Pull Tight

Attended the UTA Maverick speaker series last night. Heard an excellent presentation last night by Jeff Corwin, author of 100 Heartbeats and commentator on various TV shows. He spoke mostly about the mass extinctions going on today how it is affecting all of us and what we should be doing about it.  One of the messages was spend more time outside.  Spend time taking your children and/or grandchildren outside and exposing them to the natural world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tQCRmnB1NM

D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game Homepage : Went to see a reading of this play last night starring husband and wife Carole Cooke and Tom Troupe.  If you are a theater fan you likely know some of their performances or have seen them at some point.  Carole and Tom even at ages 89 and 84, mesmerized the audience with great performances.  D.L. Coburn, the writer of the play, was in the audience for his first time to see Carole and Tom perform.  Having the performance at the Kalita Humphreys theater (one of three surviving theaters designed by Frank Lloyd Wright)  was the icing on the cake.  The play won a Pultizer Prize for drama and was Tony nominated.  Written in the 1970s, its theme and commentary on nursing homes are as current as if it was written today.  See it if you get a chance.

Yesterday Mom and Dad spent much of their day searching for a couple of missing calves which were found unharmed 3 miles away.  Made me think of calling and feeding cows when I was growing up. Below is an edited post from 2005 when my son was 15. Sometimes when Austin and I are riding in the car, we have these "philosophical" discussions. Sometimes it is  black holes or quantum mechanics and sometimes it is car repairs Yesterday it was car parts and repairs. I was explaining how car parts, particularly electrical parts, used to be replaced at much greater frequencies. Head lights used to cost a fraction of now, but you replaced several of them over the life of your car. I told him that his Grandpa used to wear out multiple pick up truck horns from calling cows. We talked for a while about calling cows; Austin thinks that his Grandpa probably still wears out horns, even with the newer technology. Austin has recently discovered rock and roll from the 60s and 70s. As we...

Before Twitter, IM, Texting, Facebook, etc, bumper stickers were how we communicated short messages to the rest of the world.  When I lived in Austin during the 70s, it seemed like every "stranded in the 60s" type driving a VW microbus had at least an Onward thru the Fog bumper sticker.  I like to imagine them as old geezers now, driving Priuses with COEXIST bumper stickers. When I spotted the bumper sticker in the title above, it took me a couple of miles.  Maybe my creeping senility or the decreased number of smokers??  Keep your butt in the car is sound advice to display for all to see if you are driving west on I 20 out of Fort Worth into the dry grasslands of West Texas.  Maybe bumper stickers are still pretty good for those short messages.

Turritella species found in Cretaceous outcrop near Paluxy, Texas. Maybe it was always a small world. The fossils in this area are mostly lighter color. This particular gastropod may have had a bad meal just before becoming preserved.  That is my thumb (bad manicure and all) for scale.

  "So remember every picture tells a story, don't it"  from Every Picture Tells a Story sung by Rod Stewart Spent part of Monday at Mom and Dad's going through old photos, scanning them to share and hearing stories about the people in the photos.  This photo is of my great uncle and aunt, Will and Alice Holmes taken sometime in the early 1920s.  Some of you might remember Alice, she lived in the big white house on the road to the cemetery in Tolar until sometime in the 1970s.  It was Will and Alice's son Thomas who was killed in an armed robbery of his store in Hill City.  Two of Will's five brothers suffered from hemophilia (factor 8 deficiency) and bled to death as adults. I would encourage all to go through those old boxes of pictures in parents, grandparents, and your own house.  Record names and make copies to share.

Many of you probably don’t know this and maybe I shouldn’t admit it. In about 1980 I got really burned out working in the Medical Laboratory and began to pursue a job in Laboratory sales. Perhaps due to the tight job market at the time or my lack of appropriate experience, I was unable to find a job in that industry. An acquaintance from one of the labs where I once worked had gone into insurance sales and encouraged me to do the same. I should have known better. For the most part, I lost all respect for the insurance industry and most of the people in it. I did however acquire a few good friends and had some pretty good times. The insurance office I worked out of in Austin, Texas had a couple of big live oaks out back that had managed to escape the construction bulldozer. If you walked out the back door of the office past the oaks you ended up in the parking lot of a convenience store and an adjoining liquor store. About once a week (more for some), in the late aftern...