Update

The uke now has white strings.  The original strings were black.  I had said before that I had read that my particular model of ukulele would be better with better than the factory original strings, and so I would probably restring it sometime.  I recently made a trip up to the Sam Ash store for some band supplies for the kids, so while I was there I bought a set of Aquila strings, because that was the brand that was most often recommended in various online uke forums.  It was only $8 for the set of strings.

It took me quite a while to do it--probably about an hour and a half to two hours, but I wasn't paying close attention to the clock.  I had special trouble with the E string for some reason.  One odd thing I noticed is that the original strings all look identical, but the new strings have visibly different widths except for the A and G strings--they're too close.  According to what I've read and seen in some instructional videos, it should take a couple of weeks before the strings settle down and quit stretching so they hold their tuning better.  I had already noticed this with the factory strings when I first got it.  I just hope I got them wound correctly so they don't slip.  If that happens, I might have to go back to Sam Ash and have one of their techs string it for me.  That would be embarrassing, but might be necessary if my job is inadequate.  I have replaced a couple of broken guitar strings before, but they were easier than this.  Maybe because they were wire and these were "nylon."  Aquila actually calls them Nylgut, because they're supposed to be like some kind of synthetic gut and are better than plain nylon.  They feel like nylon to me.


I downloaded a sampler of this band a while back from Noisetrade and this song was on it.  It immediately became a favorite of mine, and yesterday it turned up on my phone shuffle while I was working (mandatory OT Saturday).  Nowadays, whenever I hear a song I like I always think about how to play it on the uke.  So when I got home I looked it up and found that they have the chords for it on their official website, but for some reason in certain places the chords were wrong.  Anyway, it was easy to fix and last night I played it over and over for a long time.  This is another of those four chord songs and it's very simple.  The original is in E♭, so I transposed it down to C to make it easier for me to play and so it would fit my vocal range better.  The E♭ chord itself is one I'm still working on playing smoothly; it has an easy fingering but requires some finger stretching.  However, the B♭ chord is still a problem for me and A♭ is just impossible so far.

I had already begun working on E♭ because I've been playing "Rain" by Uriah Heep.  It's originally in C, but I transposed it down to G for my voice, and in G it uses an E♭.

One of my FB friends had posted that "four chord" video the other day, and one of their other friends commented that that chord progression has become so clichéd that it should be retired.  I only commented that as long as people like hearing it, there's no reason to stop using it.  But beyond that, it just seems like a dumb thing to say, because you could say that about everything in music.

Anyway, the new strings seem to be better than the old ones so far, except that they don't hold their tuning very well yet.

I have honestly read some of these

20 Books You Pretend to Have Read

A couple of things on this list I'm surprised by.  I guess movie fangrrls might pretend they've really read LotR.

3.  Moby-Dick:  Most definitely.  I remember being surprised by how interesting and "readable" this book was.  I know there are a lot of so-called "classics" that are just an onerous chore to plow through, but this is not one of those.  If you haven't read it, don't waste any more time and just do it.

5.  The Bible:  Okay, I have not ever read the Bible cover to cover.  I did listen to it on CD completely through, which took me several months, a little at a time, because the CD collection I have runs about 75 hours.  But I was exhaustively taught the Bible through many years of church Bible classes when I was growing up.  I'm one of the few who would actually want a Bible category on Jeopardy, because I'm always surprised at how ignorant the contestants are on this topic.

6.  1984:  Yes, I read it, on my own, not because of an assignment, although I was still in high school.  The second most depressing book I've ever read.  The most depressing book was We the Living by Ayn Rand.

7.  The Lord of the Rings:  Good grief.  I might even say...well, duh!

10.  Catcher in the Rye:  Didn't read this one until I was a grown-up, more or less.

19.  Harry Potter:  Only the first three.  I'll read the rest someday when I get around to buying them all.

20.  A Tale of Two Cities:  Because it was a high school reading assignment.  This was one of those so-called classics that was an onerous chore to plow through.

I've always wanted to read Catch-22.  Just never got around to it.  I've never even seen the movie, except for little bits here and there (somehow).

Directions

I hate it when people ask me for directions.  It happens often, because a lot of lost people assume I know the entire city like the proverbial back of my hand because I'm a meter reader or something.  But that's not why I hate it.  The reason I hate it is because the vast majority of people don't know how to take directions.  There seem to be a lot of people who want to hear directions like:  go to where the Best Buy is across from the Wal-Mart and then find the Pizza Hut next to the green house.  My wife is one of these.  Recently we were going somewhere, with her driving, and she asked where she should exit.  I told her the exact exit number.  "Is that where that Mexican restaurant is?" she asked.  "I don't know," I screeched, "just take exit number so-and-so."  I don't remember the number now.

By the way this is another flat tire story.

So today I was doing my regular cycle 17.  This is actually two routes bundled together, and it is usually done by two people.  However, the other guy is on vacation this week, so they gave it to me to do in 2 days instead of one.  So yesterday I did pretty much all the hard stuff and left all the easier stuff for today.  This is a common tactic.  You have to work longer and harder the first day but it means you have a really easy day coming up the next day.

This route starts way down on South Presa, south of Berg's Mill, then goes down Southton Road to Shane Road, where it does a couple of neighborhoods and finishes up on Villamain about where the "haunted" tracks are.  Somewhere on S. Presa I must have hit something with my right rear tire.  About the time I turned onto Southton, the low tire pressure idiot light came on but it wasn't a fast leak so I kept going until I could park in a good spot on Bobbie Allen Way, where I could walk the neighborhoods.  I called the office and they dispatched the tire guy--this was at 7 AM (I got an early start, read my first meter at 6:30)--and he said he'd be there "within the hour."  I knew this was b*******, but I hoped for the best.  I did the neighborhood on the south side of Shane Road because the houses there are very densely packed and I could (and did) do close to 200 meters per hour, which pretty much finishes it off.  So at 8 AM, the tire guy still wasn't there.  I called in and told them that he wasn't there yet.  So they sent one of our "team leads" or whatever they call them now with another truck that I could take, and he was going to sit there with my truck until the tire guy fixed it, then drive it back to the office.  So he called me and asked where I was.

This is where I groaned aloud.  I knew this was going to be a cluster****.

Knowing that he was leaving from the office, I told him, "Go south on South Presa until you get to Southton Road, then turn right and call me for more directions."

So he asked, "Is that off of 410 down there?"

"Uh, yeah," I answered.  "Just go south on South Presa until you get to Southton Road, then turn right and call me for more directions."

Well, although that neighborhood on the south side of Shane is very dense, the neighborhood on the north side of Shane is not.  In fact, it is so not-dense that I always motor it ("motor" in this case being a verb that means I drive through it).  The difference is that although I can do 200 meters per hour on the south side, there are only about 70 meters on the north side and it also takes a whole hour.  So I knew I was going to be stuck walking that side.  I drank some water from my truck and took off.  About 30 minutes later I came back within close enough sight of my truck that I could see it was still flat.  I called in again and told them the tire guy still wasn't there.  About that time the team lead guy called me again and asked if I was over there in the place back behind Stinson Field.  Holy...

It is true that I was in the same general area of Stinson Field, in the same way that the Alamodome is in the same general area as the AT&T Center.  I said, "Well, I never come from that direction.  Just go south on South Presa until you get to Southton Road, then turn right and call me for more directions."

I should mention here that ALL EMPLOYEES ARE ISSUED MAPSCO MAP BOOKS, which old-timers still refer to as "the Ferguson."


See that look on Bud's face at 1:08?  That's how I looked most of this morning.  There are always a couple of spare books kept in the office for occasions exactly like this.  Also, if you walk in the front door of our office, go straight ahead until you either have to hit the wall or turn right, and turn right, you will see sweepingly huge maps of our entire service area covering the hallway walls.  Or, for the rest of you, it's at that place where the women's restroom is across from those big offices that are empty all day.  If I had been this team lead, I would have asked what street the guy was on and he wouldn't have heard from me again until I was pulling up next to him.  But then, I am apparently not an idiot.

Another 30 minutes went by, which made it 9 o'clock.  I finished everything that I could possibly walk, and then dead-walked (walking a long distance without reading any meters) back to my truck.  Lo and behold! there was the tire guy.  I stood there for less than 10 minutes while he finished up, and as I was signing the receipt for the job, the team lead guy drove up.  "Man, I've never been down here before.  I was lost!"  I just shrugged, but what I really wanted to do was scream, "That's because you didn't go south on South Presa until you get to Southton Road, then turn right and call me for more directions, you ******* imbecile!!!"

It wasn't a big deal, because I had an easy day anyway and I only lost about 30 minutes from having to walk instead of drive.  But still, when I give someone explicit directions, why can't they just follow them instead of driving all over the frikkin south side for an hour trying to figure out where I am?  Sheesh.

Weird voice mail

Just thought I'd share this one.  I can't understand all of it, but apparently a French/German evil villainess wants my social security number and two large pepperoni pizzas.  I can just see her sitting there stroking her little white dog.

Top 10 Most Dangerous Vocations

Top 10 Most Dangerous Vocations

I didn't expect to see roofer at #10, but I won't argue with it.  I've never done roofing--not professionally--but I did spend a little while installing alarm systems in houses under construction, and I had some fairly precarious times climbing through rafters running wires.  I was always confident about it, though, and never felt worried while doing it.  The only time I got scared was when I was at the top of an extremely high ladder putting a motion sensor at the peak of a cathedral ceiling.  I thought that ladder was going to flip over at any second.

The real reason I mention this is because once when I was reading meters in an alley I came upon a house that was being re-roofed.  One of the roofers looked down at me and said, "I don't envy you your job."  It struck me as odd, because I thought surely he had a rougher job than I did.  I replied, "I don't envy you yours either."

My recent flat tire experience

Dave of Living Out Here recently said something on FB about a flat tire experience.  I recently had one, too, which was quite annoying.

When I bought my current vehicle, I looked under the seat to see where the jack was, and saw it was there.  Unfortunately--and this was entirely my own fault for being assumptive--I did not remove it to verify that every piece was included.

So I had a flat tire.  It wasn't totally flat yet, but getting there.  I went to change the tire and discovered that two pieces of the jack handle were missing--one of the extension pieces and the handle/lug wrench.  So I managed to, shall we say, acquire an extension piece and a handle/lug wrench that would fit the existing pieces so that I could change the tire.  The handle/lug wrench I acquired did fit the lug nuts on all the tires.

Except the spare.  Whoever had this vehicle before I did had, for some reason, changed the nuts on the spare to a different size (larger), so I couldn't remove the spare from its mount.  WTF?!

So I drove to that big tire-fixin' place on Rigsby which I can't remember the name of just now and found that my going-flat tire was pretty well worn out anyway, and I bought a used tire to replace it.  I didn't feel to bad about this; it's par for the course with tires.  They all have to be replaced eventually and if this was an original, it had over 100,000 miles on it.

I asked the tire guy if they could sell me a couple of new lug nuts for my spare.  He said yes.  But he had a hard time finding the right size.  It took him four tries before he finally got the right ones.

So, the new tire cost me $35 and the two new lug nuts for the spare were $1.50 each (I splurged for the more expensive lug nuts).  I had no problem with the expense.  I think I got off easy.

But those missing jack pieces and the odd-sized lug nuts?  I say again, WTF?!

On the topic of that Bigfoot allegedly shot in San Antonio

I have just spent a while watching this full playlist:  The Man Who Cried Bigfoot.  It's a home-made, from-the-ground "documentary" about that spot in S.A. where Rick Dyer claims to have shot a Bigfoot.  I find it interesting.  Some of the homeless people who are living here are interviewed.  You can take or leave whatever they say.

I would like to point out that in the first clip he points out large clumps of "scat" lying around and says that they are old but there are no cattle there.  I can conclusively state that there were cattle there up to about 2 years ago, long before any of the people living there now where there.  I know because I read the water meter at this property every month and I used to see cattle there all the time.  I didn't see many, maybe only 3 or 4 head.  The water service that was installed there was for the sole purpose of filling a cow trough.  After the cattle were removed, the trough was also removed, but the hydrant is still there (it hasn't used any water since the trough was removed).  If you watch closely in the video below you can see a white pipe sticking up out of the grass to the right of center at about the 2:50 to 2:53 mark; that's the hydrant.  [Correction:  it's visible in my original video, but after uploading too much resolution is lost; you can't see it.]

I'm not going to say that Bigfoot exists or not.  As a true skeptic (not an active disbeliever), I have seen no proof either way so I won't draw any conclusions.  However, in spite of everything the interviewees state, I think that Bigfeet (Bigfoots?) living in this little patch of forest is highly unlikely, given the amount of food and water a pair of Sasquatches would probably require.

I made this collection of video clips with my phone the last time I read this route, primarily for the purpose of showing how much activity is going on around here.  How on earth could a pair of Bigfeet(?) live here and not get hit by cars out on 1604 or 151?  They would have to roam to find enough food.  For that matter, I would think that there would be a lot more sightings just because they would have to be scavenging in people's garbage, and a lot of people live around here.

By the way, when they say that they've seen mountain lions here, I completely believe them.

I would also add that if I were the owner of this property, and someone was going around claiming to have shot a Bigfoot on it, they would be in a hellish nightmare of legal trouble.

Anyway, here are a bunch of short clips from around the area that I took with my phone and patched all together into one video.  On the subject of that, I used the software Avidemux and it's a pretty cool tool.  I think I might have to make more little videos like just for fun.

Debunk this

I came across this graphic at Who Forted, a blog about strange (Fortean) phenomena.  I was going to post it at FB, but I know that many of my FB "friends" would find Bigfoot's implied gesture to be offensive, so I'll just post it here because it's too funny not to share somehow.

Update

I'm on vacation this week.  Well, last Friday the A/C bit the dust.  Someone came out by Saturday afternoon and made enough minor repairs to get it cooling again, so we only went about 24 hours without it, but what a bad 24 hours it was!  It was the hottest day of the year so far, with outside temps hitting somewhere around 110 here.  The digital thermometer in my bedroom got up to 99.7 by the time he got cold air blowing about 3:00 PM.  About 9:00 that night when I was ready to go to bed, the inside temp had dropped to about 86.  Yesterday a couple of other guys came out and made all the more extensive repairs required to keep it running indefinitely.  Fortunately I was able to get it financed so I don't have to pay for it all at once.

My wife is still working this week, but she has an irregular schedule and is off today and tomorrow.  So today we took a trip to the Texas Snake Farm and Exotic Animal Park in New Braunfels.  For those who don't live around here, back when I was a kid this place was just called the Snake Farm--they had mainly snakes plus some other reptiles.  It was recently bought by a new owner and has been expanding, so that they now have quite a lot of other stuff, both various birds and mammals, and the new owner has also bought 30 additional acres behind the current park which he is going to expand into even further, so we'll have to go back again in a few years and see what's been added.

Unfortunately, I found it just about impossible to get any decent photos of the snakes because of the wire frames that kept people away from their cages plus the glass fronts of said cages.  What few good pix I took I'll be adding to my photo blog With Camera Eye later on, but I'll upload some here that didn't make the cut for the photo blog.  Click all images for larger versions.

Of all the snakes around here, the copperhead is the one I've seen most often in the wild and is the one I'm most familiar with.  They had this magnificent specimen which is one of the largest I've ever seen.  Of the dozens I've encountered in the wild, I've probably seen only one or two the size of this one.  I'd say it was probably around 30 inches long.  I can say that the longest copperhead I ever actually went to the trouble of measuring after I'd killed it was 28 inches long.  I know they can get much larger than that in other parts of the country, but that's pretty big for around here.  They also had a coachwhip, another snake I'm very familiar with from encounters in the wild, but conversely it was the smallest--even tiniest--coachwhip I'd ever seen.  I couldn't get a good photo of it.

Some kind of rattlesnake.

I think this was some kind of cobra.  You can see that he had looped back over himself a few times.  He was quite long.

A black mamba.

This is "the snake pit."  Those are all rattlesnakes coiled up down there.  Sometimes you can see them get fed, but not today.



By the way, they have three mountain lions but I just couldn't get a decent photo of them because of the fences.  One of the females was in heat, and was getting a lot of unwanted attention from the male.  On the plus side, we all got to hear what a mountain lions sounds like.  Plenty of vocalizations going on with that one female.

One of their two gray wolves.  This looks blue because I forgot to switch over to outdoor lighting and still had it set on tungsten for the snake shots.  It was the only good, clear shot I got of her face. 

An African serval.  The guy who worked there said it was kind of like the African version of the bobcat.

And this is my daughter holding a ball python.  My son couldn't summon up the courage to actually hold it, but he did at least touch it.

After we left there, we went up the highway to San Marcos and went to the Aquarena Center, which used to be a theme park called Aquarena Springs.  Pretty much all the old fun stuff is gone now.  I had been to it twice before when it was still a theme park, once when my wife and I were first married, and once on a school trip when I was in fourth grade.  The biggest thing they have there now is the glass bottom boat ride.  They also have a small aquarium and a floating wetlands boardwalk.  So we weren't there for very long, but the kids thought the boat ride was pretty cool.

Another by-the-way, they also have two hyenas at the Snake Farm.  I got some pretty good video of them being fed, but the file turned out quite large, around 500 MB, so I might try to upload it later on.  It will take me a while to upload even with my fairly-high-speed service.  I also got an excellent shot of a capybara, but I'm saving that one for the photo blog.

Rant mode on

Here is a great example of the kind of weird, stupid stuff I have to deal with sometimes.  I did my regular cycle 14 route today, which covers a huge swath of area up Foster Road, down FM 78, and all kinds of stuff.  We had two "niners" on it.  I think I've explained niners before, but the short explanation is that they are new meters that have never been on the route before.

Now, meters that were installed many years ago were installed by people who mostly knew what they were doing, and recorded good and accurate location information.  For example, last week I was looking for an old meter on a route I'd never done before and the location information was something like "36 feet from the corner and 6 feet in from the street."  This is by far the best location info I have ever heard for any meter.

The people who install meters now are complete morons.  The info I got was "near the corner at the intersection of Woodlake Parkway and Windfield Gap."  In the above map, you can see where Woodlake Parkway is.  The other street is very small and wasn't labeled unless you zoomed in really tight, so I put a little red dot on it to show where it is.  See it?  Now, someone please explain to me exactly where the intersection of Woodlake Parkway and Windfield Gap is.

Well, we eventually found the two meters we were looking for, sort of.  By the way, a much more accurate description of the location would have been "near the intersection of Windfield Gap and Binz-Engleman."  By sort of, I mean that one of them was the right meter with no problems.  However, the other meter was a complete mess.  It was supposed to be a 2-inch meter, but it was in a huge vault that is usually reserved only for very large meters because they are connected to very large pipes.  Indeed, this vault had a very large (I'd guess an 8-inch) pipe in it, but the meter was on a very small bypass pipe and was only a 5/8-inch meter.  Also it had the wrong serial number.  The only thing that was correct about it was the manufacturer.  I wrote everything down about it that I could think might be important and turned it in to my supervisor, so now it's somebody else's problem.

Once, there was a large meter that suddenly disappeared.  I mean, it had just been removed so that there was only a straight pipe.  This happens occasionally, but it's usually just a plain old residential meter and it's because someone decided they'd be sneaky and get rid of the meter because they think this way they can get free water (they don't).  However, this was a large industrial pipe at a big company and I didn't think they were doing anything stupid like that.  I kept skipping it and turning it in as a straight connection, and my "superiors" kept telling me it was still there.  Eventually they even gave me a map of where it was, as if I was some kind of imbecile.  This made me snap a little, and I and my supervisor had a rather heated exchange about it.  "I've been reading this route every month for 5 years, and I know where every single meter is.  But that one is not there anymore," I told him.  So finally, and this was after about 7-8 months, an "investigator" was sent out to "investigate."  (P.S.  Don't even get me started on investigators).  The investigator discovered...that the meter was gone.  It took a few more months to get all worked out, but eventually someone discovered that someone else in the company had decided to make this pipe a fire line and therefore the meter was removed.  Whoever that person was hadn't bothered to inform anyone else in the company about the decision.

Rant mode off...for now.

A song, illustrated

 

A song that I've liked for a long time popped into my head today for no particular reason--or for a reason that I was not conscious of.  So of course I looked it up and strummed through it a few times while singing as is my wont these days.

While looking these towns up to see where they actually are, I discovered that there is also a Tonopah in Nevada.  But since I've actually driven almost that exact route in the bottom map before, I decided to use the one in Arizona.  I must've driven through Tonopah, AZ quite a few times without noticing it.  I probably just thought it was part of Phoenix.  I must've driven through Tucumcari a few times, too.

And Winslow.  Made a lot of drop & grabs in Winslow.  But that's a different song.

A brief comment on an article at Cracked

4 Commonplace Technologies That Every Movie Still Gets Wrong.

They missed one, which has always aggravated me because I like to get aggravated about inconsequential things.  I noticed this one all the time back before cell phones in the Age of Pagers.

I should point out that pagers are still in use, mostly in a single industry:  that is, the medical industry.  Hospitals still use pagers to call doctors in hospitals because they can just page them with the location they need to get to.  Back when I used to work on pagers, we occasionally worked on voice pagers and we would test the audio by simply opening the door to our Faraday cage and listening to hospital transmissions to see if they sounded good.  I mention this because I've recently been watching Scrubs on Netflix and although this show was made after the Age of Pagers was pretty much good and gone, the doctors on that show all carry the Bravo Plus.  This was a numeric pager made by Motorola and was the best pager they ever made.  It was probably the best pager ever made by anyone.  You can see a picture of one here.  By the way, God help you if you ever got hold of something in the Advisor family (original Advisor, Advisor Gold, Advisor Elite--especially the Elite--man, if you got one of those you were frikkin' doomed--here's a photo of one during one of its brief spasms of actually powering on).  The LX was one of the last generations of numeric pagers and wasn't completely horrible, but they were nothing like the Bravo Plus.  The LS350 was total junk.

Anyway, the thing they get wrong is this.  Whenever someone on a TV show/movie gets a page with the ubiquitous Bravo Plus, the sound effect we hear is not a page alert.  It is the power-up alert.  It still bugs me.  I've probably pointed it out to my wife at least 500 times.  She still hasn't left me.

Alex Woodard and Sara Watkins - Reno (lyrics and chords)

This is a song I downloaded some time ago and it's been there lurking in my mind and occasionally turning up in the shuffle.  I couldn't find the chords for it on ye olde internets so I'm taking a shot.  I think these are right.

And it is actually pitched in C.  Also the lyrics I found weren't all correct, so I believe I've corrected them.

(Male)
C               Em
I pulled out of Memphis
F              C
With her on my mind
G                 E7             Am     G   F
She reminds me of someone I left behind
C             Em
In a hotel in Nashville
F              C
Or a club in L.A.
G          E7                   Am    G   F
Or maybe a lover's house on the way

(Female) (same chords)
Been working in Reno
Trying to get out
I've got a lonesome I worry about
It ain't the same feeling
As being alone
It's more how my lover's house ain't a home, no more.

(Both)
             C
So i need to know
                  Am    G
Is it time to let go
              C                               G
Is it time to leave these dreams behind me in Reno

(Male)
She was there at the station
When I stopped to fill up
This diesel tank and stained out coffee cup
(Female)
He says he needs coffee
But I think he means me
So I'm filling his cup with all my dreams



(Both)
How I need to know
Is it time to let go
Is it time to leave these dreams behind me in Reno
I think I know
It's time to let go
It's time to leave these dreams behind me, in Reno

(Male)
C               Em
I pulled out of Reno
F              C
With her by my side

The chords are the same pattern throughout.  Shouldn't be hard to figure out if anyone is looking for this.

Kid update

My daughter is a more voracious reader than I once thought (I've learned differently).  When she started to get into horror, I told her to read my Lovecraft books.  "I already have...one of them anyway."  I think she started with the wrong one and I'm still trying to get her to read some of the better stories.  Anyway, she recently became a fan of Sherlock, which can be streamed on Netflix.  Also, she totally has a crush on the guy who plays Sherlock, even though she won't just come out and admit it  ("he has the deepest voice I've ever heard!...he's just...ooohhhh").  I told her she should read the original stories.  "Do you have them?" she asked.  I handed her my two volume set of the complete Sherlock.  So she is now reading Sherlock Holmes.  Yes.

I've been trying to talk her into reading some of my fantasy collection, but she doesn't seem to be all that interested in fantasy.  I'd think a teenage girl should really like all the Dragonriders of Pern books (especially since many of them have prominent female protagonists), but I haven't been able to get her to read even that yet.

P.S.  She is NOT a fan of Twilight.  "I tried to read the first one," she said once.  "It was stupid.  I couldn't finish it."

P.P.S.  I remember reading her Lovecraft's "The Festival" when she was 5 years old or so, paraphrasing some of the more difficult language so she could more easily understand it.  She loved it.

Today's fun

Today I decided that rather than just bum around the house all day, we'd go to the Witte Museum to see what we could see.  Here are a few pix and one video from my phone.

We will have to do this more often.  I think next time we're all off on a Saturday we might hit the Institute of Texan Cultures.  I haven't been there since I was a kid.

Weekend update and some pix

My "new" smartphone doesn't have a great camera, but I've been trying to take some decent pictures with it anyway.  Here's a close-up I got of some Heavenly Blue morning glories that I think turned out pretty well.  Somewhere on one of my routes last week.

We were in Floresville all afternoon today for a big Girl Scouts bridging ceremony for all the Girls Scouts in Wilson County.  I found this relatively new marker at the community center.

And just beyond it, the grave site.

And my daughter, who "bridged over" to Senior Girl Scout.

And finally:  H.E.B. now has Whataburger's spicy ketchup.  I will never eat regular ketchup again.

So I took a CPR class

One of my requirements at work is to take at least three classes this year--all of which are furnished by my employer--as some sort of self-improvement gimmick or something.  One of them will be learning how to handle the new handheld device whenever it comes in, so that leaves two more.  I've been looking for classes that seem interesting and useful.  There are a lot of classes that would basically be just blow-off classes for me, like how to use Excel and Word, or the Computer Basics class.  I might take on one Powerpoint or Access just for kicks.

Anyhow, this past Tuesday I took a day-long class on basic first aid and CPR.  I think it was a great class, and I gave the instructor high marks all the way around on my class critique (something we have to do for every class we take, even the ones that are only an hour long).  This class was the American Red Cross version, so if you've had one of their classes you've probably been through all the same stuff.

I've been wanting to get CPR certification for a good while now, so when I found out it was one of the classes we could take, I signed up right away.  Since this was at work, I didn't have to pay for it myself (and of course, I was on the clock the whole time, so you could say I was actually paid to take it).

It had plenty of hands-on stuff, but honestly I think I would like to take a more intensive first aid course that covers more stuff.  I remember my dad, who worked for the highway department, had to take a week-long course every couple of years.  When I was a kid I'd read all the books he brought home from the class, so I've had a basic knowledge of first aid since I was quite young.  I remember once when my sister and I were at home alone after school and she somehow cut her hand pretty badly and started panicking (blood squirted everywhere).  I applied a pressure bandage just like I'd read in my dad's book and got her calmed down.  I was her hero after that.  My mom had to boast to everyone about it.  I was probably around 8 years old at the time, which would have made her 4.

I remember another time when I worked at the pizza place, I walked in for my night shift and found one of the day crew workers with her finger stuck in a cup of what appeared to be Big Red--but we didn't serve Big Red.  "What's that?" I asked.  "I cut my finger," she said,  "it won't stop bleeding."  "What the **** do you have it stuck in a cup of water for?" I said, a little testily.  "Isn't that what you're supposed to do?" she said.  "Holy ****," I said, "NO."  So I had to patch her up, too.

Last year, my employer put at least one AED (automated external defibrillator) in every building they have.  There's one in our building near the front.  During a break, I asked our teacher if he would be covering how to use it, and he said yes.  The ones we use can be seen here.  They are pretty slick.  This model turns itself on as soon as you pull that part that says, "PULL."  It has voice instruction that tells you everything to do and when to do it.  It also has clear diagrams showing you exactly where to place the pads.  The only thing you need to know is how to do chest compressions and it takes care of everything else.  For our class, we used training models that behave just like the real thing except they don't actually deliver a shock.  They also beep at the correct rhythm during the time that you do chest compressions so you don't have to sing "Another One Bites the Dust" to yourself.  That carrying case it comes in is a little smaller than a standard kids' lunchbox.

We also had hands-on training on how to roll someone over, how to apply a pressure bandage, how to make a makeshift arm splint, for which we used our instruction manuals, and how to recognize and treat shock and heat stress.  The heat stress thing is a big problem in our work.  Also burns.  Getting burned is a problem in some other departments, but it probably won't happen in mine, except for sunburns.  But mostly the class was focused on CPR.  I should be getting my card in a couple of weeks.

We were also given a face shield in a little pouch that can attach to your keychain.  To see it, click here and scroll down to the American CPR Mini CPR Keychain.  I think I might go ahead and order one of their packs that looks like a mini-backpack and has a face shield, gloves and antiseptic wipes.  They only cost $3.50 for one.

I'm glad I took this class.  I just hope that if the occasion ever arises, I'm still able to do what I was taught without freaking out.

Weekend update

Well, how about an update of sorts.

My daughter has been "borrowing" my ukulele.  She keeps bugging me to buy another one so she can just keep it in her room and play with it all the time.  I'm still planning on buying another one--a tenor next time--but not until next year's tax return because I'm planning on spending around $200 on it.

I haven't been working regularly with it, but I'm still making progress.  Certain chords, such as B♭major and B major & minor don't scare me so much anymore, but I still have a ways to go before I can play them smoothly.  E major is still throwing me.  So far I've been avoiding it, but if I want to play anything in A I'm going to have to learn it (E7 isn't giving me any trouble at all).

I've been grabbing chord & lyric sheets for a lot of songs from various websites and putting them all into a 3-ring binder.  Some of the songs that I originally wanted to try and learn have fallen by the wayside because I found I didn't have all that much interest in them.  Others I suddenly realized I wanted to try although I hadn't thought much about them before.  So since I don't have much else to talk about, here's a list.  You may feel free to stop reading at this point if you're not interested.  These are in no particular order except how I stuck them into the book.

Flowers on the Wall  - The famous song by the Statler Brothers.  I really like the lyrics to this song, they are very bleak and belie the happy sound of the music.  I might work on an alt version of the music just for kicks.

That's How I Got to Memphis - One of my favorite Tom T. Hall songs.

Streets of Laredo - An old cowboy song which I know from the CD of Don Edwards that I borrowed from my dad.  In a couple of places I changed a C major chord to an A minor to give it a sadder sound.

Walking the Floor Over You - Ernest Tubb.  Old country songs tend to be quite easy to play and sing, and although I don't listen to this music all the time these days, this is where I came from.

Paradise - John Prine.  Some people mistakenly call this one "Muhlenburg County."

Some Days are Diamonds - The John Denver song.  I have always really liked this song.  The chord sheet I found for it had one minor mistake, according to my ears, which I easily corrected.  The person who uploaded it had a C major in the chorus which should have been a Cmaj7.

Corpus Christi Bay - Robert Earl Keen.  A very simple three-chord song.  The hardest part about this one is keeping up the driving energy throughout the whole song.

Rank Stranger - An old folk/gospel song, recorded by numerous bluegrass artists.  The only version I found was in C, which sounds too low for my voice although I can hit all the notes.  Every version I've ever heard was recorded in F.  I can hit the high notes in F no problem, but this is one that was giving me trouble because in F I have a IV chord of B♭, so I've been practicing it in D.  Once I get that B♭down I'll be doing it in F so it will have more of that "high lonesome sound."

When I Reach That City - I stumbled across an album of old country gospel songs that I was able to download and this song was on it.  The family who recorded it (at Sun Records) way back when performed it with only two chords (I and V or V7).  I changed the chorus a little and added a IV and a vi chord in the right places to give it a little more flavor.

Angel Band - Another old folk/gospel song in three chords.  I recently came across a version recorded by The Monkees(!) with Michael Nesmith singing lead.  It's always been a favorite of mine, but I really like the Monkees version.

Waltz Across Texas - Another Ernest Tubb song.

Shot Full of Love - I haven't been practicing this one all that much but I've always liked it.  The first version I ever heard was by Juice Newton, from her album Juice.  It was also recorded by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  It was written by Texan songwriter Bob McDill.

Cool Water - I've learned that Sons of the Pioneers songs are deceptively difficult.

The Last Cowboy Song - Ed Bruce.  So far this is the only song that I've practiced doing something other than just straight strumming.  I pick the root note of the chord first, then strum the full chord for the two following beats of each measure (it's in 3/4).

Faded Love - I haven't practiced this one much because I don't have the melody firmly fixed in my head.  I need to listen to it several more times.

Orphan Girl - A more modern country/gospel song.

Morning Dew - Another Tom T. Hall song.  I've had this song memorized since I was a little kid.

Maria - Brian Setzer.  This one probably doesn't translate too well to the uke, but it has a fairly easy chord progression.

Lodi - John Fogerty (Creedence Clearwater Revival).  A fairly easy 5-chord song (I, ii, IV, vi, V).

The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore - Originally by Jean Ritchie.  The first version I ever remember hearing was by Michelle Shocked.  June Carter Cash also did it, and probably lots of others since it's an old country/folk song.  I've been mostly listening to the version by Annie Patterson.

Knockin' On Heaven's Door - Because why not.  I have to have at least one Dylan song, right?

King of the Road - Heh.

It's Hard to be Humble - Mac Davis.  I did this one as a joke for my wife one night and she liked it, so it stuck.

Is Anybody Going to San Antone - There are going to be a lot of old country songs on this list.

In the Pines - The version I know best is by the Louvin Brothers.  There's no way I can hit the high notes in this one, when they aren't singing words but just going "ooooh, ooooh, oooh" etc.  So I whistle that part.

I Can Still Make Cheyenne - Another one that I tried for kicks and my wife got starry-eyed, so it stays.

Hollywood Waltz - By the Eagles.  I've also been practicing "Seven Bridges Road" but I haven't bothered to print it out because I know it so well.

Hallelujah - Leonard Cohen.  Everyone knows this one, so I should too, I guess.  I like it a lot, anyway.

Fraulein - One of my dad's favorites, for some reason.

Do What You Do Do Well - Two chords:  D and A7.

Dark as a Dungeon - Recorded by numerous country artists and even by Wall of Voodoo.  I've been mostly focusing on the version by Tennessee Ernie Ford.  This is part of my trilogy of coal mining songs, along with "L&N" and "Paradise" previously mentioned.

Angel From Montgomery - Another John Prine song, but more famously recorded by Bonnie Raitt.

Amarillo By Morning - Another favorite of my wife.

All My Tears - Another country/gospel song which I first heard by Emmylou Harris but written by Julie Miller, and it's Miller's version I've mostly been listening to lately.

After the Glitter Fades - Because I wanted at least one Stevie Nicks song and this one fits in with the country-ish theme of the whole collection.  Also it's pretty easy.

Boat on the River - An old Styx song from their Cornerstone album, written by Tommy Shaw, who has in the past few years become my favorite Stygian.  I need to practice this one a lot more, but it has a few chords that are still difficult for me.

Black Muddy River - From the Grateful Dead's In the Dark album.  I don't remember it getting any radio play, but it's my favorite song from that album.  This is another one that will be easier once I get the B minor down.

Before the Next Teardrop Falls - I've been practicing singing that one part in Spanish.

Evil Love - A goofy little song from the Phineas & Ferb TV show.  I'm still working on playing syncopated rhythms so it will sound right.

Goodnight Irene - Another standard.

Downbound Train - Probably my favorite Springsteen song.

Don't Stop Believing - The way I sing it, it has a wistful, almost ironic sound.  Probably not for most folks.

Della and the Dealer - This song is really hard because of the vocal range required.  Hoyt Axton had such an excellent low range.  I just can't come close to it.

The Traveler (Days are Numbers) - Alan Parsons Project.  Easy chords, but doesn't sound all that great strumming.  I think this song will eventually drive me to actually finger-pick.  I also want to learn their "Old and Wise" but it has some chords that are really difficult for me.

Closing Time - By Lyle Lovett.  I can do the chords, but I'm having trouble getting the melody fixed in my head.

Mountain of Love - I'm most familiar with the version by Charlie Pride, but lately I've been listening more to the version by Johnny Rivers.

The Weight - A favorite by The Band.  I just started working on this one tonight, and am happy to report good progress.  I have it in G, which means I have to play a B minor, which is one of the chords that has been giving me problems.  But I can tell that eventually I'll be able to do it.

Gorilla You're a Desperado - Which I've been plowing through just for fun but it doesn't sound very good yet.  I'd really like to to Zevon's "Desperado Under the Eaves" but it's a lot harder.

Video Killed the Radio Star - Yeah.  I worked on this one for a few hours non-stop one night until my hands were tired and cramped.  It's fun.

Books About UFOs - By Husker Du.  Quite easy.  Just requires a lot of energy.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow - Trying to play something similar to the version by Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.

Landslide - Written by Stevie Nicks, recorded by Fleetwood Mac.  I hadn't thought at all about this one until I saw Jake Shimabukuro do it.  Of course, I'll never play it like he does, but I still like it.

Wish You Were There - The last song from the Hi Infidelity album by REO Speedwagon.  Another obscure song that is nevertheless one of my favorites.

I Miss a Lot of Trains - I really like this song.  By Tom T. Hall, but lately I've really been digging the version by Iris Dement.

Pancho and Lefty - This is another one that I've been working on a lot.  I've been listening more to the orignal Townes Van Zandt version than the one by Willie & Waylon.

Dead Flowers - By the Rolling Stones.  But I pattern mine more after the version by Townes Van Zandt.

Seven Spanish Angels - Famously by Willie, but recorded by many others.  I've mostly been listening to an old version by Daniel O'Donnell.

Tia Maria - Ronnie Fauss.  I posted the chords & lyrics for this one a while back.

Love Songs in Spanish - Another easy one which I posted chords & lyrics for previously.

Dust in the Wind - Another one I'd never thought about until I saw Ukulele Mike do it on YouTube.  This one I do just for my own personal amusement.

Give Me Forty Acres - My favorite truck driving song.

He Stopped Loving Her Today - When George Jones passed away recently, I suddenly remembered this song.

I'll Be Coming Home - A bluegrass-y piece by Tommy Shaw from his Great Divide bluegrass album.  I think I added a vi chord in there that isn't in the original just to keep it from sounding too monotonous when I do it.

Northwest Passage - Stan Rogers.  Another one I do just for myself.

Over the Waterfall - I have a few songs by Michelle Shocked which don't sound all that great just strumming.  They sound much better with a real guitar player and a fiddle to fill them out.  But as with most of these, I do it for myself.

Prodigal Daughter - Michelle Shocked, see above.  I haven't practiced this one much because singing the melody is giving me fits.

Silent Ways - Also Michelle Shocked, but I think one works a lot better and I've been practicing it more.

The Secret to a Long Life - Michelle Shocked again.  Another one that doesn't work that well for me, but I play with it anyway.

You Never Even Call Me By My Name - I intend to annoy the **** out of somebody with this one someday.

Praying Mantis - By Don Dixon.  Simple chords, but requires a lot of energy and syncopation.

Rose Colored Glasses - John Conlee.  Another old favorite.  That reminds me I also want to look up his "Backside of Thirty."

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain - I used to play around with a harmonica, and this was one of the few songs I taught myself to play on it.

Gentle On My Mind - Most famously covered by Glen Campbell, but written by John Hartford, and it's his version I've been listening to.  There's a video of him on YouTube performing it with nothing but his own banjo for accompaniment.  This one stumped me at first because of the relatively unusual seventh chords in it.  But then I tried it and was elated to discover how simple it is to make the changes on a uke.  This one would sound much better if I could finger pick.

Wild Horses - Another one that I'll be able to do better when I get that B♭down.

My Darling Clementine - I ran across the full lyrics for this one the other day and decided to write my own music for it.  So the version I've been practicing is actually totally original as far as the music goes.

A Horse Called Music - I came across this one by Willie Nelson on a sampler I had downloaded.  I still have to listen to it a lot more to get the melody down in my head.

Whoopi Ti Yi Yo - An old cowboy song recorded by Don Edwards.

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry - This is another one I've thrown a minor vi chord into just because I like the way it sounds better in certain places than the original major I chord.

Juggle this

Just had to share this, via the Ear-Trumpet.

Some 19th-century dude juggling rifles with fixed bayonets.  Probably violating a few of the Rules in the process.

Yeah, but...

The only thing I could think was, that ukulele has a broken string.

Chet Atkins - I Still Write Your Name in the Snow

I just heard this song for the first time and it cracked me up.

A screen shot related to the previous post

That little green blip is a "cheat" that is part of the ZDoom program.  It's like a sight.  I don't think I would use it much, because most of my combat was so close-range that trying to sight with it would have only slowed me down.

By the way, although I don't really do gun-blogging here anymore, I think I can go ahead and mention last week's range activities.  It had been quite a long time since the last time I went out shooting.  My dad was on vacation so I had to go to his house last Saturday to put out some range cubes for his cattle, and my son and I set up some coke cans around his tank, using the dam as a backstop, and we did some shooting.

My son is 12 years old.  He had previously done a lot of BB gun shooting and a little .22 rifle shooting when he was in Boy Scouts.  I took four guns this time:  a Single Six (.22 revolver), my grandpa's old Winchester slide-action .22 rifle, a single-shot .410, and a Model 28 S&W .357 magnum revolver (6-inch barrel model).

He performed quite well with the .22 rifle, fairly well with the Single Six since he hadn't reallly shot a handgun before, and I let him blaze away with several rounds in the .410 just for kicks.  When I was gathering up my ammo for this excursion, I grabbed a box of gun show reloads which had a bunch of ammo loose in the box as well as a plastic bag of cartridges.  I thought that the loose ammo was .38 Special and the bagged ammo was .357.  I was planning on having him shoot the .38 stuff first, and then if he handled it fairly well, go ahead and let him step up to the .357.

Well, I didn't look at the ammo closely enough and it turned out that it was all .357.  But, it was stuff that had been reloaded just for target practice and wasn't particularly powerful for .357 ammo.  However, it was most definitely still at .357 level and far above .38.

So I went over all the stuff about how he should hold it and all that stuff to help him minimize and control the recoil.  The first couple of shots he took a few steps backward because the recoil startled him a little.  So I asked him if he wanted to go back to the .22 and he said, "No!  I want to keep shooting this.  I like the way it kicks."  So I ended up letting him run 4 or 5 cylinders worth through it.  When he finally decided it was making his hand hurt too much, we went back to the .22s and sat on the tank dam shooting turtles for a while.

I have had people tell me that they won't shoot a .357 because it kicks too much.  I have always considered this to be nonsense.  If my skinny 12-year-old can handle one, then I think anyone should be able to unless they have some kind of actual physical disability.

It was all great fun.  Today after I hunted down my cleaning kit, I ran him through cleaning both the handguns.  I decided to leave the long guns for another day.  They'll keep.

I don't know if this should make me proud or not

My son is a Doomer.  I think it's kinda cool that kids can still be fascinated by a game as old as Doom, but then it was and is one of the greatest games of all time.  I had installed Doom 2 for him to play, but I had misplaced my Doom (original) CD.

The other day I found it, when I was looking for something else, of course.

So I installed it for him, and also handed him a CD that I bought many years ago that has lots of pwads* on it.  He fired one up and I immediately noticed that he wasn't going to get any armor.  I warned him about that.  "I know," he said, as if this were obvious, "it's called Blood Red, Daddy."

He proceeded to blast his way through on HMP (Hurt Me Plenty, or the third level of difficulty) and finished with 147% health.  Good grief.  I don't think I could have ever done that well.

P.S.  If you ever want to fire Doom up on a modern computer, download a tool called ZDoom.  It will make the game run as smoothly as if you were on a fast old DOS machine.



*In Doom parlance, a pwad is a wad** that was created by a player, not by ID Games.

**A wad is a file that contains all the information for a certain level or levels.

Javelinas in San Antonio.

I didn't take the picture below.  This was from a co-worker/friend of mine who is a Field Service Representative, which is a fancy euphemistic way of saying he's one of the guys who turns off people's water when they don't pay their bill, and then turns it back on again when they do.  He was on Yucca Valley just south of Medina Base Road when, down in the brush behind Aspen Valley he saw "a half dozen or so" javelinas.  Here's a still photo he took of one of them with his phone.

He also took some video but his ISP wouldn't let him email it because it was over 25 MB and when he tried to upload it to his Picasa web album it got stuck in some sort of weird Picasa limbo where he--and only he--can view it but he can't share it or do anything else with it.  So, no video unless he figures something out.

Anyway, I know javelina are very common south of here but this is the first time I've ever heard of any being actually inside San Antonio (inside Loop 410).  So don't be too quick to blame your neighbor's dog or the coyotes on rummaging through your garbage.  It might be javelinas.

Checkered garter snake

This is a checkered garter snake.  This was a snake I had never seen until I started this job; they just don't live out here in the sandhills where I grew up, although I have on rare occasions seen the Texas garter snake out here.

This one was unusual in that it had just begun the shedding process.  It had only its head clear and the rest of its body was still covered by the old skin.  I tried to get a good shot of its head, but it didn't cooperate with me.  So its coloration is usually more vivid than this.  It's so dull looking because that's all the old skin that it was about to get rid of.

I've seen dozens of these things hiding in meter boxes.  I'm not one of those people who is irrationally afraid of snakes, but I must say that I used the digital zoom on this one because he was really peeved at my uncovering him.  He zeroed in on me and kept pivoting around so that he could face me instead of just trying to get away like they usually do, and when I did finally flip the lid back on the box, it struck at my hook, which is a first for my encounters with this kind of snake.

The picture below was taken by accident because I touched the "take a picture" button before I meant to.  But it did get a good shot of my Roadrunner, one glove and hook.  I have to take off the glove to use my new phone because touch screens don't work with gloves.  The Roadrunner is soon to be gone; we are going to be getting new devices within the next few weeks.  They haven't told us which one yet, but I'm hoping for a model made by Itron.  It looks like this.

Found a movie I've been looking for

When I was a kid, my family went to the movies every now and then--I never go now, although my kids have gone a few times with friends or the church youth group.  This was back when Disney was still making innocent, fun, kid-friendly movies under the Buena Vista banner, like Hot Lead and Cold Feet,  The Apple Dumpling Gang, Where the Red Fern Grows, Escape to Witch Moutain, The Biscuit Eater, etc.

Once my mom even took my sister and I--or possibly both my sisters, I don't remember if the youngest was born yet--to the theater in Nixon to see a double feature of Old Yeller followed by Mary Poppins.  That was back when Nixon still had a theater.

Anyway, there was this one movie we saw that was most definitely not a Disney nor a Buena Vista movie.  It was a movie about Bigfoot.  Now, I (of course) just loved this movie.  I was fascinated by mysterious creatures from birth, probably.  What makes me wonder now why we ever went to see this movie is because my dad empatically doesn't believe in any of that nonsense.  But he took us all to see it anyway.  Years went by and I tried to track this movie down so I could watch it again, but it was not until just last year that I spent some time combing through Wikipedia and imdb.com until I finally weeded out all the chaff and figured out which movie it was.  It's called Sasquatch:  The Legend of Bigfoot.

I don't know if it can legitimately be called a "documentary," but I think it's fair to say it is documentary style.  It had a lot of parts that were still scary to me as a 13-year-old in 1977, and scared the snot out of both of my sisters (who were 5 and 9 at the time).  I think it might possibly be the scariest G-rated movie I ever saw.  I bring this up now because I was just catching up on posts at Cryptomundo and found that they have posted an interview with the director of this movie.

I think that any exposure I had to the Bigfoot phenomenon before this movie was probably limited to an episode of In Search Of and maybe a book or two from the junior high library.  I remember that after we got back home that night, I sneaked up outside of my sisters' bedroom and mimicked the sound that the Bigfoot made in the movie, which started them screaming.  I was sternly reprimanded by my dad, but I could tell he was holding back laughter the whole time and I didn't really get in trouble for it.

I am happy to report that Netflix has this movie on DVD, packaged in a 3-for-1 with two other movies that look to be just B-grade "horror" flicks.  So I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

They also have The Biscuit Eater on DVD.  This one was from 1972, when I was only 8, and man I just loved that movie.  I'm sure if there had been VCRs back then I would have begged my parents for a tape of that movie just so I could watch it over and over again.  In fact, they have quite a few of these Buena Vista releases from the olden days.  I don't think I'll ever need to see Hot Lead and Cold Feet again, though.

11-4165

Since I have mentioned/complained about it so many times, here is my cycle 11 route, 4165.  It clocks in at 4.13 miles--about 50 that are not in alleys and about 400 that are.  Also there are 5 or 6 more meters that I drive to.  This is my worst foot route.  The start/end dots are covered up by the 3 mile marker.

A work picture

For people from San Antonio, this needs no explanation.  For the rest of you, there used to be this horrific intersection of state highway 281 with Loop 1604.  It was two major highways that came together with just a plain old stoplight intersection--a holdover from the days when people were still getting used to horseless carriages.  A while back they began construction to turn this into an actual interstate highway-style interchange, and have been progressing remarkably fast (the usual S.A. rule of travel is:  the shortest distance between two points is under construction).  People drive through here now just for the sheer exhilaration of not having to sit in line at a stoplight for 35 minutes.  I took this photo through my work truck's window from the very top of the interchange today.  Just don't tell anyone I was taking pictures while driving.

That long highway fading into the distance is 281, facing south.

Argh

Not a good day today.  This is my usual cycle 8, which normally is a pretty good route.  Smooth terrain, all fronts, no dogs.  This route is officially sequenced so that it begins and ends right at Rhapsody and what on this map is inexplicably called "River Path."  There are no such signs on this street.  Pretty weird, but not unusual for Google Maps.  All signs call it San Pedro.  Anyway, I quit doing this route by the official sequence a long time ago, because I didn't like having to park in someone's parking lot on Rhapsody.  So I have been parking at Stardream and "River Path."  Since, like almost all foot routes, this route is circular (it ends where it begins), you can start anywhere and eventually get back to your starting point.

I realized last summer that I could park at the community swimming pool--the intersection of Fantasia and Reverie--and this would make me come back to my truck halfway through the route and then again when I finished, because you cross that intersection twice coming from two different directions.  I did this during the summer so that I could take a Gatorade break at the halfway point.  Since summer is coming up again, I thought I'd do it this way again just to make sure I knew what I was doing, because I might eventually completely resequence it so that it "officially" begins and ends here.  Also, I figured if it cooled off by the time I got back to my truck the first time, I would be able to grab my jacket.

But it started raining.  Only a 20% chance of rain, but I should have known this meant I was going to get absolutely hammered.  I stopped and took shelter several times going down Fantasia toward "River Path," and as I was heading back down Stardream, the norther hit.  So, I was wet, and now I had frigid 30 mph winds hitting me.  I started running from meter to meter, but pretty soon I realized this wasn't going to help.

When I got to Rhapsody and Rendezvous I diverted from the route and skipped all of the West Rhapsody stuff and actually ran from where that 1 mile mark is all the way back to my truck.  Man, that was unpleasant.  I can walk quickly for hours and hours, but running kills me, partly because both of my ankles are messed up, probably from repetitive stress (the Achilles tendons are the problem).

When I got back to my truck, I fired it up and turned on the heater, put on my jacket and finished the rest of my coffee, which was still hot because I have a totally awesome Thermos travel mug that keeps coffee hot for hours.  Mine is black, and I got it at Wal-Mart, and if you think $20 is too much to pay for a travel mug, you probably have never had one that is actually leak-proof and keeps hot drinks hot.


So when the rain slacked off a little, I had to backtrack and do everything that was left, which was quite a lot.  It still rained and I got totally soaked, but eventually it stopped and by the time I finished I was mostly dry.  But I was still chilled and, as usual, working in a cold rain makes me really tired.  Also my legs are hurting (especially my right ankle) from running up that hill back to my truck.  When I finished all this, I went and got the stuff on W. Rhapsody that I had skipped earlier, which I didn't bother to track.  I still had to do my partial route, which I also didn't track because I decided--screw it, I'm just going to drive the whole thing.

Not a pleasant day.

Let's face it: neither of these guys is going to sing out of tune

I recently "liked" a FB page called "Marillion - The Fish Years."  Fish (a.k.a. Derek Dick) was the previous lead singer of the group who went solo in the late 80s.  Since "liking" this page I've seen some links that were interesting for a Marillion fan.

Here's one that may be of interest to my legions of readers who are fans of other bands as well.  In 1987 a Marillion concert was "crashed" by Bruce Dickinson, Nicko McBrain and Janick Gers of Iron Maiden; and Jimmy Bain of Dio and Rainbow.

One of the items resulting from this impromtu visit was this Joe Cocker style version of "A Little Help From My Friends," featuring a duet between Bruce Dickinson and Fish.

Early Roles of Famous Actors

I took a couple of days vacation just for kicks--I go back to work tomorrow--so I'm home having an early morning pipe and doing some recreational internet reading.  I thought this was an interesting list for movie/tv buffs:  32 Mind-Blowing Early Roles of Famous Actors at Cracked.

A few of these surprised me.  I knew several of them already.  I did not know that Denzel Washington was an unnamed thug killed by Paul Kersey in the original Death Wish.  But there are two others they could have included from that same movie.  Jeff Goldblum was one of the original trio who raped Kersey's daughter and murdered his wife.  Christopher Guest was a police officer who had a couple of significant lines right at the end of the movie.  Additional trivia, according to imdb.com:  Guest's first credited role was also as a police officer, in the movie The Hot Rock, which I've never heard of.

Influences

Is it my imagination, or does Willie seem to be channeling Snoopy?

Cycle 4

I don't plan on doing this map thing forever.  I just want to get maps of my routes and get a good record of how far I walk on each one.  This is my regular cycle 4, which is a rough route.  By rough I mean the terrain is actually rough, uneven, so forth--and it's also very long.  Not many sidewalks, and where there are sidewalks they are broken and hazardous to walk on--and the meters are all over the place--you can't count on them being lined up.  Maybe one is right down by the street, maybe the next is way up in the yard close to the house.  It's a mess.

This one is done in two parts.  It's sequenced so that you park at Sabinas & Cincinnati and do that part that I drew in blue first, then you drive down and park at Cincinnati & Zarzamora and do all the red stuff.  Today I decided to do the worst part first, so I did the stuff in red, which is 6 miles long.  Then I did the other, smaller part, but the app didn't work right and for some reason it couldn't save or upload the map, so I didn't get a record of it and I'll have to do that part again, but I think it was around 1.5 miles.

This map might look a little strange because I had to stitch on that blue part.

It's sometimes an interesting area, and sometimes I see things that I think are...er...interesting.  Today I saw two ducks fighting.  At first I thought maybe they were attempting to "mate" but after a minute or so I decided that no, they were definitely fighting.

There are also lots of college students around here--there's at least one sorority house on this route, so there's sometimes some pleasant "scenery."  One time, that sorority house was holding some kind of barbecue fund raiser, and they had four different barbecues going all at once.  I could smell that stuff all over the place that day.  Having to smell food cooking when you're working is just torture.  It's almost impossible to do this route and not smell someone, somewhere, cooking frijoles.  One time the manager of a Mexican restaurant on this route gave me a free breakfast taco when she saw me outside.

This is one of the routes that I was put on when I was first hired, and have done it regularly since (regularly meaning almost every month, but not every month).  So when I first started, there were these two meters with a Cincinnati address, numbered A and B at the same address, and I couldn't find them.  Whoever had been doing that route before me had sequenced them where it appeared they should have belonged according to their address.  But I couldn't find them.  Since they were still fairly new meters, there was no location information available for them.  According to the address, they should have been somewhere on the north side of Cincinnati between Elmendorf and Alexander.  I walked all over that place and couldn't find them.  So eventually the guy who was our lead meter reader back then (he retired since then, and his replacements are worthless) went out and somehow found both of them.

It turned out that neither of them were anywhere near where it seemed they were supposed to be.  One of them is near the intersection of Vollum and Josephine Tobin, about 3-4 steps off into the grass toward the lake.  The only thing it services, as far as I can tell, is a water fountain.  The other one is somewhere on the other side of the lake.  So it wasn't even on the right route.  The other side of the lake, and yet it has the same address as the other one--neither of which are even close to Cincinnati Avenue.

Another thing that makes this route bad is the number of loose vicious and semi-vicious dogs on it.  There was one that kept jumping his fence and coming after me.  He's still there, but one time I threw a beer bottle at him and luckily whacked him right in the face with it.  Since then he never has jumped the fence.