Pull Tight

I am frequently asked by friends or relatives around the country what the weather is like in Texas. The usual perception is scorching hot and dry with an occasional break for a tornado. I would like to set the record straight, starting with the current season. It is Fall in Texas • When you don’t use your car air conditioner on maximum……..before noon • Monthly home air conditioning bills plummet to below $500 • Heat stroke is a possibility working outside during the day…the north wind blows in and…..frostbite seems a possibility the same evening while watching a high school football game If you are from Texas please add your comments and/or observations

Europe Vacation Click picture above for a slide show.

Yesterday I rode in a bike rally near where I wrote in The Ride, in http://pulltight.blogspot.com/2006/08/ride.html. What a difference 40 degrees makes. Very well organized ride along some very nice country roads, through tiny towns like Nemo and Eulogy, but with a bit more traffic than I expected. We shared the road with many trucks for the burgeoning natural gas fields in the area. As I was passed by a somewhat beat up pick up truck with a confederate flag decal, a pit bull in the back and pulling a trailer with a four wheeler, this thought went through my mind. How much right of way will this guy yield to a bunch of middle aged guys in brightly colored shirts and spandex pants? As far as I know we all survived the ride.

The Mill as it appears in recent history

The Paluxy Mill sometime before being destroyed by the floods from the 1908 hurricane. Also see Pulltight entry. Maybe an engineering problem, the bridge as you can see was on the upstream side. When the river rose the bridge and debris against it from the flood broke loose and destroyed the Mill. I wasn't there, this is just the story I have heard and it makes sense.

Freshly mown grass As I was riding my bike today, I passed someone in the process of mowing the right of way between the sidewalk and the street. Smells usually trigger some specific memory for me, as I think they do for many (most?). Freshly mown grass always reminds me of the family cemetery. Since this is just a small community/family cemetery, there have never been regular caretakers until a fund was recently established for this purpose. From the time I was a small child through my teenage years, the people from the community and a few far flung relatives would get together one day per year to clean up the cemetery. It would be overgrown with native grasses and when mowed the smell was always strong, but very pleasant. We would fill in any graves that were sinking, upright fallen or leaning tombstones and mow everything down to an inch or two. And then we would have a picnic lunch under a couple of post oak trees in the edge of the cemetery. As an adult I have become more ...

I have recently been so entertained by other blogs that I haven’t gotten around to writing, or at least completing the blogs I have started. If you are entertained by blogs you might also enjoy the “Blogging the Bible” in slate.com or the blog by Guy Kawasaki (you can search under his name, he is a former Apple executive). Both are great reading. I am again promising myself that I will write something at least twice each week. Probably I will break some of the stories I would like to tell into multiple parts.

Picture emailed from cell phone camera, am I getting high tech or what? “When the evening falls, twilight shadows find there beneath the stars…….” from Maiden’s Prayer by Bob Wills There is a little motel on S. Congress Ave in Austin, the San Jose Motel. Within a couple of blocks are 3 live music venues and several restraunts. I stayed here on my trip this week. The rates varied from ~ $90 to ~ $280 per night. The $90 room fit my budget for business travel. The room was as I envision a room in a Scandinavian country. It had a wooden platform with a single mattress on one side and a wooden table on the other with just a desk lamp, TV and wifi access. Floors were all wooden with no rug or carpet of any kind. My room had a tiny balcony overlooking the street. The area is very noisy, so the room came with earplugs; this was only a minor inconvenience. The bathroom was shared with two other rooms and furnished with Dr Brommer’s peppermint soap making the whole place smell great...

The Ride After inviting everyone for a bike ride a couple of weeks ago, I guess I should mention the ride. Everyone had the good sense to decline or ignore my request on a day that would reach over 100 degrees (very good decisions). My advice for riding in N. TX in August. · Start your 8:00 AM ride before 9:30 · Have breakfast somewhere other than Whataburger · Carry more than 2 bottles of water · When the buzzards start circling, head for home The State Farm roads around Paluxy have become amazing popular with motorcycle riders. On the couple of miles I rode on these roads, I saw 10-15 motorcycles. Most of my ride though, was on paved county roads. I biked on these roads for about 2 hours Sunday morning and saw one pickup truck. The county roads are almost as lightly traveled now, as they were 30 or 40 years ago. I hope the motorcyclists don’t discover them. Although the solitude was nice, the only man made sound most of the time were bike tires on the pavement, it was almost...

Weather and Politics I think of something every day I would like to post, but life and work seem to get in the way of sitting down and writing. I originally thought I would avoid writing about the weather or politics. Generally boring subjects, but this year the weather is so consistently hot and dry, maybe it is worth mentioning. And Texas politics; the governor’s race is going to be the most interesting in recent memory, maybe ever. I will probably not be able to resist writing some opinions and would welcome anyone else’s. While my political views are probably slightly to the left of most who might read Pull Tight, I suspect we largely share the same thoughts on politicians.

We were in Norman OK this week moving Lauren in at OU. It was really hot. The previous record for the day was 105. It was 106. The next day I was talking with one of my coworkers in Oklahoma City. Maybe it is because July was the 2nd hottest month in recorded history of planet Earth, but there is a new expression in Oklahoma when it is really hot. In Texas we might say "It is hotter than Hell". In Oklahoma the expression for really hot is "It is hotter than Texas".

I am planning a bicycle ride for August 13, the morning of the Paluxy Homecoming. This will be my 4th consecutive ride on Homecoming day. It is a bicycle ride through time for me as I remember places things happened and the people of the places as I cruise by. On a couple of occasions I have hauled the bike to Morgan Mill and followed the roads along the Paluxy River with and optional loop around by Lanham Mill at the end. Other times I have ridden a circle through Cedar Point and Bluff Dale. Riding through Rock Church and Tolar is an option also. The ride is about 20 - 25 miles long and I usually average about 13-15 mph. If any of you would like to ride with me, contact me. And if you need a bike, I have a couple of 10 speed road bikes I could bring. Depending on the route we could stop in Bluff Dale or Tolar for a cold beverage, but bring a couple of water bottles for the ride. If we start at about 8 or 8:30 we will be through riding about 10:30 or 11:00 (probably before t...

Blog has been on vacation along with the rest of the family. We traveled to Europe for 2 weeks and I will be posting our adventures, misadventures, etc sometime in the next week. Came home to almost no home at all. Our privacy fence caught fire while we were gone and came very close to burning the house as well. Lauren’s boyfriend who was watching the house for us caught the fire in time to extinguish with fairly minor damage to the house. It must have been scary. About 12 feet of fence and part of a deck were lost.

Thinking about phone numbers. Remember when we all many less numbers, but we knew them all. I used to know all of the numbers of relatives, freinds, work, pizza delivery, etc. The only numbers I actually know today are the ones that haven't changed in 20 years. There are over 200 numbers in my cell phone and I probably don't know 10 of them. Is speed dial causing us to lose our memories and making us dumber?

I have posted most of the contents of Dad's birthday book to www.juniormcintire.blogspot.com. Thanks again to all who contributed.

Tonight or tomrrow I will publish the book online we did for Dad's party. This image was used for the invitation. Everyone had a good time at the party and Dad was very pleased.

I guess no one who knows Dad and has seen him make such a rapid recovery from his accident (see entry Nothing Runs Like a Deere), will be surprised. Monday, two days shy of two months since his accident and two weeks short of his 80th birthday, Dad was back on one of his farm tractors.

This is my first attempt at audio content from a cell phone. There is now the option not only to not read but not listen as well.

One of my high school teachers, Mrs. C. retired a couple of weeks ago after 44 years of teaching. By my estimation, she must have taught around 1,200 students during that time. She was the business teacher and because the school was small, all students in my day took her classes. We learned our original keyboarding skills on full size manual typewriters. None of us could have predicted that 25 years later, keyboarding skills, would become such a valuable skill for everyday life in the computer age. There was a reception of sorts at the high school after school one day last week, which was attended by probably over 100 students. Mrs. C. had been my class’s sponsor, advisor and homeroom teacher for several years so our class was particularly close to her. 8 of the 13 students I graduated with were at the reception. Because the school was so small, we obviously knew students well from many other grades and it was fun to see them. We are not all the same age and state of health a...

Pull Tight is the nickname for Paluxy. I'm not sure if is Pull-tight, Pull Tight or Pulltight, although I tend to think of it as one word (Pulltight). The origin of the term, and later the name, Pulltight, probably comes from the teams of horses having to pull so tight to get loads of freshly ground grain up the river bank. The pull up from the old grist mill is somewhat steep and sandy. It must have taken an extra effort to pull the wagons out of the river bed onto the river bottom and then on up the hill to Paluxy. Most likely the nickname caught on when one of the early settlers used to remark “We are going to have to pull tight to make our town succeed”. My favorite version, but probably the not the favorite of my Baptist relatives, is that one day after an afternoon of drinking, in the Paluxy saloon, one of the old men was too drunk to say “We are all full tight” and it came out “We are all pull tight”. I like to think of pulltight as having a meaning other than a nick...

Dad is recovering nicely with no complication except it was discovered last week he has a broken leg. He complained that it began to hurt after walking. An X-ray was ordered and yep it is broken. The tractor here is the one from the accident.

The last store in Paluxy closed sometime in the late 1950s. The McRimmons were the last store owners. I remember it as being a general store but, the only single product I can actually recall is XXX Root Beer. It’s Funny how your memory of things long ago is so selective. The only time I remember actually drinking them was when my Grandpa Wann would buy them for me. They cost a nickel and the nickels had Buffaloes on them. I must have had them on some particularly hot days when I was really thirsty, because to this day no beverage has seemed as good as those root beers with my Grandpa. I like to think he always had the same drink and maybe he did or maybe not, but that is how my brain has decided to remember. This store had the only hand operated gasoline pumps I ever remember seeing in actual operation. You pumped gas into an overhead graduated glass cylinder and then drained the gas from the cylinder into your car. I remember actually getting to do the pumping a couple of t...

Deja Vu This morning as I was driving between client sites, I was listening to the local public radio station. There is pledge drive running and although we probably contribute an average of about once per year, I mostly listen to another station during these fund raisers. The radio shows during the fund drives, however, are usually especially good in between the pleas for money so I was tuning in every few minutes. The part of the show I caught this morning was an interview by Terri Gross with a psychologist, Dr. Dan Gottleib, from Philadelphia. He was talking about his practice and his books. While he was very interesting, the most intriguing part of their discussion was the story of an automobile accident he in 1979. While driving on the Pennsylvania turnpike about an hour west of Philadelphia, a wheel came off a truck, also traveling on the turnpike, and landed on top of and crushing his car. His neck was broken and he was paralyzed from the chest down. He went on to become ...

Dad continues to improve rapidly considering the extent of his injury. He will possibly be coming home in the next 2-3 days. He is walking around the hospital floor with minimal assistance, with a walker that he is actually not using. All his tubes, IV lines and oxygen were removed today. I jokingly suggested to him, he should work with the physical therapist on stepping high enough to get on a farm tractor.

01/24/06 Some Dogs I Have Known One of my coworkers was talking about his 2 border collies last week and I have been thinking about dogs. Nancy and the kids will not find it unusual, as they think there is some link between our canine cousins and me. Speculation at our house is, in one of my previous lives, I was a dog. Sometimes I tell our dog Shooter he would have to increase in value to be worthless. His reward for this observation consists of trying to lick my beard. Dogs always seem to like me, even strange ones. It is worth mentioning that sometimes at home I am referred to by the pet name of D. Dog (short for daddy dog I think). A few years ago we were walking through the airport in Newark, New Jersey when we saw the security dog coming towards us with his very own airport security man in tow. I have no idea if this was the bomb sniffing dog or the drug sniffing dog. Anyway, we were stopped for a minute before going through the metal detector. The dog stopped lo...

Sunday 4/16/06 Dad entertained Austin and me, yesterday, with stories from his Navy experiences in the 40s. He continues to improve. His doctor this morning told us, he may go to a regular room today, depending on one set of lab results and the availability of a bed (hospital is really full). It will be good to see him escape ICU. Mom has become the matriarch of the ICU waiting room. I think she knows every patient's story and all of their visiting family members. The other families will miss her when she and Dad go another part of the hospital.

Dad seemed much better yesterday and this morning. Lung cultures are still negative, Sodium is back within normal range and vital signs look good. He is much more like himself after changes in medication. He smiled at a couple of bad jokes by the ICU nurse and me. Mom is going home for a few hours today for the first time since the accident. He is still in ICU, but we are optimistic he will be in a room soon.

Written 01/19/06 Cars and Neckties A much bigger company purchased the little company where I work. I went from an 800-person company to one with over 26,000. It seems like I am 20 times busier. There are a lot of new systems and procedures to learn. I am just beginning to catch up with life a little. With the new company, I will be getting a company car; Buick Lacrosse, I think. For the last few months I have driven our family car, a Chrysler Pacifica (a crossover SUV). It will be nice to have someone else (the new company) picking up the entire tab for my car. Although the Chrysler is much more comfortable and versatile than the Buick will be, the Buick will have a unique advantage for seeing my first client everyday. For the last almost 20 years, I have driven regular cars for work almost exclusively. Because most often my first stop is at least ½ hour (and sometimes much further) from home, I don’t put on my tie until I arrive at my initial destination. Then ...

I spent the night at the hospital last night with Dad and Mom; my sisters have spent the other nights and that has been very good for Mom. Mom hasn’t left the hospital for more than an hour in the last week. Dad seemed uncomfortable and restless most of the night. He is getting more aggressive respiratory treatments starting today. These will sometimes involve a nasal tube. The goal is still keeping him off a ventilator. The report this afternoon - he was not nearly as restless after a change in the pain medications and he took a few steps aided by a walker. Still no word on when he might move from ICU.

written 12/15/05 I am making a quick trip to out of town tomorrow to see my one of my biggest clients. Actually they are the biggest in more than dollars spent with my company. Of approximately a dozen people working in this lab, the smallest is probably 50 lbs overweight. I need to take them something for Christmas. After thinking of what they might like I settled on cookies. I don’t think anyone in this group ever passed up a good cookie. The best, biggest, tastiest and highest calorie cookies to be bought are possibly the chocolate chip cookies from the Doubletree Hotel chain. While visiting clients in Dallas today, I stopped in to pick up a couple dozen at a Doubletree on the LBJ freeway. Because of Lauren’s accident (see Groundhog Day blog entry), I am driving a rental car from the insurance company. It is a new silver nondescript Camry. I came out of the Doubletree talking on the phone, adjusting my sunglasses, balancing a tray of cookies and fumbling with my car keys. I...

Just talked to Mom and Sharon. Dad's heart rate seems to be in control today. And he ate some breakfast this morning after eating almost nothing yesterday. His primary Dr from the ER, said he will be using a walker today. He will be getting salt tablets to increase his Sodium. I remember when athletes and manual labor workers used to take them before sports drinks were available.

The meds helped Dads perspective on life by Sunday evening and he is again thinking he going to recover. Sunday night his heart rate went to the 170s, but with the cardiologist recommended treatment Monday evening it was back to normal. The main short term concerns are keeping his lungs clear and correcting a low sodium. He was up taking a very few steps today and will be again tomorrow. He is probably looking at quite a few more days in ICU.

Dad is really down today. Perhaps it is a combination of his age, the pain and the medications. His vital signs all look good and his lungs are slightly better per the ICU nurse, but that isn't doing anything to lift his spirits. He is being started on meds that should make him feel better. More later.

Dad was up sitting in a chair in his ICU room this morning. The main concern for the time is preventing pneumonia, the most likely severe complication. He is getting regular food (maybe that is overstating hospital food), although his appetite is not good. He is starting on a nutritional drink today (even worse than hospital food). As his appetite gets better, we will bring in food. Mom and I looked at his chest X-Rays with the ICU nurse this morning. You can see the increased congestion in his lungs today as opposed to when he arrived at the hospital on Wednesday. It is good his lungs are as clear as they are, but he still may not avoid going on a ventilator for a few days. We also learned that there are more fractures than we initially thought. He has fractures in his shoulder in addition to his collarbone. By looking at the X-Rays, I would guess the tractor knocked him down. The rear wheel went up his right side breaking ribs laterally. The wheel continued over his shoulde...

Nothing Runs Like a Deere Yesterday while working in Fort Worth, I received a call there was an accident on the farm and Dad was on his way by Careflight helicopter to Harris Medical Center. He had been in a tractor accident. I was in the parking lot next door and came directly to the ER. As I arrived at the ER, I received a call from my brother in law, Ken. It seems that while Mom and Dad were moving hay from a field to near their house, Dad was run over by the tractor. Being the first to the ER, a security guard escorted me to a family room and immediately one of the hospital chaplains came to see me. He had just come from seeing Dad. He said Dad was alert and on his way for a CT scan. He told Dad he would pray for him and he said Dad thanked him. I refrained from telling the Chaplin of the study just completed about prayer. It seems that patients who know they are prayed for in fact may have more complications than patients that do not know. Mom gave me the story of what h...

DRIVING LESSONS Probably, later this week I will take Austin for his learners permit. We are going to home school for Driver’s Education. We will enjoy the driving time together as we usually do when I am driving. We both become philosophers when in the front seat of a car. We have already solved several of the world’s problems on the way to school or the batting cages. One of my earliest recollections is driving. When I was 4 or 5 Dad used to let me steer the old Ford pick up truck in the hay fields. He would pull the hand throttle out slightly and get the truck moving very slowly. My job was to steer the truck between 2 rows of hay bales without running over any. Dad or Dad and a hired hand would load the hay as we slowly moved down the row. When the truck was loaded, Dad would step onto the running board, open the door, slide me over and stop the truck. Most of the time I think I did pretty good but I do remember a couple of very big slow bumps as I ran over th...

There is a new book about the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 when so many people died. It turns out, the flu from 1918 was Bird Flu. Scientists have exhumed and taken tissue samples from the bodies of flu victims in the permafrost above the Arctic Circle. It is now proven that this great epidemic was bird flu. Most significant flu epidemics have come from either pigs or birds. The book is supposed to be quite interesting, I plan to read it soon. When Austin was in kindergarten and Lauren was in 3rd grade, they took piano lessons from the same music teacher. Ms. Elizabeth Few was a retired music teacher from the Fort Worth ISD. She had about 40 students, held 2 private recitals per year, and played the piano and organ in church. One day when I took the kids for their lesson, Ms. Few asked about my wife Nancy. I told her Nancy was home in bed with the flu. Ms. Few said, “Yes, I had the flu and I thought I was going to die”. I am thinking at this point Ms. Few must be lik...

 

You teach me baseball and I’ll teach you relativity…No we must not, you will learn about relativity faster than I learn baseball. Albert Einstein I am writing today about one pitch in one baseball game from the 1920s. But, before retelling what I remember of the story, I am going to share my memories of the catcher in this game. As you have obviously observed, this game took place 20-30 years before I was born. The only record was the memory of the catcher who died 30 years ago and the pitcher who verified the story for me a few years ago. In his 90s now, maybe I should go see the pitcher once more so we can relive this play again.  The pitcher, John Crowell and his wife Lois were always at the Save the Paluxy fish fry fundraisers. Lois makes a Green Grape Cobbler from wild mustang grapes that is even more legendary than this baseball play. They were two of the very strongest supporters and hardest workers for saving the Paluxy River. That the river still flows free is in large ...

Grandpa(2nd from left) and his baseball team - Taken about 1904

01/30/06 “ Got a big black dogWhose name is DanLives in my backyard in BirminghamHe is the meanest dog in Alabam'Get 'em Dan” Lyrics from Birmingham by Randy Newman As part of the PhD program, at UT in Austin, my first wife, Alice (W1) was enrolled; she was required to take an animal surgery class. Mostly they used rats, doing things like intestinal drug absorption studies. As part of the course, however, she was required to perform a sterile surgery on a larger animal. Dogs purchased from a pound somewhere in Arkansas (or so they were told) were used. For her particular surgery, she performed a splenectomy. While performing the surgery, she remarked to her coworkers that she had always wanted a dog such as the one she was operating. A coworker insisted she would be a dog murderess, because the splenectomy was part of the preparation for his next procedure. He was to undergo a terminal cardiac output experiment in a couple of weeks. About one week later W1 bounced into...