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Thursday, July 31, 2008

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It's amazing how nasty things can get when it comes to settling whose land a certain piece of ground is. We have some friends who have an interest in just such a controversial decision and the stakes are actually pretty high. The judge has to decide who really owns this particular property and then how it should be handled. There's a lot of rumors in the air; a lot of intrigue. Before the legal proceedings start, the judge has suddenly recused himself from that case. In other words, he's stepped down on this one because for some reason - maybe a conflict of interest - he's basically saying, "I don't think I should be the one to judge this one."

Friday, July 25, 2008

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It happened over 40 years ago, but it's one of those events I'll never really forget. It happened in Chicago where I grew up, and it was the most devastating tragedy most of us would remember from that time. It was December 1, 1958, and a fire broke out at the foot of a stairway in the Our Lady of the Angels School. That fire raged out of control very quickly, and it cut off any normal escape routes. Ninety grade school children died in that fire. But there's one I remember vividly from a news account that I read at the time and I still haven't forgotten. This little boy was in a second story window - they had a photo of him. The boy's father was down below, yelling to him to jump into his arms. That boy could see the fire racing toward him from behind, but he refused to jump. Then, in one awful moment, the boy disappeared. He was one of those victims.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

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OK, backpacks are basically a good thing. They make it possible for you to carry some essentials while you keep your hands free, right? But backpacks are not always a good thing, especially when you forget you're wearing one! I've seen a lot of the dangerous side of backpacks, especially in airports and airplanes. You see, you get used to your body ending at a certain point, and you navigate through a crowd knowing where the "oops, I bumped you" point is. Now you add a backpack and suddenly you have enlarged what is commonly known as your space, but you continue to navigate crowds and narrow places as if you had the same old parameters. So you got to turn around and "aahh," you clobber someone behind you or next to you! I mean, its one thing to carry your load, it's another thing to hit someone else with it!

Friday, July 11, 2008

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When my airplane flight is over, it's not really over. You see, there's that closing chapter of a trip that you get to spend at baggage claim. At my home airport they have these big carousels where suitcases are dumped out and where they circle until their owners claim them. Now, my bags seem to have a knack for waiting until almost all the other bags are out, for some reason. So I just keep watching those suitcases of all shapes and sizes and conditions appear, and waiting for one I like - no, no, no. I mean, one I recognize. But there always seem to be some phantom bags there. They just keep circling and circling and circling. And since the luggage carousel is all I really have to look at, the show gets pretty boring! Yep, there goes that baggage again!

Thursday, July 10, 2008

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OK, so I fought it for a while and I lived in denial for a while. At least I have faced reality now; I have bitten the bullet. I finally broke down and got glasses - mostly for reading. I had been the 20/20 kid my whole life. I just couldn't face the fact that the world was getting blurrier and blurrier. I just thought my arms were getting shorter. But finally I couldn't hold my reading material far enough from my eyes to make things stop blurring. So, hello, glasses! And what a difference! All those little words that were fuzzing out on me suddenly look big and clear! Including what I'm looking at right now! It's amazing how clear things start to look when you're seeing them through corrective glasses!

Monday, June 30, 2008

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My father-in-law gave my wife and her sister Grandma and Granddad's little farm house in the mountains, and so we had to do some restoring on that little special spot. And since we were able to be there only occasionally, my wife decided to plant accordingly. She said, "I'm planting perennials." Now I'm sort of horticulturally challenged, so my wife had to explain a little further. See, I grew up a city boy, and cement doesn't grow much of anything, as you know. As I'm beginning to understand better now, you can actually plant annuals or perennials. Annuals will bloom for a little while - let's say, geraniums - and then they'll be gone. Unless you replant geraniums next year, which is extra work, and hard to do when you're not there. Nope. We need perennials. So my wife planted things like crepe myrtle (that's actually the name of a plant, not some long-lost aunt), she planted azaleas, she planted honeysuckle. Now as you might guess from their name, those perennials are not going to die on you; the perennials will always be there for you! And that's what we need!

Monday, June 23, 2008

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Our friend is in the flooring business; actually that's wood floors. He had been tearing the old floor out in this house he was working on, and before he threw it away, he decided to call us and see if we might have any use for it. Actually, we were pretty excited about his call because we were in the middle of a project where we'd be needing a floor. He said, "I do want you to know it's actually pretty ugly, but it's a good solid maple wood."

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

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I think most women have learned that men are never lost - or so men think. Some man's driving from Chicago to LA and his wife asks, "Honey, why did we just enter Pennsylvania?" Is he lost? No, he's exploring a new scenic route. Listen, I have to be realistic enough to admit that I can get lost - especially if it's an area I'm unfamiliar with - especially if it depends on my sense of direction, which is like no sense at all. But my wife on the other hand, oh, she has a great farm girl's sense of direction - plus I have learned over the years that she's great with a map. She's very good at evaluating our options and picking the roads that will get us there the fastest. So, on a typical trip you'd see me driving and my wife with the atlas in her lap, telling me the road or exit that's next. I don't need to see the map! I have a great navigator!

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

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You have to stay up late sometimes to see those rare total eclipses of the moon. But if you haven't, try it sometime if you have that opportunity again in your lifetime. The last time I saw one it was really amazing. It seems like most of those disappearing moon things happen when I'm in sleepy land - but this one was at prime time. You can see why these eclipses freaked out primitive peoples - that moon, that great white light of the night, suddenly starts to disappear. That big old harvest moon darkened little by little, until finally there appeared to be no more moon. Fortunately, in the crowd I was in nobody panicked - there were lots of educated folks. We all knew what was really happening. The moon has no light of its own, of course, it's just light reflected from the sun. When something comes between the moon and its light source, something like a little tennis ball called earth, the moon just goes dark.

Friday, May 23, 2008

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I hadn't been planning to watch anything on TV that night except the news, but I got hooked by a program that followed. It was a fascinating special on the Titanic, including an interview with one of the survivors. Now, she was just a little girl that awful night when the ship that they swore was unsinkable, went down in the icy waters of the Atlantic. Over 1,500 passengers died that night. The Titanic had been constructed with these water tight compartments in their hull that were supposed to contain any flooding. Well, she left England in April of 1912, traveling according to some, at speeds and at a time that the Titanic never should have been traveling - but remember, the Titanic was unsinkable, right? Until it hit that iceberg. Actually it only scraped the iceberg. Most passengers never even knew about it, but that simple scrape had left a deep hole in the hull below the water line. For a while no one knew how much danger they were in. But within a relatively short time, the unsinkable ship was gone. The man who had designed it, went down with the ship. This crusty old survivor summed up her lifetime reflections on the Titanic in a few haunting words. She just said, "It was a monument to human arrogance."

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