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.