he could lose a game that he left when the score was tied. How can that happen? The winning run was not on base or across the plate when he was pitcher of record.
Sometimes college scorekeepers did not cross their eyes or dot their T’s properly. Statistics can be pretty brutal once they are in the books.
Five Seminoles went on to the major leagues that year. Craig was one of them. After his senior year he signed with the Boston Red Sox as an amateur free agent. I think if he hadn’t been pitching injured at the end of that year he would have gone high in the draft. One of my mentors, the local sports editor sure thought it was going to happen. He did not mention that Craig ended the year in pain and suffering. He did not want to hurt the young man’s chances in the draft. Craig loved baseball and he went to the minor leagues for his on the job training. There wasn’t much time for recuperation. Minor leaguers had two or three seasons a year depending upon how highly their team thought of them and often went to spring training with the club. Craig was one of those kind of guys. The better they were the harder they had to work.
Craig spent four years in the Show… finally making it there in 1973. He had one year with the Red Sox pitching 28.2 innings… an 0-1 record with a 6.28 ERA. He relieved in 11 games. After a trip down, he went to the Texas Rangers in 1976 and had a pretty miserable year. I don’t know how it was possible unless he was shelled and threw a home run ball to his first batter in almost every appearance, but according to his official stats he pitched a total of 5 innings in 9 games. His 12.6 ERA seems to support that theory. He spent some more time recovering from injury back in Triple A. He next was called up to join the Braves for the ’78 - ’79 seasons where he ended up with 3-2 and 1-3 records. Over those two years he pitched a total of 87 innings. He was a workhorse not only at the end of his pitching career in college but also in his last two years in the pros.
In 1969 FSU did not make it to the CWS or even the Regionals. They ended up in the FINAL COLLEGIATE BASEBALL POLL a solid #10.
FSU’s current baseball head coach is Mike Martin. Mike has been around FSU baseball for a long, long, long time. About thirty years as head coach. He followed Dick Howser who followed Woody Woodward who followed Jack Stallings. Mike is a heck of a baseball coach. He is one of the best coaches in college baseball with one of the highest winning percentages out there. Coach Martin has never won the Big One. No team has been to Omaha more times (20) without winning a championship than Florida State has. Fourteen of those appearances were under Head Coach Mike Martin.
Florida State University Seminoles Baseball is nothing but tradition. The ‘Noles are to college baseball what the Chicago Cubs are to professional baseball. The Seminoles have a little better winning percentage than the Cubs except when it comes to winning World Series’ titles.
After this year, although the College World Series will still be held in Omaha, it won’t ever again be played at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, formally known as Omaha Municipal Stadium, a stadium which has been in operation since 1948. For this loss of tradition we will all be losers. It is akin to abandoning Tiger Stadium, tearing down Yankee Stadium or even the Cubs leaving Wrigley Field.
I wish in 2010, the year of the last College World Series at Rosenblatt, maybe, just maybe Mike can walk off the field with an even bigger smile on his face showing how proud he is of the team he has stuck with all of these years. Maybe this year FSU can come out of the Loser’s Bracket and go all the way. Maybe Coach Martin can win his first World Series and the last series ever at that stadium.
That would be one for the statistics and one for tradition. I only have a little advice for Coach Martin: Don’t leave your pitcher in too long and let TCU crush us like they did in the first game that sent us to the loser’s bracket. Don’t let your pitcher become injured worse by pitching injured.
Maybe Mike McGee will still have enough gas left in his tank to hit two home runs and a double to beat these guys like he did against those dreaded rivals, the Florida Gators, in the last elimination game the day before yesterday. Then he can again come in from left field in relief in the ninth inning to record the final two outs just like he did against the Gators, including that stunning line-drive double play with the bases loaded that ended the game. Holt the other team captain said. "The talk was, 'Hey, we know what it's about. We're going to stick around this time.' " I wish that wish comes true.
If the ‘Noles can beat TCU on their second try they have a few more games to win before they will meet one team standing between them and the national title: the UCLA Bruins. UCLA is the one team still in the Winner’s Bracket on FSU’s side of the draw. All their players and coaches have John Wooden’s initials on their ballcaps to honor that great coach that died earlier this year. Baseball is all about tradition… to win the title the Seminoles might even have to beat UCLA… only TWICE this time. UCLA has been to the College World Series three times. They can wait for their turn.
The other side of the draw has Clemson as the only undefeated team and FSU beat them to win the ACC Title before the Regionals. They went to different Regionals and Super Regionals.
I wish that Jim Gurzynski, Dave Cowens and Craig Richard Skok were available tonite. Craig’s rotator cuff should have had more than enough time to heal by now. The Seminoles could use Gurzynski’s and Cowens’ bats. They could probably hit one outta Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium… almost to the moon with those new fangled aluminum bats. Even in their sixties we might need them in the lineup tonight. It would give each a chance to participate in a championship game if it comes to that.
At a minimum they will be rooting for our team from their recliners... just like me. If FSU loses to TCU or UCLA it really won’t be the end of the world. They can be winning losers and just like the Cubs; there is always next year.
DakotaDawg is rooting for her ‘Noles! She is helping me with some of that German I missed in college while I was at the ballpark. I hope she is not too talkative. I have a miracle in the works to watch. I wish we are the home team. I wish someone will crush that walk off home run. I wish FSU and Coach Martin win it.
If wishes were horses, the Seminole Baseball Team will ride home from the series instead of taking an early flight home.
IIf the ‘Noles can beat TCU on their second try they have a few more games to win before they will meet one team standing between them and the national title: the UCLA Bruins. UCLA is the one team still in the Winner’s Bracket on FSU’s side of the draw. All their players and coaches have John Wooden’s initials on their ballcaps to honor that great coach that died earlier this year. Baseball is all about tradition… to win the title the Seminoles might even have to beat UCLA… only TWICE this time. UCLA has been to the College World Series three times. They can wait for their turn.
The other side of the draw has Clemson as the only undefeated team and FSU beat them to win the ACC Title before the Regionals. They went to different Regionals and Super Regionals.
I wish that Jim Gurzynski, Dave Cowens and Craig Richard Skok were available tonite. Craig’s rotator cuff should have had more than enough time to heal by now. The Seminoles could use Gurzynski’s and Cowens’ bats. They could probably hit one outta Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium… almost to the moon with those new fangled aluminum bats. Even in their sixties we might need them in the lineup tonight. It would give each a chance to participate in a championship game if it comes to that.
At a minimum they will be rooting for our team from their recliners... just like me. If FSU loses to TCU or UCLA it really won’t be the end of the world. They can be winning losers and just like the Cubs; there is always next year.
DakotaDawg is rooting for her ‘Noles! She is helping me with some of that German I missed in college while I was at the ballpark. I hope she is not too talkative. I have a miracle in the works to watch. I wish we are the home team. I wish someone will crush that walk off home run. I wish FSU and Coach Martin win it.
If wishes were horses, the Seminole Baseball Team will ride home from the series instead of taking an early flight home.
In baseball anything is possible, even Winning Losers. I am very proud of my Winning Losers regardless of the outcome against TCU, any of the others still left... even UCLA.
It ain't over 'til it's over.
Thank you fellow catcher.
© 06.23.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
College football, basketball and baseball are sports I always followed very closely. Part of that might have been that I lived in and was President of the Athletic Dorm when I went to school way back in my college days. College sports never went on strike.
The football players were a little too rowdy back then, even for me. I remember sitting by my window in that seventh floor room watching some of the linemen carry the drunken quarterback up the stairs after curfew the nite before some big games. I did become pretty good buddies with Grant Guthrie the FSU place kicker. I used to long hike the footballs to Grant's girlfriend Leslie who held the balls as Grant kicked them through the goal posts at the high school field that was across the street from the dorm where the track team held its meets.
Dorm life was exceedingly interesting. I had the five starters on the basketball team living in the suite upstairs above my room. I was hardly intimidating at 3AM when I had to go up there to ask the guys to have a little mercy and stop dribbling the basketballs. Their court was the ceiling of the echo chamber where I slept. Dave Cowens, that great center for the Boston Celtics would be sitting on the bed, while his teammates sat on the other bed or standing around dribbled their balls. Dave used to love to dribble the ball a couple of times, palm it and then make that dunking motion or the sky hook shot. Especially at 3AM. He would then start the process all over… Lather, rinse, repeat. Go upstairs again, ask them to knock it off… Lather, rinse, repeat.
Every day during the off season Dave went to Tully Gym and shot basketballs from the top of the key and performed aerial acrobatics dunking the ball or shooting hook shots. Dunking was banned in college basketball in 1967 and the dunking ban was lifted in 1976. Even though he could not do it in college games Dave was getting ready for the pros. Dave knew he was going to play professional basketball. Once in a while he missed a shot but mostly I stood below the rim and caught the ball right after the swoosh.
Cowens led the Seminole five to the NCAA Tournament in 1968 and ’69. As a senior, his Seminoles had a 23-3 record. Dave was the number 1 draft pick of the Boston Celtics. There was a lot of talk about this team breezing though post season play and giving the Bruins their comeuppance. That never happened because Florida State went on probation in end of the season. Dave was not allowed to participate in post season play that year. FSU like many of the other really great sports programs back in those days was always in trouble with some NCAA regulation and up to its ears in recruiting violations. It was a lot like Nixon. Even though everybody did it, we got caught. I am still quite embarrassed by my losing winners.
I also used to go to the weight room in the dorm and spot Dave when he was working out. This was before the mega weight lifting gyms in sports training facilities now on most university campuses. I helped him load the weights on the bar. I was there to help if he dropped the weights when doing bench presses. I seriously doubt that I would have been much help because I could barely lift off the floor what he was doing reps with.
The weight lifting room in the athletic dorm doubled as the television room. In the middle of the night on July 20, 1969 we sat next to each other in that smelly room and watched the men hopping around on the moon while we slammed down Coca Colas in the dark because we had some scam to outwit the soda machine.
I am not sure if Cowens was as talented as he was dedicated. Dave was pretty good at all sports. He was extremely imposing standing at home plate with that giant wood bat in his hands, guarding the plate.
After the basketball probation was over, in my senior year in college, Dave had graduated, but some of the men that were recruited because Cowen’s played for FSU again went to the NCAA Tournament. From Wiki: “In 1972 at the age of 34, Durham led FSU to the NCAA Championship game coaching against Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith and John Wooden in three consecutive NCAA Tournament games. Durham's Seminoles knocked off Rupp's Kentucky Wildcats and Smith's North Carolina Tar Heels. In the NCAA Championship game, Wooden's UCLA Bruins edged the Seminoles to win the title. Wooden, Rupp and Smith combined to win 16 NCAA Championships in their careers.” Kentucky, North Carolina and especially UCLA were the basketball dynasties of that era.
They ‘Noles won 27 games that season and set a team record. They managed to lose the most important game of them all… the last one. They fell to UCLA, 81-76, on the Bruins' home court in the Championship Game. Coach Hugh Durham (an old FSU point guard turned head coach) might have bested John Wooden and his Bruin protégé Bill Walton if Dave was on the floor. It became the eighth championship for UCLA in nine years under their legendary head coach John Wooden.
FSU did win two NCAA Championships under that Dad’GumIt football Coach that had more than enough of his own problems with NCAA sanctions and probations. The football team still seems a little too rowdy for me. FSU recently forfeited 22 games because some athletes preferred to try to cheat the system on tests instead of going to summer school to stay eligible like Dave did. Bobby retired under a bit of a cloud and somehow did not have all of those forfeits deducted from his record. He can no longer compete against Joe Paterno to be the winningest college football coach. That race is over and the winner declared.
Unlike when Neon Deon played football and baseball at FSU... you get the drift. I am still quite embarrassed by my losing winners.
Florida State also has had more than its share of chances in Omaha in the College World Series. Florida State’s home away from home is Omaha. The team has gone to the tournament twenty times. Only three teams have gone to the CWS more times than FSU. Each of them has won the final game.
In 1968 – ’69 Jack Stallings was named head baseball coach. He inherited a pretty good team from former head coach Fred Hatfield, who resigned several months before the new season began to return to professional baseball. Hatfield coached FSU into NCAA postseason tournament play in four of his five seasons and to the College World Series in 1965.
I had gone to high school with Jim Gurzynski, FSU’s first baseman. He was two years older than me and was a senior. He hit a lot of home runs over FSU’s right field green monster. Gurzynski did not live in the athletic dorm because he was married.
A fellow I did know well from the dorm was Craig Richard Skok #33; one of our Southpaw aces in 1969. I liked Craig. He was soft spoken, confident and very talented. Like me, baseball was one of Craig’s first loves. I arranged my class schedule around the FSU home games. It there was a conflict, baseball always won. My German suffered a bit that quarter.
When I think back to Craig I remember two things. I remember what a wicked curve ball he had in college. I caught him several times on the grass in front of the dorm. His first pitch to me was a curve that went sharp right and then hung a hard left as it crossed the plate. That one crashed into my left elbow. I had a hard time trying to decide if the pain from the ball hitting my elbow was worse than the sting of the palm of my left hand still in my old catcher’s mitt when I caught his third pitch. I went inside to the janitor’s closet to get some hard sponges to cushion the next blow. If his curveballs had that much heat on them I was not looking forward to the fastballs. The other thing I remember was how hard Craig always worked when he was on the mound.
IIRC Craig did get drafted after his junior year but did not go high enough to get the signing bonus he surely deserved. He decided to come back for his senior year. He was a workhorse of the pitching staff. Back in the days when coaches thought pitchers ought to all be like Sandy Koufax and pitch complete games, Craig was in the starting rotation, one of the four regulars.
Pitchers took their at bats and tried to contribute to their own destiny. Everyone was supposed to be a designated hitter. Skok batted a magnificent .143. His contribution was mainly on the mound. He fielded his position flawlessly for the entire year. He never had even one E charged to him. Craig had about a 3 to one average of K’s (strikeouts to the uninitiated) vs. Base on Balls.
His season record was six and two. He only had one undecided game. He won all of his games before the length of the season and his pitch count overpowered his ability to deliver victories. He lost his last two games. Craig had pitched three complete games and two 8.1 inning games. He was sore and broken by the end of the long season when twice he pitched only 6.1 innings in the games where he got the L's. Even with those two losses he ended the season with a .94 ERA.
According to the official stats in his last away game at Auburn, he pitched his second 6.1 inning game in a row. Craig left the game when the score was tied. He is listed as the losing pitcher. Baseball is as much a game of statistics as it is a game of tradition. I cannot understand how he could lose a game that he left when the score was tied. How can that happen? The winning run was not on base or across the plate when he was pitcher of record.
Sometimes college scorekeepers did not cross their eyes or dot their T’s properly. Statistics can be pretty brutal once they are in the books.
Five Seminoles went on to the major leagues that year. Craig was one of them. After his senior year he signed with the Boston Red Sox as an amateur free agent. I think if he hadn’t been pitching injured at the end of that year he would have gone high in the draft. One of my mentors, the local sports editor sure thought it was going to happen. He did not mention that Craig ended the year in pain and suffering. He did not want to hurt the young man’s chances in the draft. Craig loved baseball and he went to the minor leagues for his on the job training. There wasn’t much time for recuperation. Minor leaguers had two or three seasons a year depending upon how highly their team thought of them and often went to spring training with the club. Craig was one of those kind of guys. The better they were the harder they had to work.
Craig spent four years in the Show… finally making it there in 1973. He had one year with the Red Sox pitching 28.2 innings… an 0-1 record with a 6.28 ERA. He relieved in 11 games. After a trip down, he went to the Texas Rangers in 1976 and had a pretty miserable year. I don’t know how it was possible unless he was shelled and threw a home run ball to his first batter in almost every appearance, but according to his official stats he pitched a total of 5 innings in 9 games. His 12.6 ERA seems to support that theory. He spent some more time recovering from injury back in Triple A. He next was called up to join the Braves for the ’78 - ’79 seasons where he ended up with 3-2 and 1-3 records. Over those two years he pitched a total of 87 innings. He was a workhorse not only at the end of his pitching career in college but also in his last two years in the pros.
In 1969 FSU did not make it to the CWS or even the Regionals. They ended up in the FINAL COLLEGIATE BASEBALL POLL a solid #10.
FSU’s current baseball head coach is Mike Martin. Mike has been around FSU baseball for a long, long, long time. About thirty years as head coach. He followed Dick Howser who followed Woody Woodward who followed Jack Stallings. Mike is a heck of a baseball coach. He is one of the best coaches in college baseball with one of the highest winning percentages out there. Coach Martin has never won the Big One. No team has been to Omaha more times (20) without winning a championship than Florida State has. Fourteen of those appearances were under Head Coach Mike Martin.
Florida State University Seminoles Baseball is nothing but tradition. The ‘Noles are to college baseball what the Chicago Cubs are to professional baseball. The Seminoles have a little better winning percentage than the Cubs except when it comes to winning World Series’ titles.
After this year, although the College World Series will still be held in Omaha, it won’t ever again be played at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium, formally known as Omaha Municipal Stadium, a stadium which has been in operation since 1948. For this loss of tradition we will all be losers. It is akin to abandoning Tiger Stadium, tearing down Yankee Stadium or even the Cubs leaving Wrigley Field.
I wish in 2010, the year of the last College World Series at Rosenblatt, maybe, just maybe Mike can walk off the field with an even bigger smile on his face showing how proud he is of the team he has stuck with all of these years. Maybe this year FSU can come out of the Loser’s Bracket and go all the way. Maybe Coach Martin can win his first World Series and the last series ever at that stadium.
That would be one for the statistics and one for tradition. I only have a little advice for Coach Martin: Don’t leave your pitcher in too long and let TCU crush us like they did in the first game that sent us to the loser’s bracket. Don’t let your pitcher become injured worse by pitching injured.
Maybe Mike McGee will still have enough gas left in his tank to hit two home runs and a double to beat these guys like he did against those dreaded rivals, the Florida Gators, in the last elimination game the day before yesterday. Then he can again come in from left field in relief in the ninth inning to record the final two outs just like he did against the Gators, including that stunning line-drive double play with the bases loaded that ended the game. Holt the other team captain said. "The talk was, 'Hey, we know what it's about. We're going to stick around this time.' " I wish that wish comes true.
If the ‘Noles can beat TCU on their second try they have a few more games to win before they will meet one team standing between them and the national title: the UCLA Bruins. UCLA is the one team still in the Winner’s Bracket on FSU’s side of the draw. All their players and coaches have John Wooden’s initials on their ballcaps to honor that great coach that died earlier this year. Baseball is all about tradition… to win the title the Seminoles might even have to beat UCLA… only TWICE this time. UCLA has been to the College World Series three times. They can wait for their turn.
The other side of the draw has Clemson as the only undefeated team and FSU beat them to win the ACC Title before the Regionals. They went to different Regionals and Super Regionals.
I wish that Jim Gurzynski, Dave Cowens and Craig Richard Skok were available tonite. Craig’s rotator cuff should have had more than enough time to heal by now. The Seminoles could use Gurzynski’s and Cowens’ bats. They could probably hit one outta Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium… almost to the moon with those new fangled aluminum bats. Even in their sixties we might need them in the lineup tonight. It would give each a chance to participate in a championship game if it comes to that.
At a minimum they will be rooting for our team from their recliners... just like me. If FSU loses to TCU or UCLA it really won’t be the end of the world. They can be winning losers and just like the Cubs; there is always next year.
DakotaDawg is rooting for her ‘Noles! She is helping me with some of that German I missed in college while I was at the ballpark. I hope she is not too talkative. I have a miracle in the works to watch. I wish we are the home team. I wish someone will crush that walk off home run. I wish FSU and Coach Martin win it.
If wishes were horses, the Seminole Baseball Team will ride home from the series instead of taking an early flight home.
IIf the ‘Noles can beat TCU on their second try they have a few more games to win before they will meet one team standing between them and the national title: the UCLA Bruins. UCLA is the one team still in the Winner’s Bracket on FSU’s side of the draw. All their players and coaches have John Wooden’s initials on their ballcaps to honor that great coach that died earlier this year. Baseball is all about tradition… to win the title the Seminoles might even have to beat UCLA… only TWICE this time. UCLA has been to the College World Series three times. They can wait for their turn.
The other side of the draw has Clemson as the only undefeated team and FSU beat them to win the ACC Title before the Regionals. They went to different Regionals and Super Regionals.
I wish that Jim Gurzynski, Dave Cowens and Craig Richard Skok were available tonite. Craig’s rotator cuff should have had more than enough time to heal by now. The Seminoles could use Gurzynski’s and Cowens’ bats. They could probably hit one outta Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium… almost to the moon with those new fangled aluminum bats. Even in their sixties we might need them in the lineup tonight. It would give each a chance to participate in a championship game if it comes to that.
At a minimum they will be rooting for our team from their recliners... just like me. If FSU loses to TCU or UCLA it really won’t be the end of the world. They can be winning losers and just like the Cubs; there is always next year.
DakotaDawg is rooting for her ‘Noles! She is helping me with some of that German I missed in college while I was at the ballpark. I hope she is not too talkative. I have a miracle in the works to watch. I wish we are the home team. I wish someone will crush that walk off home run. I wish FSU and Coach Martin win it.
If wishes were horses, the Seminole Baseball Team will ride home from the series instead of taking an early flight home.
In baseball anything is possible, even Winning Losers. I am very proud of my Winning Losers regardless of the outcome against TCU, any of the others still left... even UCLA.
It ain't over 'til it's over.
Thank you fellow catcher.
© 06.23.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Oxygen Thieves
In life there are some that shouldn’t even breathe.
Today I am more than a little bit angry. Not that it ever does much good but sometimes it is good to vent, to get it out of our systems.
I wish DakotaDawg was visiting some friends home while they were working yesterday because their kitties were not quite threatening enough to keep a thief out of their house.
They lost a lot of personal things that have a value that could never be calculated by Actuarial Science. St. Jude has been called in to help in what may be a hopeless cause. I am trying to locate Sister Mediatrix to see if she will throw up a prayer too.
DakotaDawg did start lighting up from her post on the lateral file yesterday afternoon. I went to the front of the house to investigate and saw a young guy turning the corner at the driveway hustling away down the street at a pretty good clip. He wasn’t pushing a lawn mower. At the time I thought very little of it. We have people coming to the house all the time trying to hand us political literature, sell us magazine subscriptions or get us to sign some petition or the other.
We live pretty near our friends. I am going to look at these folks a lot more critically now because it is not as if I have not been a victim myself a few times in the past.
Many years ago someone broke into an apartment where I was living and stole some things from downstairs including car keys, my money clip and the valuables left in plain sight. He counted among these a brand new pair of my Red Wing boots. I couldn’t then and still don’t understand why a burglar wanted a pair of someone else’s boots. My little poodle and I slept upstairs through the entire break in. The police caught that guy. He had worn my boots for enough time that when I finally got them back, eight months after the robbery, I really did not want them. I gave them to Goodwill.
Another time some guy broke into the screened porch behind another apartment where I lived. He stole an old locked up steamer trunk. He didn’t get much. However, a lot of personal things that had no value at all except to me were missing. I wonder where in the heck my junior year high school yearbook and those old desert bucks are now.
Once somebody climbed over the fence at my shop and stole a bunch of things from my boat including my anchor and line. He got some fishing rods, a tackle box that I had fishing lures my grandfather used to use, a pair of rubber boots and my electronics. I was pretty angry then but one of the electronic devices was his ultimate downfall: my EPIRB or EMERGENCY POSITION INDICATING RADIO BEACON. This unit was to be activated in case the boat sank.
This oxygen thief sold the EPIRB to a fellow that bought things he knew were hot for a few bucks with the hope he could turn them for a big profit. The second oxygen thief did not understand what an EPRIB was. He most certainly did not know how it worked. He turned it on to see what it would do. The Coast Guard sent the Sheriff to find out why the device was sending out an emergency signal from downtown instead of the Gulf of Mexico.
When the deputy got there he had the guy with the goods… the EPIRB did its job. It saved me in a hopeless situation, much like St. Jude. The fence rolled quickly on the thief who was then arrested, prosecuted and convicted. The one that stole the stuff got seven years plus restitution for the items he sold that I never recovered. The second guy got let off the hook for cooperating.
I got a notification from the State Attorney letting me know the thief was being released for good behavior two years from being sent up river. As a condition of his parole he had to make restitution or he would go back to jail. That was twenty years ago. I told the State Attorney I never got any checks or my rubber boots. I am still waiting for them. He did go back to jail but it was not for forgetting to send me the money… he got caught again after another burglary.
Another time I was doing a frame off renovation of a Toyota Land Cruiser. I had it stripped down to the bare frame and everything was sandblasted and freshly painted. The frame was sitting behind my shop. It had a brand new set of fancy rims with brand new huge tires that still had the rubber nubbies on them. I only left it out over the weekend because we needed space inside the shop for political signs we were silk-screening.
On Monday when I went out behind the shop the frame was sitting on the ground. The brand new tires and rims were not there. The police gave up looking for them. I didn’t. I guessed that a high school kid took the tires so I checked all the high school parking lots looking for those extra wide tires and fancy rims. Toyota six lug rims also fit Chevy pick up trucks. I finally found the rims in a parking lot at the high school in the county south of where I live on a Chevy. I notified the Sheriff of the tag number and VIN of the truck that was wearing my shoes and they arrested the boy that nite. I did get restitution because I went to lunch with the boy’s dad and explained that he could do the punishment or his boy could have a record: his choice. No matter what, I was getting four brand new tires and rims. The dad paid up. The boy paid his dad back and turned into a pretty decent human being.
Four other times I had burglaries at my sign shop. It was in one of those neighborhoods where connoisseurs of cheap drugs frequent. Once they stole my tools out of my truck by breaking the storage doors off. The other times they just broke into the building one way or another. It did not matter whether I had an electronic burglary alarm monitoring service or not. Thieves can always get in when they want to badly enough. In and out so fast they were gone before the police could get to the scene. In the worst break in the oxygen thief stole my computers and found the portable hard drives where I had all the data backed up. Keeping the back up media where the computers were may not have been one of my best strategies. Fortunately, I had a second back up set of CD’s at the house so I did not lose too much. This was back in the days of Megabytes before the advent of Gigabytes.
At our house we are now going to rent a safety deposit box to put some of our really treasured things in it. Some things can never be replaced; things like my friends lost. We are also going to do all of the things we started to do but never completed. Things like a complete inventory of everything worthwhile in the house with digital pictures, serial numbers, etc. We are going to keep this information in several places including on the Cloud.
After that last shop burglary I decided to get the DakotaDawg. Her first test came after I had her for less than a month. She was sleeping in the back of the Land Cruiser when I ran in to grab one more Christmas present for someone special. I had a new pair of shoes for myself in a bag on the floor in the front seat and a DVD of bird calls for someone else. Those shoes were pretty weird looking Bjorn mules.
When I got back to the vehicle, DakotaDawg was standing in the back where she had been napping with her hackles up. She was barking. It was a FAIL and too little too late. She must have gone on guard just in time though because on the transmission hump was my fancy digital camera still in its bag. DakotaDawg and I had a long discussion in Hochdeutsch about exactly what her responsibilities are. I learned my lesson. DakotaDawg never stays in the truck while I run in for one more thing. I also lock the doors no matter how little time I am going to be away from my car.
I can’t figure out what it is about these crooks and my shoes.
I am not trying to make light of this problem… there are just too many people in the world that are wasting our oxygen. Many other friends have had break ins of their residences or vehicles. They lost valuable things. Few recovered what was taken.
DakotaDawg now takes her protection duties seriously. We all need to start doing this a little better for each other. If I see someone else leaving the driveway in sort of a hurry when DakotaDawg lets me know she was not pleased about the visit I am going to call Law Enforcement and my neighbors.
That darned bug man and the mail lady better watch out.
I am really hoping that when one of those computers taken in the most recent robbery logs on to the internet that it calls home. If this is not happening for every log on, it sure ought to be!
I am kind of an old curmudgeon and I used to make signs. I might start making a few that say: “You better not be in this yard unless we knew in advance you were coming. DakotaDawg is watching you!”
And: Since their personal treasures and computers don’t have EPIRB’s… Jude, please help my friends in their hour of need. Let justice triumph over all Oxygen Thieves… “I PROMISE you, 0 blessed Saint Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor and I will never cease to honor you as my special and powerful patron and to do all in my power to encourage devotion to you.
Amen.”
http://www.op-stjoseph.org/advance/devotions.htm#Jude Prayer - Prayer to Saint Jude Thaddeus
Besides I can't afford to lose any more shoes.
Thank God for DakotaDawg and St. Jude.
© 06.22.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Today I am more than a little bit angry. Not that it ever does much good but sometimes it is good to vent, to get it out of our systems.
I wish DakotaDawg was visiting some friends home while they were working yesterday because their kitties were not quite threatening enough to keep a thief out of their house.
They lost a lot of personal things that have a value that could never be calculated by Actuarial Science. St. Jude has been called in to help in what may be a hopeless cause. I am trying to locate Sister Mediatrix to see if she will throw up a prayer too.
DakotaDawg did start lighting up from her post on the lateral file yesterday afternoon. I went to the front of the house to investigate and saw a young guy turning the corner at the driveway hustling away down the street at a pretty good clip. He wasn’t pushing a lawn mower. At the time I thought very little of it. We have people coming to the house all the time trying to hand us political literature, sell us magazine subscriptions or get us to sign some petition or the other.
We live pretty near our friends. I am going to look at these folks a lot more critically now because it is not as if I have not been a victim myself a few times in the past.
Many years ago someone broke into an apartment where I was living and stole some things from downstairs including car keys, my money clip and the valuables left in plain sight. He counted among these a brand new pair of my Red Wing boots. I couldn’t then and still don’t understand why a burglar wanted a pair of someone else’s boots. My little poodle and I slept upstairs through the entire break in. The police caught that guy. He had worn my boots for enough time that when I finally got them back, eight months after the robbery, I really did not want them. I gave them to Goodwill.
Another time some guy broke into the screened porch behind another apartment where I lived. He stole an old locked up steamer trunk. He didn’t get much. However, a lot of personal things that had no value at all except to me were missing. I wonder where in the heck my junior year high school yearbook and those old desert bucks are now.
Once somebody climbed over the fence at my shop and stole a bunch of things from my boat including my anchor and line. He got some fishing rods, a tackle box that I had fishing lures my grandfather used to use, a pair of rubber boots and my electronics. I was pretty angry then but one of the electronic devices was his ultimate downfall: my EPIRB or EMERGENCY POSITION INDICATING RADIO BEACON. This unit was to be activated in case the boat sank.
This oxygen thief sold the EPIRB to a fellow that bought things he knew were hot for a few bucks with the hope he could turn them for a big profit. The second oxygen thief did not understand what an EPRIB was. He most certainly did not know how it worked. He turned it on to see what it would do. The Coast Guard sent the Sheriff to find out why the device was sending out an emergency signal from downtown instead of the Gulf of Mexico.
When the deputy got there he had the guy with the goods… the EPIRB did its job. It saved me in a hopeless situation, much like St. Jude. The fence rolled quickly on the thief who was then arrested, prosecuted and convicted. The one that stole the stuff got seven years plus restitution for the items he sold that I never recovered. The second guy got let off the hook for cooperating.
I got a notification from the State Attorney letting me know the thief was being released for good behavior two years from being sent up river. As a condition of his parole he had to make restitution or he would go back to jail. That was twenty years ago. I told the State Attorney I never got any checks or my rubber boots. I am still waiting for them. He did go back to jail but it was not for forgetting to send me the money… he got caught again after another burglary.
Another time I was doing a frame off renovation of a Toyota Land Cruiser. I had it stripped down to the bare frame and everything was sandblasted and freshly painted. The frame was sitting behind my shop. It had a brand new set of fancy rims with brand new huge tires that still had the rubber nubbies on them. I only left it out over the weekend because we needed space inside the shop for political signs we were silk-screening.
On Monday when I went out behind the shop the frame was sitting on the ground. The brand new tires and rims were not there. The police gave up looking for them. I didn’t. I guessed that a high school kid took the tires so I checked all the high school parking lots looking for those extra wide tires and fancy rims. Toyota six lug rims also fit Chevy pick up trucks. I finally found the rims in a parking lot at the high school in the county south of where I live on a Chevy. I notified the Sheriff of the tag number and VIN of the truck that was wearing my shoes and they arrested the boy that nite. I did get restitution because I went to lunch with the boy’s dad and explained that he could do the punishment or his boy could have a record: his choice. No matter what, I was getting four brand new tires and rims. The dad paid up. The boy paid his dad back and turned into a pretty decent human being.
Four other times I had burglaries at my sign shop. It was in one of those neighborhoods where connoisseurs of cheap drugs frequent. Once they stole my tools out of my truck by breaking the storage doors off. The other times they just broke into the building one way or another. It did not matter whether I had an electronic burglary alarm monitoring service or not. Thieves can always get in when they want to badly enough. In and out so fast they were gone before the police could get to the scene. In the worst break in the oxygen thief stole my computers and found the portable hard drives where I had all the data backed up. Keeping the back up media where the computers were may not have been one of my best strategies. Fortunately, I had a second back up set of CD’s at the house so I did not lose too much. This was back in the days of Megabytes before the advent of Gigabytes.
At our house we are now going to rent a safety deposit box to put some of our really treasured things in it. Some things can never be replaced; things like my friends lost. We are also going to do all of the things we started to do but never completed. Things like a complete inventory of everything worthwhile in the house with digital pictures, serial numbers, etc. We are going to keep this information in several places including on the Cloud.
After that last shop burglary I decided to get the DakotaDawg. Her first test came after I had her for less than a month. She was sleeping in the back of the Land Cruiser when I ran in to grab one more Christmas present for someone special. I had a new pair of shoes for myself in a bag on the floor in the front seat and a DVD of bird calls for someone else. Those shoes were pretty weird looking Bjorn mules.
When I got back to the vehicle, DakotaDawg was standing in the back where she had been napping with her hackles up. She was barking. It was a FAIL and too little too late. She must have gone on guard just in time though because on the transmission hump was my fancy digital camera still in its bag. DakotaDawg and I had a long discussion in Hochdeutsch about exactly what her responsibilities are. I learned my lesson. DakotaDawg never stays in the truck while I run in for one more thing. I also lock the doors no matter how little time I am going to be away from my car.
I can’t figure out what it is about these crooks and my shoes.
I am not trying to make light of this problem… there are just too many people in the world that are wasting our oxygen. Many other friends have had break ins of their residences or vehicles. They lost valuable things. Few recovered what was taken.
DakotaDawg now takes her protection duties seriously. We all need to start doing this a little better for each other. If I see someone else leaving the driveway in sort of a hurry when DakotaDawg lets me know she was not pleased about the visit I am going to call Law Enforcement and my neighbors.
That darned bug man and the mail lady better watch out.
I am really hoping that when one of those computers taken in the most recent robbery logs on to the internet that it calls home. If this is not happening for every log on, it sure ought to be!
I am kind of an old curmudgeon and I used to make signs. I might start making a few that say: “You better not be in this yard unless we knew in advance you were coming. DakotaDawg is watching you!”
And: Since their personal treasures and computers don’t have EPIRB’s… Jude, please help my friends in their hour of need. Let justice triumph over all Oxygen Thieves… “I PROMISE you, 0 blessed Saint Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor and I will never cease to honor you as my special and powerful patron and to do all in my power to encourage devotion to you.
Amen.”
http://www.op-stjoseph.org/advance/devotions.htm#Jude Prayer - Prayer to Saint Jude Thaddeus
Besides I can't afford to lose any more shoes.
Thank God for DakotaDawg and St. Jude.
© 06.22.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Monday, June 21, 2010
The Animals Are Restless Tonight!
The Google search tells me they can find only five results after scanning all the documents on the interweb for that word string so I am feeling a little heady this morning. Two of them are in one thread where someone quotes another so that really is only four. None of them refer to anything like what I am talking about.
Somewhere deep in my subdirectories this song remains from a Roy Rogers movie I must have watched as a kid:
Stampede!
Lightning a flashin' everywhere
Thunder a rollin' through the air
Wind and rain, cattle look insane
This herd might stampede tonight
Clouds are drivin' cross the moonless sky
Cattle a rollin' frightened eyes
Keep 'em close and tight, cowboy pray with all your might
That this herd won't stampede tonight
There's lightning there's thunder
There's wind and rain, stampede!
More cowboys seemed concerned about this than people with pets.
I knew we were in for trouble noon yesterday when all the classic symptoms of early summer afternoon and evening thunderstorms were there for us to see. It was hotter than blazes. The only place I noted more moisture than under my arms was in the humidity hanging in the air waiting for something to get it mad after I finished my walk with DakotaDawg.
Another clue I get that we are going to have a bad thunderstorm is when DakotaDawg is my new best friend. We got back from the walk and she stayed very close. She did not take up her normal station on top of the lateral file in the Sun Room. Instead, everywhere I went DakotaDawg got there right before me. If I got up she got up. I knew when I looked her in the eyes.
Somewhere deep in my subdirectories this song remains from a Roy Rogers movie I must have watched as a kid:
Stampede!
Lightning a flashin' everywhere
Thunder a rollin' through the air
Wind and rain, cattle look insane
This herd might stampede tonight
Clouds are drivin' cross the moonless sky
Cattle a rollin' frightened eyes
Keep 'em close and tight, cowboy pray with all your might
That this herd won't stampede tonight
There's lightning there's thunder
There's wind and rain, stampede!
More cowboys seemed concerned about this than people with pets.
I knew we were in for trouble noon yesterday when all the classic symptoms of early summer afternoon and evening thunderstorms were there for us to see. It was hotter than blazes. The only place I noted more moisture than under my arms was in the humidity hanging in the air waiting for something to get it mad after I finished my walk with DakotaDawg.
Another clue I get that we are going to have a bad thunderstorm is when DakotaDawg is my new best friend. We got back from the walk and she stayed very close. She did not take up her normal station on top of the lateral file in the Sun Room. Instead, everywhere I went DakotaDawg got there right before me. If I got up she got up. I knew when I looked her in the eyes.
DakotaDawg with that wild look in her eyes.
DakotaDawg is not real happy with thunder or lightning. The kitties are not too wild about these events of nature either. It is a mistake to let a kitty sit in my lap if there is even the slightest chance of a boom somewhere near the house. This is compounded by the flash of light and then the inevitable leap of the kitties as they dig in their back claws to gain extra advantage. Then of course, there is the blood.
We went to bed early. It was still raining with the occasional flash and boom very close to the house. Kitties decided that they were safer in the bed. DakotaDawg saw the logic behind this reasoning and attempted several times to come aboard. This is one place she is not allowed. She knows that but ignores it when it is storming or when we have left her unsupervised in the houses with her co-conspirators, the three wonderful kitties. If we are very quiet when we come home we can usually find two or three of them snuggled up together right in the middle of the bed. The big gray cat prefers to leave his hair on other pieces of furniture or some pile of clean clothes not yet put away in the dresser.
It ended up being a little late for me by the time we were ready to get some shut eye. The animals had calmed down some but were still on edge. This storm I thought was nearly over then kicked into high gear. It was off to the races.
Stampede!
The Kitty Le Mans started in the bedroom and continued into all the other rooms of the house. I am not sure whether DakotaDawg wanted to participate or if she felt the need to provide supervision.
Stampede!
The Kitty Le Mans started in the bedroom and continued into all the other rooms of the house. I am not sure whether DakotaDawg wanted to participate or if she felt the need to provide supervision.
She took up a new station at the bedroom door and the kitties were forced to finish the Stampede! throughout the rest of the house. Things, like the weather, quieted down and I thought we were finally going to get some rest… right up until the Not So Cute Little Orange Talking Kitty decided that he had won the Le Mans. It was time to come into the bedroom and catch some ZZZ’s on the bed.
DakotaDawg was having none of that. Pippin sat just outside the door whining about DakotaDawg blocking his entry. As usual, he got his way. DakotaDawg had to rest next to the bed on her rug. After a few more attempts to join us in the bed DakotaDawg fell into a deep snoring dawg stupor.
I figured if I was going to have any chance of getting any sleep I better make another visit to the bathroom. When I got back the Not So Cute Little Orange Talking Kitty was stretched out on my side of the bed and ‘sleep noises’ were coming from everyone.
I went out to the TV room, sat in the recliner and closed my eyes and slipped away... Right up until the Big Gray Atticus thought this would be a perfect time for an uninterrupted visit. Some head butting got my attention and I realized that one of three things must be making him unhappy. The first check was the litter pan and thankfully there were no new presents in there for me to take care of. I checked the water bowls in the two locations where I keep them religiously filled to try to avoid these middle of the night reminders... both completely full. There was only one more thing it might be. Catticus had decided that the food bowl was not filled to his specifications. This means that no more than 10% of the food is eaten. So I filled the kitties’ bowl and went back to the recliner.
I finally fell asleep. I think I managed almost an hour before I was awakened and ordered back to bed. I said a prayer to Thor that he take a nap because the animals were still very restless.
Today is the solstice when the Sun reaches its northernmost point in the sky. It is the change of seasons and the longest day of the year. I think I am going to join the animals and take a nap. I know they need their rest so they will be ready for action should we have another storm tonite.
I think I will just stay up, going around the house waking them so maybe all of us can sleep when it finally does get dark. Thank goodness we don't live above the Arctic Circle.
Pippin, WAKE UP!
© 06.21.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
