Sparky's first real haircut

They have both gotten pretty hairy. Sparky reminded us of the Abominable Snowman.

The furry one from a side view:

Then they spent today at the groomer:


Don't they look great?

If you give a mouse a cookie

TGP grew up in the Hollys, when Grandfather Denzil moved the family to Kentucky in the 30s.


Just to the left of the front entrance is the library, pictured below. Long before my time, it held a beautiful partner desk, where Denzil and Polly worked together.


In 1986, I brought the desk to Charleston. It then spent some time in the upstairs of Orangeburg, but finally made it to the den of our house in Atlanta. See Caroline using it below.

As decorating progressed, the desk ended up in the basement. Teddy had eaten some if it, and time had not been kind.

For our upcoming 25th anniversary, we decided to get the desk restored. Here it is on its way back into the house:




We're working on some wonderful decorating around this piece. Think of the desk as the cookie and Mary Anne as the mouse.

Sparky has his operation

He's certainly not convinced it was a good idea, but Sparky was neutered today. He's pretty pitiful now, but should be felling better in a couple of days.

The Elkhorn Creek

It has been way too long since I've written. By way of excuse, we've been traveling a good bit. But I've missed it and hope to do better. There are lots of ideas in the future blog entry hopper.

Looking at where we grew up, this one is hard to believe. I've also hesitated a little about this entry because I'm not sure how to make it funny. In the end, however, getting the story out is more important to me than provoking laughter.

Check out the dam in our back yard; it was about a 10 foot drop down.
There are a lot of dams on the Elkhorn. Chuck Ellis and I canoed from our house to Frankfort as a high school senior project; we had to portage around the places where the creek drops. The dam in our back yard was also why the creek was deep upstream. That let us have the tire swing - see Kim the delightful child story. There will be a story in the future about another bridge over the creek and certainly more about jumping into the creek from the tire swing.
Every two or three years, the creek would flood. It happened a little more often than it froze in winter. That's part of why the dance hall in the flat back yard was elevated. See the snack bar as it still stood in 1980.

When I'm talking flood, I'm talking about water sometimes up as high as the white boards you see on the snack bar across that very wide area.

Just like we got the pool table because Uncle Hall needed it out of his basement for a while, we got a canoe through some special deal with a local man whose name escapes me that did a lot of canoeing. We enjoyed it during regular creek elevations and even took it on the aforementioned senior project.

Let me digress a bit. As I have aged, I have been white water rafting several times. I have pictures of going in 1984 with MA, then with
Eleanor (2003)

and Caroline (2006).


Note that both my girls seemed to enjoy it considerably more than my wife. When herself and I went with our Sunday School class from Peachtree Pres, she was thinking only of the social aspects. She was a wonderful new bride. It came as quite a surprise that there was actual water and even danger involved. On the trip on the bus upstream, after the guide said when you fall out, MA thought she was going to die. Despite our financial situation, she told me that if she survived, I would have to go to Needless Markup and buy her a dress. It's a pretty floral and she wore it holding Eleanor.
Here is Eleanor in that self-same dress some 18 years later.

Back to the main story. The most interesting and inexplicable use of the canoe was one heavily flooded afternoon in the spring of 1978 (my junior year in high school). TGP decided that we should run the dam when the water was so high that there was no dam. I'm very sorry (for me as much as for you) that I don't have a picture of a flood, but picture the water pretty much flat where you would expect the 10 foot drop. Actually, it wasn't flat, but had a 3 foot drop followed by a 3 foot rise. The general water level was flat from above the dam to below the dam. We put in a few hundred yard upstream, near my cousin Bryan's cabin. I was up front, wearing the life jacket and paddling like hell (think back to the whitewater pictures above). When we hit the dam, the canoe when down the 3 feet, and the angle of the canoe never recovered. When we came up, we were almost at the bridge from which this picture was taken, to give you a sense of the distance.
Somehow, we pulled the canoe over to the side and got out. We walked all the way back over the bridge and back up to the house, coughing, sputtering and laughing the whole way up. I can't imagine how Muv felt watching that adventure.

The canoe made it to Charleston when we moved, but wasn't used in the harbor where the Ashley and the Cooper meet to form the Atlantic. I think TGP ended up giving it away to someone else in the Navy.

I guess this goes in the "Gee, it's great that we survived our childhood" category. In fact, it is a great story because it makes me smile. I wouldn't do that with my girls, but it is fun to remember.

Herman the Wonder Chicken

I'm not sure what inspired me to want to take Herman (a cement chicken) with me to New Haven for Freshman year at Yale. I actually wasn't brave enough to do it first thing in the fall, but I decided clearly enough that I wanted him that brother Dunn had to carry him through Laguardia Airport in the fall of 83. Good thing that was before the security they have in airports today, because I am sure Herman would not have made it through the carry ons.

This was the trip where upon arrival at the Old Campus, my whole family was looking for me (don't know why TGP didn't know where Phelps Hall was). They ran into Tom Fahsbender (I would love to contact him any yalies that know where he is let me know), fellow freshman, who happened to be in Calhoun College and knew me. Therefore, when TGP said "Do you know Eben Hollingsworth?", Tom was able to answer "You can't be his family, you all have shoes on". (As per the newspaper picture from 1979, I frequently did not wear shoes, even in that northern clime).


What does one do at Yale with a watch chicken, you may ask. We used him as a door stop and decoration, and the roomies were surprising tolerant (probably just thinking this was a southern thing) for all four years. I still don't know what Lo-Babe was doing with the towel in the picture.


Kim told me later on that he and sister Sophia actually lifted that cement chicken from a friend's lawn in Georgetown one night. I didn't know how it first appeared at Millstream but never thought to ask for years.

The saddest part of the Herman story is that I did not send him home after graduation. Herself claims now that she wanted to keep Herman and I refused to bring him home. I don't remember it that way, but then again, it's been over 25 years. I guess I didn't really see a concrete chicken as part of our married decorating scheme, so Herman stayed in the squash court storage in the basement of Calhoun College in May 1983. Hopefully, some underclassman put him to work the next fall. MA thinks someone probably threw him off of the balcony pictured here in the fall of 1983.

Surprisingly, years later, she wanted some homage to Herman. The chicken we bought in Pinehurst seems a pale comparison.

Gasoline

We had a small scale gasoline crisis in the ATL a couple of weeks back. After supper one night two weeks ago, we loaded up the dogs and the four of us spent 30 minutes in line at the local Shell station so we could get filled up. If you looked at the national gas price map, you would have seen that Atlanta was the darkest kind of red. The price has dropped a dollar a gallon since then, but everyone is still of a mind to make sure every drop counts.

I was listening to Click and Clack on NPR in August, and they got a call from a woman who lifted up the gas hose to empty the last few drops into her tank after she shut off the fuel pump. As you would expect, Tom and Ray mocked her severely. She was even forced to admit that her 16 year old son refused to follow her lead and raise the hose. Upon further inquiry, the Magliozzi brothers found out that her father had taught her the trick about lifting the gas hose.

I learned a lot about driving from TGP. He did a lot of random honking of the horn to keep rabbits out of the road. When queried as to the efficacy of that, the answer was always "You don't see any rabbits, do you?". There was also his axiom that once cruise control was set, it should never be broken. Muv's sucking in air through her teeth was not enough to provoke a slow down, whether for an off-ramp that really shouldn't be taken at 55 or a driver ahead of us that didn't understand his car needed to move back to the right lane.

The most lasting lesson Pha taught was that you should shake your car after the gas pump turns itself off so that the gas settles in the tank, making more room so you can top off the tank. You have to grab the car high on the back side and push and pull to rock it back and forth. It was probably an interesting sensation for those still in the vehicle. I persisted for years even over the protests of herself and wonderment of both girls. It was only when Helen and Jenny went on a long trip with MA and she told them stories about me that the teasing became too much to overcome and I had to stop. Not that I ever really got that much more gas in the car after shaking it, but it was a habit. Even so, I was able to stop cold turkey, and don't even do it on the sly when I am alone filling the car.

I really didn't get back at Helen until I showed her Scout's AKC registration. Our Welsh Terrier's official name is Helen Scout Poole.


In the end, watch your habits, because you never know which ones your children are going to pick up. At least teach them some good ones.

Managing Maxine

Herself and I went to the Alliance Theatre yesterday afternoon to see Managing Maxine. This production is the world premiere of a work written by Atlanta's own Janece Shaffer. We enjoyed dinner with Janece and her husband in August, and it was a great pleasure to see the finished work after hearing about its origin and evolution. I do not agree with the AJC's tepid review, and would encourage anyone in town to see this show.

The show is full of well painted personalities. It is multi-generational, but the truths about relationships cross all age barriers. I believe that Janece wanted us to leave the theatre more in love with our spouse and believing more in the possibilities of love, and she accomplished that. MA & I agreed that the whole show was really about acceptance. Once a couple truly accepts each other, they can have real intimacy.

The set was open, portraying the living spaces of three of the characters and the lighting was used to move from scene to scene. It worked well as we followed conversations between daughter and mother while seeing both.

The cell phone usage and conversational speech gave a very genuine feel to the entire production. We heard the actors in AfterTalk after the show and they talked about how their own experiences contributed to their performances. We felt that during the show.

We laughed and we cried; what more can you ask for from a couple of hours in the dark?

Sparky's ears, the sequel

Scottish Terrier puppy ears are fascinating to me, even if not to anyone else. After working at it so hard, Sparky got both ears up, as noted on the post from 9/20. Shortly after that post, as if to question my journalistic integrity, the right ear remained up, but the left one went down. Watch the ears from several angles:


This week, his ears are back up, presumably for good.




Lest we forget Helen Scout, the two of them continue to get along very well:


And finally, just because I am enjoying the pictures, remember the debate in the late 19th century about whether all four legs of a race horse were in the air at the same time. They used photographs to settle the question (they are). Scout's legs are also all in the air at the same time:

I Love Technology

The first half of this was written on 9/25, as I waited for Delta for 3 extra hours to get home after a conference in Canton, MA. The title, of course, comes from Kip's song (after the credits) in Napoleon Dynamite.

I'm stuck in Logan Airport with an hour to kill before my flight. Logan advertises their WiFi all over the airport, but I'm too cheap to pay the $10 per day for an hour's benefit to get access to the net. Unfortunately, all my story ideas are on my Google Docs. It's so rare these days to not have access to the net that leaving my story ideas there seemed perfect – I could get to them from whatever computer I was using.

The Legal Seafood test kitchen at Logan has, as always, a great clam chowder. The lobster roll isn't bad either.

What does ubiquitous connection to the net really mean? Google is betting that it means having all your data in the cloud is the technology of the future. As I use more and more different computers (2 desktops and 2 laptops at home, plus a work laptop), it's easier to imagine not caring which machine I'm on. My daughters' generation assumes it; they have never used an email client that stored the messages on their local hard drive.

Having all my data on the cloud reminds me of when daughter Eleanor first became vaguely aware of the telephone. She assumed that our home number in Mt. Pleasant would follow us when we went to a friend's house. Before she reached adulthood, that was her reality. The dorm freshman year included a land line; I don't think she ever gave out that number. She certainly never checked the old-fashioned answering machine I attached to it. The cell phone in my pocket is now the best way to reach me also.

As I review my airport ramblings towards the end of the next week, it's clear that the theme I was trying to get to while stuck at Logan is the evolution of technology to meet at least some of our expectations. Eleanor expects her phone number to follow her and eventually that's exactly the way it works. I have always thought we should have a cashless society. Clearly, I was ahead of my time.

In 1984, six months after our nuptials, I was on my first business trip. NDC was selling its pharmacy system to Rite-Aid and somehow I was sent to a 2 day meeting in nowhere Pennsylvania. It took one day more than expected to close the deal, so I extended my trip. That meant that I used the last of my cash in Washington National airport as I changed planes on the way home. I spent $10 in 1984 dollars for an unappetizing hot dog. I arrived at Hartsfield about 10pm. I recognized my dilemma immediately in that my VW Rabbit was in the parking lot and I didn't have the cash to get it out. There were no ATMs at the Airport. The ticket counters were closed, so no one could cash a check for me. The worst part is that I spent an hour looking around to try to find some way to fix my problem by myself. By the time I called my bride about 11pm, our friend Kim had just left the house after giving up on waiting for my return. MA had to go to the ATM on Jimmy Carter Blvd (a sketchy place even then), and then drive 20+ miles to the airport. That's an awful lot to ask from a 22 year old girl raised in small town SC, especially very late at night. When I saw the maroon Renault Alliance approach the drop-off point on the airport road, I was thrilled. Herself, clearly less so. She stopped and I opened the door. She threw a 20 dollar bill on the passenger seat. I grabbed it and she sped off quickly enough that the door closed on its own. It was a long drive up I-85 to the Treehouse apartments.

Today, the parking ticket machines inside the terminal don't even take cash to pre-pay before leaving ATL; they only take credit cards.

I love technology.

The Delightful Child

Lemon's Mill is not a road like many of you have driven with much regularity, but its character is central to this story. It is about a lane and a half wide and has some wicked curves. The curve and hill we remember most is the one where TGP has a wreck in his Omni (TGP was never really very good at picking cars). It really was a bad Sunday afternoon for USAA, because Muv ran headfirst into a station wagon driven by a pregnant lady on the way home from church. As we were waiting for police, etc., one of the bystanders was warning approaching traffic a little ways back from the first accident. TGP came along, saw the man waving his arms and decided it was better to run the Omni up the embankment rather than over the man directing traffic. It went up and then flipped over on its roof. Muv was close enough to see his flipped car and burst out in tears, thinking Pha was hurt. Instead, inside the upside down Omni, Pha was simply gathering his pocket contents off of the roof of the car before unbuckling, dropping, then crawling out. Anyway, Lemons Mill was how we always got from Georgetown to Sleepy Hollow.

I met Kimberly at swim practice, which was at the tiny indoor pool at Georgetown College. He had just moved from Olympia, Washington and we hit it off immediately.

His first visit to Sleepy Hollow, of course, took him out Lemons Mill Rd and he loves to tell the story of that trip. Not surprisingly, my brother Dunn was doing something challenging in the middle of the back seat as we were heading home. Muv was, as usual, going 70 down Lemons Mill. Dunn's action required some response from Muv, so she took off her shoe (at least in the story, it is pointy toed and high heeled) and beat him where he sat, without turning around or slowing down. Kim took great note and decided that Muv was someone to be respected.

Life went on and unlike the picture above, Kim became much bigger than me. Perhaps to avoid the "Boy named Sue" syndrome, he became affectionately known as Red; we became BFFs. Fast forward to my junior year in high school, and one of many random gatherings around the creek. Kim, me, Soph, Karen S. and probably several others of us were at the dock. Muv's rule was that no one could swim in the creek unless she was there. An interesting rule given that she couldn't swim a stroke. On the creek, the lure of the green water was too much for almost all of us and we used the tire swing to jump in. Kim, however, resisted the temptation and sat on the dock. As usually happens when kids are doing what they shouldn't, Muv came home as we were swimming. There is no way, especially without towels, to appear dry right after being in the Elkhorn. Muv surveyed us all in our wetness and contrasted it to Red's superbly dry self. She fussed at us all pretty strongly, but declared him a "delightful child".
Some thirty years later, he still is.

The drought in Georgia

We had the big pine tree in the front of the house die fairly suddenly a few weeks ago. Apparently, that's what happens after extreme drought. Even with slightly better rain this year, the dry times in the past were too much for that big old tree.

It took about 3 1/2 hours for the crew to take care of it, but I've condensed it into about a minute. Note the use of the "zip line". Because there are Crepe Myrtles right underneath the tree, they let the high cut branches slide down a rope into the yard instead of falling straight down.

Enjoy the video.

Sparky's ears are up

Doesn't he look great?

Scottish Terrier Ears

As our Sunday School teacher today said, you have to look for moments to celebrate "In the Meantime". She meant that real life frequently happens on the side while whatever else you are doing that you think is important is happening. Many of our moments lately have been puppy inspired. It's great to watch Sparky's ears evolve on their own from floppy and almost labrador-like to the standard firm up-pointing Scotty ears.

Remember Sparky at 8 weeks. Note the floppy ears:



By his second weekend here, he was more adventurous, but the ears haven't done too much:



Now at 10 weeks, Sparky's left ear is up. The right one is at three quarters. It's a very good look on him:

I'll post again when the ears are all the way up.

Just for fun, we have below Sparky's first hole, Scout and the soccer ball and both pups relaxing.




And finally, because Steve asked, here's 10 seconds of Scout playing soccer in the back yard:

Water balloons at UK

My hard-earned tuition dollars at work

Video

Oh, yes, Caroline was there. Bill was too.

Bow and Arrow

First, let me introduce Tom Grunwald, fourth form head and most interesting member of the Sayre School faculty, hereafter affectionately referred to as Gruner. I have also referred to TGP in an earlier post, and will frequently in the future. TGP is "The Great Pha". Pha is Father and the somewhat self-chosen moniker came about somewhere late in high school, during the trip he chaperoned to Williamsburg.

Anyway, on with the story. As part of American History in ninth grade, Gruner wanted us to understand what it took to create a bow and arrow. Actually, he was willing to provide the arrow; we just had to create the bow.

Living in the country, you would think that it wouldn't be too hard to find a suitable piece of pliable wood. Wikipedia says: "Find a piece of dry, dead but not gray and cracking hardwood--oak, hickory, yew, black locust, or teak" Honestly, I don't even remember the search across our acreage for the bow wood. We had birch and a few other types of trees, but Uncle Hall mowed just often enough that there wasn't a lot of dead wood anywhere on the property. I eventually found some piece of wood that I thought would be suitable and brought it home. I worked and worked at bending that wood so I could string the bow. It didn't bend much.

I do clearly remember that after my stringing effort failed, TGP came to the rescue. He promptly pulled and pulled and finally broke the bow that I had found. It was late and it was dark, so we shifted to the next obvious choice, a broom handle. Recall the Wiki article and the fact that there was no mention of broom handles. Think logically about what you want a broom to do (not bend) and contemplate what comes next. TGP said "Oh, it will be fine" with enough authority to inspire whittling. Amazingly enough, whittling was followed by an exceptionally long time in the bathroom with the shower on hot for steam. A 40 gallon hot water heater will only produce steam for so long (check with 19 y.o. Caroline for exactly how long), but that process was repeated for multiple cycles. Thankfully the Tankless Water Heater had not yet been invented. I'm surprised that my bathroom wallpaper even survived the night.

Very late that night I had, essentially, a tapered broomstick with a bow string that literally touched the bow for the length of it. Not any bend at all.

Now, being a straight A student, I was nervous going into class with my sorry bow. Gruner took one look at the contrivance and said, "Oh, it will be fine". Perhaps an interesting trait of Kentucky men, or just an interesting coincidence between Pha and my history teacher. We went from Old Sayre to the parking lot behind the gym. Several bows were demonstrated with real arrows and pullable strings. Gruner took what I brought from home and worked at stringing it. He just wanted to force a little bend in it.

Of course, Gruner broke the broom handle bow trying to string it there in the parking lot. I don't know what grade I got on that project, but it was not a high point of my academic career. It's not clear what we learned about native Americans, except that I bet they were better at making a bow than this ninth grader at Sayre. But I do laugh when I remember the story. And I love having grown up trying to make things out of orange juice cans and bailing wire.

Modern Communications

Well, response to the blog has been somewhat mixed. Most of my friends and family apparently don't do blogs on a regular basis. Someone guided me to Facebook instead, to see her profile, but I don't do social networks much. I am now on Facebook, with two friend invitations out. I've seen at least a few people that I have lost touch with that I will work towards reconnecting with via Facebook, which makes that effort worthwhile.

Anyway, even in the empty nest, with supper to make, puppies to walk and just a little relaxation time, it's hard to imagine how folks spend too much time on social networks or blogging.

That said, email has been a great boon to communication. I email my father-in-law almost every day and we both are better for that correspondence. And, to continue my edits on this post, I had to bring a laptop up to the bedroom, so electronics are good for something.

I talk with herself a lot about maintaining contact with people. It takes time and effort, and perhaps these mechanisms can be a way to leverage some of that time. College friendships seem easier by comparison because you're in close proximity with the people you want to see. Many of our friends and most of our family are tens of minutes if not hours away.

Herself wrote some hand written notes this evening. Now there's a communication method that we reserve only for expressions of gratitude.

Even after stewing for several days, this post is rambling. Then again, that may be what blogs look like.

Sparky Video

At least some of you have asked, so here is some video of Sparky:

A new addition

This is my first blog post. I still have some qualms about the public nature of blogging, but she who will be obeyed is rightly pressuring me to write some.

The Blog title, "What A Bunch" is what TGP said every night as we scattered to go to bed. I hope for these musings to be mostly about family, so the title seems appropriate.

This post should be about the new addition to our family. Reds fans from the 70s will remember Captain Hook, who pulled pitchers early in the game before that was cool. The Big Red Machine was always more about the bats than the arms. We have been a dog family since shortly after our move to a house with a real back yard in 1997. Teddy Shipou (whose story will certainly be in a later post) was a great dog, but he died rather suddenly earlier this summer. Both girls were home, which was a blessing. We mourned, but were ready to go back to being a two dog family again fairly soon. The girls insisted that we not get another Scottie that looked just like Teddy, therefore the more obscure white-haired variety became our focus.

Meet our version of Sparky Anderson:





Some challenges remain with formatting.


We'll see how this evolves. I anticipate musings on topics of interest, which will include family stories, grammar, software development, child rearing, my faith and who knows what else.

Stay tuned.