Category Archives: photo paffoonies

April 8, 2017 · 4:05 pm

New Stuff Happens Here

Well, Spring is sproinging with a great green ferocity. The wisteria that is eating the corner of the house by the pool is blooming. The pool is full of winter rainwater and must be drained before it begins to bloom millions of mosquitoes.

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So, I rented a pump and started to drain the swamp. (Yes, I know I could make a joke here about somebody orange who promised to drain the swamp and is instead putting swamp monsters in it… He got his Supreme Court Scalia Dragon added to the murky deeps of dollar politics yesterday… but I won’t because I hate how the Twitter Baby in Chief is always filling my perceptions with dirty diaper business.)

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I collected some neat new Pez dispensers by stopping at Toys-R-Us to use the restroom halfway through my daily rush-hour trek to pick up my son from his school in Lewisville.

I found Fluttershy to complete the My Little Pony set, and I picked up all three of the Smurfs. Brainy Smurf is my favorite Smurf because I like the way he constantly gets put down when he is trying to be too smart for his own britches. It’s really nice when that happens to somebody who isn’t me.

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And when, at midday, I got so stuck in traffic I had to stop and take a break in Hobby Lobby’s air conditioning, I found some HO scale dragons, Pegasus, and a unicorn to add to the denizens of Toonerville.

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So life has generally been good to me, even when it is a little bit bad.

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Filed under autobiography, collecting, feeling sorry for myself, happiness, humor, photo paffoonies, photos, self portrait

Tagged as collecting Pez, humor, pool repair, silly stuff

April 6, 2017 · 11:37 am

Rescuing Rolling Stock

Welcome to Toonerville’s Mountain Station atop lovely, snowy Church Mountain. The Snowball Express is just pulling out.

I believe I may have mentioned in recent posts that part of the joy of cleaning the garage after a long illness left it in a nightmare shambles of boxes and old toys and stuff we really need to throw out, is that I found the boxes with the remnants of my old HO model train layout. Now I am busy rescuing, repairing, and photographing the pieces of Toonerville that I have dug out of the trash piles.

In the picture from Mountain Station, you see the billboard boxcar and the old caboose I managed to pluck out of one of the boxes that heavy stuff had been tossed on top of.

Smokey Joe, the engine number 99, is pulling the 1890’s Pullman passenger car and mail car that will soon pull into Mountain Station.

The two Pullman train cars that I rescued from the same box as the billboard boxcar are both built from kits back when I was in college and had my train set in the basement at home in Iowa.

You may have noticed the mysterious mansion up the mountainside from the Methodist Church that gives the mountain its name. No one knows for sure what the two weird, big-nosed men currently living up there are up to, but lately there has been a lot of barking filling the air. The lights are on in the mansion currently. Maybe someone brave should go up there and investigate.

Here’s a better look at the side of the Pullman Passenger car as it zooms past the church.

The Super Chief is pulling its passenger observation car and its gondola car toward the station also. Santa Fe’s finest passenger service also goes fast.

I bought the Super Chief engine at a train show in San Antonio in the middle 90’s. The passenger cars I have had since I was in high school, circa 1974.

The F-9 diesel freight hauler is pulling a lumber car and the old caboose.

The blue F-9 is the same kind of engine as the Super Chief. It was originally part of the set my father bought for himself when he retired. He intended to build a layout in the basement at the farmhouse when he moved back to Iowa. He finally gave it up, though, and gave it to my sons and me as a gift. I found it in the box in the garage. It looks like it probably still runs. The Union Carbide lumber car was on the back porch in the mess left behind when my father-in-law’s house burned down and he piled the salvaged stuff there. It was in a box with old salvaged kitchen goods that managed not to burn. It still needs serious cleaning. My caboose is missing its back wheels and the trucks the wheels ride on is broken.

Cruella DeVille’s roadster was spotted near the mysterious old mansion. It is very possible something bad is going on up there.

Of all the many things I have to get done before I schlepp off this mortal coil stage right, rescuing my HO rolling stock is probably not the most important, but it is definitely one of the most satisfying.

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Filed under autobiography, cleaning genii, healing, humor, nostalgia, photo paffoonies, playing with toys, Trains

Tagged as HO model train, humor

April 5, 2017 · 2:30 pm

Dark Thinking

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On a quiet back street in Toonerville there is a haunted house. Obviously four meddling kids and their talking dog are looking around inside, but they won’t find anything. It is my dark place. I am the only one that can go inside and discover what truly is there, for the dark things inside are all a part of the dark side of Mickey.

But Mickey doesn’t have a dark side, you try and argue. Micky is all goofy giggles and nerdy Dungeons and Dragons jokes. Mickey is all cartoons and silly stories and he makes us all guffaw.

But I can assure you, everyone has a dark side. Without darkness, how can anyone recognize the light?

So, I have to go inside the old Ghost House every now and then and take stock of all the furniture, and make note of everyone… and every thing that has been living there. I go in there now because I am starting to rewrite a very dark story that I really have to get down on paper in novel form. It isn’t a true story. Ghost stories never are. But it is full of true things… old hurts, old fears, panics, and ghosts of Christmases Past.

There was the night I was stalked by a large black dog when I was nine and walking home from choir practice at the Methodist Church. We are talking Hound of the Baskervilles sort of big damn dog. I knew every dog that lived in town in those days, but I didn’t know that one. Maybe it wasn’t actually hunting me, but I ran the last two blocks to my house that night faster than I ever knew I could run before.

There was that cool autumn afternoon when he grabbed me and pushed me down behind a pile of tractor tires in the neighbor’s yard. He forcibly got my pants down… and what he did to me… It has taken more than forty years to be able to talk about what happened. I wasn’t able to talk about it until after I learned that he had died.

There were the nights spent in the emergency room. Severe potassium depletion… chest pains that could’ve been heart trouble but weren’t… The morning when my blood pressure was so high I thought I was going to die in front of my second period seventh grade English class. And the terrible waits in the emergency room when someone I loved was serious about suicide… that was the most terrible of all.

I am not frightened by the grim reaper in the same way that Shaggy and Scooby are. I have spent time in his company too many times for that. I do not fear him. In some ways he brings welcome relief. And I do believe I can beat him in chess and at least tie him in checkers.

So, yeah, the dark resources are all still there… still in place at the bottom of a deep, dark well. Bad things do wait in the future… but they are in the present and the past also. I am not a slave to fear and evil has no power over me. So, I think I can safely write a horror story. And I admit I am not Steven King. But I don’t want to be him. I want to be Mickey. And that is certainly scary enough for me.

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Filed under autobiography, battling depression, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, ghost stories, horror writing, humor, novel plans, photo paffoonies

Tagged as dark thoughts, The Baby Werewolf, writing a horror story

March 19, 2017 · 3:04 pm

Return of the Train Man

I was an aficionado of HO model trains as a kid. I continued that horrendous fixation with 1/78th scale worlds long into my extended juvenile immaturity (I was an unmarried teacher of middle school students until 1995.) Even after I was married, my wife allowed me, to a very limited degree, to continue to be a train man.

I spent a good deal of time over the years building building plastic model kits of buildings, painting and repainting plaster model buildings, and collecting engines, rolling stock, and trackside details. Painting little 1/78th scale people is definitely an exercise for steady hands and a zen-like, highly focused mind.

But that all reached an impasse when we moved to the Dallas area. I had to tear down my train layout, box up my trains, and put everything on hold until I had another place to build and create my HO model-train world. So, while it was all boxed up and transported to first, a house that we rented from my brother-in-law, and then a house that we bought, it got shifted around and stacked inappropriately, and grandma put some really heavy items on top to crush and mangle my treasures. It also spent a night outside in the rain when my brother-in-law’s water heater had to be replaced in the garage where everything was stored. I was not a happy camper for a while.

Now, a decade later, I am still taking the tiny items and trying to glue the pieces back together. I have basically given up trying to get the trains to run again. But I can use the bits and pieces of Toonerville to make pictures like these. It makes the art-parts of my psyche and soul a little happier.

Old number 99 had to have the front part where the headlamp is located reattached and restored. It gave me something to do this weekend while I was down with a bad back and breathing difficulties. It would be neat to put the train table back together and get things set up once again, but there is no space, and no unlimited funds, and less and less time. So for now, the train man comes back to me to rebuild in photographs and in my imagination.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, photo paffoonies, Trains

Tagged as artwork, HO model train, humor, Paffoonies, rebuilding

February 24, 2017 · 12:02 pm

The Doofy Doll Collector

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I suppose it is a rather girly thing… or maybe even a creepy thing, that a sixty year old man like me collects and plays with dolls. This post, a lazy-writer short post, is intended just to show you some of my newest dolls and newest collections. I am not going to waste time justifying why I like dolls. That would probably require an advanced degree in abnormal psychology. So I will just show you and gloat about what I have achieved in my own weird little way.

This Monster High doll is Frankie Stein, the daughter of Frankenstein’s monster. I scored two of these at Walmart’s pre-Christmas clearance sale for three dollars apiece. This is the one I pose and play with. The other I am keeping as a mint in box.

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These are the three lovely girls I bought with Christmas money from relatives back in Iowa. I went almost to the limit buying Starfire at a pricey $19.88. The collection rules clearly state, “Never buy a single doll worth more than $20.”

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I bought Starfire to keep Harley Quinn, my other $19.88 doll company as part of my DC Heroines collection. That collection as it now stands follows.

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You can see I still need Batgirl and Poison Ivy.

So there is my lazy-writer post about me playing with dolls, poorly rationalized and barely explained.

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Filed under action figures, collecting, doll collecting, foolishness, humor, photo paffoonies

February 19, 2017 · 2:43 pm

Toonerville Traffic

I had the good fortune recently to find some of my boxed-up HO train pieces that had been packed away since 2004 when we moved from South Texas to the Dallas area. Now, in these photos I took of Toonerville, not all of it was part of the uncovered treasure. But some of it most sincerely was. The people out in front of Mike Minskey’s Tavern are from a set of unpainted 1/78th scale German townfolk from the 1880’s. You see them posed here in front of the Batmobile parked in front of the Teapot Clockhouse.

Here you can see the two F-9 Diesels from the SuperChief (I have a thing for Sante Fe Railroad engines and rolling stock). I parked them next to the Snowflake Express which you may have seen before, since I bought it in a garage sale after we moved here.

The multi-colored bus that you see behind the Miss Amy Wortle Boarding House is actually the Partridge Family tour bus from the TV show my sisters loved in the 1970’s.

Here’s a view of the front of that same TV bus as it sits between Miss Wortle’s place and Eggbert Egghead’s Egg House. Dabney Egghead is the boy in the sailor suit showing off his brand new velocipede.

The old lady crossing in front of the Toonerville Trolley is Granny Wortle (who controls all the money in the family… I named a lot of the residents after people in Fontaine Fox’s comic strip of the 1930’s).

Here’s the back end of the trolley as it passes Digby Davies’ Pet Shop and the purple eggplant house where Gilbert Dornhoeffer and his seven vegetarian children live and build snowmen regularly.

On the other side of Eggbert Egghead’s Egg House you can see Butch and Marcia Niland’s VW mini-bus next to the old shoe-woman’s house which she built from a gigantic pink-and-white high-topped sneaker. Digby moved his velocipede, either to get it in the picture once again, or to get closer to the Scary Clown’s Ice Cream Truck while they’re still serving Eskimo Pies in midwinter.

So now you can plainly see that Mickey finding old boxes of toys that he thought were lost is not a good thing for Toonerville traffic in general, and definitely not good for Toonerville rush hour.

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Filed under autobiography, humor, illustrations, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Toonerville, Trains

February 15, 2017 · 3:44 pm

Artsy Fartsy Endeavors

As I get older… losing my hair… well, okay… growing my hair long to cover psoriasis sores… I don’t get to actually use Beatles’ lyrics in this post except for the opening of the misleading lead sentence. But as my life and movement is limited more and more to one room of the house (okay two rooms, the bathroom is practically an equal partner in my life story) I have expanded outward by turning inward. I look inside at all that is creative in me and commit acts of gaseous art. “Art farts” is the term pointed to in the title. I spend some of my more difficult sick days making art out of the clutter and doll collections that surround me in my bedroom.

This is what the clutter of old “Art Farts” looks like lingering at my bedroom door at the moment.

Small bits and pieces when I am in too much pain to draw can make interesting still lifes or collection-clutter documentation.

The bustling city that has grown up on my upstairs bookshelves is also fascinating.

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And it isn’t a matter of always being in bed and never getting out. I managed to get several pictures of Anselmo the cattle egret that lives in the park. He has gotten used to me taking his picture as I walk the dog five times a day so she can load the park with poop (which I do pick up in plastic bags, by the way).

And why do I call him Anselmo? Well, look at him, that pointy beak, that staring eye… He just looks like an Anselmo. I taught three Anselmos in 31 years of teaching, so I ought to know one when I see one.

So, what exactly is an “Art Fart”? Well, making artwork out of the things you see every day around you. Like fart gas, it is a natural outcome of digesting stuff. And why am I surrounded by so many toys and weird things? Well, I am a Mickey after all. And this is my second childhood… or third… or tenth… of three-hundred and thirty-fifth… but who’s counting?

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Filed under artwork, goofiness, humor, photo paffoonies, playing with toys

February 12, 2017 · 2:31 pm

Still Collecting Sunrises

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I am not by nature an early riser. I have been far more of a night owl than a morning lark in my sixty years on this planet. And yet, as a school teacher and father and dog owner (which also means dog-walker and dog-poop-picker-upper), I have been forced to become an early riser. But I like to look at sunrises. We are never guaranteed waking up alive in the morning. One day soon I anticipate waking up quite dead. But in the meantime, I am still looking at sunrises and collecting them. Proof that I still ain’t dead.

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And I am trying hard this winter to think and write about other things than Donald Trump. As bad as he is to have to deal with, life goes on… at least, until it doesn’t. And each day I am older and wiser than I was the day before… at least by a day’s worth, if not more. Good things still happen even if they don’t happen as often as they used to… or as much as the bad things still happen.

I am watching more than one kind of sunrise. This statue was molded and fired in a kiln at school by my daughter, a rising sunshine of art talent. In fact, all my kids can draw… I wonder where that comes from?

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My daughter sometimes draws weird cartoon characters like this boy with a band-aid on his nose riding on a dinosaur/dragon/thing with a laser eye and a mechanical right leg. That is about as goofy as it gets. And I wonder, too, where the heck does that come from?

And you can stop shouting at the computer screen. I only pretend to be as thick as rock for comedic effect. In truth, only my head and my really old unwashed socks are that hard and dense and thought-resistant.

But I keep going while I can. There is still lots to do… novels to write… pictures to draw… dogs to walk and poop to pick up… being retired, even being forcibly retired for health reasons, is like a bag of Saturdays, with no real work responsibilities hanging over my head except for the ones I put there for myself.

And I keep on collecting sunrises, one after another… simply because I still can.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, kids, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, strange and wonderful ideas about life

February 11, 2017 · 4:51 pm

The View From My Little Town

An aerial view of Toonerville in Winter

As immigration officers round up school children and their families blocks from a school in North Carolina, Trump minion Flynn is being accused of violating the Logan Act over discussions with the Russians before Trump took office, and DeVos is being chased away from a Washington middle school by angry protesters who don’t want her sucking the intelligence out the students, I am reminded there are quieter places to go and get away from all the insane noise that is trying to kill us. Thus I head back to Toonerville, my HO scale model train town that has been packed away since we moved to Dallas in 2004. I have laid the downtown and part of the residential area out on a snowfield on the spare bed in my bedroom.

I am reminded, as I revisit Toonerville (with the Toonerville Trolley waiting down front from the train station), that I am a humor writer that writes about small town experiences and the teaching of children. I am imaginative and creative, and I have working strategies for dealing with the stress and insanity caused by all the political baboons doing the politically-charged things that political baboons do baboonishly every baboon day. There are places to go to get away from the Trump Circus’s endless monkey-house of horror.

In Toonerville, none of the clocks keep the correct time and none of them agree what time it is. Certain things are timeless. The village works together to solve its problems. What the wits and twits who chew Red Man tobacco down at Al’s General Store think about politics never leaves the checkerboards in front of the fire place. Mayor Moosewinkle at City Hall has no plans to run for State or Federal office. (Thank God for that, he’s a nut.) And officer Billy Bob Wortle, formerly from Texas, has never shot anybody of any color. The County Sheriff doesn’t even trust him to own bullets for that big old gun of his. As far as executive orders from Washington go, we mostly don’t give a damn.

Down at the Post Office, Mr. Murdoch the postman has never “gone postal” and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He loves to gossip, though. And Mr. Santucci, the hot-headed Italian owner-operator of the Farmer’s Market (who looks just like Santa Claus in the Coke ads, but is one very foul-mouthed Santa at Christmas time) secretly believes that it is the many differences between the various residents of town that keep life interesting. And old Ben Johnson, the town’s only black man, is his very best friend.

It’s a truly good feeling to live in a small town where all the people bicker and throw fits, but no one would every want to throw anyone out of town. People belong together, working for the common good. And it is a rather sad thing if the only place such a town can exist is inside my goofy old head. But if we bicker a little less and throw fits less often on the inside, won’t we be better people on the outside too?

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Filed under artwork, commentary, compassion, goofy thoughts, humor, imagination, insight, inspiration, Paffooney, photo paffoonies, playing with toys, satire, strange and wonderful ideas about life, the road ahead