The Sand Pile

This morning I was reading the digest from one of the yahoo groups I am a member of and one of the members was talking about someone playing in a sandbox. When I was growing up, we never had a sandbox, but we did have a sand pile, two in fact. The first was located on the west side of the big cedar tree in my parents yard on the south side of their house. The second one, and its subsequent re-incarnations was under the big water oak tree in their back yard. I am not certain, but I think that the sole purpose of those sand piles was for us to play on. I know that some building projects require sand and here at my house, there was a sand pile for several years that was the remains of sand used by the brick mason who did my chimney. But I don't think that was the case at my parents house. Also I don't know the source of the first sand pile but I am fairly certain that the second one was the result of a pint of whiskey slipped to one of the county's truck drivers. Back then such things were a common part of doing business, today if something like that happened and was discovered, chances are 2 or more folks would spend time in the minimum security prison in Montgomery.

Regardless of their source, the sand piles were great fixtures in my growing up. When you are a child, there are a lot of things you can do with 3 yards of washed sand. Unfortunately for us, we had numerous outside cats so one of the first things you did was be very careful. If a place on the sand pile looked freshly disturbed and slightly mounded, you did not play there. Looking back on it, it is kind of embarrassing recalling just how long I continued to play out there. It was a place of endless construction projects and dreams long forgotten, but from my recollect mostly a place of great fun.

Panning For Gold

Back in the early 1990's, when I still had a C-Band satellite dish one of my favorite channels was the Outdoor Channel. There was a guy on there by the name of George "Buzzard" Massie. He was the founder of the Gold Prospectors Association of America and a co-founder of the Outdoor Channel. The Buzzard had a program called Gold Prospecting. You can still see some of the old programs online at this website.

Watching those programs back then really gave me gold fever. I even joined the GPAA and fully intended to go and do some gold prospecting. Unfortunately, I had a full time job and enough other responsibilities to occupy my time. I never got around to doing any prospecting.

Fast forward to this year. Around the first of October, I was out on eBay looking for something and I came across a guy out in Arizona selling 2 pound bags of paydirt from his gold claim. I still had my gold pan that I got back when I joined the GPAA so I ordered a bag to try my hand at panning. What the paydirt amounted to was the concentrates that this guy got from his sluice box after running the raw materials through it. In other words, it was 2 pounds of sand, clay, small gravel up to about pea sized and with any luck at all, some gold. Now the bag only cost $10 so you don't expect to find much gold, if any. Well I panned it out and sure enough, there was gold in there. Not much. In all about .06 grams which at the current price of $1600 per ounce is worth a little over $3. But it wasn't about the money. It was about getting to pan for gold. To actually take some rocks and dirt and pan it down to where there was something of worth left in the bottom of that pan. It was just as much fun as the ole Buzzard had shown it to be on TV.

Español

Back before I retired, I worked for a investor owned public utility. I never mention them by name to save them the embarrassment of having the general public know that (1) they hired me and (2) they kept me on the payroll long enough for me to retire. Besides, most of the folks that read this know who I am talking about anyway. The company was and is a pretty good sized outfit and like most big companies, they had something they called employee development. The idea is a good one, keep your employees learning something new, that way they don't grow stale. In practice, I fear it becomes an opportunity for the training department to increase their size and budget.

Being the contrarian that I am, I tried to formulate my annual developmental plan with a minimum of conventional corporate training. Now keep in mind that the developmental plan had to be reviewed by higher ups so it could not be superficial and they were accustomed to seeing a lot of corporate training courses. Sometimes it took a bit of doing to come up with something worthwhile that didn't fall under the corporation's training department.

I usually tried to include the reading of some good books, often self help, business or management related. Those were pretty well accepted and I have to admit I learned quite a bit from some of them. After a couple of years, it began to get to be even more challenging to come up with meaningful studies. One day while I was brain storming on what I could include, I hit upon the idea of learning Spanish. I had a couple of semesters of French when I was in high school, but no foreign language courses in college. When I came up with the idea, the south end of the town where I lived was developing a sizable Hispanic population, we had an all Spanish radio station and a Hispanic supermarket. I figured I could learn a new language and actually have a use for it. I bought a tape, a couple of CDs and a book and set out to learn Spanish. Over the course of the next year, I did manage to learn several Spanish phrases and a lot of nouns. My favorite noun was esparrago. I would walk down the isle of the grocery store and when I passed the asparagus I would very quietly say esparrago. I just liked the way it sounded. In all truthfulness I did not learn a great deal of useful Spanish that year but I did manage to minimally accomplish the stated goal in the developmental plan.

That was quite a few years ago because I have been retired for ten years. Occasionally, over the years, I would come across a label in a store and would recognize some of the words in the Spanish portion of it. Then a few months ago, I decided that maybe it was time to renew my study of a foreign language. Since Spanish still seemed like a good idea to me, I began to explore my options. Someone suggested Rosetta stone as being quite good. I soon discovered that it was quite pricey as well. One of the problems with learning Spanish was and is pronunciation. I discovered that Google Translate has a little speaker symbol in the lower right hand corner of the translation box. If you click on that speaker, the word or phrase that was typed in or translated is spoken back to you in the appropriate language. That was a major coup. Now I could get any word I wanted pronounced correctly. Next I needed to find an organized method to set about learning the written language. I did a bit of searching and came up with a program called Anki. It is a flash card based program that feeds you new information at a rate you set for yourself and as you learn the information, it gradually introduces new information and periodically reinforces the old information. Fortunately someone had devised a card set for Español. I down loaded the file and started to work. When I got to a card that had a word I could not pronounce, I would paste it over in the Google Translate box and click on the little speaker symbol and get the correct pronunciation. It really worked quite well.

I've been at it now for several weeks and while I would still have to say to anyone speaking Spanish to me, "Por favor, hable despacio, mi español es malo", I can pick up bits and pieces now and then. Reading is much easier than understanding the spoken word. So far as the writing goes, it is currently very difficult and conjugation of verbs, well forget about that for now. I think if I keep on going at the rate I am going, in 2 or 3 years I may be able to have a simple conversation with someone speaking Spanish. Of course, at the rate the Alabama Legislature is going, by that time I may have to go to south Texas to find someone to have that converstion with, but that is a subject for a different post. For now I will say simply, adiós.

Buy American

I subscribe to several online newsletters and groups and receive weekly publications or daily digests from most of them. Last week I was reading through one of them and came upon an article about buying American made products. The author was lamenting the current state of our economy and placing a significant amount of blame for it upon the fact that we are all buying Chinese products down at Walmart. Now I am pretty sure that we have much greater problems in this country than Chinese products from Walmart, but the guy made an impassioned argument. In his article, he mentioned a company that made shoes and was located in the USA. He went on about how the man who ran the company would only sell American made products even though he could make more money if he moved his manufacturing off shore. He also mentioned about the quality and style of the company's products.

Well I could use a good pair of shoes so I decided to click on the link in the article and see what I could find. Initially I was disappointed in what I saw. The shoes on the main page of the website were what I would describe as butt ugly. Actually I see shoes like that all the time so I suspect that many folks like them but they don't appeal to me. If you saw them, you would know what I am talking about. I am sure there is a name for them but I don't know it. Anyway, style aside, the next problem was sticker shock. They were priced between $300 and $600 a pair. I had expected to pay more for something made in the USA, but not quite that much more. I decided to search the website and see what I could come up with. After a few minutes, I came upon a nice looking shoe that I would describe as a boat shoe. It was made of distressed leather and just looked comfortable, kind of like an old pair of leather work gloves or a WWII bomber jacket. The price was not bad either. They were $125 a pair. I was contemplating clicking on the "add to cart" button when I saw it. Down near the bottom of the page was a statement, "Made in the Dominican Republic." Poof! The magic disappeared. I closed the page. Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against the Dominican Republic or Haiti or even Cuba for that matter and technically I realize that they are just as American as we are, but somehow when I read the guy's article I was thinking about helping some folks in Youngstown OH or Provo UT or somewhere like that. I realize that he never said made in the USA but unfortunately I fell in to that trap that we citizens of the USA set for ourselves. We call ourselves Americans when actually anyone living in North or South American are Americans. If folks from Canada are Canadians and folks from Mexico are Mexicans then I suppose that folks from the United States are actually United Statians. Pretty easy to see why we call ourselves Americans. I suppose we could be called staters or we could call ourselves what I suspect most of the other people of the world call us but SOBs is not quite geographically specific enough. But I digress.

The point is that very little that is attractive and affordable is made in the USA at this time. Now you can take that as a personal affront and spend all your time running around looking for "Made in the USA" stickers or you can go ahead and do the best you can with what you can find. Life is a lot like a game of cards. You have to play with the cards that you are dealt. We may not be happy with the way things are, but hang on, they will change, and who knows we may someday look back on today as being back in the good ole days.

South Dakota and Saskatchewan

Back in 2008 I took a trip up to Alaska. It was great and I hope to get back up there real soon. I drove up through Canada instead of taking the Marine Highway. They say that the ferry ride is great and the sights are spectacular but I really wanted to drive the Alaska Highway.

The trip took me through several states and five Canadian provinces. I enjoyed the entire trip and all the scenery but there were two places in particular that just struck me the right way. That may sound funny and I am not sure I can explain it but you know how sometimes something just feels right? Linda says that sometimes about stores or houses. She says that she can just feel a good feeling or a bad feeling when she walks in the door. I don't know that I exactly understand it but I have to admit that the time I spent in South Dakota on the way up and in Saskatchewan on the way back just felt right. I suspect that a lot of it has to do with the people I encountered when I stopped to eat or to fuel up but I can't say that for sure. I do remember talking to some folks that seemed real friendly in both places but I talked to friendly folks in other places as well. I feel like there is more to it than that but like I say, I can't exactly put my finger on what it was.

If you get a chance to visit either of those places, see if you experience what I experienced and if you do email me and tell me about it.

The Edsel

My father was not given to a lot of nonsense. He was born in 1921 and by the time he was a teen, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. He had to quit school in the ninth grade and start work to help provide for his family. Then came WWII and he served in Europe. To say the least, his early life left little time for frivolousness. While he was all about working and saving, occasionally he would do something spontaneous. I remember one time when I was working at his shop, he had been up the Sylacauga to pick up some parts around mid morning and he came back with a sack of hot dogs, enough to feed everybody at the shop. Might not sound like much to you but for him, it was noteworthy. Life was about working hard and making a living. I remember us going up to the shop once on Labor Day and working. I think it was because we were swamped with work and he was just trying to catch up, but when I complained about having to work on Labor Day, he said that is what you are supposed to do on Labor Day, labor! He was equally serious about not wasting. He remembered what it meant to have to "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

I tell you all that so you can fully appreciate the story of "The Edsel." It was the summer of 1960. I was out of school and working at the shop for the summer. In addition to repairing cars, my father would buy, sell or trade vehicles. Somehow, he go hold of an 1958 Edsel. He may have took it in trade for something he had, probably with some boot, but somehow he ended up with it. I don't remember a lot of the details about it but I think it was a hardtop and it must have been a northern car because it had some serious rust issues. I do recall that it had a big V-8 motor and an automatic transmission. I think that it had also been in an accident and one of the front fenders may have been messed up. There was not much demand for Edsels back then, especially ones that had that many problems. Anyway, someone came up with the idea of taking the "smoke wrench" and turning the Edsel into a cutdown. Normally I would have expected my dad to say to not be wasting oxygen and acetylene but for reasons unknown, he said it was OK. I remember that Wally Burks and myself took the cutting torch and managed to remove the top, the front fenders, the doors and a few other items from the Edsel and sure enough we had ourselves a cutdown. I don't know what ever happened to it. I suppose it eventually was sold for scrap but I think that for awhile we used it to push start vehicles that could not be started by other means. I do recall that on at least one occasion we drove it the 16 plus miles from the shop to our house. With all that heavy sheet metal removed, the old V-8 Edsel would fly. I can remember it as if it was yesterday, driving down through Hanover (I was 14 but had been driving since I was 11), no top, no doors in the warm summer early evening air with the radio blaring The Happy Organ by Dave 'Baby' Cortez

I look back on it now and still find it strange that my father would go along with anything so patently frivolous. As I was writing this, it dawned on me that I was about the same age when all this happened as my father had been when he had to drop out of school and go to work. Maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe he was experiencing something with me that he could not experience himself at that age. I don't know, I just remember that it was great when it happened and it is still great 50 plus years later.

Tea Cakes

The other day I was searching for something on the web and came across a recipe for tea cakes. I had not thought of them in years but that recipe immediately brought back memories from my youth.

When we were growing up my sister and I spent a good bit of time down at my maternal grandparents house. Mama worked and every afternoon after school, we would ride the bus down to my grandparents house and stay there until mama got off work and came to pick us up. My grandmother who was a diabetic and nearly blind had fallen several years earlier and had broken her hip and was confined to a wheel chair. That did not stop her from getting around in the large kitchen in their house and she still did some cooking. She always tried to have something for us to eat in the afternoons. I remember eating tomato sandwiches made with whole wheat bread and canned tomatoes, but one of the staples down there was tea cakes. Seemed like they always had some tea cakes on hand. Sometimes they would put chocolate icing on them but most times they were just plain tea cakes.

When I came across that recipe I printed it out. I had most of the ingredients on hand but was running low on butter and lacked the right kind of flour so I could not fix them right then. Since then I have been to the store and got what I was lacking. This afternoon, I mixed up a batch of tea cake batter and cooked a small pan full of them. They were just as good as I remembered them. In the next few days I may try my hand at putting some chocolate icing on a batch.

On Being Lucky

A mechanic that worked at my fathers garage used to say "I'd rather be lucky than have a license to steal." If you think about it a bit, it makes a lot of sense. If you could steal legally, you would still have your conscience to deal with but when things just pop into your lap, well, you can just kind of bask in the glow. Of course there are different kinds of luck. There is the finding a 5 dollar bill laying in the middle of a parking lot kind and the narrowly missing being hit by a train kind. I know folks that have experienced both.

My grandpa Kelley by his own account was lucky at least one time in his life but no one seems to know the exact details. Pawpaw, as we called him was a fine decent god fearing man. He was a fantastic farmer who always raised more vegetables than he and his family could eat. He freely shared this abundance with his neighbors and best I could tell was well thought of in his community. He went to church regularly and did not smoke. But none of that has any bearing on this particular incidence of luck. Being a Kelley, he had one stereotypical Irish trait. He was fond of a little drink. Unfortunately, in his younger days, there seems to have been no such thing as a little drink. It was an off or on, all or none proposition. When he drank, he would go on what my folks referred to as "a tear." I got the impression from what I was told that it did not happen that often, but when it did, look out. The incident I recall hearing of involved him having been gone off for about a week with God knows who doing God knows what. He came in stark, disheveled ,still pretty tipsy and visibly shaken. His wife and kids got him to the back porch and set him in a rocking chair and my grandmother started asking him what had happened to him. All he could or would ever say was "we was just lucky."

This morning, as I reflect on Auburn's game yesterday with Utah State, I realize that they were lucky. There are those that will tell you that you make your own luck and there is a lot of truth in that but I still think that what happened to Pawpaw and what happened yesterday at Jordan-Hare probably fall a lot closer to the being narrowly missed by a train kind of luck instead of the finding a $5 bill kind.

Coming Up A Cloud

I was sitting here just a few minutes ago and I heard the sound of thunder off in the distance. I immediately thought of what must be going through the minds of the many victims of the recent tornadoes. This thunder and lightning has got to bring back those terrible memories. I wonder if I had lived through that, would I be able to continue to live in Alabama with all our thunderstorm activity? As I sat here thinking about all that, my mind drifted to thoughts of when I was young. Back then we did not have the instantaneous communications we are accustomed to today. There were no warning sirens. No one talked of EF-4 , EF-5 , wall clouds or hook echos. Back then when it became evident that a thunderstorm was approaching, some one would say, it's coming up a cloud. That was it. No one know exactly what to expect until it had passed.

I had some relatives that were terrified when it came up a cloud. My paternal grandmother, who it was said was once struck by lightning, was one of them. I never was at their house when it came up a cloud, but I have heard my dad and my aunt Annie Julia talked about how scared she was of "clouds." Now a days, when the weather gets bad, the guy on the TV says to go to your safe place. Back then some folks had storm shelters which I think might have started life as root cellars and ended up mostly being used in bad storms. Although my mother often talked about wanting a storm shelter, we never did have one. When it would come up a bad thunderstorm with lots of lightning, we were told to go get on the bed. I don't know what the hell getting on a bed was supposed to do. Maybe, since the frames were metal folks thought the lightning ,if it struck, would run to ground through the frame and spare the occupants. Having seen what a direct lightning strike does to an oak tree I don't think being on a steel bed would help much. But that was our safe place.

I remember one time when my sister and I were quite young and were at home with mama, a particularly bad storm came up. There were a lot of direct cloud to ground lightning strikes near the house accompanied by deafening thunder claps. We had a little black fiest dog that stayed in the yard but she was as terrified of lightning as my grandmother was. When a cloud came up, the little dog would find a way to get into the house. We were all in the living room and at one point my mother told us to go get on the bed. The little dog took off running and beat us into the bedroom. When we got there, she was in the middle of the bed looking back at us. Keep in mind, this was an outside dog. She was virtually never allowed inside. How she knew what a bed was, I don't know, but it sure looked like she understood what my mother said and reacted immediately.

I am truly thankful that my worst memories of thunderstorms involve having to jump up in the middle of a bed with a little dog and not what so many of our neighbors have recently endured.

Drinking from a Branch

When I was in my early teens I often went squirrel hunting with my uncles or grandfather. We never still hunted. Instead they had squirrel dogs that ran through the woods smelling the ground. When the dogs caught the scent of a squirrel or surprised one on the ground the dogs would follow the scent or chase the squirrel to a tree and then bark. We would follow along and when we got to the tree we would locate and shot the squirrel. This kind of hunting made for a lot of walking and occasional running. Even though the weather was cool during squirrel season, pretty soon we would get thirsty. Back then, late 50's and early 60's, we did not take canteens or water bottles along to drink from. Instead, when we got thirsty, we would drink from a branch. It was a little tricky because if you were not careful, you would get wet but few things in my life have ever tasted as refreshing as a drink of cool water from a branch.

They tell me you can't drink from a branch today because of giardia. In case you don't know, giardia are little protozoan parasites that do nasty things in your intestines. I have not drank any branch water in years and would not attempt it now without a proper filter to get the little nasties out first, but this whole situation brings a question to my mind. Where were the giardia back when I was young? I did not take a lot of biology during my years in school, but I know enough to know that protozoa are an old life form. They haven't just shown up in the last few years. People say they are spread in the feces of wild animals and birds. Well, there were plenty of wild animals and birds back then, maybe even more than there are today. So why did we not have intestinal problems back then from drinking from a branch?

Twitter

Since I have started using Twitter I don't blog much anymore. Actually I don't tweet very much either but I do read what others are saying. I have found that most everything that I think of, someone else is thinking of it or has already thought of it some time ago. I have also discovered that most of the time, they have expressed it much more succinctly than I could ever hope to.

Don't get me wrong, I am not giving up on blogging. I just think that when I think of something, I will count to ten before I blog. Chances are while I am counting some one else will tweet what I am thinking and I can just re-tweet them.