I have a busted headlight. Moisture somehow got into the plastic headlight assembly and apparently the teardrop of a mosquito means doom for the bulb. I tried last week to replace the bulb myself, but I drive a Nissan, which means you must remove the fender well from the bumper to access the headlights. Even then, there would be problems. That wouldn’t remove the moisture, so we’d be right back here in two days.
So I bit the bullet to see about getting it done professionally. (The next time you are on the market for a car, add this to your list of things to investigate.)
After a few conversations with Rick, the nice manager of one of the local service centers I learned that I had picked up the wrong bulb. So, you know, good thing I didn’t replace it myself.
“The bulb you need” the moisture hating xenon bulb, “would cost $180″ he said.
He offered to install an after market bulb, but estimated those would run about $120. But there was still the moisture problem. He found a place where I’d been dinged in a parking lot. It was his considered professional opinion that perhaps that introduced the moisture. He suggested I take a repair estimate to my insurance agent and get them to fix it. I’d be out the deductible — which is not cheap — but if I bought the new headlight assembly it would be around $800, he said.
So I talked with Rick’s colleague Jerry. He asked who my insurance is with and said he’d write it and I could fight it. That’s all you can do, right? To fix the damage that Rick pointed out, which was small and simply an means to the end of getting the headlight repaired, he estimated it at $1,700 or so of work.
They should make sure you’re sitting down, have a loved one with you and a complimentary nitro pill for such news.
I came home and did what I do best: I found brand new after market parts online. I called Jerry who said he’d put my parts on for a minimal fee if I brought them to the shop. Returning to the computer I bought all new moisture-fearing xenon bulbs and a driver’s side headlight assembly. It still wasn’t cheap, but it is going to cost around half of my deductible.
I long for the days of removing two bolts, removing and installing a new bulb in 10 minutes for about $7 of bulb. And this is why you should ask about the headlights when you are car shopping.
And now a gymnastics story.
I started going to gymnastics meets with my lovely bride when we first met, so that’s about six years of season tickets. We watched the great Alabama gymnastics team for four years, while we were both in grad school at UAB and then while in the PhD program at Alabama. During that time we also caught an SEC championship meet and the national championship one year. This is our second year attending meets at Auburn.
There’s never been a more exciting meet than tonight’s.
Look at the ladies in the background of that picture. They shared a giddy, explosive, relevatory feeling running throughout Auburn Arena where the 16th-ranked Tigers had Alabama on the ropes. The Tide has beaten Auburn in their last 103 meets, which may be the entire history of gymnastics at the two schools. Tonight the juggernaut Alabama squad was fighting for their life. The announced crowd of 7,299, a gymnastics attendance record for Auburn, was electric as the tension and energy grew through the last routines.
Alabama was Alabama, but one more slip from the defending national champions and Auburn would claim a huge upset. That Auburn team is young and talented — a true freshman is anchoring the floor routines — and they’ve won the crowd. They’re so, so close. Tonight they were 196.325-196.250, close. It was a great thrill to see.
An email conversation spent me on a late evening genealogy search. My known family tree only goes back so far, it seems. Some people aren’t interested in doing the research. We have common names. We are from a typically inconspicuous rural lifestyle, so there aren’t a lot of newspaper mentions.
I haven’t done any real genealogy research, the extent of my primary searches have come from old digitized newspaper copy, but I do enjoy digging through the hard, good work of others.
So in this conversation today I realized there were names I’d forgotten and names I couldn’t recall ever knowing. I started searching. I got back an extra generation and found two new surnames. I also found the obituary of my great-great grandfather. He was a World War I draftee, and died in his home. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.
These were the ads on the obituary page of The Alabama Courier (Athens, Ala.) on Thursday, February 28, 1946. (The Courier was established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969. They’ve been publishing as the News Courier since.)
Miss your loved ones? Bury yourself in work! The nuts and bolts of the Army Air Corps will see you through! The coveralls are free, but you’ll earn the stripes.
This is from the Ads You Don’t See Anymore department of the newspaper:
I couldn’t find any mention of the Clem Brothers Gin, but I’ll ask around. The closest thing I can find is a lumber concern over in Georgia.
Ahhh, a glamorous night out on the town. You’ve put on your best coat, your wife is wearing that beautiful dress. And the maitre’ de can set you up at the best table! “We’ll take the milk. Christopher’s.”
“Garçon! This is from a different dairy. Please take it back.”
I can’t figure out if this was the local logo or something that died out before the muscle car era, but here’s the Dodge ad:
A man named Robert Mills had worked at Draper Motor Company for about a year when this ad came out. After a decade on the lot he bought the dealership in 1955. It stayed open at least until he retired, in 1979. Can’t find anything about the place after that.
The Plaza Theater was on the square in neighboring Athens:
The movie, West of Pinto Basin, was released six years before, in 1940. My how the world changed in between. The IMDB blurb for the movie: “Three cowboys fight a saloon owner who is trying to grab up all the local land by engineering stagecoach robberies so an irrigation dam can’t be built.”
Can’t miss, right? It is a durable plot. Shows up in a lot of westerns.
Here’s the Zorro serial, in full:
Three people are killed and a stagecoach crashes off a cliff into a creek in the story’s first two minutes, before the first word is spoken. They do a great cliffhanger at the end of the episode, too. (You can watch the entire story at the Internet Archive.
And, yes, the title says Zorro, but the character is Black Whip. Released in 1944, the serial was meant to capitalize off of a 20th Century Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. Republic couldn’t get Zorro, and so this was how they solved the problem. (See? Hollywood has been out of ideas before.) The serial is set in Idaho and the main theme is a fight to prevent and ensure statehood by the villains and heroes respectively. You wonder if other territories had other Zorro spinoff franchisees. A different color, a different weapon and some hero could pay a few royalties to the Big Z and save the day, and probably a few Hollywood production companies, too.
One last thing on the Zorro serial: James Lileks a theory that projects from this period always have a Star Trek tie. So I ran the entire cast and crew through the Star Trek filter — it zooms along at warp speed don’t ya know … — and found exactly one match. Tom Steele was a stuntman on Black Whip. He started in 1932 and worked until the mid-1980s. He appeared in Bread and Circuses as Slave #2. He has the best stuntman bio ever:
Stuntmen are often selected because of their resemblance to the star they are doubling for. In contrast to this, many of Republic Pictures’ western stars in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliot, Rex Allen and Monte Hale, were selected in part due to their resemblance to Steele, who would do their stunts.
The Added Joy? It was a cartoon short from 1937, back when Mel Blanc was uncredited.
But I digress. The Plaza opened in 1939 and sat 340 people. (The city itself had about 4,300 at the time.) In 1954 a newspaper ad said the theatre would be closed temporarily starting in June, but it never reopened.
Here’s where the theater stood:
Last year, the Courier reported that a non-profit community organization that prettifies the downtown area asked the current owner of the building, a pharmacist, to improve the façade of the old theater. The dilapidated stucco came down, the brick underneath was still in good condition.
BABY CHICKS – The KIND THAT LIVE. As opposed to the chicks that, you know, die.
It verily screams out at you on the obits page.
Anyway. In my paternal grandfather’s family I gained an extra generation — Smith’s are tough to trace at a casual glance — dating back to my great-great-grandfather.
Now, my paternal grandfather’s mother? She told me when I was very young about some uncles who fought in the Civil War. I was young enough to be enthralled by this, but not smart enough yet to ask if she knew any details. If she were still here I might be able to tell her a few things after this bit of reading.
It was her father’s obituary we started discussing here. I picked up a thread on rootsweb that allows me to go back 13 more generations. Assuming these various people’s hard work is correct (I see a few logic errors in chronology in some peripheral details, but let’s assume the big stuff is accurate) we can go back to a man named Eltekens, in 16th century Midwolda, Groningen, Netherlands.
The Hendrix, again I didn’t even know this name until today, came over to the New World in 1662. (In my mother’s family a young man came over on the Mayflower, so my roots are fairly deep, it seems.) Albertus Hendrickssen became Albert Hendricks. He was a house carpenter, owned land in Pennsylvania and was a constable and a juror.
This would have been his land around the turn of the 18th century:
Albert’s particular son that matters to this story, Johannes (or John), was a shipbuilder. His second wife extends the chain a bit closer to my family. He had two children in Philadelphia before dying in 1709. It was John’s son, James, that moved the family south. He found himself in North Carolina in the early 1740s. He had nine sons and “several unknown daughters as he left no will.”
James Jr. changed Hendricks to Hendrix. He is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War. James Jr.’s son Larkin moved the family to Alabama in 1830 or earlier.
Larkin’s son, William, and grandson, Joseph, lived through the Civil War — though I don’t know if they fought. Joseph also read about World War I and the Great Depression in the local paper. He was a farmer, and he died in 1933 at the age of 88. His son was James, the World War I draftee, my great-great-grandfather at the beginning of this post.
At least one branch of my family tree has been in that county for nine generations and 180 years. It’s only been a county for 196 years. (They should really own more property given this information.)
All of this is more than you wanted, of course. But when you do this sort of thing it is good to write it down and make good sense of it all. That way you can bore your friends endlessly at parties.
It was a mistake to ride my bike today. Did 30 miles. Most of the first few miles felt pretty bad, but you can’t quit during the warmup. Somewhere around miles 10 through 16 — the most generally downhill section of the route — where the best part of the ride. Everything beyond that was either bad or outright miserable.
The maximum temperature today was 41, the mean was 34. At one point, as I calculated when I got home, I made my own wind chill of 26 degrees. Felt like this guy:
So that means that, between the heat index of July and the wind chill of January I’ve found myself in an 84-degree swing of temperature. In a few days, though, the temps will return to more moderate levels, and then I can struggle through another ride.
We hit Hobby Lobby this evening to round out a few framing projects. The Yankee picked up a matte for a Christmas poster. We found four frames and mattes for over the mantle. We also got a shadow box for a Christmas gift.
The matte guy had to cut our orders because they had no white 8×10 boards ready for a 5×7 print. You buy the large board, he cuts it and charges you labor. But he gave us the remainder of the board — we’d bought it after all — for the next matted project.
It wasn’t until after we left that I thought “We should have asked for the 5×7 holes. We could have had 4×6 opens cut out of them.” You know, for when you want to get really crazy with your framing projects.
Visited World Market, which was just next door and had cluttered every window with giant signs advertising furniture sales. We have a few pieces from World Market, and they’re not bad at all. And, since we’re soon going to be looking for another decorative piece of wood inside which we can store things, we thought we’d visit.
They did not have anything interesting.
So, then, the grocery store, the frozen crab. Pasta and various accompanying vegetable things were purchased. Chicken and tomatoes and artichokes were mixed with a wheat noodle in a light oil. I’d endured 30 miles on my bike, I felt no guilt in the carbohydrates.
I did not notice it was Friday the 13th until someone else remarked how they hadn’t noticed it was Friday the 13th. (I’d forgotten again by the time I was ready to publish this.) Wonder what that means?
Updated and edited my vita, which was a job that was past due.
Rode 25 miles on my bike, enjoying the beautiful January afternoon. The afternoon was the best part about it. It’s going to take three or five good long rides to start getting my form back. My only complaint about riding is that just when I hit my stride events overcome me. Something will come up to preoccupy me for too long and all that hard work is undone.
Around finals I had a nice 45 mile ride and just started to get back into a good pace and comfort level. Then I got sick for a week and change, and then there were 10 days of holiday travels.
So this week has been a return to square one. (I’m not a very good cyclist.)
Visited the library this evening. Thought I’d do a little historical research. This is an issue of the 1914 Orange and Blue, Auburn’s student paper that preceded The Plainsman:
Note the championship-wining football team’s headline. The story included this argument for facemasks:
Babe Taylor, Auburn warrior, and by the way, Birmingham-bred, displayed a vast amount of gameness yesterday afternoon. In the early part of the first quarter someone, unthoughtedly of course, kicked in the upper section of Babe’s face, in the neighborhood of the left eye. Babe’s face wore an expression of agony and the blood trickled down his features in doublequick time, but he stood by the fort and played a grand game of football.
Sixty percent of the front page is devoted to football, which happened pretty regularly, even in 1914. Note, also, that the band played Touchdown Auburn, which was a tune that pre-dated Jim Fyffe’s famous call by many decades. There’s a note that students from Alabama telegraphed their congratulations on the championship — you have to wonder what their angle was.
There’s a poem on the right hand side, a dream of a beautiful young woman, and “An Ode to some Pickles.”
Upon a night long ago
Three fellows sat at ease
And tried to soothe their inner man
With pickles and with cheese.
The cheese, by nature yellow,
Met quick and sure defeat;
But the unassuming pickles
Were very green and sweet.
The eats were good and everything
Seemed lovely for a while —
Till a feaster’s flesh, turned wan and pale
In the middle of a smile.
His face began to shudder,
A twitch and then a jerk;
We looked at him and realized
The pickles were at work!
A private, and not especially good, joke 97 years ago was published in a newspaper. And you’re reading it today. None of this would have been conceivable to the poet who wrote those lines.
Didn’t find what I was looking for — though I have a feeling I’m getting close — so I’ll have to go back. No problem there, the old microfilms are great fun.
We’re back home after a medium-length evening of mostly uneventful travel. The hour isn’t yet late, but it feels like it somehow. The sun went down in the three minutes from the curb to going inside the airport, and somehow that long exposure to darkness brought along a great deal of melatonin and it makes you a bit tired beyond the hour.
Life is tough, I know.
Actually, there was a bit of turbulence I could have done without. I’m refining my taste on bumpy air. The top to bottom stuff I can handle. The chop that shakes the jet from side to side? You can keep it.
Anyway, we are home. But before we got home, we went to Stew Leonard’s:
They’ve been telling me about this place for years. And earlier this year I finally got to sample the cookies, which I’ve also heard about for years. Today I got to walk around inside the place. (We went for more cookies.)
The lights and the colors make for a very rustic, retro feel. The absence of aisles — it is more of a maze than anything — makes it feel very large. And it is something of an event. I could see shopping here. I could see it being amazing to little kids. I could see getting so annoyed with the place I swore it off forever. I can see me shooting a video here on our next visit.
They call themselves the world’s largest dairy store. Their website boasts of a 1992 entry into The Guinness Book of World Records for having “the greatest sales per unit area of any single food store in the United States.”
They focus almost exclusively on perishable items, leaving things like napkins and paper plates to the big chains. They’ve been refining this model from years, perhaps since they opened in 1969.
In the early 1990s Stew Leonard Sr. was convicted of tax fraud. He fell on his sword to keep his son in the business, but there was something like $17 million in cash register receipts moved through their registers illegally. Another son, meanwhile, had his own tax troubles.
There are some great sites to be seen there. The Leonard operation includes its own dairy farms, so they’re bring the milk straight to the store and bottling it there. There is fresh squeezed orange juice. You can have rice cakes spat at you from their machines. There animatronics playing shows every three minutes.
We saw two uniformed security guards. I am not sure why.
How cute is she?
That’s at the Sesame Place Theme Park in Pennsylvania, when The Yankee was four. I enjoy her childhood pictures. There’s always a great expression, and any where she might have even thought about pouting about picture time have long since been removed.
She confessed to putting specific pictures together in the photo albums. There’s a picture of her sitting with her mother on the piano bench, overlapped with another of her, same outfit, standing nearby with her father.
“That was my ‘I want to be a twin’ phase.”
Her mother, who was looking through the pictures with us, was unaware of this phase. But there it was, every few pages, another scene in the yard, or by the Christmas tree, where she was pretending to be a twin in photographs.
You can’t do that in Flickr.
But you could clone it in Photoshop.
This is Maria:
She runs Tutti’s Ristorante and Pizzeria. I’ve had better Italian, but I had to go to Italy to get it. Her daughter is an aspiring model. Her son is a professional soccer player (though his site seems a bit out of date). He’s now in Serie B in Italy after playing the States, Finland’s Premier Division and Iceland. She’s a proud mom.
This is Chef Pasquale Funicello, a master chef from Sorrento, Italy.
This might be the most dramatic picture I’ve ever managed to take with my phone. Nice little depth of field in the Photoshop app. The light was good, he was leaning in just right and I shot it blind, from the tabletop.
The man makes an incredible marsala.
Anyway, we are home. Allie, the cat, is frantic. I am unpacked. My holiday travels were great, as I hope yours were. Being back in my own kitchen, on my own sofa and looking forward to my own pillow, those are treats too.
