Pull Tight

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...