Still with the sinuses. Started new pills today, and they’ll be as equally ineffective as the last batch, of which we could charitably say they at least took off a tiny bit of the edge.
Have you been on the sinus and allergy aisle of a drug store lately? The offerings are paltry. Most of the things there are just cardboard inserts. You’ll take those to the pharmacist, who’ll card you, fingerprint you and forward your political affiliations to the IRS.
So you’re left with the cheap stuff, the drug store-branded generics from who knows what country. At least the blister packs work.
Visited Chris’ Hot Dogs in Montgomery today, because it has been there since 1917. They fed FDR, two Bush presidents and every governor for a century. And they’ve served more hot dogs and hamburgers to regular folks than you can count.
Today they served us. Here’s Adam getting his hot dog hamburger combo:
I had the special, which is two nitrate packaged skins in one flour enriched bun, complete with kraut, onions and special sauce. The Yankee had that, minus all the extras. Tasted like a hot dog to me, but the special sauce will clear your sinuses right up, which was enough for one day.
And now for no other reason than they were there, here are the bar stools:
On the wall covered with signed portraits there is a headshot of a judge. A judge signing autographs feels like a problem, but then you see the note: he worked there as a young man in the 1950s. Maybe that early job made all the difference.
I noticed a short time back there was a tire on my car that was going out of round. I managed to drag this out and limp around as long as possible. Last week I was on an errand and noticed the thump-thump-THUMP-thump was even worse. I stopped between here and there and added air. When I got back home I noticed the front tire was contorted to an alarming state. Heat some plastic and torque it between your hands. My tire looked like that, which is, to say the least, troubling.
So I went to the tire place today. I put a little air in hoping that it would at least help get me close to the shop, which is about four miles from our home. Just before I arrived there the thump-thump-THUMP-thump returned to pre-front-tire-deformity levels. When I got out the front tire looked fine.
The guy at the counter, the kind of guy who speaks low and fast and is hard to understand over the noise of a room and has an odd beard and gives you a general uneasy feeling to start with, assures me that tire is probably fine because there are two pieces of rubber and they blah blah blah.
I don’t know that much about tires, but I have seen round rubber on vehicles my entire life and I can say these two things: 1. round is the optimal shape and 2. a bad tire doesn’t become good. With this wisdom in mind what he said didn’t carry that much weight, but, he said, they’d put the car on the rack and do their thing and so on. It was agreed that I would return this afternoon for the car.
So we went to Montgomery. We returned. We had lunch at Byron’s with a friend. I told the story about how, when Byron’s used to be a Dairy Queen they one day found themselves out of ice cream. I told the lady that day she should lock up and go home. No one goes to Dairy Queen for the chicken fingers, after all. Today Byron’s was out of chicken. Always something. (I had a vegetable plate and it was good.)
The Yankee isn’t feeling so well, so we went to pick up her bike which now features a shiny new derailleur and, presumably, no more shifting problems. (Which would be a change for her.) We stopped at the house for a bit and then headed out to fetch my car.
It had been moved, but the two guys working, earnest, confident men who gave you the impression of knowing what they were doing, said they had no idea what was going on with my car.
I’ll just skip ahead here to the point where I closed my eyes and was mentally, actually, really, counting to 10. I pointed out they seemed to have some sort of communications breakdown between the morning crew and the afternoon crew. They pointed out how much the tires were going to cost me and I was going to get my car fixed. I would be the last one of the day. I apologized for that, hoping it wouldn’t keep them there late, but also making the joke that I hope they did it right because, you know, the guy has PTA or a softball game or what have you.
And then this man decides to play the age game. I was just thinking to myself the other day, You know, no one has played the age game in a long time. Maybe you’ve outgrown that sort of thing.
This guy who, and I get it, took a bit of exception to my do it right joke, says “I bet I’m older than you. How old are you?”
Really?
So I told him. And he told me how old he was, which was meant to be some sort of prima facie evidence that he does his work right. The general utility of his morning colleagues aside, I had no reason to doubt this. The urge to play the age game notwithstanding, I am not qualified to comment on this man’s dedication and pride in his work. I couldn’t bring myself to point out that plenty of people who have a decade or so on me are perfectly capable of doing a lousy job, but I’d already counted to 10 and this guy wanted to put two tires on my car and go home. What’s more, he looked great for his age. So I apologized for my joke and we laughed about it.
Half an hour later I got my car back — I wandered around the store and tried to not look bored — and the tires feel great. That gentleman knows his craft, and I hope he hit a triple or really proved a great point in his parent-teacher meeting.
We were talking about grandparents. I’ve had the great fortune to know many ancestors, some of them for a wonderful and long time. (Ten or eleven, if you’ll let me count step-grandparents, who always manage to dote on you just like a regular grandchild, anyway.)
I have prominent memories, for example, of a great-great-grandmother. I could not remember when she died, so I had to look that up. I was in the ninth grade or so. She’d lived for 93 years, a simple, country life, but she’d seen planes, cars, penicillin, the nuclear age, space flight, hippies and the entire run of MacGyver.
She was a little woman, always wore her bun in her hair. We were always probably too loud for her. But she gave you a kiss and a half a stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint every time you saw her.
In re-discovering her obituary I found a link to someone’s genealogy research. I had great luck going back in time through her husband’s family tree — most of the success coming from the men, as they are typically better documented beyond a certain point. I found the names of people who died before the family cemetery was built. These people have a long history in the area, which helps explain why they are one of the four or five family names you always hear in that county.
I found a man named Peter who served in the 2nd Regiment of the West Tennessee Militia. I found a mention that suggests he might have bene in the middle of Andrew Jackson’s lines at the battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.
Peter had sandy colored hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. The Census noted he could read, though his wife couldn’t. He was a Tennessee boy, but moved, with his brother, to Alabama soon after that opened that section of land was opened up to white settlers. Purely a guess, but I’m guessing this was in the 18-teens, likely just before statehood. So that family has been in the area a good long while. (That’s four two-brothers stories I’ve heard of in that county. How everything isn’t named Romulus and Remus is beyond me.)
Peter came from a big family. His father, Layton, married twice. He had 24 children, his last when he was 63. Somewhere, how he found the time I don’t know, Layton moved his family into what is now Tennessee, soon after the Revolutionary War. But Layton’s parents were from New Jersey, back when it was still new, and spent some time in West Virginia before moving into Virginia to avoid the Indian Wars. And right in here, somewhere in the middle of the 18th century, is when the spelling of their family name changed.
One more generation puts you in New York — in Amersfort, NY (modern Long Island or
Brooklyn, NY). That makes my grandfather 10th generation American, a farmer like much of his family before him, and descended down one branch of his family line from Netherlands.
If all of that is correct. I did read it on the Internet. But it is easy to be amazed at how many people you’ve never heard of, supposedly in your family, doing genealogy research when you skim those sites.
Update: A trip home to look in one of those compendium books — someone solicited family stories from everyone in the county and all that were received were organized, hashed out, molded into some semblance of common sense and published — from the turn into the 21st century gave a few more details. They were merchants and farmers and soldiers and store clerks. There were teachers and county commissioners and sheriffs. There were soldiers, fighter pilots and phone operators.
One person, one of those people I don’t think I’ve ever met, wrote in the book “they were law enforcers as well as law breakers. They are hard-headed and stubborn at times, but believe in fair play for everyone.”
Hard to put that in a coat of arms.
One of them was named Rite Rise, which is just about the neatest alliterative name possible. I bet he woke up early every morning, too.
I’d already found where that family’s name changed the common spelling, as you read above. Now I’ve found the first apparent spelling change: it goes back to England, where in the 14th century they backed the wrong side in the War of the Roses. Guess I should have paid more attention to that in junior high. That’s when they moved to Holland before, a few hundred years later, sending out descendants to the new world.
One of the ancestors was apparently the Lord Mayor of London.
On the other side of the family tree I found some Dutch roots last year, through a hit off a digitized 1946 newspaper. The Alabama Courier (established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969 to publish the News Courier) copy yielded two new surnames and the obit of a great-great grandfather, a WWI veteran. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.
Some of that genealogical work was done by a nice lady whom I emailed, but have never met, who is apparently a fourth or eighth cousin.
Makes you wonder what a real family reunion would look like.
At the ballpark tonight Conner Kendrick pitched seven and one-third innings, allowing only four hits while striking out eight, which ties a personal best. When he left the game Auburn had a 2-0 lead over the 11th ranked Arkansas Razorbacks:
Kendrick’s night ended so that Terrance Dedrick could take the mound. Dedrick, as a junior, has become the closer that Auburn has been searching for over much of the last decade. He’s 4-2 this year and came in tonight with nine saves.
And he’s usually doing something amazing, ballet moves at first, over the shoulder catches behind the mound, or just striking people out the old fashioned way. Tonight he forced a 4-6-3 double play to end the game and give Auburn a key late-season win over Arkansas, 4-2.
There’s video:
The first conference shutout since 2011. Now they just need two more wins to end the season.
So I downloaded Vine. I haven’t done anything with it yet. I’m waiting to see something amazing and use it one time, and then walk away. (At some point you have plenty of ways to capture atmosphere, after all.)
Like other newsrooms, KSDK uses Vine to show the personalities and the processes behind the curtain, but Anselm says the tool is also useful for finding stories.
She suggests searching local hashtags, like #STL in her area, and #breaking. “A lot of people think it’s a really lighthearted, fun thing, but you can get serious content from it,” Anselm says.
There is a video, which is useful. Just like Vine, it is 9:13 long.
The next video is more entertaining. Someone mentioned the Golden Trailer Awards earlier this semester. Those are the awards given for best movie trailers. The Golden Trailers began in 1999. That’s because in 1989 they saw the best trailer ever, recovered for a decade and then started judging every other inferior product.
This being the best one ever:
This movie, Captain Phillips, is coming out in October:
You might remember the circumstance behind it in 2009.
This part better be in the story. They downplay it here, but this an impressive series of shots by the SEALs:
Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that reads as if it came from the finest restaurants. However, when Zachary gets to school, he finds a very different reality. Armed with a concealed video camera and a healthy dose of rebellious courage, Zachary embarks on a six month covert mission to collect video footage of his lunch and expose the truth about the City’s school food service program.
Here’s the trailer:
The guy is hysterical. Here’s another clip, which is the direct inspiration for this post.
A spokeswoman for the Education Department, Marge Feinberg, said in an e-mail that vegetables and fruit were served daily and she suggested that Zachary must have chosen not to take the vegetables served in his cafeteria.
“It would not be the first time a youngster would find a way to get out of eating vegetables,” she wrote. Zachary responded that he always took every item he was offered.
And then:
On Monday, Zachary thought he was in trouble again when he was sent to the principal’s office and found two men in black suits waiting for him.
They turned out to be representatives from the Education Department’s Office of School Food, he said, who complimented him on his movie, asked for feedback on some new menu choices, and took him on a tour of the cafeteria kitchen.
[…]
Then he sat down for lunch with the officials. The adults ate the cafeteria lunch of chicken nuggets, carrots and salad.
Zachary had pork and vegetable dumplings – brought from home.
Went running tonight. We realized that the trail near our home is measured out perfectly, so I can say that, this evening, I shuffled along a 5K, here:
It is blurry because, when my feet are pounding and I have no breath and the blood is flowing everything sort of looks that way. But at least there was honeysuckle:
So there we were this evening beside the green leaves, the light green weeds, over the brown runoff dirt and through the honeysuckle, running and walking and shuffling five kilometers. I do not know what is happening.
(This phrase is now protected as winded-intellectual property. It will probably be used quite often.)
(So is the expression “winded-intellectual property.”)
cycling / music / Thursday / video — Comments Off on There is an etc. at the end of this post 2 May 13
I rode my bike 15 miles today, just hitting the hills out through the back of the neighborhood, down to the state park and back up to the main road.
There’s a hill right off that drops away like a waterfall. From the very top of it, and from a stopped-start, you can coast six-tenths of a mile and hitting about 28 miles per hour. That’s fun, but climbing back up it is the ride. So we did that a few times. And then we took one of the side climbs on the biggest “hill” in town a few times.
So that was a nice 45 minutes or so on the bike. And then, as evening sighed and gave way to night, we ran about two miles on one of the neighborhood paths.
It sounds like we’re in shape or something, right? My run would disagree.
And, now, Pavarotti sings Nessun Dorma
On that run I found the first honeysuckle of the season. It seems late, in general, but everything about this spring is late. We broke 70 for less than an hour today, but at least we broke 70. Have I mentioned I live in the deep south?
The the nice part about sucking wind on a poor run at the height of spring is the smell of so much honeysuckle. Trying to enjoy the nectar of the honeysuckle just before a run? Noticing there was not really any nectar to speak of? That was an odd thing, but this has been an odd spring.
