Victory.....!

It was a great victory, for GW Bush and our country. Democrats would disagree, but they should be used to being wrong. I am not, however, going to gloat. The President is not gloating, he and I are just glad that the elections are over. And before I move on I do have to thank John Kerry and/or those at the Democratic Party who had the sound thinking to not protest the results in several close states. Perhaps, just perhaps, this is the turning point in becoming a more civilized nation as pertains to our politics. I can only hope, and ask that the Republican Party try to answer in kind. This election is over.

I saw the USA Today map above referenced at Bunker Mulligan's Place and it really gave me pause. I'm interested in maps anyway and this one really caught my attention. It's a county-by-county breakdown of the voting, showing counties where the lead was more than 5% for Bush [Red] and Kerry [Blue] and illustrates graphically the divide, great and small, that we have geopolitically in this country. Looking at the MSM TV maps where the states are either Red or Blue in totality doesn't give the same effect, no sense of how much power the relatively small urban areas wield.

I've pondered awhile about the people, thinking and culture in the Blue areas. Some are obvious. On the West Coast you have the actors, "wing nuts", ex-hippies and new age practitioners i.e. California and the people who have moved to Oregon because California is to crowded. In the Seattle Bay area, it rains constantly and so people are depressed, perfect fodder for the Democrats. Anarchists are from here also.

On the North East Coast reside our betters, the cultural elite, Ivy League scholars, the old families, old money. i.e. those who think that we who live west of Pennsylvania are the great mass of unwashed peasants and farm hands. It's the other assorted Blue's that make me wonder what is going on in these scattered and diverse areas that would cause them to vote for John Kerry.

Except for the upper MidWest, which is an anomoly, I have to conclude that the driving force behind most of the "Blue" counties is economics. Wealth or mainly the lack of it. Wealth on the far East and West Coasts.....lack of it in between. Take a look starting in the east. You'll notice areas in Virginia, North and South Carolina ....the tidelands and Appalachia. Some of the worst poverty in the country and I'm sorry to say a population still waiting for government to bail them out of their misery. A little further Northwest you'll find blue areas in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Coal mining country, a depressed area for decades. In conjunction with Appalachia you'll see blue stretching into Northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The dead remnants of the Old South that have never really caught up. Further west, running north and south, you can outline the lower Mississippi River and the poverty that follows that waterway. I honestly don't know what is the matter there....it's just poor. Finally, one last look in the Eastern U.S. around the Great Lakes and you'll notice the outline that was once, and probably still is, known as the "Rust Belt". No wonder they'd be bitter about jobs going overseas.

As stated above, the upper Mid West is hard to understand. A bundle of blue that is not, I think, related to poor economic standing. I know many people from this area, and most are hard working patriotic Americans. Why they continue to vote with a liberal bent I think is more related to their heritage. Germanic and Scandanavian stock who somehow, I'll wager, have a touch of socialism programed in. My Grandmother's father came from Germany, she went to the University of Wisconsin. The one time she worked in her life, she was a social aide worker. She was a liberal.

In my home state of Texas there are five blue zones. No questions about those. Three along the Rio Grande River are El Paso, Presidio and the lower Rio Grande Valley. Hispanic and dirt poor. A fourth is around the Beaumont/Port Arthur area. Sorry that I'm not versed enough to know exactly why with a fairly vibrant Texas economy that these folks are not doing well, but they never seem to. To close to Louisiana I suppose. The fifth small blue outpost towards the center of the state is Austin, which has always been a magnet for.....well see California above.

The Blue tracts in the vast majority of the great West are large but spread thinly. One has to ponder a little more deeply to concieve of the answer for their existance. Pardner that's Indian country. Many of the large Democratic areas are Indian reservations particularly in Northern New Mexico and Arizona. I have great admiration and sympathy for American Indians, their poverty is by and large a product of Government ineptidude and failure. To bad they vote Democratic, perhaps they don't connect the two.

Lastly, the remaining areas in the West are not born of poverty but of the Democrats new found friend, wealth. Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Aspen and Whitefish Lake Montana.....blue all. But of course these too are inhabited by ordinary common folk. Common millionaires.

Hope you enjoyed the tour, please leave any observations that you might have. And rest easy tonight, the country is in good hands for four more years.

Twick or Tweat.....!

Truco O Convite! We're right in the middle of Halloween as I write. Don't know about your neighborhood, but we get very few "local" kids. We mainly have kids from more disadvantaged neighborhoods whose parents truck them over [literally] for their trick or treat goodies. Some of our neighbors leave their lights off and don't participate....and I have to say that occasionally I think that it's a tad to much when 6 or 8 kids get out of the back of a pickup and show up at the door.

But Julie always buys lot's of goodies for these folks who have less than we do. And I'll have to brag, that these kids who show up at our door in Midland Texas are supremely well behaved, are generally cute as a bug and always say "thank you". If they don't, their Mom or Dad who is standing behind them reminds them, sometimes in broken English, to do so.

The only problem we had was a cute little companêro who showed up sporting a Kerry/Edwards button. I told him that he was an evil little boy and would get no candy. And I also took his picture and said that I was sending it to Santa Claus so he would also get no Christmas presents.

OK, he got candy too, but hope he remembered what we were wearing [above]. By the way the picture will stay at the masthead until Tuesday. It's a busy week for us and don't know if I'll have time to post any passing thoughts, so just want visitors to be reminded of the right thinking way to vote.

Ramblin' Thoughts....

I've been a little flumoxed this week.....so decided to just pass on a few thoughts. Flumoxed, I've always liked that word. It should be used more. I'm flumoxed for several reasons.

My partners and I have been working on a big project in the gas business for over two years and next Thursday we give our presentation to the board of directors of a major NYSE utility company who, if all goes well, will partner with us in the effort. The fate of the free world depends on this meeting. We'll, OK, the fate of creating a permanently endowed income for my family rests on this meeting. A really good income. So I've been creating a PowerPoint™ show of epic proportions for the event. Love PowerPoint™ and I've pulled out all the stops on this one. I've loaded it on my server so that executives in New Jersey who can't physically be at our meeting in Odessa will be able to follow along via the Internet during the teleconference we are running in conjunction with the meeting. Oh, and in addition to the meeting on Thursday, the managing director/energy of a rather large German bank will be coming on Tuesday to see about financing the project. We've been working on Word© creating a paper presentation for him. So....I'm rather computered out for the moment.

My second area of flumoxation, and one that has stuck in my craw all week, was our semi-usual political conversation with my Mother at lunch on Sunday. To summarize: she's a liberal.......she's gotten worse. In a nutshell I think that she still identifies the Democratic Party with FDR, something that I have not blamed her for. She lived thru the depression and he was her President for all those years. Her thought is that the DEM's help poor people. Nice thought from a rich lady. But, truthfully, her support of Kerry has gone beyond that. Like many of the sort, she really has no positive things to say about his plans or even about him personally. She just dislikes Bush. In fact on Sunday, she made her "liberalness" complete. While Julie and I were pointing out the many, shall we say, "discrepencies" in Kerry's career, my Mother got flumoxed herself and just blurted out...."I don't care I just don't like Bush, he's stupid". My Mother is not a stupid person herself, I suppose just brainwashed. Go to the links at right and click on "Dissceting Leftism" by John Ray. You'll probably find my dear Mother's picture there. Textbook case.

So much for areas of flumoxation. Here's a thought. Osama Bin Laden. This week I was almost ready to write an article stating that I had revised my thoughts and now believed that there was a fair chance that OBL was, in fact, dead or captured. We hadn't heard anything crediblly ascribed to him in a very long time. Being a media egotist of some high degree I thought his absence from the airwaves was a good sign.

But today Osama would have made me look foolish.....he's back. Ossie just couldn't let the U.S. elections go by without giving us his thoughts. Something, however, did seem different about his rhetoric. The bits and pieces of his screed that I caught didn't seem like the Osama of old. He talked about his corps being "freedom fighters" instead of Jihadists. He seemed to indicate that if the West would leave the Arab World alone the terror problem would be eased. That's a major shift from previous rants about the decadent West and killing all the infidels. It makes me wonder what's going on with Osama. Perhaps living under a rock for two years has made him rethink his religous fervor. Maybe he's getting anger management counseling in Pakistan. Who knows.....I'm just glad that he reminded us he's there. It helps in the President's campaign.

Eclipsing all.....!

What a stroke of fate. For the last several days the usually clear skies of West Texas have been obscured by clouds. Knowing that there would be a full lunar eclipse tonight, I didn't have much hope that we would see any of it.

But at about 9:45 the clouds gave way to a fully clear sky revealing the moon already passing through the earth's shadow. A grand sight...and one that I'm sure gave many ancient, native people quite a worry.

A total eclipse one might ask, well how come I can still see the moon in a faint red hue? The answer is thus. During an eclipse, when the Moon is in the Earth's shadow, there is a little bit of sunlight that passes through our atmosphere and is deflected by the Earth's gravity. White light from the sun is composed of all the colors of the rainbow, but our atmosphere treats different colors differently. Blue-colored light is scattered in all directions by airborne molecules. This is the same phenomenon that causes the sky to be blue. Red-colored light, on the other hand, is scattered very little. However, it is refracted inward toward the Moon. Red light that hits the Moon is reflected back toward Earth, so that we see the Moon glowing red during totality. If the Earth did not have an atmosphere, the Moon would be nearly black during a total lunar eclipse.

So now you know the rest of the story and I hope it was a cloudless night at your home.

The Little Scholar....!

The picture at left is our little scholar, Jack, who received all "A"s this term in the fifth grade at the St. Ann's Catholic School. This in addition to participating full time in two sports. We are very proud of him.

Condiment of Choice....

Now you have a choice in your ketchup. Heinz 57 Vagaries or American made......

W Ketchup is America’s Ketchup™

Letter from Kabul......

I stay in touch with many people from my days of service in the Army. One of those is my old company commander in the 25th Infantry Division, Bill Schofield. In one of the strangest coincidences of my life I first ran into Bill in civilian life in mid town Manhattan four years after I resigned from the army. I was waiting for an elevator in a very large office building. When the elevator door opened, there was Bill, the only person getting off, while I was the only one getting on. I think it shocked us both. Since that time Bill has been with the U.S. State Deptartment and has advanced to Senior Attache, now stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan for a two year tour. While in Santa Fe, I got an email from him. I thought you might like to read excerpts.
-----------------------====Letter from Kabul=====--------------------------

"I have been in Afghanistan just over two months now and wanted to say hello and pass along some observations you might find interesting.

I arrived August 29 on a flight from Baku. Once we passed over the Caspian Sea, the landscape turned brown and we flew over one ridgeline after another until we reached Kabul. Mountains surround the city. There is almost no greenery. Dust covers everything. On a clear day, the mountains are spectacular, even a little snow on top of some. When it is dusty, however, you cannot see all of them and the sun is dim.

The embassy is a construction site inside of a firebase. We work in the old embassy building. Next to it, we are building a new, six-story embassy and an apartment building. They are scheduled to open summer 2005. A wall topped by concertina surrounds everything and there are guard towers on the corners. A Marine rifle company secures the embassy. We also have some civilian “shooters” and Ghurkas. Most people now live in CAFÉ (compound across from embassy) across the street. It is several rows of white “houches” - renovated shipping containers, a dining facility, and a few offices surrounded by a wall with wire on top. It looks like an upscale POW camp or prison.

Living is much better than I had anticipated. Some people have even started to wear ties to work. The work-week is Thursday through Sunday. The “hooches” are comfortable; there is TV, a gym, and a track. There is time to read or study Dari. The food is good, but aimed at a 19-year old Marine. In the dining room next to the Marine barracks you can get all the meat and fries you want. The troops lean their weapons against the wall and watch sports or action movies on a big screen TV during meals.

Kabul is a congested, bustling city. It suffered a lot of damage in the fighting after 1989. The streets are torn up and buildings damaged. About 2m refugees and displaced persons came here in the past two years, so the infrastructure is over-taxed. The city is full of little shops with good-looking fruit and vegetables. There are quite a few brick office buildings and blocks of six-story Soviet-style apartments. Some large, luxurious homes are springing up, allegedly owned by drug dealers. Most smaller houses and shops are made from mud bricks. They cover the sides of the hills, as well as downtown. Traffic is heavy, a combination of little yellow and black taxis, Toyota Landcruisers that the foreigners drive, big, brightly painted trucks and buses, military vehicles, horses, little donkeys, and the occasional camel. Since Ramadan started, it has gotten worse as people often go home around noon

Security is an overriding concern. ISAF, the NATO-led force, patrols in and around Kabul. The day I arrived, a car bomb exploded at an office in downtown Kabul and killed a dozen people, including three Americans. Since then, we have not been able to go to stores or restaurants. We can go to work-related meetings and there are bazaars on Friday at military compounds. In Kabul, you can drive without protection. If you go outside the city, military or civilian “shooters” must accompany you and you wear a flak jacket in some places. Occasionally, the Taliban or their associates fire rockets at the city. These old, inaccurate Soviet weapons have not hit near the embassy or, fortunately, populated areas of the city. You can hear the explosions, then sirens sound and you go to the bunker until the all clear. The bunker is a building protected with sandbags and other barriers.

I get out almost every day and have had the chance to travel outside of Kabul. A few weeks ago, a couple of us went to Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan toward the border with Pakistan. We flew in a small Beechcraft over the mountains and then down a green valley to the airstrip. We stayed with a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), a military unit composed of a civil affairs team, a security force, and representatives of State, USAID, and sometimes the Agriculture Department. A PRT is designed to strengthen security in the countryside and do some civic action work. This PRT had a company from the Iowa National Guard, some elements from Utah, and a Marine company. Within the city – Jbad to the troops – a couple of soldiers went with us. When we drove an hour east of the city, we traveled in five Humvees with 20 Marines.

The drive along the main east-west road was fascinating. It was a combination of new truck stops and scenes right out of the Bible: brown desert broken up by green areas; small donkeys carrying wood or pulling carts; mud huts surrounded by walls; a group of Kuchi nomads and their camels in the distance. On the way back after our meetings, we ran into a stand off over land between two families. They had faced off about one hundred yards apart, blocking the road. One man was wounded and evacuated in a new, silver taxi. We dismounted and waited until this ended. Everyone along the road was friendly and resigned to the delay.

A few weeks later, we went to Parwan, north of Kabul, for a DDR (disarm/demobilize/reintegrate) meeting with the governor and local militia commanders, the polite word for warlord. This group was part of the Northern Alliance that had fought the Soviets and then the Taliban. They had recently agreed to turn in their weapons and return to civilian life. After the meeting, the commander invited about 50 of us to lunch at his headquarters in an old Soviet base. He had a few hundred mujahideen (fighters) in formation for a ceremony. Someone sang a few verses from the Koran, the commander gave a speech, and then we had lunch of rice, lamb, chicken, and nan (bread). There were forks for the foreigners, but most ate with their fingers and nan.

The elections October 9 had been our focus for a couple of months. I went to Peshawar in the Frontier Province in Pakistan to observe voting in the refugee camps. I do not want to seem too much of a Pollyanna, but it was very impressive. There was a good turn out and everything was organized. A lot of young men, old men right out of central casting, and quite a few women voted. There were separate polling stations for men and women. Some women did not want people to know they had voted and asked the poll workers to put the ink they used to mark the fingers of voters only on the inside of their thumbs. It took courage for women in some places to vote. There were problems with the election, as the media reported, but overall I think it was a major success. We all expected some efforts by the Taliban to disrupt the voting, but they did nothing. Still a long way to go in stabilizing Afghanistan, but this was a good step.

A few of the addressees on this message served 30+ years ago in the 35th. Infantry, 25th. Infantry Division. TF CACTI, 2/35 Infantry, now operates in Paktika Province south of Kabul. MG Olson, CG, 25th Div, commands TF 76, the US force that chases the Taliban. I sat in on his briefing a week or so ago on security for the elections. The soldiers still refer to the “Tropic Lightening” patch as the “Electric Strawberry.” It was odd to see that patch on desert camouflage rather than the old green jungle uniform. These soldiers and Marines are a bunch of good young men and women doing a sometimes dangerous job a long way from home.

I hope this message finds you well. I look forward to seeing you when I get home.

Bill"

Go Cardinals......!

Rooting for the Cardinals, I was not a popular fan in my home. But what was I to do with an autographed picture of Stan Musial hanging over my desk? My parents are from St. Louis, my grandparents are from St. Louis. The first time I ever went to a ballgame was at the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, when I was 5 years old. Need I say more?

We're back........!

We arrived back in the flatlands of West Texas yesterday evening and have spent the last 24 hours getting resettled in the humdrum of daily life. It's tough doing that when you've been to a place so wonderful as Northern New Mexico. I'd love to write a prosaic essay about the trip but I'm not enough of a master of prose to do that. As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words" so I'll let some photo images do the talking for me.

New Mexico photos that speak for me

I do have much to say about the trip and will start off by firstly thanking my bride for arranging it for us. We both love New Mexico, but she knows I don't like to go to long without a trip to the Santa Fe area and this time she made that possible. Secondly we met some great folks at all the spots we hit. In Galisteo I got to talk at length with three excellent photographers and have corresponded with two of them since we got back. As suberb as these men are, they were interested in my ability to use the Internet to sell photos online on my We Were Soldiers website. They want to learn how to do it. Besides these artists and by pure serendipity the fellow who sat next to me on the train trip from Chama was a Vietnam combat photographer. The photo of me via the link above was taken by him. Who could have asked for a more interesting person for us to travel along with. He is already helping me with a project I'm working on to display combat photography at our museum.

Thirdly and the theme of my short essay tonight is the politics we encountered. Coming from downtown Bushville, we were in cultural shock being around so many Kerry/Edwards stickers, banners and pins. Now we're not naive, we know that Santa Fe and places like it tend to be more liberal. What got to us was who was sporting these little Kerry mementoes. Well of course it was the middle class. Middle class if you consider people roaming Canyon Road in tweed, turtlenecks and silk sports coats to be middle class. Middle class people who were having a hard time finding parking spaces for their Lexus's, Jaguars and Mercedes. For those not familiar with Canyon Road, it's the trendy art gallery area of Santa Fe. And not art ala velvet Elvis. Were talking five figure art.

These people are middle class to someone like John Kerry I suppose. With a family net worth of $800 million or so, these people who may only have several million, might as well be common laborers. I don't think that the real middle class would identify with these people either. The real middle or lower class can barely afford to eat on Canyon Road, much less buy art there. And that's the secret to why so many silk sports coats wearers driving Mercedess like enclaves such as Santa Fe, Sedona or Boulder. They don't have to deal with the little people of America at these place...except to wait on them in a fashionable gallery or restaurant. That's why there are so many Kerry pins and buttons on Canyon Road.

The other observation I have is the unusually large number of groups of single slightly past middle aged women I see traveling together in Santa Fe. Not the dolled up Texas style "girl weekend" sort that go to Dallas to hit all the stores. These groups in Santa Fe look like they have escaped from a nunnery. [no offense to nuns meant]. They wear no makeup, usually have short hair or their slightly graying hair pulled back and the clothing, though expensive and trendy, is definetly understated. Not lesbians I think. No, from overhearing their conversations from time to time I suspect that these types are PhD's in humanities at eastern universities or work without pay for some UN organization. They were wearing Kerry pins and buttons too.

Riding the rails...

The day was unbelievable. We arose before dawn to start our 100 mile journey north to Chama and the Cumbres and Toltec Railway. This is a trip that Julie had planned for me some time ago and I was not disappointed. If you've never ridden a steam locomotive high into the Rockies, it's something you need to do during your time here on earth.

The 64 mile trip starts in Chama at an elevation of 7200 ft. and wends and winds it's way through New Mexico and Colorado [crossing the border 15 times!] ending up in Antonito Colorado after passing through mountain passes at over 10,000 ft. Early clouds broke as we started out and the sun was magnificent on the golden shades of the aspens. The blue of the sky at that altitude is stunning and made for great photography. The first half of the trip tranverses canyons so tightly that the faint of heart will swoon. The grades are steep allowing a maximum speed of only 5-6 mph so there is plenty of time to enjoy the sights.

At the half way point of the trip the train stops at a high mountain station for a really great homemade lunch prepared by folks who have to drive 17 miles through dirt roads to get there. All the folks on the train eat together and so we got a chance to get to know some of our fellow travelers including, to my liking, a former Vietnam Army combat photographer. As the train stopped for lunch we noticed low clouds gathering again and at that altitude this meant snow.

And snow it did. The 1920's coaches were a bit cool as we started out again, but my prefered place had been on the open flatcar and so back I went. What an experience photographing the canyons, tunnels, trees and mountain peaks thru a blinding snowstorm! The snow did not stop until we reached the lower areas around Antonito when once again the sun burst through upon a grazing herd of antelope and mountain ranges across the valley of southern Colorado.

In Antonito a plush tourist bus takes the travelers back to their cars in Chama. And there the dramatic part of the tour unfolded as we crossed the pass at 10,200 feet in a blizzard. We all tipped our driver Joe for getting us through safely. Slippery roads with 300 ft drop offs can get even the most stalwart a bit nervous. But arrive back we did and started our trip back in the gorgeous New Mexico twilight.

I can't wait for you to see the pictures! Back home Monday night.

Riding the rails...

The day was unbelievable. We arose before dawn to start our 100 mile journey north to Chama and theCumbres and Toltec Railway . This is a trip that Julie had planned for me some time ago and I was not disappointed. If you've never ridden a steam locomotive high into the Rockies, it's something you need to do during your time here on earth.

The 64 mile trip starts in Chama at an elevation of 7200 ft. and wends and winds it's way through New Mexico and Colorado [crossing the border 15 times!] ending up in Antonito Colorado after passing through mountain passes at over 10,000 ft. Early clouds broke as we started out and the sun was magnificent on the golden shades of the aspens. The blue of the sky at that altitude is stunning and made for great photography. The first half of the trip tranverses canyons so tightly that the faint of heart will swoon. The grades are steep allowing a maximum speed of only 5-6 mph so there is plenty of time to enjoy the sights.

At the half way point of the trip the train stops at a high mountain station for a really great homemade lunch prepared by folks who have to drive 17 miles through dirt roads to get there. All the folks on the train eat together and so we got a chance to get to know some of our fellow travelers including, to my liking, a former Vietnam Army combat photographer. As the train stopped for lunch we noticed low clouds gathering again and at that altitude this meant snow.

And snow it did. The 1920's coaches were a bit cool as we started out again, but my prefered place had been on the open flatcar and so back I went. What an experience photographing the canyons, tunnels, trees and mountain peaks thru a blinding snowstorm! The snow did not stop until we reached the lower areas around Antonito when once again the sun burst through upon a grazing herd of antelope and mountain ranges across the valley of southern Colorado.

In Antonito a plush tourist bus takes the travelers back to their cars in Chama. And there the dramatic part of the tour unfolded as we crossed the pass at 10,200 feet in a blizzard. We all tipped our driver Joe for getting us through safely. Slippery roads with 300 ft drop offs can get even the most stalwart a bit nervous. But arrive back we did and started our trip back in the gorgeous New Mexico twilight.

I can't wait for you to see the pictures! Back home Monday night.

A great day in Galisteo....

This morning, from Santa Fe, we drove the 25 miles down to the small town of Galisteo an historic town and for decades an artists mecca. Today was the "Studio Tour" where one was invited in to the aritsts studios to few there work. As an added attraction since most arists work at their residences, we had the opportunity to walk through some fabulous homes.

We spent the bulk of our time talking with the photographers on the tour. There are some world class photographers working out of Galisteo and their hospitality was second to none. Several of them had homes with views of the distant Ortiz Mountains that could only be called stunning. I bought one landscape image from Richard Shuff, but could have come home with 20 or 30 more...easily. I'm sure we'll be purchasing more soon and I'll have the web links to their sites when we return home.

We had a great visit with noted Midland artist Woody Gwyn who took time out from preparing for a New York showing of his works to show us his new works and give us a short history of Galisteo and his historic home. The house was built in 1703 and through the years has seen some notable historic visitors including Civil War era generals Sibley and Kearney. Woody also gave up signed limited edition copies of the book concerning his work and a new portfolio just out for a showing he had in Santa Fe recently.

Time now to go rest for a moment before our trip back into Santa Fe and dinner at the ever popular Pink Adobe restaurant. It never disappoints. Before I go, I have to say that if you have never been in Northern New Mexico in October, you have to come soon. The cottonwood trees are the most golden yellow allowed by nature and against the supremely blue sky and distant snow capped peaks it's a sight you just can't believe.

Friday evening in Santa Fe....

A beautiful cool crisp evening in Santa Fe with just a sliver of a moon diving behind the mountains in the western skies as we ventured up Canyon Drive in search of a light meal. And what better spot than the El Farol and it's Spanish chef with his tapas treats.

The El Farol has been a restaurant in Santa Fe since 1835 and in approximately the same location as it is today. The food is excellent though since we didn't have reservations we had to sit on the veranda overlooking the road. A little cool in the mountains once the sun goes down, but well worth the taste treat. I like the tapas concept....a miniature sized portion with extreme flavor. Julie had chared filet on a skewer with small sweet onions and flavored with an herb that was unidentifiable yet pleasantly sweet.I had a small chicken breast with chipolte peppers and the same sweet onions. Due to the chill in the air we both had a delightful strong coffee with raspberry flan for a sweet small dessert.

We are now back to the comfort of the El Rey with a fire going in the kiva fireplace in our room. More tomorrow from Galisteo.

Howdy from Santa Fe..

Miracle of miracles, nowadays even hotels originally built in the 1930's have high speed internet access. And so I'm sitting in the lobby of the El Rey Hotel, overlooking what was once Route 66, writing to you from the beauty of Santa Fe.

We arrived in Santa Fe about noonish local time after an easy trip from Midland via SouthWest Airlines. The weather is gorgeous, really warmer than we had anticipated. However the mountains behind Santa Fe have a beautiful crown of snow, which when accentuated by the golden glow of the turning leaves on the cottonwood trees makes the scenery all that we hoped for.

Our room wouldn't be ready until 3 p.m. so we drove the short way into the heart of town near the plaza and had a leisurely lunch in one of our favorite eateries, The Plaza Cafe. I had a regular sirloin burger while Julie had some scrumptuous quesidilla's with fresh squash, onions, "pulled" chicken, corn, sauteed mushrooms and a heavy dose of fresh garlic. A treat for which she is paying. She's down the road purchasing some Pepto as I relate these facts to you. We browsed some of the shops and galleries near the plaza and had a nice chat with my friends at Andrew Smith's photography gallery.

Santa Fe seems more crowded than usual so, after the late lunch, we may not "do" any of our regular restaurants tonight, but dine on some lighter fair. We'll be up early tomorrow for our trip down the road to Galisteo. I'm looking forward to some great photo op's!! Hopefully more reporting from the road tomorrow.

Gone away.....

We'll be gone and blogless for several days. We're heading to Santa Fe for our annual fall get away in that region. It's about time.

I imagine we'll hit some of the galleries Friday afternoon including one of my favorites the Andrew Smith Gallery. Andrew has one of the premier photographic galleries in the country, I'm in awe everytime we browse there. And by chance, one of their chief buyers will be at our museum in Midland next week to give a lecture on buying photographic images. I wish I could afford an Ansel Adams.

Saturday we are heading down the road to Galisteo home of 270 friendly souls including our friend, noted artist Woody Gwyn. Woody is an affable artiste and we look forward to touring his historic home and studio, the Ortiz Hacienda, which was built in 1703.

On Sunday Julie has arranged another railroad treat for us...a trip on the scenic Cumbres&Toltec Railroad near Chama N.M. Photo opportunities abound on this trip and the fall foliage, cool crisp atmosphere and mountain scenery should make my life a busy one processing images upon our return. See you on Tuesday, in the meantime talk amongst yourselves.

The Third Man......

I don't comment on entertainment or films very often and for good reason. You wouldn't be much interested. I admit to having eclectic tastes in the cinematic arts area and I am not much of a current run movie goer. I like what I like....and there's not much of what I like coming out of Hollywood these days.

I stayed up much to late last night watching a movie I've only seen snippets of over the years. I've never seen the whole movie, but I've always been enthralled by the films background music and have heard it since childhood. It's zither music. Like I said...eclectic.

I had gone to turn the TeeVee off at about 11 p.m. and as the Mrs. and I are wont to do I flipped over to one of our "default" channels, Turner Classic Movies for one last look. [as an aside, TCM is Ted Turner's one saving grace..24 hours of classic flicks with no commercials. It's like he's repenting for CNN!] The host, the congenial Robert Osborne, was just introducing the film, "The Third Man" English version.. as opposed to the American version. I didn't know there were two. IMDB.com, the authoritative online film database lists it as the 40th best film ever as voted by their knowledgable readers and I've read where it was also voted the best British film ever made. I'll wager it's the least famous "famous" film in existance.

Based on a Graham Greene story, "The Third Man" is of the film noire genre, both in philosphy and in fact....much of it is filmed at night or very darkly. The story is a mystery and is good, but what makes the film for me is the photography and in fact the cinematographer won an Oscar for his work. The odd low angles, the sharp oversizesd shadows and contrasts of the shots suit my style as a photographer. Set in post WWII Vienna, the filming in 1949 was done mostly on site in Austria amid the still very much visible rubble remaining after the war and adds to the character of the images.

Only four actors among the myriad in the cast were recognizable to me. Joseph Cotten, a young Trevor Howard, Orson Welles and Bernard Lee, who later played "M" in the James Bond series. The rest of the ensemble are European character actors who make the movie all at once dark, artsy and quirky. I think quirky by design. Any film that features a continual light backdrop of the same theme played by a zither virtuoso has to be termed quirky. Especially the almost comical loud flat notes when anything suspenseful happens.

The closing scene is, in my opinion, one of the best in filmdom, both as a photographic image and as an unclosed romantic mystery. Try "The Third Man", you might like it. I can't wait to see it again to catch more of the nuances.

Now showing on Dutch TeeVee...

The Mrs. has launched her film career in the Netherlands. Dutch news producer Sander sent me a nice note of thanks for his visit here in Midland and directed my attention to this link to his online journal to view a short clip of his Midland interviews. To view the story use the link and then go to the, "Op zoek naar de wortels van president Bush" video link at the right.

I hope you have better luck than I have had viewing this on our two computers. I can hear the audio but haven't been able to pull up the video portion yet. I'll keep trying and we'll be ready to travel to Holland for the Dutch Emmy awards.

Newsworthy.......

Once again Julie is a hot international news commodity. As you may know she was President G.W. Bush's secretary for four years back in the good old days when Dubya was a lowly independent oilman. Over the last year or so we have hosted news and documentary film crews from the BBC in Britain and the Arte Television Channel of France and Germany wanting to learn the inside scoop on George and how Midland has made the man.

Today, through our agent Natalie at Jessica's Well we filmed with a crew from Dutch public television. We met at the site of the President's boyhood home, not far from our estate, which is now being transformed into a tourist destination. I wasn't privy to Julie's interview but knowing her it went well. She looked lovely and I'm sure the audience in Holland will be impressed with her wit and wisdom. Producer Sander Warmerdam is a genial fellow as were his interviewer and cameraman and we enjoyed spending part of an afternoon with them. I think this also tells us something about the state and direction of the US media. Three seperate European news organizations have sent reporters out here to the hinterlands to find out more of what makes President Bush who he is and as far as I know, not one single American reporter has bothered to show up. Go figure.

Sander and crew are in the US to chronicle the last days of the election process by visiting small town America, starting out in Midland and driving cross country to Boston....from Bush to Kerryland as they described it. You can catch his journey at his weblog Amerika Kiest. I suspect we'll be mentioned tomorrow. Hope your Flemish is better than mine.

As the old saying goes, "be careful what you ask for...you just might get it" With a prolonged drought in West Texas what we had been asking for was rain. And this year, this month we have gotten it. If your eyes are on the downhill side, the rain gauge at left reads over 2.5 inches. And that was just in the last two days. More specifically the last two nights. I hesitate to say it, but enough is enough. I'll rue this statement some months from now, because the commonly held community ethos in West Texas says that you can never have enough rain. But for now we've had more than enough to suit me, the

Mrs. and the two dogs who cohabitate with us.... young Jack is ambivalent. The middle of the night extreme thunderstorms are stating to affect my good nature. On Tuesday night I was up at 1:30 and 4:00 A.M. Last night I was up at at 1:30 once again setting out the leak buckets.

In spite of my best efforts, or probably because of them, the roof over the den has a leak. Several years ago I noticed the beginnings of the leak around the fireplace and set about fixing it. There was some fairly obvious decay in the flashing where the chimney enters the roofline. Some synthetic tar seemed to do the job during the next year of light rains. But now with gushers arriving every night, the devious water has found another route to drain down through the roof, into the interior canned lighting and thence to the floor. Not a good situation. It has been raining for the last three weeks and the house is beginning to smell moldy like a Louisiana fishing cabin.

The dogs are none to happy either. And thusly the woman of the house is not happy and ergo, I'm not happy. The Big Gold Dog has always been thunderstorm averse, the condition manifesting itself by putting him into a catatonic state...with panting. Lot's of panting. And since he needs comfort during this crisis, he desires to be right next to the nearest human being...while panting. Three weeks of this can get on the nerves of even the best friend of a dog....or his wife. When the storms start Daphne, the outdoor dog, gives up all claims to a life outdoors and tries her best to become an indoor dog. Whining, barking, running crazily, peering in the back door with a frenzied look that says, "I'm dying out here, Pleeease let me in...now"! This approach works on me until I let her in and the frenzied running continues, except now it's frenzied running with muddy paws all over our tasteful pale tan Berber carpet. This makes the wife start her own frenzied running...after me.

With 2 months to go in the year, we are about 3 inches over our yearly average. We have been under flash flood watches and warnings continuously now for 5 days..with a tornado alert thrown in every now and then just to keep us on our toes. Five inches of rain fell in an afternoon in Andrews County to the north of us...causing all work to cease in the oil fields. Our Spanish tile patio has brown algae and scum growing on it. But as I peer out the window at the office this afternoon, the sun is blazing brightly so perhaps we're over the worst. Maybe. This is what I thought the last two afternoons as I peered out the window to see the sun blazing brightly. But it's OK, you know in West Texas you can never get enough rain!

Air Sho..fog, storms and disappointment

In the decade and some years of the CAF being headquartered in Midland, we've never even come close to a rainout of the Air Sho. But all good things must end and today was the day. Dawn broke with low clouds, fog and drizzle but the forecast called for the weather to change. And it did, with thunderstorms and more low clouds.

At the pilot's briefing the prediction was for all the weather to lift between eleven and one o'clock, so we knew we might have to adjust things in the show to some degree. But the "lifting" never came, only a few breaks that served to falsely raise our hopes. By 1:30 the main event, the Tora Tora Tora reenactment of Pearl Harbor, was scrapped and we never got anything else significant off the ground. Most of our loyal fans stuck with us, however, and we did have all planes do a powered run down the taxiway in front of the crowd.

The crowd did get an extraordinary thrill however from our explosives teams. The charges that make up the explosions for the show are laid early in the morning and so were ready to go for this afternoons show. Not to disappoint, the decision was made to fire off this significant amount of ordnance in rapid fire fashion. To say the least it was impressive.

Later in the afternoon, with a thunderstorm on it's way a few entrepid aviators did take to the skies including the Masters of Disaster Aerobatics team. I would term them "The Three Stooges take to the air". Some exceptional flying and at very low level below the clouds. The Jet Truck is also part of their act...zooming along at 400 mph on the runway while the three biplanes try to run into each other in the air. I have to admit, their aerobatics are the closest I've seen to pilots having a mid-air and getting away with it. We also had a low level demonstration of the F-16. F-16's normally use airspace upwards in altitude of 15,000 feet in their shows. This was all below 4000 feet, mostly high speed passes, which suited the crowd just fine.

I feel a great disappointment about the situation today, mainly for the many 1000's of people who come to the airshow. A great many come every single year..and look forward to it each and every time. Many more are first time visitors who are there to see what I consider to be one of the best entertainment and historical events in the country. Like one couple with two small children. They looked and sounded to be Eastern Europeans. They stopped me and asked in broken English..."will there be flying today"? I had just heard an announcement from the "Show Boss" over my radio that the Tora Pearl Harbor event was scrapped so I had to tell these nice people that "flying didn't look good today". I've never seen four people look so crestfallen. I hope they had a good time anyway and that they'll come back next year.

Today's amazing pictures: Sunday Air Sho Pictures

It's Show Time....

The weather was ominus and rather eerie when I arrived for Air Show duty around 8 A.M. today. With the ceiling hovering around 5-7,000 feet and stiff winds flying, both aerobatic and formation, would be difficult....but the show goes on. Shortly before the first flights went up it did rain some big heavy drops, but then stopped. So the aerobatics pilots, professionals that they are, went about their business. And my transportation personnel went about their business of hauling aviation devotees in. 1000's of them. A little "iffy" weather doesn't stop most old airplane fans from showing up.

This is the 13th airshow I have assisted with since the CAF moved to Midland, and though certainly not blase about the flying, I have seen it all, at least once. But we do try and keep our eyes skyward, for these planes are something not to be missed no matter how many times you've seen them. The sound of a multitude of radial engines starting up, taking off and flying over head is something amazing. As my friend Del finally realized today, and said.....there is something gut wrenching and sensual about it. It's something to be missed in the jet age.

A few notes about the amazing performances. The jet assisted propeller driven Bi-Plane is always one of my favorites. It's an enigma. An old prop plane that is doing lazy loops until the pilot hits the "Jets" and streaks straight up almost from a stall. Then there are the Heritage flights. Three WWII vintage Army and Navy prop fighters flying with a fourth modern jet. It shows how far we have come. And then there is Ken Shockley's Jet Powered Semi-Truck. Julie saw it for the first time today and was amazed at it as I always am. Here's a guy who's mounted three military surplus jet powerplants onto a semi-truck cab allowing him to motor along at a top speed approaching 400 m.p.h. He gets there in about 5 seconds. I've met Ken and you can't really tell he's crazy by talking to him

Due to my "position" and stature in the CAF we are able to sit right along the taxi way not far from the runway where most of the planes land..and where Mr. Shockley performs his power run. He has a habit of driving the truck along this taxiway, dumping raw fuel into the jet turbines and lighting it off. The result is somewhat akin to a napalm explosion. Today he did this directly in front of us..surprising the beejeebus out of Julie and nearly singing our hair. It felt kind'a good on a chilly day.

Our private spot viewing spot is between the runway and the ramp where all the bombers are parked. As we sat there watching 15-20 fighters taking off right in front of us..P-51's, P-47's, P-39's, F4U Corsairs....we heard the bombers start to fire up their radial engines behind us. Four B-25's, two B-17's, a B-24, 2 A-26's and the B-29. It didn't take much dreaming to imagine that you were in Britain in 1944 and also to think of the sacrifice that so many pilots and crews made as they too started up there engines, headed for Germany and not the peaceful skies of West Texas. We owe them so much and our gratitude to them is the reason we have this show.
Today's pictures at: Saturdays Air Show

Air Sho:Day 2.....

Preparations for the Air Sho begin in earnest on Friday. In the morning a special show is held for handicapped persons from all over the region. A big undertaking in itself it takes a dedicated group of over 200 volunteers to run. For the main two day air show we have in excess of 800 volunteers!

My task for the day was to round up several pickup trucks donated by our local Ford dealer and to get these out to the airport and matched with their trailers. Job completed...then my faithful assistant and business partner Del and I got to enjoy lunch in our local chapters hangar and visit with friends I hadn't seen in ages. I also enjoy visiting with the active duty military personnel who have brought their aviation assets to the show...and in particular with the German, British and Australians. While in the museum I got to say a quick hell-o to Gen. Paul Tibbets of Enola Gay fame who was signing his autobiography. Got mine several years ago when he was here. Friday's pictures: Air Sho Images

It's Show Time.....

As I plod along the highway of life, some weeks are berift of activity and some are fraught with all the action I can handle. This week has been one of those. Thus the dearth of posts, disappointing all three regular readers.

I have been absorded at the office, mostly mentally, putting together a rather large PowerPoint© presentation to be presented to board members of a Fortune 500 corporation that will be our partners in an exciting new gas project. It's big time for us poor boys in the oilfield, so we are doing a bang up job, and thusly having to develop a wealth of spreadsheets and data.

The other preoccupation here late in the week is the annual CAF Airsho, a truly large and time consuming event. Being the transportation committee chairperson I have to plan, organize, lead and control a plethora of equipment and personnel. Sounds big time.....but what it really means is that I supervise a bunch of trucks and drivers pulling trailers for people to ride upon. A fifth grader would probably fill the bill, but we can't find any fifth graders willing to do it. And being the third year I've held the job, I have the same people assisting and it's become cookie cutter.

So, we'll be at the Air Sho for 9 hours daily during the next three days. Well maybe 14 hours on Saturday as we'll stay late to see Jerry Jeff Walker. I will provide pictures updated daily for all at: The Air Sho!

They say it's your birthday...!

Today is a special day at the Bedford Drive estate...it's someone's birthday. Someone very special that I love very much. Although she's a year older she is still young and precious! Years younger than me and definetly more precious. We love you and Happy Birthday!

And a birthday gift for Julie is the news that Casey, lying wounded in Germany, has made it successfully through his first operations and his condition is notably improved. He should be evacuated back to the U.S. within days. I'd like to give a special thanks to the bloggers who have signed the "get well" card on his family's website. I've noticed you..! Thanks a million.

The war....closer to home

We have had several soldiers from the Midland area who have fallen in Iraq, which hurts but we have not known any personally. Now the war is coming closer to home. For more than a year we have been kept abreast of Marine LCPL. Casey Owens activities through forwarded emails and converstations with Casey's loving Aunt Mary, a very close friend of Julie's. That's why the news of his wounds hurt us so much.

Casey was seriously wounded when a rocket propelled grenade hit his vehicle on Wednesday, killing one of his crewmates. Casey is now at Ramstein AFB, Germany where he has lost part of one leg and has severe shrapnel wounds to the head which makes his prognosis touch and go. This was Casey's second tour in Iraq.

A heartbreaking addendum to this story is that Mary had just stood in line at Barnes and Nobles last weekend to have Midlander, Gen. Tommy Franks sign his autobiography personally for Casey. And what a good idea came of this at Julie's suggestion. I emailed Gen. Franks today, told him the story and asked if he would send a personal email note of support to Mary for their family. Within 15 minutes I had a reply from Tommy, saying it was done. God bless America and Gen. Franks. And say a prayer for Casey. LCpl Casey Owens Webpage

Buy a round....

There are many successful charitable operations run by bloggers to support our soldiers welfare and the war effort. Organizations offering everything from letter writing to soldiers, shoes for Afghani children to comfort packages for wounded soldiers in Germay. But I've run across a novel one recently. Beer for Soldiers let's you buy a round for soldiers on leave or returned from a combat zone. Check it out for yourself and decide if it's a worthwhile organization.

Having consumed more than my fair share of cold beverages through the years as a soldier and beyond, I know they'll appreciate the effort. But remember...."moderation in all things"....a lesson I learned a tad to late.

Passing Images....

I note with sadness today the passing of one of the truly great photographers of our era, Eddie Adams. Even the most notable photographers are usually not household names but as it should be Eddie's work speaks for itself.

Eddie started his career as a Marine Corps combat photographer and went on to photograph 13 wars, including Vietnam, where he accompanied troops on 150 operations. He was the recepient of over 500 individual awards for his work. Adams's photographs regularly graced the covers and front pages of magazines and newspapers around the world, including Time, Newsweek, Life, Paris Match, Parade, Penthouse, Vogue, The London Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times, Stern and Vanity Fair.

Eddie was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his unforgettable photograph of the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner shown above. The photo helped change the sentiment about the war on the homefront....a result that Eddie did not intend nor like. Nor did Eddie take much joy from the Pulitzer Prize, for the image that he captured is the ruin of the lives of two people.

Because of my friendship with combat journalist Joe Galloway I have been fortunate to interact with several of the best photojournalists of the Vietnam War and actually work in a limited way with them on a few projects. Over the next weeks I'll direct you to their work.

"I'm not a great believer in the power of the moving image. A still image has greater lasting power. A still photographer has to show the whole freekin' movie in one picture. On the screen, it's over and back in the can in seconds. A still picture is going to be there forever."

Eddie Adams

Pardon Me.......

Excuse my absence from the political scene, but we've been busy here at the estate with chores, football games and today an afternoon at the polo matches. I haven't had time to follow the details of who is accusing who of being a shirker or a fraud when it comes to the candidates military records, but I just know the antics have gone on fine without me.

This whole election season, which by the the way has been a long season...3.75 years by my count, has worn me down. I'm even longing for the much calmer days of Bill Clinton. Days when partisan politics didn't seem so nasty. That's a hard comment to make, but it does seem true doesn't it? It was a more civilized hatred back then. And so since I really haven't checked the news in two days, I'll just refer you back to my CNN article written in 2001 as an example of how even a Republican like me could curry favor with the Clintons. My Presidential Pardon

Untruthful Texans....

In my extensive roamings around the Cyber Globe recently I ran across a new group calling itself, Texans For Truth. Mention was made of these "Texans" in such journals as CNN, USA Today and Fox News. How nice, I thought, since we Texans are a truthful lot by nature. The name evokes a nice website by down home Bubba's wanting to get to the facts of things in the upcoming elections. But the theme of the new organization is that G.W. Bush didn't serve well, nor finish his tour with the Texas Air National Guard. Strange, and coincidental I'm sure, that the new group was formed just as the RatherGate© Memos hit the press. Their mission statement taken verbatim from the website states...."Texans for Truth, an organization from Bush's home state, believe time has come for America to learn the truth about Bush's shadowy past". [editors note: guys, get a grammar checker].

But what I discovered with a little investigation is that this "grassroots" organization has very deep roots with the liberal hucksters of Drive Democracy which is heavily funded by MoveOn.Org. The little grassroots effort of Texans For Truth is run by a professional campaign organization in Austin by the name of Mercury Campaigns which seems to lean a little left in their clientele. Names like:

*John Kennedy for US Senate
*US Rep. Martin Frost
*Richard Morrison for US House of Representatives
*Texas Democratic Party
*Tony Sanchez for Texas Governor 2002
*Texas State Rep. Chuck Hopson
*Texas State Rep. David Farabee
*SaveTexasReps.com
*CleanUpTexasPolitics.com
*Dean for Texas

The Texans for Truth is such a Texas grassroots effort that the Inside Bay Area, Ca. weekly has a news story entitled, "Texans for Truth has local tie:
Offspring of Bay Area's MoveOn.org begins airing" in which they explain that noted screenwriter Daniel J. O'Keefe of Los Angeles wired Texans for Truth $100,000. So much for Texans......so much for truth, perhaps their campaign is based on the the Dan Rather model.

MemoGate....Tit for Tat

With the Dan Rather "memo" controversy hitting the fan for the CBS network, it is not surprising that new allegations about President George Bush's service are resurfacing. And now, not just about the quality of his service but whether he exaggerated his claim about being in the Air Force vs. the Air National Guard during his congressional run from Midland in 1978. This past history is being rehashed, as pointed out by Tim Blair, by some dweeb named David Corn which I'm sure is the name he signs his faked memos with.

But having sat on the sidelines to long it is time for us to let certain documents we have in our possession come to light. Read this document to see what the President of the United States, Gerald Ford, thought of young Lt. Bush's service record.

Disclaimer: although Julie worked for George Bush as his personal administrative assistant shortly after this memo was written and had access to his personal files and desk, we can't be sure of the true nature of how this document became public.

Business offer....

Wanting to do my part to keep the RatherGate© inquiries alive I have emailed CBS News offering my forgery services to them. Quite frankly I feel that I could do a much better and more professional job than the bozos who generated the "Killian" memos. Having been alive and typing in the 70's my skill level with typography and the machines of the era is highly proficient and as a former member of the Texas National Guard I can throw in the correct lingo and words of the time. And for a nominal extra fee I can guarantee them some "genuine" photos to go along with the text.

Here, through Tim Blair, is an example of someone else trying to cash in on the poetentially lucrative "genuine fake" documents business. Genuine Fake Memo

Being a realist, I know that the chances of CBS News reading my email are slight, so I also sent a note to our local CBS affiliate explaining that I would find it hard to watch their news programming knowing that their parent network profers forged documents as fact. CBS News does listen to their affiliates, and at least in this market, the affiliates listen to their viewers.

Superscript this.....

At the risk of being the only person in the Western DigiSphere not to comment on the CBS "now apparently forged documents" [NAFD's] I will do so now, hopefully with brevity and wisdom....OK, let's shoot for brevity.

I do, however, have some expert wisdom on the subject being the geriatric sort who spent decades typing on manual typewriters, some of it in the Texas National Guard, and later transitioning to digital wordprocessing. Apparently more expert wisdom than anyone at CBS.

Like most people of the Blog persuasion, I was truly amazed at the speed with which the story broke in the BlogWorld and made it to the general media arena, the MSM©. I found the story Thursday at mid morning on my office computer and by the time I watched the ABC Evening News with Peter Jenkins© mention had been made of the anamolies in the documents [kudos, for once to ABC]. By the time I did my at home evening perusal of my usual Blogs, the story was all over the web...and with 100's of helpful comments.

Now to my take of the documents...and in particular the main one in question, the LTC. Killian "CYA" memo.

Much has been said, and rightly so, about the fonts, kerning, spacing and so on...the formatting of the document. This is important, especially the superscripted "th" which was not available on any known typewriter of the early 70's and of course is an automatic feature [unless disabled] of modern day MS Word©. But my doubts were based on things more basic, things I know about and have experience with.

One of the first Blog articles I read had side by side comparisons of the NAFD memo and a newly created copy of the memo done on MS Word©. They were identical and what are the odds of that occuring by chance? Nil to zilch. Having written 100's of letters on a typewriter, the telling feature for me was the placement of the date, just to the right of center above the body of the text,exactly where MS Word© places it by default. To do this on a typewriter, the operator would have to either set a tab at that particular spot, release the carriage and move it over to that exact spot or use the space bar about 40 times to achieve that position. I can tell you as an ex manual typewriter user...we just didn't do that. We normally set the date at either the left or right margin...and more often the left margin, because that was were the carriage was by default.

Another basic and telling clue to me was the neatness of the CYA memo. I'm betting that LTC. Killian was in his mid to late 40's when he supposedly wrote the note. Back in the good old days, older guys didn't type, or if they did they were completely inept at it. Most did the "hunt and peck" technique although some like myself had taken typing in high school and were only partially inept. I can almost guarantee that even in a memo as short as this one, a guy would have had at least one mistake. And a mistake in those days, meant you left a reminder of that error on the page. In the early 70's one either used an old fashion eraser or the "high tech" strip of tape with white dust on the back that imprinted the correct letter over the old mistake. In either case, it was visible. And today my suspicions were confirmed by Killian's family who say that indeed he couldn't and didn't type.

Of course, one could suppose that the memo was typed by someone else such as the unit's clerk typist. Typically the unit clerk was a lower ranking soldier or airman and I don't believe that the commander, a Lieutenant Colonel, would want a 19 or 20 year old typing up personal correspondence designed to "cover his ass". There has been a hypothesis set forth that perhaps this Texas Air Guard unit had access to one of the latest super typewriters that did do some magic things with fonts and spacing, but to this I say Hooey. [I like the word hooey and don't get to use it enough]. No Regular Army or National Guard unit that I had contact with ever had the latest in office equipment or anything else for that matter. In fact, I remember in my National Guard unit, having to use a completely manual typewriter for our work. For younger readers that means even without electricity!

So as I write this, better scribes than I are further dissembling this story and CBS has called for an "internal investigation". But for me, the case is open and shut. I'm betting that some under 30ish demon of the Democratic Party is the author of these NAFD's and hadn't a naive clue that typewriters didn't function like computer word processors. To bad. This might have worked if he'd consulted a baby boomer.

The monument to.....me

I invite anyone who doubts my Scottish heritage to take a gander at the monument built to me by the good people of the highlands. ".....the 220 feet high Wallace Monument sits prominently on the Abbey Craig two miles north of the city of Stirling itself". As noted my monument sits high atop our family abbey.
The Wallace Monument

Sincerely yours,
Wallace Craig
Monumentee

Driveway Visitors....

After a flurry of politically oriented posts last week, it was with some welcome relief that I was occupied by visitors to the estate over the weekend and unable to muster the time to update Streams until now.

Our good friends Bruce and Arlene Crandall stopped by on their wanderings in their driveway filling RV. They are great driveway guests and it's always good to see them semi-annually and catch up. Their son Donovan is now residing in Houston where he is the managing director of energy banking for a large German bank and so Bruce wanted to learn more about the oil/gas business resulting in a trip to my office and later a lengthy tour of the Petroleum Museum. Bruce had the oil and gas 101 presentation, but I suspect he was more impressed by the Chaparral Racing wing of the museum. We also got the opportunity to take them to little Jack's first tackle football game, where they got to see little Jack get faced smashed in a bone jarring block. But he got up, shook it off, and went back to the game...so we were all proud of him.

Bruce is a lengendary Army aviator whose character was portrayed by Greg Kinnear in the film "We Were Soldiers". Bruce was also the aviation advisor on the film where Arlene and Bruce became so close to Greg that they are God Grandparents to the Kinnears first child, daughter Lily. And we always enjoy hearing more stories of his flying exploits around the world. This time it was about flying mapping missions in Libya in the early 60's. Interesting tales of seeing miles and miles of burned out German and British tanks from the great battles of WWII. And the German minefields that in some places were more than 17 miles wide, so thick in fact, that Bruce said they were afraid to land their helicopters in the desert.

I've known Bruce and Arlene only for 5 years or so, but it feels like much longer and we certainly see them more regularly than many people I've known for much longer. We'll probably see them again in Washington D.C. at the Ia Drang Veterans reunion in November, and then again in Febrauary when they stop on their way back to their home in Olympia Washington. And through pure serendipity, I'll see Bruce's banker son Donovan next week in Midland to talk about financing our new gas project. Friends are great.

Europe explained....

I've seen a very interesting and instructive Jerusalem Post article referenced around the web. Speaking of European, and in particular, French "attitudes" vs. "actions" the author explains....

....if you don't actually have to do something about your attitudes you're likelier to have more of them, and they are bound to be both more extravagant and more unrealistic. People who are in no position to end world hunger and bring about peace in the Middle East can endlessly carry on about ending world hunger and bringing peace to the Middle East. Doing so means only that they're declaring themselves the sorts of folk who deplore hunger and war. But statesmen who must actually wrestle with issues of cost, capacity, local difficulties and unintended consequences tend to have more realistic, and therefore restrained, attitudes.

And carrying this observation to American shores, one wonders what in John Kerry's personna makes him so hungry for European support and approval?

Zell........

In case you missed Democratic Senator Zell Miller's address to the Republican Convention tonight.....you missed one of the finest verbal ass whuppin's you'll ever have the chance to hear. I've been waiting for 10 years for a man of courage to pull no punches and just tell it like it is and this was it.

I doubt that Senator Miller will be much welcome anymore in Massachusetts or at the Democratic Mens Club but he's welcome in our Republican home any time. Thanks Senator for being a man of conscience.

Takin' it to the streets...

I just wanted to take a moment to heartily thank all the protestors in the streets of New York City. Thanks extreme environmentalists, gay rights activists, transgender activists, anti-war activists, anti-globalizaton activists, anti-Christian activists, anti-Semetic activists and all those who are activists but haven't really figured out what they're so active about.¶ Thanks, because every time I see you on the TeeVee I think.."good job, thanks to you somewhere out there in middle America another undecided voter has made the choice to vote for George Bush".

I know, logically, that all you active sorts are not really for John Kerry. You are more likely to be in favor of electing Ralph Nader, John Dean or Karl Marx and you are linked only by one common philosophy. After in depth study of the serious issues of the day you have decided to pursue the most pressing; you hate George Bush because he's stupid. I think that in the main you could care less about John Kerry, but by default when the great middle of the American public sees your face, your mispelled poster or your juvenile papier-mâché caricature masks on the TeeVee, whether it is conscious thought or a subliminal suggestion, you are to them activists for John Kerry and the Democratic Party. The Repbulican party could not buy better advertising.

Thankfully, and to the protestors credit, most of the demonstrations have been fairly peaceful, but a few broken windows, cherry bombs and burning tires might be forthcoming and we thank you in advance for these, God forbid, should they occur. Papier-mâché masks are good for only so many swing voters. Violent anarchists rampant in the streets could really bring in the votes for Bush.

So once again thank you, have a great time, ACTUP!, and keep those votes for Bush coming. And a special thanks to the large numbers of environmentalists from the Pacific Northwest who in getting to New York had to burn up huge quantities of fossils fuels in order to protest the burning of so much fossil fuel.

¶Disclaimer and statement of political correctness:
Not that there is anything wrong with these. I tend to be an environmental advocate. I have several very close friends who are gay. I have friends who opposed the war in Iraq. I myself am undecided on Globalization. I know people who disagree with Christian religous tenets. I know people who disagree with Jewish canons. I am working hard to befriend any transgendered person I come upon and finally, my own Mother is a liberal Democrat.

The times they are a changin'......

In a prior life I used to spend some time in Minnesota. I like the place. It's mostly a pretty place, clean and the citizens are a nice bunch of hard working Germanic and Scandanavian folks. But living in such a nice place away from most of the worlds real problems they tended to be of an idealistic nature and a liberal persuasion. And so I was somewhat surprised to read this in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune...

The Outpost is a working man's bar in a bellwether piece of a battleground state. These are the voters who elected Jesse Ventura governor and who helped deter him from running for a second term when they fell out of love with him. But if John Kerry had dropped in to seek votes Thursday, he would've run into a wall.

In a place full of carpenters, plumbers, auto mechanics, factory workers and other blue-collar guys who used to vote for Democrats almost as devoutly as they used to drink beer (most were sipping soft drinks), I could only turn up one John Kerry voter. The rest plan to vote for George W. Bush. "This is basically a Democratic place, but everybody seems to be going for the Republican," Hartinger said. "That's what I hear over the bar. Kerry's just too soft and a lot of the guys just don't like his wife. They weren't too impressed when she started speaking all those foreign languages at the Democratic convention. She's not American."

Glad to hear it and it starts on the road to confirming the gut feeling I've had about the election results in November; that the average American has gotten a good glimpse of John Kerry's altered biography, elitist demeanor and below average performance as a national leader and they don't like what they see. And I don't like, nor much trust, his wife either.

Thanks to The Discerning Texan for the tip on this story.

The mysteries of life.....

Even in this advanced technological civilization of ours many unanswered mysteries abound. How can we prove that there is a God? Why can't we more accurately predict hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes? Do ghosts really exist? Is time travel possible?

But perhaps no mystery is more intriguing than the plumbing and electricity in an older home. A home such as ours. Not old really since it is about as old as I am...I meant to say "gracefully aged". The mystery of plumbing and electrical malfunctions reminds us that we are mere mortals and is why plumbers and electricians are some of the wealthiest people I know. They would have been the Shamans and Medicine Men in Native American tribes....the respected elders who "knew" the secrets of life...or plumbing.

Another of those mystery moments came for us tonight. After a superb, but late, supper Julie was washing a few things in the sink while I attended to important matters in another room. I think I was racing Formula One on the PlayStation2. At some point I heard a scream and the clanking of implements from the kitchen. Upon investigation I found that the sink was stopped up and that Julie had tried to turn on the disposal to clear the drain whereupon she received a significant, but thankfully not fatal, dosage of voltage through her disposal-turning-on finger.

Thinking that probably since she was jolted so quickly that the disposal didn't have time to do it's duty in clearing the sink, I used a towel to again run the In-Sink-a-Rator© hoping to solve the clog problem. No dice. We had a major clog sitution on our hands, peeving me greatly as we had just paid one of the aforementioned rich plumbers to clean the line out. Doubly peeved because this line also drains the dishwasher and so now it was fast filling up with soapy scum water too.

While pondering my options I remembered...."AHA"....that we have a drain cleanout valve for this area of the house outside. I also quickly remembered another axiom of home repair. "The easier the apparent solution.....the harder it is to find the right tool". Most guys have been here. This is a simple screw valve with a hexagonal nut type head. But a nut that would in the Army be called a GP Large version [General Purpose-Large]. To make matters even more difficult the GP Large nut is located in a little tunnel in the side of the house surrounded by the cedar shake shingles that coat our Mission Style estate.

Not to be detered, I went through all five of my tool boxes. Yes, I said five....complete ones too. I've had one forever, then my brother apparently forgot and gave me versions of the same high quality 300 pc. German tool set for two Christmases running and recently my Dad cleaned out his garage and gave me two more sets. I looked in his first, as he had some GP Large tools. To shorten the story, let me say that I went from tool box to valve and back many times in about 45 minutes, even finding a ancient tool in my Dad's box that I think was made for this exact purpose. It had a GP Large hex head and a stem with a hole in it for inserting a turning device. Great, except that it wouldn't fit into the tunnel housing the valve. And so do you think that I gave up after this close call? You betcha' I did.

So as Julie was putting Jack to bed, I went to the kitchen to clean up what I could and to plot my strategy for tomorrow. That being either to construct a tool for the valve or more likely just take the drain line under the sink apart and run a "snake" thru it. And here, as I ruminated over my options, is where the mystery of plumbing rears it's head, for the standing water in both sinks and the dishwasher was simply gone. Vanished....poof! An hour+ of consternation solved by doing nothing.

I know that there are logical explanations for this event, though I'm not sure logic is the correct discipline to describe man's relationship to plumbing and electricity. This is my point. It's more aptly described in the realms of the occult or the mystical. And so here is my final and most important axiom regarding plumbing and electricity. "Those things that you think that if simply left alone will get better....won't. Those things that you spend hours busting your knuckles on....will".

The Silver Star....

The Silver Star is awarded for gallantry in action, and as the regulation states, "The required gallantry, while of a lesser degree than that required for the Distinguished Service Cross, must nevertheless have been performed with marked distinction." I know many fine individuals who wear the Silver Star, and from what I know of their actions they certainly were deeds of marked distinction. John Kerry wears the Silver Star and asks voters to believe that he is worthy of the office of The President because his deeds were of a marked distinction also. I ask you to compare his deeds against another Silver Star recepient, my good friend Will Parish.

John Kerry's Silver Star:

While in command of a three-boat mission, his Swift boat was ambushed; he ordered his men to beach the boat so he could pursue the attacking Vietcong; a teenager with a grenade launcher popped out of a hole a few feet away; one of Kerry's men shot and wounded him in the leg, but he ran; Kerry, fearing the youth was trying to get far enough away to fire a grenade, chased him and shot him dead. Kery was awarded the Silver Star for valor.

Will Parish's Silver Star:

Specialist 4 Willard Parish, 24, of Bristow, Okla., was a Charlie Company mortarman, but this morning [at LZ Xray] he manned a machine gun. "I looked to the front, and it seemed like the North Vietnamese were growing out of the weeds," he remembers. "The training took over. I just fired that weapon, totally unaware of the time, the conditions. I remember a lot of noise, a lot of yelling, air strikes. Then quiet." When he ran out of machine-gun ammunition Parish stood up with a .45-caliber automatic pistol in each hand and kept shooting. Later, they counted more than 100 enemy dead in front of his machine gun. Parish was awarded the Silver Star for valor***.

Which of the two awards do you think should be called a "deed of marked distinction"? Just asking.

***Account from "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young" by Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway

The Band of Brothers.......

I have refrained from writing publically about John Kerry's Vietnam service for a variety of reasons. He did, after all, serve when so many did not. However, I do have strong opinons about Kerry's motives, his actions and his subsequent betrayal of those he now so proudly calls his "band of brothers". The band of brothers from whom he chose to cut and run using an obscure regulation and three minor scratches. In the band of brothers I know, this would be unthinkable.

Among the band of brothers I know well are those men of the 1st Cavalry Division who fought in the horrendous battles in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Some of their units lost more than half their troops killed outright over a five day period with many more of the remainder wounded. Many of the wounded [some grievously] heroes, of my band of brothers chose not to pursue the road back to home and safety to which they were rightly entitled, but instead defied orders by doctors and superior officers and simply left the hospital in their bandages to go back to their units where they were desperately needed. Back to their brothers. Other brothers I know personally from my time suffered guilt beyond reckoning when the time came for their allotted 365 day tour of duty to end. The guilt and grief born of leaving their brothers still in harms way while they went home to safety, family and loved ones.

Whether John Kerry pulled a man from the water under fire, whether he was in Cambodia or not, whether his purple hearts were deserved or not....these are secondary to me. What matters and is a matter of record without a doubt is that John Kerry abandoned his brothers in Vietnam and then again in Washington with his public outcry against them. He has lost the right to be included in the "brotherhood". Period.

Kudos.......

CNN reports that President Bush has decided to bring home at least 10,000 troops from overseas non-combat stations, mainly in Europe and most particularly Germany. This would mean that an estimated 100,000 American troops, families and support personnel would be coming back to US bases. With German unemployment hovering at around 10% this will undoubtedly create further severe economic hardships on the Reich. Tough Noogies!

Update: Read more from Davids Medienkritik German [conservative] perspective. A, soon to be, new additon to my list of fine reading references.

Profile this.....

Several weeks ago in order to leave a comment on someones blog site, I filled out the Blogger "profile" information on myself. My thought is that this is a little teenagerish, but here it is. The info is the run of the mill drivel of my likes and dislikes, favorites and hobbies. The hardest entry to complete was the "favorite movie" section. I'm not a big movie goer, at least I don't self-generate the interest to go, but there are many films I do like once someone else coerces me into going. Or, as it is in modern life, once the bride and child bring home a DVD. A recent case in point being "Second Hand Lions" which I thoroughly enjoyed. How could I not like a film about crusty old Texans sitting on their front porch shooting shotguns and chewin' Redman. I could have played the part. And, of course, any film that contains a pack of dogs in it's cast is top rate with me.

But concerning the "profile", the interesting thing I noticed is the word counter displayed on the page that shows just exactly how many of the Queen's own nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and dangling participles one has written in the life of the Blog. In my case, as of this very moment [excluding these words] I have set to digital paper the grand sum of 132,011 words. Now I have been at this, a proud Blogger, since June of 2001 and in those 3+ years all I've come up with is a tad over 132k of words. I wasn't counting as I went but I would have thought that it would have been more...something along the lines of 133k. However, come to think of it, if the average word typed was 5 letters in length that would mean that my fingers have tapped the keyboard over one-half million times setting Streams to digital print. That sounds better! Doing something one-half million times sounds a lot more impressive than writing 132,000 measly words.

A Thing of Beauty....

I made a short day long business trip to Houston on Monday and as I returned home from the airport I phoned Julie from the car to tell her that I was on my way to her loving arms. "Whatever" she said, but added that I'd had a phone call just minutes before saying that an old college frat brother was in town and would like to stop by. You could have knocked me down when she told me his name. Jeremy, a.k.a. "Butch", a.k.a. "The Troll" Cooper. Butch, as I'll always think of him, was an older guy, a senior when I was a freshman, a mean taskmaster when I was a frat pledge and a cool guy to us youngsters. He drove a humongous '58 black Chrysler New Yorker knicknamed, "The Pig". That about says it all.

Adding to his mystique, we knew that he had raced cars and motorcycles and had crashed his fair share of both. He drove The Pig at breakneck speeds around San Antonio, usually with a gaggle of terrified frat pledges as passengers. With all this stuff of masculine legend, what I learned later was that Butch was a terrific, very intelligent and very sensitive guy. I saw him rarely until just this last decade when I learned more about him.

He was born in England where his dad was a senior banker and advisor to the government and had, during WWII, been on the team that cracked the super secret German "Enigma" code. At an early age his family moved to Canada where his dad ran the North American offices of Westminster Bank. Butch had an aptitude for things mechanical and financial and went into banking in New York while building cars and motorcycles as a hobby. He later relocated back to San Antonio in banking but at some point in life decided to follow his heart and worked full time building cars and cycles.

Which brings me to the image of the Chaparral 2H in the photo above. Knowing that Butch would be interested in seeing our new museum dedicated to Midland's Chaparral racing history we paid a visit on Tuesday morning. What I hadn't known about Butch was that for several seasons after college he had worked with McLaren Racing...the prinicple competitor of the Chaparrals in the glory days of Can-Am Series sports car racing. Butch regaled me with first hand racing stories of the Chaparrals along with the awe and respect they were accorded.

The Chaparral 2H is a thing of pure beauty built in 1968 and looking to us to be ahead of it's time still, 36 years later. For all it's beauty however, the car never did perform well and the driver hired by Chaparral to pilot it, John Surtees, refused to race it. I knew the basics of the story, but Butch filled me in on the details of the mismatched front and rear airflow, braking and visibility problems.

What a pleasure to see Butch again, get reacquainted and to have a visitor to our fair city who truly appreciated one of our new attractions!

Ben Stein....on what matters

I've always liked Ben Stein. His dry wit, humor and intelligence are like an oasis in the desert of the gliterazzi entertainment world. I like him even more after reading his farewell article for E-Online Magazine. I hope Whoppi reads it..

The "Real" Stars
By Ben Stein:

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "e-online FINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again .

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The police men and womenwho go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin--or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me.

This came to be my main task in life.

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Ho Hum.....!

I believe that I've run into the summer doldrums of blogging. I've just not been inspired to post any snide comments, interesting news or stories from the past to take up space here.

Actually we've been busy too. I helped Julie put special effort into a burst of housecleaning late last week for her "church ladies" meeting, party and gambling extravagnza which was, I understand, a rousing success. I got the information second hand as I was summarily thrown out of the house for the duration of the event. At the same time my sister and her family from Philadelphia arrived for a visit so when I was asked to remove myself from my residence, I got to spend the evening with them playing miniature golf. Where.....I'm proud to say, I got my name once again on the low score board by shooting a 38. I was good that night, but also it's my home course, it having not changed since I started playing there in 1962.

Friday evening we had my folks and sister, with family, over for a wonderful meal and then the next morning Julie and I left for Comfort, Texas and a birthday party/family reunion centered around her Dad. A nice trip at a lovely B&B and I got to meet many of her multitude of cousins who I'd known by name only. Nice folks....even the black sheep portion of the family...the Democrats.

Sunday evening upon arriving back from the whirlwind trip we immediately started in again visiting with my sister before their departure back to Pennsylvania. Jack had been away for two weeks so he got to meet my 14 year old nephew for the first time and Julie and I got to entertain the lads until 10:30. Today it was back to work, the regular schedule and trying to convince Jack to start studying his cirriculum for the Duke University gifted student program he was selected for. He watched TV all day. What's new.

That's about it, but here are a few, very few, pictures from Comfort. I was in the photographic doldrums also. Comfort Trip