December « 2014 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

December, 2014

adventures / Auburn / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
31
Dec 14

Happy New Year

We went downtown, listening to the cars hum by and the parties going on across the street and watching the fire trucks head off to a call. We shivered. We stomped our feet. We met with friends and made a new friend. We shivered some more. We stood out there for almost an hour, enjoying a clear, cold, regular night, staring at the time and the temperature on the bank clock on the opposite corner. We took pictures and wished each other well.

It was, hopefully, the start of something, the “See ya later, 2014. I’m headed to Toomer’s!” tradition. It seems a fitting way to end a year, to revel in it, celebrate it, push it away, whatever you want to do with it. And it is as fine a place as any to offer people you care the sincerest of happy new year wishes.

To the 11,000+ visitors and several thousand more subscribers of this little corner of the web, I wish you peace, prosperity, love and fulfillment in this next orbit around the sun.

family / history / maps — Comments Off
31
Dec 14

70th anniv – My great-grandfather’s war

I’d guess you don’t really celebrate the new year when you’re enduring a historic Belgian winter and trying to not get shot at. That’s more or less what my great-grandfather was doing seven decades ago as a World War II combat medic. We don’t know about his individual time in the 137th Infantry Regiment, we didn’t even know that was his unit until years after he passed away, but I’ve pulled the unit history to get a glimpse of what he might have been going through. We don’t know which company, or even which battalion he was in, he never talked about it, so this is an educated glimpse of a guess.

So, then, for Dec. 31:

Company I was counterattacked by the enemy, who had positions in the woods to their front.

The 1st Battalion jumped off for the town of Villers-la-Bonne-Eau. Companies B and C entered the town and occupied some of the buildings. Two enemy tanks started shelling them. Men from the companies fired bazookas at them, but the tanks kept just out of range, and although several hit the tanks, they did not knock them out. The elements of the two companies were forced to withdraw to the cover of the woods.

At 1700 the Regiment was ordered to dig in for the night and continue operations the following morning.

The 2nd Battalion, less Company G, pulled back to the town of Surre and moved to north of Livarchamps.

Two hundred thirty-five men were reported as missing from Companies K and L. The majority of these men were believed to have been captured in the town of Villers-la-Bonne-Eau, where they had been cut off for two days by enemy tanks and infantry.

Sounds pretty grim for those two companies, indeed. This update — if you look in the map below and scroll a bit to the north and west into Belgium — includes a photograph from that part of the conflict. Scroll around in the rest of the map and click some of the pins for other days to follow along in the 137th’s fight.

This information is derived from the unit history, found here and here and from this unit overview. These markers are rough estimates and are meant only to be illustrative. Any errors are mine alone.

adventures / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
30
Dec 14

Travel day

We made it home just before midnight, too tired and too hungry for the usual “Huzzah for home!” public sentiments. I was not, however, so tired as to have the terrible “Am I more hungry than tired? Or more tired than hungry debate?”

Throw a soup in the microwave, unload the car, eat the soup while fending off the angry/relieved cat who is demanding, in equal parts, all of your attention and all of your soup. The common post-holiday tale.

Before all of that, though, my mother-in-law’s friend came over for a multimedia presentation. It seems she is interested in visiting Peru at some point in the near future. It just so happens that my lovely wife has just returned from Machu Picchu. She took a lot of great pictures, which you can see here. They camped on the Camino Inca Inca Trail for three days, working their way up to the 15th century site. The short version: Beautiful, great, hardest thing she’s ever done.

I think she talked the family friend into a Peruvian vacation. Check out those pictures and you’ll want to go. And the good news is, you can just take a train ride direct to Machu Picchu. But if you do, the hiking campers may judge you. Or so I’ve heard.

We hit our favorite little Italian restaurant after the slideshow, here’s my best girl now:

Back to the in-laws’ home, then, wrapped up the backing, loaded the car and off to visit some more people. Hugs and kisses and more assertions that “You should come visit!” and then off to the airport.

The holidays always bring about the strategic planning of what to bring and what to ship. What is the temperature differentiation? What am I going to need right away? When we checked in both of our bags were just under the 50-pound limit. Hers was 48 and mine was 49. We’re getting good at that. I carried a smaller roller with most of our presents inside.

At the security checkpoint I met a new TSA agent who still cared. He was conversational, but quiet. He had the patter down, but the patter didn’t yet have him down. While he waited on the pat down scanner to make sure my jeans weren’t explosive, he said he changes gloves for each freedom grope. The way he said it suggested that wasn’t the protocol. I asked him how many he goes through a day.

About 140, he said. And that’s his job.

So the real winners here are those glove manufacturers, and the people advertising in the bottom of the personal belonging trays.

Some shots from the plane. I’m guessing this is either Plymouth Meeting or Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But you can’t really read the street signs at night:

No idea where this is:

And this is coming into Atlanta:

So we landed and everyone demonstrated their zeal to leave the plane by standing up immediately. That took a good long while — it always does when you stand up while the plane is still on the runway — but then off the plane and down to the airport tram. We caught that just as the doors opened. We made it to baggage claim just as our 50-pounders where falling down the conveyor belt. We walked out to the shuttles just as ours was loading up. An Army veteran took credit for making the driver wait for us. The shuttle was full, I stood in the aisle with the luggage, but we got back to the hotel we used as a park-and-fly. The car was there. We loaded up and turned right to the interstate and then headed home with open, clean, dry roads rolling off into the inky night.

It was an easy trip home, then, wrapping up a nice trip away.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about one of the new books I got over the holidays.

family / history / maps — Comments Off
30
Dec 14

70th anniv – My great-grandfather’s war

This is the 70th anniversary of my great-grandfather’s service in Europe, so we’re revisiting the map I made of his time as a combat medic. Tonice was attached to some element of the 137th Infantry Regiment, in the famed 35th Division. We don’t know which company, or even which battalion, so this is only a regimental overview with some movements down to the company level.

So, then, for Dec. 30:

The snow that had fallen the previous day had frozen over, and the ground and roads were extremely slippery. Harlange and Villers-la-Bonne-Eau remained the points of enemy resistance. The 3rd Battalion was operating southwest of Villers and the 1st Battalion assembled at Livarchamps, with Company A manning roadblocks to the east, in the gap between the 3rd and 2nd Battalions. The 2nd Battalion had two companies on the edge of the Surre Woods, meeting heavy enemy fire from the vicinity of Harlange and Betlange.

Company E advanced with moderate resistance until it reached a position within 400 yards of Harlange, when it received severe machine gun and mortar fire, which pinned it down. Company E withdrew from the open field under a protective barrage, moved up a draw on the left flank of the enemy to outflank the enemy position, and ran into tough opposition near Betlange.

The 3rd Battalion held four buildings in Villers-la-Bonne-Eau, and the enemy activity and resistance in the town increased considerably. Enemy assault guns and SS troops moved into the town in the morning to reinforce the enemy garrison, and the armored guns moved in and around the town shooting into the houses occupied by elements of the 3rd Battalion. Two of these guns were knocked out by bazooka fire. Heavy fighting continued all during the day in the town, until Companies K and L were considered cut off from the rest of the Battalion.

Scroll through the map — look a bit to the northwest, into Belgium, for today — and click on some of the other pins to see other days in the story.

This information is derived from the unit history, found here and here and from this unit overview. Any errors are mine alone.

adventures / friends / I do not know what is happening. / memories / Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off
29
Dec 14

“Due to a copyright takedown notice …”

A year and a half ago I picked up some music for video beds and, today, I got a take down notice about one of them from YouTube. Someone had filed a complaint and now I have “a strike.”

I looked up the company and it seems they are doing this a lot, granting licenses and then revoking them for whatever reason. I suppose they feel they can get some sort of monetary gain from that. It is, in the common parlance, a shakedown.

So the old video was gone, which meant a page on my site did not have the appropriate video. And if there is one thing around here that we don’t abide by it is Errors That We Know About.

We are perfectly fine with Errors Of Which We Are Unaware.

So when you spot the bountiful errors, point them out. They get fixed with equal parts chagrin and alacrity.

Anyway, I had to find the right page, which was easily narrowed down to three or four, based on the context. And then I had to find the proper video. Of course, I wanted to upload the video again, this time with music from someone who isn’t a con artist. So I had to dig up the original video, which took a few searches, but was easy to find in the scheme of things. Feeling as though I was lucky to still have it, I loaded it in the video editor, dropped out the now illicit music, made an edit and then put in some bed music that hasn’t been pulled out from under me. The other music was better, but this is fine. I had some graphic considerations, and I figured that, since I was there, I may as well put it in the new video style. And here it is, new template, old video, acceptable new tune:

Took 15 minutes.

And no, I’m not updating all of my old videos to this template. It will probably wear on me soon enough as it is.

On the other hand, I got to read through my notes and see the videos and photos that I took on our trip with Jessica and Adam to Ireland in the summer of 2013, and that was grand. And, in one of those happy little coincidences, all of the headers (randomized for your variety) that I get when I refresh the page are from Ireland. Delightful.

Here are a few of the pages, now: The Cliffs of Moher, On Inisheer, the Aran Islands and On Inishmore, the Aran Islands.

I should just make a category and link to that, so amazing was the entire trip. We could then just jump to that amazing time in a wonderous place with ease. Give me a minute …

OK, when you want to go to Ireland, just go to Ireland.

About three days into that one of us said “We should have kept count on how many times we said ‘Oh wow!’ as we rounded each curve.” And we should have.

On the eighth day, seriously, we started contemplating employment there. Just beautiful.

Today was also lovely. The wind chill was just at freezing this morning when I went out for a run:

It took 1.75 miles to get warm. The last 2.25 miles were just hard, but I got in four miles for the day.

And then we spent the rest of the day watching football and trying to stay warm.

Our sunset:

An altogether fine Monday, the last of the old year, and two cheers for that. Hope your week is filled with more relaxation than work. Stop back by here, though. There will be plenty going on, of course.