Trip around the sun

Hear 'em singing Happy Birthday
Better think about the wish I made
This year gone by ain't been a piece of cake
Every day's a revolution
Pull it together and it comes undone
Just one more candle and a trip around the sun

I'm just hanging on while this old world keeps spinning
And it's good to know it's out of my control
If there's one thing that I've learned from all this living
Is that it wouldn't change a thing if I let go

No, you never see it coming
Always wind up wondering where it went
Only time will tell if it was time well spent
It's another revelation
Celebrating what I should have done
With these souvenirs of my trip around the sun


Yes, I'll make a resolution
That I'll never make another one
Just enjoy this ride on my trip around the sun
Just enjoy this ride ...
Until it's done

Throwing Rocks at the Train

I grew up, whatever that means, in a suburb of Seattle, but when I hit the ninth grade my family move to the panhandle of Nebraska and I was somewhat obligated to go with them.

Work was slow in Seattle. There was a big lay off at a rather large company called Boeing. At the time there were bill boards up that said “Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?”

My father worked as a millwright at a logging/lumber mill called Weyerhaeuser. It seems that things were slow there also. My Great-Grandmother was around 80 years old and her husband of 60 some years had just died. It was decided that we would move there to be with her during her “twilight” years…she lived to be 102! Twenty-two years is one heck of twilight!

I liked being in cowboy country. Dad was a cowboy, granddad was a cowboy and my great-grandfather was a cowboy. That is as far back as I know. I was proud to walk around town in my no-name cowboy hat and a pair of Acme cowboy boots. Later in life I would not have been caught dead without a Stetson hat and a pair of Tony Lamas. Now it is a Nautica or a Mount Gay Rum cap and a pair of Sperry Top-Siders, but quite often I miss my Tony Lamas.

My grandparents had a ranch in an area of the panhandle called “The Sandhills”. As the name implies there was nothing there, but sand, grass and Cottonwood trees if there was any water around to provide for the trees and the grass. It was once described as the Sahara Desert with grass. Someone wrote that when the buffalo still roamed, there was no grass there because the herds were so large they ate it all or their hooves destroyed the roots, but I do not know for sure. I do know that when the wind blew it would find somewhere where the roots of the grass were not tightly knit together and it could cause a huge hole called a blowout. It looked much like a sand-trap on a golf course, but surrounded by tall prairie grass not fine trimmed fescue.

There was a train that came by in the morning and one during the evening. It consisted of a diesel engine with a couple of dozen box cars made up of mostly grain cars and a caboose. Please do not remind when the last time was that you saw a working caboose.

At one time in my dad’s life he was a brakeman on a train. They have gone the way of cabooses and switchmen which only makes sense because without a caboose they would have no place to ride and without the workers there would be no need for a caboose. He always knew interesting things about trains like how many cars in a mile long train, how many engines it took to pull that train and what the different colored lights mean on the cross bar above the tracks.

One warm summer evening while I was helping out with the chores I heard the train whistle blow somewhere down the line. My dad caught my attention and said “Come on let’s go throw rocks at the train.” Oh the excitement of committing delinquency with my father! This is going to be so good. On the one half mile walk to the tracks I started looking for rocks.

Did I mention that there was nothing in the Nebraska Sandhills, but sand, grass and Cottonwood trees if there was any water around to provide for the trees and the grass?

Australian Cattle Dogs

Here is a story about an Australian Cattle Dog from...Australia. They are certainly tough creatures.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/30089037#30089037

12%

Did you know that only 12% of the population of the United States is black? I was doing research on something else when I discovered that statistic. This is not a political or a racial comment just an observation. By the influence of black music, television, and that over 40% percent of the prison population is black I presumed it was much higher. I just did not know.

Hobbies

Sometimes I wish that I had only one hobby like a lot of my friends because I think that I would be as good as they are at what they do. I have a friend who is fantastic at dog agility. His dog is amazing and they do amazing things together.

There is another friend who can cast a fly and hit a dime at 50 yards. I am lucky to hit 50 yards, much less any kind of object like a semi-truck. Then is there is my friend the SCUBA diver who dives in exotic places and is probably more comfortable at 100 feet below sea level than on his couch.

My friend, the sailor, who knows a boat inside and out. Any boat, not only his, but any boat. He has sailed to a lot of the places that I could only dream of. He has crossed the Atlantic more than once and even had a job where he sailed most everyday. Now he lives on a Caribbean Island and can sail any day that he is in the mood.

The list goes on after the afore mentioned dog agility, fly fishing, SCUBA diving and sailing. There is hand percussion (not enough practice), flying (yeah I took ground school), photography (I lost my best camera and there was so much to learn), kayaking ( I would rather sail), reading (too much TV), writing (used to could), child rearing (my partner at the time was rather difficult to say the least), husbanding (harder than I thought and I am rather selfish)., travel (not enough money and I do have a job). Like I said the list goes on, but then so do the excuses. I certainly enjoy the versatility and learning so many new things, but I am not excellent at any of them. It is like the saying goes, “a jack of all trades and a master of none”.

In my trade, neat hand printing is a plus. I was watching a peer print and I said, “I would love to print like that.” He said, “No you don’t”. I said “Well, yes I do, what do mean?” He said “I spent hours training myself to print like this because it was important to me. You could do it too if it was important to you.” So, maybe I would only like to print like that and not love to because I am really not willing to spend hours perfecting my printing. It just seems like there is too many more interesting things to do.

So at 50 some years old I decided to learn more about myself and took an online test to see who I am and what I am about.
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http://discoveryhealth.queendom.com/type_a_personality_access.html

In fact I actually took quite a few and scored supremely low on the Type "A" personality test. I found out that most likely I will not die of stress or a heart attack that a lot of Type A personalities die from, but from skin cancer (too much sun), from sclerosis of the liver (too many boat drinks) or from an accidental death (too much fun). Actually, I would prefer to go in my sleep like my friends grandfather did, not screaming and yelling like the passengers of his car.

The final thought is that even though I would like to be the best, I am quite certain that will not be, but I will enjoy doing what ever it is that I find to do.

We Are Going Green

It seems that there is a lot of talk about being green. Having a low carbon footprint in order to protect the fragile environment and of course the big debate on global warming.

Well today we bought a bamboo cutting board.
How is that for going green? Huh? Well... it has to account for something doesn't it? Actually, my wife bought a complete set of cooking utensils and a potholder set that was made out of bamboo.
I guess that I am a little ignorant about bamboo, but I was absolutely amazed that towels, pot holders and oven mitts could me made out of it. I even found a t-shirt that was made out of bamboo. How do they do that? And what about the splinters? I knew about flooring, scaffold and a host of other building products, but t-shirts and underwear? I just didn't know.

I have been in the building industry most of my adult life and until the past few years we have never heard about this “Going Green” stuff. Lately though I have been doing a lot of research on it and some of it makes a lot of sense like using sustainable materials, energy efficient products, and recycling building products. Actually I have been “recycling” building products for as long as I have been building so that is nothing new. There are many things that are nothing new to most builders like using dual pane windows. We have been doing that for over 30 years. Using a breathable house wrap for at least that long. Reusing existing fill dirt, it only make sense.

This weekend I met a man that was really into the “green” movement. He told me that making the Portland cement that is used in concrete produces more green house gas than all of the automobiles combined. I did not know that. He was quite passionate about what he believed. He had some very practical Ideas and then there were some that seemed quite impractical.

Is there such a thing as practical green? Building the very finest home that you can afford and doing all that you can to preserve the world's natural resources by using sustainable materials, increasing the insulation value and using recycled materials?

Maybe someday I will be like “Mister Passionate Green” and have a desire to see the government enforce his views for now though I am happy doing what I can, designing homes that will be joy to look at, live in and will not negatively impact the world that we live in.

So go out and buy a bamboo cutting board, it could change your life and you will never look back.

Something to Think About

There are some really useless facts that cause me to wonder. The most recent one is that over 33% if my “friends” on facebook have their birthdays in February. Now I only have 31 “friends” and most of them are family and only one is someone that I have never met. I am not even sure how I discovered this, but I am quite certain it came from some indiscriminate “clicking”. There is not much of a chance that I could find it again.

But, just what are the chances of that happening? I am not ambitious, nor interested enough to see if that is a national average. If I were to back up, nine months that would be the month of June. Now five of them I do know where born in the cold climates so could it could have been like a summer celebration or something?

I was born in January so were two of my siblings and another was born in late December. We have a big family. That is a lot of winter births. There again, backtrack nine months…April or May. We are all from the mid-west, cold climate, but now there are flowers, warm evenings…Hey I don’t know. It just could be that the matron did not want to carry a baby through the hot humid summers of the mid-west. So now I am getting into very unfamiliar territory and feeling quite uncomfortable.

Now, you have something to think about and I am done with it.