Category Archives: photo paffoonies

June 28, 2015 · 2:43 pm

Winning Easy

20150628_124803Now that Captain Action finally liberated my X-Box from the evil Dr. Evil who was holding it for ransom and not letting me play EA Sports Baseball ’04, I have been able to play Baseball ’04 again.  (It happened in this blog; Dr. Evil’s Removable Brain)  I have been playing this video game now with a passion, as you can plainly see.  You are probably aware that the St. Louis Cardinals are my very favorite team in any and all sports.  Notice, please that I have just pitched Matt Morris’ 30th victory against no defeats over stinky old steroid-fueled Roger Clemens.  It was also his 9th shut out of the season.  This is the first 30-game-winning season since Denny McLain in Detroit, in the 1968 season.  I only had to replay the entire 2004 season 4 times to get there.  Oh, and Albert Pujols has hit 114 home runs and Scott Rolen hit his 70th and 71st in this game.   You are certainly smart enough to figure out by now that I have left the difficulty level of this game permanently set at the Rookie level.  Hey, I’m old.  I like easy wins.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon's first bloom.

A close-up of the Flower Wagon’s first bloom.

This is true in so many areas of my life.  The flower wagon that I posted about on Friday is another evidence of my dedication to the philosophy of the easy win.  It was a victory over many things… depression, tragedy, Texas gully-washers that keep on coming, the tragedy of an old toy that no longer gets played with… things where my decrepit old self with six incurable diseases needs desperately to win.

Flowers in our yard in general are a victory of sorts.  This is Texas.  A couple of summers back we were in a severe drought with like 99 days in a row of high temperatures of 100-plus.  Flowers in June in Texas are a bit of a miracle.  Good flower pictures recently taken are another miracle.  My cell phone camera takes so much better pictures with all its automatic settings than my digital camera which cost twice as much, that it makes me wonder why I ever bothered with it.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

A Yellow Rose of Texas in our yard.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Another yellow perennial that came up due to funky wet weather.

Of course, this is pictures the easy way because I am not trying to adjust the color balance (in spite of partial color-blindness), or the brightness compensation, all by my own little self with my modest-to-insignificant photography skills.  (I am just skilled enough at photography to recognize a great work of art photographed by someone else, not skilled enough to take one myself.)

I am retired now.  I have had a long hard career as a public school teacher, and I am working hard at being a good writer (professional or not) in retirement.  I figure I deserve the odd easy win.  Using my writing skills to tackle toxic ideas like prejudice and politics recently I was able to score some real points with some of my very conservative friends.  I discovered by concentrating on the things they believe which I agree are very good things, I was able to make them consider a more liberal point of view, and not cling to Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts.  I can even get them to laugh at things like saying “Fox-News-sort-of faux-Fox-facts” because it sounds funny even if you are only reading it silently in your head.  It is an example of arguing towards an Easy Win, and I have become an addict.

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June 26, 2015 · 2:52 pm

The Flower Wagon

My life has more-or-less become an exercise in making the best out of a bad situation.  Believe me, I know yours is probably the same and I am bemoaning the common condition of us all, but we do what we do and it doesn’t get easier just because we do it daily.  So today’s post is about the flower wagon.

20150531_193228Now, if you are truly fool enough to read a lot of my purple paisley prose in this basically boring blog, you may have seen references to the flower wagon before this.

Last year, doing yard work, I had an inordinate amount of crushed live-oak acorns from the street near where we park our cars.  Our oaks were excessively reproductive that year because, I guess they found the weather unusually sexy or something.  So I had copious amounts of crushed acorn.  In fact, before I got it all scooped up, a little bit of rain had turned it into the acorn-equivalent of peanut butter… goopy, sticky, and unpleasant to touch.  Most of it went into the compost bin, but the last little-red-wagon load got left in the little red wagon to get snowed on, frozen solid, and snowed on again.

We love that little red wagon.  When the kids were small, we used it to pull them around SeaWorld in San Antonio and AstroWorld in Houston.  It went all over the country with us on summer vacation, and was the Princess’ personal coach and four (provided she allowed the cooler full of ice for water, soda, and fruit to share the ride).

So, the neglected little red wagon turned into a rust-bucket lawn ornament this spring, and it was busy growing a bumper crop of weeds in all that acorn peanut butter… fertile stuff, acorn peanut butter.  So I decided to plant flowers.  I got some Walmart zinnias and some wildflowers, spending about a dollar fifty all told, pulled the weeds by hand, and sprinkled flower seeds all over it.  We are all sad to see the lonely little wagon deteriorating and being demoted to lawn ornament status, but it seemed like we had a possibility of new life within reach.

This spring, with the monsoon rains Texas apparently borrowed from Asia and the Philippines, I did not even have to bother myself with watering.  If anything, there was too much water… flash-flood-warning-daily sort of too much water.  So I have been patient… watching and weeding.  And then…

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20150626_084717The first blossom bloomed and turned color yesterday while we were picking up number one son from the airport.  Old things can produce new things.  Decay and age lead to blossoming new life.  There has to be a balance between happy and sad.  I am trying like heck to be a humorist, but I have learned the lesson that you can’t be laughing all the time.  But here is proof that after the rains come the flowers.  And I am laughing now.

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June 25, 2015 · 1:36 pm

Texas Airport Adventures

20150625_114933Ah, Love Field, the scent of baking asphalt heavy in the air… even indoors where it is nominally air-conditioned (the word nominally here meaning “in name only”), people rushing about like lemmings and hamsters (though not the cool hamster-people of the recent car commercials), and air-port workers moving at the speed of airport business transactions (slower than molasses outdoors at Christmas during a blizzard).

Number One Son, the Marine home on leave, gave me the heads-up when he texted me at 7:45 am that he would be arriving “around 11:00”.  I knew he would be flying in… but it didn’t occur to him to give me any details.  What is the flight number?  What airline are you on?  What airport?  Remember, there are two big ones in the DFW area.  So, like all men who don’t know which end their own heads are attached to, I asked my wife.  “Love Field” was all she said.

Now, this is partially good news.  Love Field is small… compared to DFW.   I could most probably catch him at the cattle-gate where all the passengers come out of the concourse through the same door.  If you look carefully at the picture, you may spot the reflection of my be-hatted old head forlornly watching the ramp up to the cattle-gate.

20150411_130035My number-two son, Henry, and my daughter, the Princess, were both waiting with me.  While we were waiting, they were bickering again.

“Jeez, Princess, if you bathed more often, you would smell a lot better than you do now!”

“I don’t stink any worse than you do, Henry!” she retorted, “And I bathe as often as you do.”

“I just had a shower last night!”

“Well, so did I.  I took a shower right after you!”

Before the blows and the beatings began I said in a grouchy voice, “Can we not have a stink-fight right now, please?”  The air-conditioner in the car only works poorly and part of the time… We also had to park out in the sun on the deck of the airport parking garage.  And it was a long walk in the sunshine of hot-old Texas to get where we were at that moment.  All of that pretty much was the reason for verbal combat and aroma follies.

“Where is he, Dad?” asked the Princess who complains right up to my patience-capacity red-line.  “Shouldn’t he be here already?”

“I texted him, but I don’t think that Houston flight at 11:00 was actually the one that he is on.”

Suddenly I got the “Where are you?” text from number one son.

“We’re at the exit waiting.”

“At DFW?”

“Oh, gawd no!” I said.  I started to hustle the two stink-warriors back towards the distant car.  “We’re at loVe FIeld.”  I hate when my finger is too big to hit the right key while texting and not simultaneously hit another key as well.

“Oh, hang on.”

I held my breath.

“That may be the one I’m at,” said the next text.

So, I halted the rushed exodus towards the $6 parking fee and the mad rush across the metroplex to the other airport.  I was still holding my breath a bit… and turning slightly purple when…  There he was with his guitar case, Marine backpack, and a rather silly grin on his face.

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June 14, 2015 · 2:20 pm

Project Updates

Being a divergent thinker and guilty of trying to waltz down seven different paths at the same time, I have various projects going all at once.  I can’t always keep track.  So, I am going to take time out of planning to haunt people when I’m a ghost to take inventory of a few of the things I am juggling while trying to blog and write novels and draw pictures.  You may remember from posts related to playing with dolls that I am a collector with hoarding disorder and a room full of action figures and dolls.  You may even remember that I finished a year-long collection of My Little Pony dolls (the twelve-inch Equestria Girls, because the ponies themselves are not within the rules).  I took up a bigger collection after that.  The prices of some of these are coming down on the bargain shelf, and they are somewhat intriguing in concept for girls’ toys.  They are the Monster High dolls.

Monster Babes

These are twelve-inch dolls for under $20, and so they qualify, even though they are totally deformed with Chibi-like big heads.  They are supposedly the teenage children of the Universal Movie Monsters.  Starting on the left, Howleen Wolf is the daughter of the Wolfman.  Then I have two Cleo de Niles, the daughter of the Mummy.  One is the Black Carpet movie-maker version, apparently being played by a very young Gloria Swanson.  (The one on the left.)  The other version is wearing the family mummy-wraps.  Then I have Howleen’s sister, Clawdeen.  Unfortunately, the bargain shelf at Walmart is often ravaged by little-kid pilferers.  I am short a pair of golden shoes and a couple of undetermined accessories that were pulled out of the bottom of the box.  I am grateful to the thieves, because although there are no mint-in-boxes here, I was able to get the dolls at a reduced-for-damage price.  Now, you probably realize that this collection is not finished.  I have reason to believe there are other movie-monster children in the series.  Dracula has a daughter.  The creature from the Black Lagoon does too.  So does Frankenstein’s monster.  I believe there may even be a daughter of the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors.  How can someone with my mental diseases and disorders possibly resist that?

Flower Wagon 1The next project to check on is the flower wagon.  Last year, while cleaning rain gutters and raking up acorns, I managed to leave the kids’ little red wagon full of the stuff.  The unnaturally wet spring we had led to a bumper crop of weeds in the organic mess that I left there over-long.  Not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth for fear it may be filled with tiny, angry Greeks, I decided to pull out the weeds by hand, and plant flowers.  I got zinnias from Walmart  (Yes, I know what kind of poopy people the Walmart owners and pharaohs are, but I can’t really afford to shop anywhere else.  They didn’t leave anybody else in business.)  I planted carefully.  I let God do the watering.  (And prayed he wouldn’t drown them,)  And then I waited.  The last time I checked on the wagon, the flowers had made it this far;

Flower Wagon 2

I can’t wait to see if anything dares to bloom.  I want to post the happy little flower faces on my next update.  And I promise to get back to plotting future hauntings.   I have already chosen as my target the worst principal I ever had (a hard choice to make from a rogues gallery that puts Batman’s to shame).

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June 12, 2015 · 3:30 pm

Sent to My Room and Sulking

Well, my family is packed up in the RV and headed to Florida, looking for beaches and fun, and going to see my eldest son graduate from his Marine MOS schooling.  I would’ve gone too, but my lungs have been very naughty and I can’t get that far away from doctors that my pirate health insurance will actually pay for.  So, I am stuck in my room.  It sucks (in the sense of a vacuum cleaner, because as a former middle school teacher, I am not allowed to even think about a less G-rated meaning; my teacher brain would blow a bad-word filter-gasket).  My family members, of course, are concerned about leaving me here alone, but I don’t want one of my six incurable diseases to be victorious over any of them.  It is enough that COPD can ruin my life, and it does not need to impact them.  Besides, I have the consolation of staying in my room with the carefully conditioned and filtered air and playing with my toys, like the old days when I was a kid (the really old, old days!) and got to stay home with Captain Kangaroo and my toys to play all day, even though I felt like regurgitated dodo-bird food… and I have a lot more toys now than I had then.

My Red Bedroom Studio

You can plainly see in the picture of my bedroom studio that I have stuffed animals all over (left over from my 2007-2008 online store days when I sold repaired and reconditioned stuffed animals from Goodwill), plenty of dolls… erm, action figures, a cardboard castle, a DVD player, laptop computer, books galore, and lots and lots of drawing paper.  I am prepared to be home-bound and left out of things.  I can draw and write stories and blog and draw some more.  And I will, too.  Besides sulking about having to miss out on the fun the rest of the family is having, something I am not only good at and thoroughly practiced at, but very efficient at producing words and ideas at the same time I am hurting, or woozing, or gasping for air, I intend to advance at least two of the three novels I am working on rough drafts for at this time.  I am working on When the Captain Came Calling, and Star-Dusters and Lizard-Men.  The first is about learning to see through lies, an invisible man who comes back to Iowa from a cursed voyage in the South Seas, and how a family deals with unthinkable loss.  The second is a star-faring science fiction tale of a planet dying of both pollution and corporate abuse that can be saved if the species of intelligent lizard-men living there are actually worthy of being saved.  So while I sulk and pout and feel sorry for myself, I have plenty to do.  And I will continue to make light of the situation even after it kills me.  Death won’t know what he did wrong to get hold of an ornery old Iowegian-Texas transplant like me who will laugh in his face until the old Bonehead is properly and resolutely perplexed.

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May 31, 2015 · 7:17 pm

Let The Sun Shine!

I am sure by now you are probably aware of how much rain has been pouring down on our heads here in Texas.  We are soaked to the bone and some of us are under water.  My poor cracked and useless swimming pool, useless because five-years-plus of drought has shrunk the soil and cracked the cement in the cement pond, is now full of water again.  The ground under it is so saturated that even though the holes are still not repaired, the water has no place to go.  At least the North Texas area we live in is now greener than I have ever seen it this time of year.

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The grass needs cutting desperately since I have not had a rain-free day to cut it in so long.  The upshot is, I need the sun to come out.  If you have been reading my blog of late, a serious mistake that some people are willing to commit, you may have noticed how down and depressing my writing has been of late.  I have been writing about how the insurance pirates have been wounding me deeply in an economic sense.  I have written about dead people talking in the cemetery in an Our Town sort of scene gone completely weird.  And yesterday I wrote about dealing with my own childhood victimization through grisly Middle Ages-inspired death-art.  I have reached the low point in the valley and decided it is now time climb the next mountain.  I need my sunshine back.

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So, today, the sun came out.  Even better, the forecast for the next week has rain chances down around four per cent.  The ducks have come back to our pool.  The songbirds have returned from wherever they’ve been hiding.  The world is cheering up.  And in spite of problems with arthritic limbs aching, book publishing going in super-slow-motion, financial doom looming above me ready to swoop down like an avenging eagle at any second, and numerous other things that are hard to turn into humor, the sunshine has restored my smile.

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May 21, 2015 · 11:15 am

Red Nose Day

Today is going to be difficult with a lot of important work to do that I can’t even write about for a while.  It involves taking risks with my secret identity and pushing for good things to happen.  You are aware that Mickey is my secret self… the superhero mask I wear to fight evil, right?  No?  Oops!   Forget that I said anything.  I have no secret identity.  We are just doing this post today for the whole Red Nose Day thing.  There is no hidden agenda.  No secret sauce and super powers.  I swear, on my honor I only tell lies in my fiction… that’s the truth… I tell lies.

rednose meeee

Here is a link explaining the whole red nose thing…

https://www.rednoseday.org/

And if you see a hero who seems a little goofy around the edges, wearing a red nose as his super-hero disguise, and he fumbles and bumbles as he tries to do the right thing, remember… that isn’t me.  It is somebody else.

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May 17, 2015 · 1:52 pm

My Mother’s Dolls

Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer

Tom Sawyer without the straw hat, as created by Lois Beyer

You may already know about my doll-collecting mania.  You may have already called the mental health people to come take care of the problem, and they just haven’t arrived at my door yet with the white coat that has the extra long sleeves.  But you may not know that my mother is a doll-maker and has something to do with my doll-collecting hoarding disorder.

In the early 1990’s my mother and I put our money together and bought a kiln while we were visiting my sister’s family out in California.  It wasn’t the most expensive model, but it wasn’t the cheapest, either.  We both had enough experience with ceramics that we didn’t want to buy a burning box that was merely going to blow our porcelain projects to kingdom come.  Mother had doll-making friends in Texas who taught her about firing greenware and glazing and porcelain paint and all the other arcane stuff you have to know to make expensive hand-made dolls.  Now, honestly, at the start we could’ve made some money at it selling to seriously ill doll collectors and other kooks, but we were not willing to part with our early art, and by the time we were ready to do more than just have an expensive hobby, everyone who would’ve paid money for the product was making their own.  So dreams of commercial success were supplanted by the hobbyist’s mania that made more and more charming little things to occasionally display at the county fair.

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The two dolls I have left to share on my blog from that era were both crafted by my mother.  She lovingly fired the porcelain body parts, painted the faces by hand, and created the wardrobe on her Singer sewing machine.  I made some dolls too, but never with the wondrous craft and care that made my mother’s dolls beyond compare.

Tom Sawyer was originally a boy doll who was supposed to be able to hold a model train in his hands.  My mother had the pattern for the little engineer’s uniform and hat that she would use on another doll instead.  He is named after the Tom Sawyer clothing pattern that my mother bought and sewed together to dress him in.  He has a cloth and stuffing body underneath his clothes together with porcelain head, hands, and bare feet.

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The other doll I have left to brag unctuously about is a doll named Nicole after the niece my wife and I have whom this doll bares a striking resemblance to.  She displays a beautiful little girl’s sun dress with quilted accent colors that my mother sewed from scratch with the help of a pattern she was truly fond of and used more than once.

These dolls were gifts to my wife and I, presented shortly after my mother bought out my share of the kiln when she retired and moved back to the frosty land of the Iowegians.  I haven’t kept them as thoroughly dusted and cobweb-free as they deserve because I have been a somewhat lazy and slovenly son… but I do love them almost as much as (and sometimes more depending on recent behavior) my own children.  (After all, porcelain kids rarely make a mess, overspend allowances, or hog the television too much.)

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May 5, 2015 · 12:43 pm

Conversations With the Ghost of Miss M…

DSCN5148Beneath the old cottonwood tree there once stood a one-room school house.  My mother went to school there as a girl, a short walk from home along the Iowa country road.  Misty mornings on a road between cornfields and soybean fields can often conjure up ghosts.

I took this morning walk with the dog while I was visiting my old Iowegian home, and I was writing my fictional story Magical Miss Morgan in my head, not yet having had time to sit down and write.  I was reflecting on times long past and a school long gone, though Miss Morgan’s story is really about my own teaching experience.  Miss Morgan is in many ways me.  But I am not a female teacher.  I am a goofy old man.  So, why am I writing the main character as a female?

Well, the ghosts from the old school house heard that and decided to send an answer.

Miss Mennenga was my third grade and fourth grade teacher from the Rowan school.  The building I attended her classes in has been gone for thirty years.  Miss M herself has long since passed to the other side.  So when she appeared at the corner…  Yes, I know… I have said countless times that I don’t believe in ghosts, but she had the same flower-patterned dress, the glasses, the large, magnified brown eyes that could look into your soul and see all your secrets, yet love you enough to not tell them to anyone else.  Suddenly, I knew where the character of Miss Morgan had actually come from.  I also realized why I was drawn to teaching in the first place.  Teachers teach you more than just long division, lessons about the circulatory systems of frogs, and the Battle of Gettysburg…  They shape your soul.

“You remember getting in trouble for doing jokes in class when you were supposed to be studying your spelling words?”

“Yes, Miss M, but I didn’t make any noise.. they were pantomime jokes that I stole from watching Red Skelton on TV.”

“But you pulled your heart out of your chest and made it beat in your hand.  You had to know that was going to make the boys smirk and the girls giggle.”

“I did.  But making them happy was part of the reason God put me there.”

“But not during spelling.  I was trying to teach math to fourth graders.  You interrupted.”

“You made that point.  I still remember vividly.  You let me read the story to the class out loud afterwords.  You said I needed to use my talent for entertaining to help others learn, not distract them from learning.”

“I was very proud of the way you learned that lesson.”

“I tried very hard as a teacher to never miss a teachable moment like that.  It was part of the reason that God put you there.”

“And I did love to hear you read aloud to the class.  You were always such an expressive reader, Michael.  Do you remember what book it was?”

“It was Ribsy, by Beverly Cleary.   How could I have forgotten that until now?  You made me love reading out loud so much that I always did it in my own classes, at every opportunity.”

I remembered the smile above all else as the lingering image faded from my view through the eyes of memory.  She had a warm and loving smile.  I can only hope my goofy grin didn’t scare too many kids throughout my career.

10931430_1392374101067123_2624334665191497015_n I needed a post for 1000 Voices that was about reconnecting with someone.  I could’ve used any number of real life examples from everything that has happened to me since poor health forced me to retire from teaching  I could’ve written any number of things that would not make me feel all sad and goopy about retiring and would not make me cry at my keyboard again like I am doing now… like I did all through that silly novel I wrote… even during the funny parts.  But I had to choose this.  A debt had to be paid.  I love you, Miss M… and I had to pay it forward.

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May 3, 2015 · 3:07 pm

This and That

tedcruzOkay, I know I claim to be a conspiracy theorist when it comes to aliens and 9-11… I am… totally loony and tinfoil-hat-wearing… can’t let those men in black read my mind, right?   But those crazy ideas are based on facts that I have uncovered and investigations into the obvious and admitted manipulations of those facts that have come out over time… from credible whistle-blowers and witnesses.  What is going on in Texas right now is not that, and not my fault.  I don’t adhere to any Alex-Jones-2nd-Amendment-FEMA-death-camps sort of conspiracy theories.  President Obama is NOT planning an attack on Texas with these routine military exercises involving Green Berets and Navy Seals.  The crap thinking that motivated Governor Greg Abbott to activate the Texas National Guard to oversee the military exercises is stupid-headed paranoid Republican propaganda.  I am trying to make humor here out of scary Texas political poop, but this is too wacko to even joke about.

20150501_195234To totally change the topic and talk about something else, I may have inadvertently changed one of my collections that feed my hoarding disorder mental illness…  I was very poetically snapping pictures of the sunrise when I walked the dog every morning and calling that “collecting sunrises”.  But I started taking other dog-walking photos, like cloud shots and moon shots and sunset shots.   Uh-oh!   More time lost to collecting things pointlessly… or is that how art happens?  the artist finding certain observations to be spiritually and creatively fulfilling… and tries to share that fulfillment?  Or when you consider the Avengers Coke cans… is it clinically a concern?

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Okay, let’s switch again…   Friday night my daughter, the Princess, was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society.  This happened at her middle school, Dan F. Long, home of the Falcons.

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They had this wonderful candle-lighting ceremony filled with wonderful things.  I experienced several of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls “spots of time” in which there is a transcendent moment that carries you far beyond the daily dose of mundane.  The first one was when the Falcon orchestra, complete with cellos and violins, was playing a waltz.  The principal was in the hallway with his young daughter to greet the parents and friends attending the ceremony.  The two of them, the extremely competent and hard-nosed black principal and his pretty little black daughter began to waltz together, not even thinking that some of us seated in the cafetorium might see them do it.  I couldn’t help but think, “while Baltimore burns…  if only we had more of this!”  And more wonderful things followed.  The NJHS faculty sponsor was a teacher I subbed for a decade ago.  She is a determined and bubbly little woman who impressed me once upon a time with her detailed planning and sharp methods.  This little woman could throw big bad trouble-making boys around the room (metaphorically of course) to get her point across and make lessons happen.  I saw her in action.  She was tough and ambitious in spite of being small and always smiling.  And the Princess was inducted with a candle ceremony (a potential disaster waiting to happen in a middle school setting) in which she was in the middle of three rows on the stairs… and no one set anyone else’s hair on fire.  And we’re talking seventh-grade nerd-boys standing with a lighted candle behind seventh-grade girls with long hair!

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And finally I wanted to share with you the progress I have made on cardboard castles.  I have made all of this so far with my own two arthritic claws using Ritz Cracker boxes, Honey Nut Cheerios boxes, tape, scissors, and glue.  I have only glued fingers together once and managed not to accidentally cut off any necessary part of my body (fingernails don’t actually count, do they?).  Why am I doing nutty stuff like this?  Well, I’m retired.  What am I supposed to do?  Sensible real-world stuff?  Get real.

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