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Monday / photo — Comments Off
24
Jul 17

Catching up

The folks were in town this weekend. I’d given them the appealing offer of coming up for a few days and doing nothing. They took us up on the deal. Saturday everyone slept in and then The Yankee and I gave them a tour of our building. We had Thai food for dinner. I had the fried rice. Rick ordered something much more fancy:

Allie enjoyed a weekend of doing close to nothing:

A cat would enjoy that, though.

Yesterday, between morning and evening rain, we saw resplendent sunflowers:

Who knows what I’ll see tomorrow.

You can see more on Twitter and Instagram too.

family / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off
21
Jul 17

Try the salmon … and definitely the croquettes

It was a quiet day on campus. The Friday of the next-to-last week of summer classes moves pretty slowly. I spent a few minutes in an audio booth:

At home, the folks are here for the weekend. After work we took them out to a local restaurant, a farm-to-fork joint. It was even called The Farm. I had the ribs:

Other things they have are better.

In the restroom they have a newspaper collage. There was a date, in the collage, Thursday, July 31, 1919. Let’s assume all of the clippings were from that same issue, making this story is 98 years old:

It seems an odd thing to read, all these years later, but people ought to have an opportunity to educate themselves on civics and the issues of the day. So let’s refresh ourselves on the issue of their day. By the end of 1919 a significant chunck of American women could vote in presidential elections. As the world started recovering from the Great War more women throughout the world became able to cast a ballot. That created more pressure here at home and several votes that would give the power to women were lost by close counts in D.C.

In May of 1919 it finally happened. Woodrow Wilson brought the Congress back to vote on a potential constitutional amendment. Missouri ratified the amendment, just a few weeks before the story above was published. Arkansas became the 12th state to ratify earlier in that same week. Readers of this little story knew the amendment was a third of the way toward becoming the law of the land. The summer of 1919 must have been full of promise for suffragists.

Tennessee voted to make the 19th Amendment the law of the land in August of 1920. It took a long while, but over the next two generations of voters, ballots cast by gender started to even out.

No one voted on those ribs, though.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
20
Jul 17

This post needs a cat farming joke

I had to visit the hardware store — the local place, because they are closer and their prices are so far comparable on everything except for light bulbs. I needed heavier nails. And in walking around the little store checking out the paint samples, listening to the chicks cheep and wondering where the nails were stocked, I found this:

You’d figure ERTL, who have been making farm toys since the end or World War II, would know that kids are going to supply their own dirt.

Plus, what about all the carpet farming that kids do? Does Mom really want to introduce this sort of thing? Kids plowing in the shag, the fake mud and the real dirt mix and the next thing you know the low pile is a big problem in the living room.

And then there’s the back 40, the good, new carpet in the seldom-used dining room, where kids can run their tractors with less disturbance and more mud.

Allie does not like tractors, but she does enjoy a good tunnel:

She’s more into birds and fish than row crops.

Maybe I’ll introduce her to fisheries.

history / markers / photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Jul 17

I’ll soon tackle the office closet, requiring signal flares

I installed two more shelves on an office wall today. If you enjoyed yesterday’s explanation of the process you can just imagine this twice this evening. Though, this time there were four nails and only four nail holes. Also, I developed something better than the traditional tape system to mark my spots. Then I did math four times, measured twice and drove a nail.

But the first nail is never the problem, is it? When you’re hanging something that has more than one holder it is always the math related to that second nail which is a bit more tricky. The first nail will live wherever you put it and, at worst, you just have a quirky sense of style. That second one though bears a direct relationship to the first. And at that point all of your hardware better come from Mars. Or Venus. Either one, so long as they are from the same one.

The nails have to be relative, is what I’m saying. Maybe they have to be related. No, that’d be weird. Why would the second nail stick around for that? Morbid curiosity? “What just happened to my brother? Oh well, I guess I’ll just sit around and seeeeeee — ” and then suddenly that nail is driven into the wall, too.

At any rate, a slow rate really, my home office is coming along. There are only two walls that aren’t spoken for. One is dominated by a rather large bookshelf. The other features a closet door and some curiously placed electrical plate covers. It is a small room, but it has two cable outlets, and they are about four feet apart and that is in vertical distance. This was done, I can only assume, at the beginning of the wall-mounted television craze. My solution has been to cover this space with wall art.

Now, would you like to hear about the procedure I used to chop vegetables for dinner tonight?

Back to the historical markers. We just returned to this section of the site last week and I’m now showing off some of the historic sites in this new county. The original premise is still the rule. I’m riding my bike to all of the historical markers in the county. To find out all about this building right here:

You can see the complete list, here. There will be more as the weeks progressed.

Elsewhere, check me out on Twitter and over on Instagram, too.

friends / Monday / photo — Comments Off
17
Jul 17

A weekend in 100 words

My noggin threw me a super cool headache on Saturday morning. It was the sort of thing that turned sound up to 11 — which is better than the kind of headache where sound gets turned up to 43. Not so much loud as intense.

That was Saturday. Sunday I had a leftover headache. And I played with Allie:

And we also had company. Sally Ann and Spencer came up from Nashville for the evening. Sally Ann is a broadcast professor. Spencer is a professional newsman. We went out for dinner, watched Game of Thrones and talked all about the nerdy journalism stuff.