November, 2015, and EMT stuff

*****STARTED IN EARLY NOVEMBER****
--I'm prepping for my EMT practical exercises, all next week. I'm not ready.


--Without getting specific, I had to officially apply my authority as a supervisor at work for the first time. I didn't much care for it.


--The weather in North Texas has been spectacular. Temps down in the mid-to-high 50s at night, up to almost 80 during the day. My wife put a drip irrigation system in for her garden in early September, and in early October, I gave her a high-end hose splitter and two-channel electric water timer. Our garden looks amazing.

--We noticed that the area around our water meter was getting swampy. I called the Public Works guys, who dug down and found a leak... on the city side! Huzzah! The very nice Public Works guy suggested that I put in a personally-owned water cut-off valve, so I bought one and a hand-hole box. He just installed that where the meter was, and moved the meter over a foot, and installed it a little higher upstream. To do this, he had to dig up the valve at the main, which was just direct-buried and not accessible by manhole or hand-hole. He took the old manhole cover and bit of steel culvert, and put it over the valve at the main, and put a new box over the meter, and put my purchased box over the valve that he had put in. He and his partner then put in sand around it, and carted away the mud, because, they said, it was dry into impermeable cement. (We have a high clay content in our soil.) 

***************LATER. MUCH LATER. WRITTEN IN DECEMBER, ACTUALLY******


--I did my skills week for my EMT studies. It was a 70+ mile drive, through downtown Fort Worth each way. Going there, I just started at about 5:45am, and made it right through the city. Coming back, I had to sit in traffic. I'm a wimp about traffic, having to only rarely deal with it. My normal daily commute is just from my front door to my car, and then on in to the office less than half a mile away.

--I took the final on a Friday. I got a 90. I'm not proud of that 90, because it means that 10% of the cases that I come across may well fall in a gap of my knowledge. I have a long way to go.


--I did my rotational internships at a regional hospital pursuing Level II Trauma Center status, and at a couple of mid-city firehouses. The fire guys were great, and were easy to chat with and get along with. They were people of the sort that I knew; they laughed and cut up, but turned on the professionalism as soon as a call for service came up.

At the ER (ED, actually), it was different. The staff was quite stiff. Tensions were up a little bit. I found myself in the way, apologizing a lot. Nurses would be professional, but often put the "curt" in "courteous." I understood. I was just an intern, and was furniture. In three days, I was gone, and there was no reason to really develop a relationship with me. Thus, I was at best a liability who could maybe be of some help in moving a patient, or cleaning up an exam room. I cleaned a LOT of exam rooms. I was surprised. My first ER preceptor, a "Tech," was a paramedic with street experience, but he was also treated a lot like an errand boy who also took vitals. And I was his assistant and intern. My preceptor was very nice, actually, and quite encouraging. He told me that he thought that I was going to be great as an EMT. I got handed off to another Tech/Paramedic, and then a nurse that I chose for her friendliness and willingness to answer questions. At the end of three days, the Charge Nurse gave me one compliment: He directed me to show the next EMT intern who was relieving me his way around the ED, and explain what was expected of him.

I did my final rotation as a 24 hour shift at the firehouse on Thanksgiving. I brought a couple of large pies with me.


--I got to see some stuff. One guy with normal vital signs had taken a trauma to the throat during sports, and during auscultation of his neck, I detected crackling sounds like rice crispies. Subcutaneous emphysema!  

An ambulance crew brought in an 84 year old man who was receiving CPR (begun within one minute of his collapse). I got put on compressions. He had been intubated. His sternum was completely broken free from his ribs. We shocked him three times. The doctors pushed a lot of drugs. As I was doing compressions, I felt something, and looked at the monitor, even as the ER doc was looking at it. He told me to stop compressions. At about this time, a paramedic and a nurse who were bagging him noticed eye movement. The patient had a viable rhythm! We backed away, and the RT put the patient onto a machine to help the patient breathe, and the doc started a central line.


We had a lot of rain on Thanksgiving night. I rolled with the fire guys to a swift water rescue that was so professionally performed that it looked actually kind of boring.  My ambulance preceptor was kind of a meat-and-potatoes guy.


An elderly woman with recent UTI and chest infection, with abnormally low BP, who had fainted in her bed and couldn't be awakened until shortly before we arrived? Well, that's just syncope (fainting). She refused to go to the hospital with us, but would with family. Walking out, I asked my preceptor about the possibility of it being septic shock. "Hey, it could well be," my preceptor said.


We had another older woman with a history of stroke, speaking in two-word sentences, with edema in her legs and respirations at about 28, who assented to go to the hospital.  While I was filling out my Patient Care Report (for my school-- this wasn't the official one), I got to the Assessment portion again. I asked my preceptor about the possibility of it being Right Ventricular Failure. He nodded and said that could be, and asked if I was sure that I wasn't going to go get my paramedic. I told him that I had too much respect for what those guys did, to assume that I could do it.

--I suppose that it's possible that someone will whine that I'm violating HIPAA by describing these cases. Of course, they'd be hard-put to figure out where the patient was, when they were seen, what the outcome was, etc, etc. I've learned a thing or two, observing my friend Kelly Grayson.

--I've sold a safe queen gun, to buy an amplified electronic stethoscope. I only asked enough to get the 3M™ Littmann® Electronic Stethoscope Model 3100, but I think that I want the 3200, with Bluetooth and recording capability. I will probably come up with the rest and buy it this weekend. I just don't feel that I can hear well enough with standard stethoscopes, over my tinnitus.


--I have to send in my EMT book to the school, and get their permission to take the National Registry test. (I'm not ready.)

This and that: February 9, 2015.

--I worked an off-duty job last week, and am expecting a little bit of mad money from it. I'm going to buy me a Canon Rebel body, and then go lens shopping. It's embarrassing that I don't have any kind of DSLR, with my family.

--I took the helm for a week as the OIC of my P.D, while the chief was out of town. Nothing happened.

--I went to a Traffic Incident Management school for a couple of days, put on by the North Texas Council Of Governments. The instructors were great, and passionate about what they were teaching. They were fervent in teaching that, if you want to contribute to the safety of first responders and the public at large, you MUST clear the roadway quickly. Statistically, for every minute that a traffic incident continues, there is a 1 to 1.5% chance of a secondary event occurring. That's astounding. They had plenty of evidence to back it up, and were proponents of taking a quick picture of the crash, and using push-bumpers and-or chains to clear disabled vehicles out of lanes so that traffic could get moving again. The instructor said, "My dream is to see push bumpers put onto fire engines. I may retire the day that I see that happen."

Firefighters like to block off extra lanes for the safety of the first responders. The doctrine that these guys were trying to push was to get the firefighters on board with clearing the lanes, in the name of preserving the safety of the motorists upstream of them. I get that.

-- I've been working out again, trying to bring back the physical gains that I had made before the holidays. That left rotator cuff is telling me that I'm stuck at the amount of weight that I'll be benching for awhile, but I'm making nice gains on the eliptical machine, and on the abdominal curl machine. I'm trying to get my wind up, and strengthen my core. Everything else is gravy. Well, losing some more weight would be nice.

--Spending time on the eliptical machine got a LOT better, once I realized that I could use the little Galaxy tablet that my mother gave me for Christmas to watch Archer episodes on, with my Bluetooth headphones on. I, uh, had to turn it off in a hurry the other day when my Bluetooth wireless connection failed and the speaker began blaring the unfortunately blue dialogue at Missus Grundy, trudging away on the machine next to me.

-I taught my 12 year-old daughter the painless-until-resistance-is-encountered come-along hold we call "the Gooseneck." It's mostly used for escorting drunks away from a location. I should make sure that my 16 year-old is good with it, too. Lots and lots of times, just getting a belligerent drunk out of a confrontation will deescalate a tense situation into nothing.

-The Open Carry Movement guys in Texas have a very, VERY vocal minority who are frankly assholes. These asses will ruin it not only for the open carry proponents, but also for regular 2nd Amendment people. The most common method of the OCM activists is to carry (legally) long guns in public places in a prominent manner. It's one thing to carry a gun, and it's another thing to carry a gun at someone, as lots of these guys are doing. The nice thing about the Concealed Handgun License in Texas has been that the guy who wasn't being an idjit, and was following the law in keeping their gun concealed, was going to prevent a lot of foolishness in other ways. More on this, later; it deserves its own post.

--I called my best friend (a small business owner) and asked his advice on starting a small business. Two hours' later, we were kind of at an impasse.

--I refinanced the house, with cash back.  Just because you have cash sitting in the bank doesn't mean that you're wealthy. Not. At. All.

--When we refinanced, they made me sign my "signature" about 75 times throughout the hundreds of papers worth of documents. I say "signature" because the rep from the title company insisted that I had to write in script my first, middle, and last name each time. Who does that?!? I then had to sign a sworn affidavit that this was my "normal and true signature," and give and exemplar above the signing. I wrote for the exemplar my NORMAL signature. The lady with the title company pursed her lips and said that might not work, "because they're all supposed to be the same." I made clear that if I were swearing to the validity of the statement, I would see that it was true, and the only way to do that was to actually sign my actual normal signature on the exemplar line. I pointed out that her own signature below her notary stamp only included her first initial and last name. She countered that it was okay, because she had a letter from her attorney saying that this WAS her normal and true signature. I laughed and said that her attorney held no power to grant such status. But I signed the rest of the documents the way she wanted me to, to keep the title company (and my now-irritated wife, also present) happy.

--They had fresh Otis Spunkmeyer cookies on a plate in the middle of the table in the signing room of the title company. I thought that was odd. The lady from the title company urged us to take them, but we declined, as my wife and I are both on a low-carb diet. We finally took them home to our children.

--I've got to make a site plan for the new fence and deck that I'm putting up. Not one in five homeowners in my city gets a permit to do such work, but I'm getting one, because our municipal ordinance calls for one.

--I want a new backup holster for a J-frame, to put on my body armor. This is easier done when I wear the body armor under my uniform shirt than when I wear it in the external carrier. But I'd like to do it either way. Suggestions? I'm reevaluating.

--I'm also getting the itch for a new subcompact auto. I've been considering a Kahr PM9, or a Glock 42. I will say, though, for being a quality little carry gun, that PM9's magazine protruding from the butt by an 8th of an inch irritates me. Not flush, yet not obviously intentionally protruding. Ugh.

--Brian Williams' claims should not blow over. He has one job: tell the news. When he was on the trip in which he claimed to have his chopper hit by an RPG, he was covering a story. When he tells of what happened on that trip incorrectly, he is changing the story. This is a journalistic ethics issue.

--I contacted Tamara for help yesterday, to see if she had another outlook at a problem that I have: I've got a stolen gun report in which the victim DID write down the serial numbers and caliber and make of the guns, but not the model. Sadly, several common gun manufacturers (not Ruger, thank goodness) re-use serial numbers. So when I get "S&W .38, S/N XXXXXX," I can't put it into TCIC/NCIC, absent the model. I had several like this, which I can't put into the system. If the guy had a Model 36 stolen, which shares a serial number with a Model 10 and a Model 42, I cannot in good conscience enter the serial numbers as stolen, and risk the innocent possessors of the other uninvolved firearms being held as a suspect for Theft Of A Firearm (a felony, no less.). Tam tried to help me, but we just couldn't do anything. It's a shame-- the owner didn't remember much about the guns, and a thief may well get away.

--My favorite practice for logging guns is this: Take your driver license out, put it next to the gun, and photograph it in strong light next to the overall gun. Then put it next to the serial number, and take a closeup picture. Email the photos back to yourself along with a description of the gun, the caliber, the value, and SN and model, along with where you got it. Save the email in the cloud, to be found later.

--My Dad is en route to my house right now, so that I can take him to lunch. Then he'll proctor me to make me do a couple more modules of my EMT training.

--I reward myself after a module by watching an episode of Archer. I reward myself while working out by watching the show, too.

--The other night,  I watched on Netflix the Miami Vice episode "Bushido" (Season 2, episode 8). Best television that the 1980s ever brought us.




--The star PSR J1748-2446ad spins a thousand times every 1.39595482 seconds. It's outer surface moves at 24% of the speed of light. It orbits another star every 26 hours.


I want a pocket steam engine.




--My wife went to Corpus Christi last Tuesday night, and flew back Thursday morning. She grew up there, but said that it felt nothing like the town that she grew up in.


--Sports Illustrated put out a casting call for people that were at the bombing at the Boston Marathon last year. Here's their cover picture. For some reason, that puts a lump in my throat. I hope that Boston doesn't overreact to their terrorism incident like New York did to theirs.


--I've responded to two structure fires in the past month while doing my police gig. At one, I attached a 5" supply hose to the engine and got water started before digging our my PD thermal imaging camera and helping by telling firefighters where the real heat was on the roof. The other one, I just did a size-up and emptied a 15 pound dry chemical fire extinguisher onto peripherals that were burning, and got people out of the way as the apparatus arrived. In both fires, the most important thing that anyone seems to care that I did was to get initial scene pictures. 


--It's amazing the good that the American Red Cross does when there is a residential structure fire. When one A.R.C. lady arrived in the cold windy night and handed out cups of fresh hot coffee and granola bars, I restrained myself from kissing her (and her crusty male partner) on the mouth. They put the family up for the night, and provided other services. Support the American Red Cross.


--The Red River border dispute yet rages, but this time in the new light of the Bureau of Land Management making claim to private lands along the river. Here you see a news story which pivots on the definition of "accretion" and "avulsion" with regard to erosion and deposits.


--I am attending the NRA convention in Indianapolis on the weekend of the 25th of April. I purchased the tickets to go, before learning that this was also the weekend of the family reunion. The family reunion is always the Sunday following Easter. I never can remember when that is. The  First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) established the date of Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon (the Paschal Full Moon) following the March equinox. But there can be disputes. Check out this table of possible dates for Easter. Moveable feasts make little sense to me. Pick a date, and stick to it!

Busy month.

--The Sophomore In The House has to raise money for a band trip. I've bought cars on several occasions for less. This means raffles, and fund raisers and volunteering to work at the booster club food booths at football games, and frankly, I'm almost ready to just say "take the damn money."

--I've been going to court a lot, lately. It never fails: work days, and you go a year between trips to wood-paneled rooms presided over by attorneys wearing black gowns. Go to deep nights, and you're suddenly testifying more often the Paul Drake did.

--I did some fire training on Friday night. I started by doing the agility test for new firefighters, while in full bunker gear. I passed it, but damned if I didn't have a lot taken out of me. Then, for the past several days, I've been having a couple of vertebrae out of alignment, probably just from the unequal tightness that I put on my back. I think that I'm going to the chiropractor. That's a shame, too, because I've spent up my Flex Spend medical account with voluntary eye surgery, back in June.  But I can't do much good like this.

--A senior asked the Sophomore In The House out to a school dance, in a pretty cool fashion. My daughter had not planned to go to the dance, but could not turn down such a sweet invitation. Uh huh. Very nice. And that's all the effective persuading that you're going to be doing, sport.

--This weekend promises to be excellent. No clouds. No wind. High of 74. PERFECT. But I have to work it.

--A bunch of work that I've done at work has borne some fruit (that in no way benefitted me, of course).

--Being an effective cop is not without its repercussions.

--I start EMT classes this month.

--I'm rolling my eyes at the sides-taking on the issue of the current government shutdown. The Republicans are saying "We don't need Obamacare! It's still more government on top of the enormous amount of government that WE want!" The Democrats are saying "The obstructionist Republicans have stopped government!" But we Libertarians are saying, "Notice how, when the federal government shuts down, life doesn't end?  Anyone else want to try some more of not paying for what  we apparently can survive without?"

--I've said it before and I'll say it again: You want to stop the out-of-control spiraling cost of medical care? Mandate that all medical providers and insurance companies give a definitive price of what a procedure or treatment costs before it is done. No more "we'll just have to submit the claim, and find out what the insurance will pay." That's like taking a check in for $10,000 and asking "How much will this buy me?  When you do it that way, it won't buy much.  We have a flawed market that doesn't permit competitive shopping. The market has no incentive to fix itself, at the current rate.

--My friends are worked up about the play of the Texas Rangers Baseball Team and the Dallas Cowboys Football Team. They don't seem to care about the Dallas Stars Hockey Team or the Dallas Mavericks Basketball Team. Loyalty is a fickle thing, dependent upon winning. Each those players make more in a year than I have in the past 10 years of working. I just don't care.

--My wife made the finest gumbo that I've ever eaten, two nights ago. That's impressive, because I've eaten a lot of great gumbo in my life. I could point to the excellent Holmes Andouille sausage, or the chicken, or the homemade chicken stock, or the home-grown vegetables and herbs that went into it, but really, the greatness lay in the roux. My wife's grandmother grew up in New Iberia, LA, and she taught her the importance of a good home made roux to the texture and flavor of a good stew or gumbo.

--Speaking of cooking, I need to pick up a beef brisket next week. I've got to uphold the dignity of Texas barbecue in the presence of out-of-staters. I'd probably better plan on doing it twice. It's been a while.

--Note: The secret is not in the sauce*. It's in the rub, and the smoke and time that you put into it.

--I know that I said it before, but I've been watching a lot of old British Top Gear episodes, lately, and they're great. I have been watching the early episodes of the reboot from back in 2002, and it's fun seeing how the silly stuff evolved. I went to watch the American version of the show, and it really doesn't translate very well. AEPilot got me started on this show, mostly to see what they did a 1988 Toyota Hilux pickup that rests on a plinth in the Top Gear studio.

--I have zero explanation for a mild interest in owning a Ruger 77/357 rifle. I won't even try to justify it.
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*I rarely ever use barbecue sauce of any kind.

Various Friday prattle.

--I lost a thousand words on this post, when my daughter logged me off when I wasn't looking, and it didn't auto-save. Ah, well. I go on too much, anyway.

--Elvis died 36 years ago today. I never understood those who worshipped him. But then, I never much understood worshipping a human that they didn't personally know. But he was admittedly talented. This one's for you, Elvis.

--The ol' boy could put together an earworm, when properly edited.

--It just now occurred to me that I'm older than Edward James Olmos was when he played Lt. Martin Castillo here. And now I feel really old.

---And do you remember when weapon-mounted lasers were as big as this one? That's like putting a VHS camcorder on your carbine.

--I'm not really big into sports. Tam, who loves baseball, tells me that what most people call sports are actually games, and that the only true sports are big game hunting and racing. There was a time when Sports Illustrated would post real stories about such sporting. I wish I could have met Papa Hemingway. I only tend to think that during the summer, when I'm reading something alone, or having a drink on a Caribbean beach, like I was when my wife took this picture:

My wife and I were betting who could get a better picture of the full moon with our tiny-apertured Nikon CoolPics point-and-shoot digicam. Obviously the flash had to be turned off, and I was sitting on a padded bench, trying to stabilize the long exposure. My wife sensibly set the camera on a low partition wall, set the timer, and let the camera take this exposure. She won. :)

--You could do worse than to sit and drink coffee and listen to my elder daughter pick scales and strum chords on her bargain-priced 6-string guitar.

--Taser has put warning boxes in their literature warning of heart captures and other potentially fatal effects of use. Some administrators are pulling Tasers off the line, as a result, because they perceive that the Taser is a "deadly weapon". This is over-reaction. You know what's a deadly weapon? A baton to the head. A shot of pepper spray to an asthmatic. A beanbag round to the head. Sure some departments have over-used tasers, but that's a misuse of force issue, not an equipment issue.

--Although there are those who consider me something of a student on the subject, I will occasionally have questions on Texas Code Of Criminal Procedure that I need to answer right away and don't have time to look up. If an assistant district attorney isn't available, I tend to call my buddy LawDog, like I did last night. I always enjoy my chats with LawDog. I should call him way more often.

--I'm pretty sure that I've never seen a corner store product come from an internet meme, but if my younger daughter has anything to say on the subject, we will be the first people on our block to have bottle (or even a case!) of Grumpy Cat coffee drink in our house.

--Tell me this is a farce. I refuse to believe it until it is checked out. I'm a cop, and a volunteer fireman. When I'm on a fire rig, I leave my cop self at home. You're going to have to beat your kids or slap your grandmother, before I'm calling the cops over what I see. As for acting as police? Nope. Not while in my fireman's hat.

--Sunday morning, I take a girl out shooting. She just graduated with a degree in criminal justice, and is putting applications into local police. My graduation gift is a couple of sessions of firearms instruction. Her daddy's a cop with a local department and a friend, and he's gotten her a decent pistol and rig. I just want the shooting part to be the least of her worries, when she's in academy.

Thursday's Prattlings.

--We're due to reach 100 degrees for the first time this year today. That's actually pretty late, for us.
Edit: We broke into triple digits with a bang:

--I write this as much for my future reference, and for my kids' future reference, as for anyone else.

--I have a decent blog-worthy story that I can't post right now. But it ends with the question: "What caliber for douchebag?"

--It's pronounced /puh Kawn/. PEE kan sounds like what you put under the bed at night.

--I worked a 24 hour shift with the fire department yesterday, and not only ripped the tags off of the new wildland firefighting apparel* that they got me about a year ago, but also got it smokey and covered with soot. A welder caught some tall grass while putting in corner posts for a new fence, in the dry 17 mph wind. Right next to him was a stack of sections of old fencing that had probably 10 years' worth of weeds and brush growing up amongst it. I can think of no finer way to start a fire without accelerants. We had to unstack the flaming pyre and douse each level of stacked fencing one by one, and then get the particle board beneath it, and then go moving old rusty farm implements to get under all that. Finally we got all that done, and went to mop-up. When we finally got all the flaming cow turds busted up and stomped out, I climbed dirty and sweaty and ash-stained into our brush truck with our paramedic firefighter, and remarked that the hymen on my new brush gear had been perforated. Startled, he said what?!? I suggested to our best medic that he had heard me just fine. He laughed.

--I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men on my Kindle. I reviewed the movie five years ago, in which I said of the main character, aging sheriff Ed Tom Bell:

I know this man. I've been around him for years, wearing different faces, standing different heights, and carrying different weights. They mostly all spoke with a drawl, and they all wondered sometimes how it all got to be so crazy. Between McCarthy, the Cohens, and Jones, I saw the bewildered squint of people that I've known personally, perplexed and aghast.

 Having read the book, I'd have to say that the Cohen brothers kept the movie's dialogue very true to McCarthy's original work. Sheriff Bell knows that the nation is doomed, and feels like he has lost control of the part of it that he is supposed to keep peaceful. He feels like a failure. I have to admit that I thought a little about whether I help the big picture. I don't take it as personally as he did, I don't think. I know my limitations. The job of a law enforcement officer is to limit damage; he rarely gets to stop it altogether.

I just downloaded Blood Meridian. The reviews show that it's a pretty dark portrayal of the American West in the mid 19th century. We'll see if I start it anytime soon.

--A family member and friend of mine is grieving the passing of a close friend of hers. I've been pretty poor about helping her deal with it. Recently, my wife pointed out the meaning of the lyrics to the Grateful Dead's song "Box Of Rain." I've never much been a fan of the Dead, but I've got to admit that there's a gentle calmness that one can feel from auditing this (first) song.

"What do you want me to do, to do for you to see you through? 

A box of rain will ease the pain, and love will see you through." 

--Speaking of music, my daughter was singing the title music to Singing In The Rain, and I wanted to hear the original, so I played this video. I come away thinking: (1) Gene Kelly was a genius dancer. (2) Even accounting for the poor synching of the sound to the video by YouTube, it's obvious that they dubbed in the tap sounds. But Gene Kelly was still a physical genius. (3) That street was a giant sound stage in Hollywood, right? Where they had to make their own rain? That was a BIG budget movie scene. (4) I cringe seeing Kelly dance through the puddles in his brown leather shoes. I can not stand having soaked shoes.

--Lately at work, I'm plagued with subpoenas to get. Think I don't beg help from the DA's investigators? Haw.

--I need a best location along the coast of Oregon or Washington (Olympic Peninsula?) for two things this summer: Tide pools and yerts.

--I'm planning an epic vacation with the girls and my wife.

--My friend Susan makes a good point: "When hanging around with drunk people...if the topic of conversation takes a turn toward Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories...it's time to leave!!"


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*Typically abbreviated to "wildland gear," which then becomes "Wild man gear." This is tough, light Nomex jeans and topshirt (usually comes with work gloves and boots, but I just use my fire gloves and bunker boots) that one pulls on over street clothes, which prevent embers from immediately burning through, but which have no insulative properties. Combined with a light plastic helmet (kept on the brush truck) and light goggles, this gear actually provides some protection without causing your firefighter to succumb to heat exhaustion in regular bunker gear.

Random pictures from my phone.

Periodically, I remember that I have a Bluetooth interface on my desktop, and I download a bunch of pictures. Then I look at them on screen larger than an Airmail postage stamp (I've got the single cheapest phone that AT&T offers with a QWERTY keyboard), and wonder what in the world the context was. Sometimes it comes to me. Sometimes, I just have to let the mystery be.

These are easy. Yesterday, I helped a family member put up some gutters on his house. Given that we had no training, no instructions (None. Seriously-- the packaging came with not a whit of instructions on it.), and no experience between us, I think that we did pretty well. This will keep the rain off when walking out the back porch, anyway. I'm going to do this for my back porch, now.

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This one's easy, too. For our anniversary, my wife and I went into Dallas, and dined at Mi Piaci, (where we toured the wine cellar. I had no idea that they had a wine cellar. If you've been there before, please know that the service has gotten a LOT less snooty, yet is still superb.) and stayed at a nice hotel, before wondering around Dallas the next day (Friday, 1 Mar 2013). We played at the bizarre Klyde Warren Park (which is situated over 9 lanes of Woodall Rogers Freeway), and walked into the Dallas Museum Of Art.

I saw the sheet metal fixture shown above (Sorry for the blurry picture. Low light, and crappy camera phone.) on the wall, which is clearly made up of air ducting. I went past, then stopped, and asked one of the dozens (scores?) of museum personnel in a blue blazer if that was a piece, or simply infrastructure. He assured me that it was a piece. I almost laughed, but stopped down for a second. In a moment of meta-artistic consideration, I thought about the few times that I have tried to cut and form sheet metal, and then get it to connect its seams tightly. It's actually more difficult than you might think. Yet it's true that every week, thousands and thousands of tradesmen (and women) do such work, leaving custom ducts and plenums (plena?) in attics and utility closets to perform their functions in the dark, gathering dust often without the appraisal of even the person who paid for them. I submit that such everyday achievements of craftsmanship might well attain the status of art, if we took time to appreciate what it took to achieve them. I took a closer look at the piece. The joints were handcut with snips, and screwed together with sheetmetal screws. I thought about that a day later, when I was customizing sheetmetal gutters with tinsnips and self-tapping sheetmetal screws.

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 I.... I have no idea. I don't remember where I was exactly when I took this. I do recall that I thought that it wasn't really what you would expect a such a location.
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At a local tire shop. Service (and education) are dead.
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It's sad how much I enjoy the cheapest foods. Basmati, red beans, and some Thai chili paste. Mmmm-mmm!
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 This is years' worth of bottle caps, saved for some unknown reason at first. Now my sculpture wife has an idea to put them onto a wooden fish, as scales. Might be kinda fun, in a kitsch sort of way.
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 Another piece from Asian collection at the DMA.
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 From a party for a good friend who joined the Texas DPS state troopers. His father in-law put up a trap and skeet shoot, in which we shot a game called "Wolf Pack." It was $5 a gun to shoot each round, with the winner getting half the pot, and the other half going to a charity. We raised over $200 for the charity, and had a lot of fun doing it.
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 ALWAYS turn the light before using the restroom at night, in the volunteer fire department dormitory.
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Panic-buying at Cabella's, January, 2013. Those are mostly some esoteric rounds left on the ammo shelf. No .38. No 9mm. No .45acp. No .22 LR.
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New Year. 2013

--You get that we can't do this better than they can, right? First we'd have to build a half-mile-tall building....

--I was driving an ambulance when the new year rolled in.

--My 10-year-old was at her best friend's house as the new year turned over. She said that they were dancing non-stop, mostly to Madonna. My wife was certainly glad that they went over to her best friend's house for that.

--We had our annual black eyed peas for New Years Day, in the form of  "Skippin' Jenny."  I've eaten this for years and never called it "Hoppin' John" nor "Skippin' Jenny." We also had cabbage. We didn't do that as a kid.

--I'm not in the least superstitious. But I like black eyed peas stewed with meaty pork bone, served over rice with greens. And I enjoy the tradition. So what harm?

--I ran a lot of calls, and overslept at the fire station.

--I did a lot of laundry, both at the fire house and at home, on New Year's Day.

--While I was on duty at the fire house, my daughter took down the tree and decorations. I had only to put them up into the attic when I got home. It feels very liberating.

--My younger daughter got an art set, which markers smell (respectively) like: honeysuckle, green apple, pine trees, marshmallows, "sea breeze", vanilla, cherry, berry, orange, spices, and lemons. Do we really want to be encouraging kids to be sniffing markers?

--I'm having more trouble than I thought, securing the right tree to put into my father's yard. Apparently 2012 was a bad year for pecans, and everyone bought up the good stock.

--It's been a bumper crop for the pecan nuts, though. Last night my daughters and wife and I shelled enough pecans to fill two and a half gallon bags with pure nut meat. That's about 9 pounds of meat, which we got out of our yard (from our neihbors' trees), all in one night, while watching a movie.

--I was surprised at how into the movie Taken my wife and kids were. Huh. A shoot-em-up, beat-'em-up thriller, with Liam Neeson (a personal favorite of my wife's) in it. There was even a moral in it for my daughters: Do what your Daddy says. Don't lie to your father. We all gave it thumbs up.

--Even with the chartered jet and knowledge of Paris, Liam Neeson's character seems to get a lot done in 96 hours. Apparently, he does so without sleep.  Then, after killing all the Albanians and all the Middle Easterners  in Paris, and after shooting the wife of one of the major deputy chiefs of the French spy syndicate, he takes his daughter and gets onto a flight to come back home. (Charter, again, I suppose.)

--I had half a fruit tart (a spoonfull is in the picture at upper left of the link) at La Madeleine French Bakery and Cafe yesterday. I also had half of blackberry and cream cheese croissant fresh out of the oven. This stuff is bring you to your knees good. Cheap, too, considering that I ate it while getting refills of coffee and complimentary fresh bread and butter. Those guys have a hell of a business model.

--I'm retiring cases from 2012. I had a lot of criminal cases to work on, and did very little traffic last month.

--I'm a complete sucker for those year-in-retrospective shows that come on about this time every year. I may write one for Better And Better.

Mishmash.

--Without going into details, that free iPhone tracker app works. Stick it on your kid's phone, with the settings so that only the account holder can see where it is. Also works for your own phone, if you trust the phone company with that info. Lots do, lots don't.

--My new FD bunker gear came in again, with the proper color striping on it. (It had designated me a captain, before.) It's so clean. It has no odor. No smoke or sweat or mud. It has never been anyone else's before. It has a drag strap on the back. It has my name on the back in 4 inch tall reflective letters. Between that and my professional tag over my locker, I really feel like I am a member of the team. One of the firefighters laughed and said, "Hey, you finally are somebody!" I actually kind of got that feeling, too.

--I worked a house fire recently. The ambient temperature in the shade was 101 degrees when we arrived. We fought mostly to save a portion of the house, which we did. But we lost a lot of it. Wearing an insulated suit with a cowl over your neck really makes you hot before putting on that SCBA and going into a smoke-filled hot burning building. This in turn makes you suck harder on that air. No one much talks about the cooling effect of the gas expansion from that sweet compressed air. The simple desire to get cooler can make you take bigger gasps so that a tank that should give about 30 minutes lasts about 10 minutes. Or less.

--Note to the President: With the recent murder of our US ambassador to Libya, I wonder where our recently-decommissioned FB-111s* went. Are they mothballed? Did we sell them to other countries? What would it take to re-commission them? Oh, I know that there are other planes serving their old role just fine, or better (see: B1B Lancer). But I think that the psychological impact of a Tripoli sky full of Aardvarks again would be worth something. 

With an average speed of 600kmph, it should take a hair less than 9 hours to get a flight of Lancers there. Mr. President, if you want me to believe that you're a tough guy, get off the whole "I gave the order to the guy who gave the order to the guy who told the guys to kill Bin Laden." Instead, put on your game face, pick up the phone, and convince Spanish PM Rajoy that he'll hardly notice a squadron of jets flying 5 miles over the neck of the Iberian Peninsula.

I know that you like to have crib notes, so here's your flight plan, which I made just for you:

Click To Embiggen.

--My suggestion? Drop a few hundred GPS-guided inert practice bombs on our own embassy in Tripoli. It's our soil, after all. The kinetic kill to those who hoisted the black flag over our soil will be just as real, and the message sent just as strong: "We could have made this hit using a conventional bomb, or a fuel-air bomb, or even nucs. And we did it with obsolete planes. Don't piss us off." No collateral damage. Just stack one nose cone into the fins of the previous practice bomb.

--I'm taking PADM 5010 at university this semester. "Wow, graduate Public Administration courses are so exhilarating!" said no one, ever. I'm waiting for my books to arrive. If I hadn't bought them used on Amazon, I'd have been out $250 to $400. As it is, I'm out about $100 for books for one three hour course.

--I took an off-duty job last week guarding a bridge over an interstate highway. It didn't go anywhere. I went up onto it and took a camera phone picture of the traffic going by underneath.

--When I stepped barefoot outside to get the mail this morning, I found some public works guys picking up branches and throwing in the back of a truck, so I helped them. When my shirt rode up while pitching brush, one of them laughed that I had a pistol holstered. Yeah, if I've got on pants, I do. The family of the late former sheriff and police chief Herbert Proffitt undoubtedly wishes that he had done so, to.  Proffitt was 82 and recently retired for the second time, when while checking his mail he was gunned down by a former customer of his, harboring a 40 year grudge.  It is your duty to make it hard for them to kill you, and/or your tribe. Do your duty.  Otherwise, someone else is going to have to clean that mess up, and that involves apprehending the right desperate armed murderer without getting hurt. What's the first step in dealing with a snake bite? Kill the snake.

--I'm about to try to step up for a local citizen that's without much resources. We'll see if I don't screw this up.

--My brother and I talked a bit today about religion. I was surprised at how close we were were on the subject, which we hadn't talked about in some years. But it was one of those conversations where neither one of us would have gotten upset if we had discovered that we were at opposite ends of the spectrum, either. I am happy that he and I are at this easy-going place in our relationship.

--With a high of 75 this weekend, we may have finally made it through the long hot death march of summer. But I don't trust it not to give me triple digit temperatures again, until I'm well into the second half of my second month ending with -er.

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* Ask your National Security Advisor to get you Condi Rice's number, and ask her what these are. Don't rely on your party's defense guys to get this one right!

Fireman stuff.

I ended my patrol shift at a structure fire, and wrote my first "Crossing Fire Hose" ticket. I knew my brethren in the red hats* would give me hell if I just let it go, and I hadn't gotten to help with the fire, proper. (Always a bride's maid, and never a bride.)  We had to run a 5" line diagonally across a major intersection, and it's harder than you'd think for one car to stop down all traffic and let them understand that they have to turn around and go elsewhere. I will make a guess that every state in the Union has some kind of law about this, so that we don't have to have a man guarding fire-hoses from each direction; the law says don't cross it without permission.

I am perpetually reminded that people are creatures of habit. If I throw a roadblock in the way of their routine, a surprisingly high percentage of the population simply cannot conceive of an alternate course of action to take. I have commented before on how people suddenly taken out of their comfort zone in expect to be told where to go. I kept having people drive up to a blocked intersection in the middle of a downtown (admittedly, a small downtown) grid of streets, asking me how they were supposed to get to work, and then still not figuring out the answer when told that this was the only intersection being blocked. They literally had to be told to make a U-turn, make three lefts, and a right, to perform the detour. Sure, if I'd had the manpower, it would have been great to have blocked the streets a block away in each direction. But I didn't, and the blocked intersection was visible from blocks away in each direction. I worry about our future, and the people that I serve.

I had one man tell me, quite upset, that this would cause him to miss his morning coffee at the convenience store he wanted to get to. When I pointed out that there was another one conveniently located along his route to work, he dismissed that as an impractical option, because he didn't know right where the coffee-maker and cream and sugar all were at the other convenience store. Mind you, we're talking about another store in the small rural town that he lives in, which he drives by almost every day. Not an option, to him.

One of the other cops that came over to help me chatted about the fire stuff we saw. He mentioned that he heard a lot of fire alarms going off, and I wondered about that, having heard none. Then I realized that he was hearing the PASS alarms on Scott SCBA air packs. The PASS alarm has a sensor on it that detects if the pack has not moved in about 20 seconds, and sets off a pre-alarm, and then goes into full-alarm. When the firefighter hears the pre-alarm, he does a little duck-waddle shimmy with his butt, to shake the pack and tell it that he's fine. Occasionally, when the pack is doffed, the alarm is not turned off properly (the bottle has to be turned off), and they'll go off.

Earlier this week, I did a shift at the FD, and practiced getting better at engine pump operations. Yes, I still need to attend the official classes, and no, I don't think that I'm qualified to be an engineer. But if there's a structure fire, I can get your engine placed pretty well, get it into pump gear correctly, prime the pump and get it up to the pre-set RPM or pressure (we are spoiled with a high-end pump system), crack open the water re-circulation cooling system, get water from the tank to the correct hose (front, rear, or two cross-lays, or deluge), and open the intake valve for water from the tanker we'll have come out to nurse from.***  I can also throw out a portable pond to draft out of. That will get us out of 90% of our problems, in our fire district.  Areas that I need to work on: actually drafting, and putting on 5 inch hydrant supply hoses (we've got two different kinds of adapters, and while I can figure it out, I need to get proficient, so that becomes a task that I perform without really having to think about.)  I drive that engine pretty much where ever we go when I'm on duty, and I perform the check-off's of the engine when I work a shift. (Others do it in 10 minutes. I generally take more than half an hour.)

It still amazes me a bit, sometimes, that it is common practice to let an unpaid volunteer get into a quarter million dollar piece of apparatus and go to work. Even more impressive was that I did it just a couple of months after starting with them. This is why they vet the firefighter applicants, and why one of the biggest reasons to dismiss an applicant is for traffic violations and accidents.

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*Figuratively speaking. Actually, in our fire department, the color of the helmet denotes the rank of the firefighter. The Chief's is white. A captain's is red. A lieutenant's is black. Mine is yellow**. I just think of the "red hat" as the firefighter, and the "blue hat" as the police officer. There are two of us who are on both departments, currently (the other guy is a full-time firefighter).  I'm seriously thinking about making us red and blue hats that have both logos split down the middle, just for the fun of it.

**Even though it's the basic brand and not really mine, per se, that Morning Pride yellow helmet tricked out with goggles, an LED light, and blast shield runs north of $300, making it the most expensive headgear that I've ever had.

***One thing that I really didn't know as a cop was that one of the first rules of the firefighter is to not use that 1000 gallons on board the engine, if you can possibly avoid it. That's to be kept in reserve, in case there's a problem with the water supply when the firefighters are fighting. There have been instances of engines arriving on the scene of structure fires, putting maximum output out of their deluge gun, and then being unable to do anything even after the tanker arrived, later, until the engine tank was refilled. Or so this rookie is being told.

Friday afternoon this and that.

--I bathed a cat today. He didn't care for it. I didn't care for it. But we put up with the necessity of it, without hurting each other. Call it a win.

--My fire chief called me in for a meeting. I kind of thought that I would be receiving an ass-chewing about something that I did at the structure fire that I had gone to with him a couple of weeks ago. Instead, he just took me around to show me different types of structures and ask me what I saw about their construction that could cause problems with firefighting. He seemed pretty happy with my knowledge of construction. Thank you, high school Industrial Arts teacher.

--The fire chief loaned me a book on understanding construction for fire fighters. I believe that I'd like to get pretty good at this. Maybe, down the road, there's an arson investigator in me waiting to get out.

----T is for Tom Waits. That's good enough for me:

I will never think of Tom Waits the same again. MAYBE I can see Cookie Monster the same.

--My partner, who has become one of my dearest friends, resigned to start his career with a much larger agency. His opportunities for advancement will be rife. He will succeed. But I've mixed feelings about it. Mostly selfishly. He rode shotgun with me his last couple of shifts. Someday I'll go ride out with him, too.

--I would absolutely watch this movie. If you've never watched an entire episode or two of Dora The Explorer, this is probably going to be lost on you.

--I remember hearing this on the local public radio station about 18 years ago. It introduced me to Le Mystere De Voix Bulgares ("The Mystery Of Bulgarian Voices", the national choir of that old country), which is good cultural music. It is terrible that THIS is the song of theirs that stuck in my head. But there it is. Earworm warning!!!

When they're speaking of "Ramaya," they are referencing a 1975 hit by a Mozambiquan artist named Afric Simone, who toured in the Communist Bloc countries during that time. He was a very early beat-boxer, and it is his music that is sampled at the end of this.

--I know of no good method for selectively killing dallis grass other than digging it up. That's a shame. Oof.

--My old college roommate Bill was doing training in Colorado Springs. He ended up a refugee from the Waldo Canyon Fire. He told me to check the weather at Garden Of The Gods National Park the other day. 40 mph sustained winds, 101 degrees temperature, 2 percent relative humidity. A perfect storm for wildfires. I feel for those guys putting out the fires up there; it's a tenderbox, in an oven, packed with accelerant. And they put on protective clothing (hopefully not full bunker gear!) and climb mountains with heavy tools, to work 16 hour days, cutting, raking, and such. Thanks to them. No thanks, if I were offered the job. Not even in my prime.

The Lost Week.

Occasionally, we have a week that went away with little to show for it, and little regret for that, either.

Two or three months ago, I made reservations at the local hostel near Phlegmmy's, to enjoy a weekend at her now Almost-World-Famous Phlegmfest. Either my calender or my reckoning was off, because I was scheduled to work that weekend, which I only realized a week or two before the date. I had just gotten a memo from my Human Resources person at work, informing me and my boss that I was no longer accruing vacation time, as I had maxed out at 360 hours. Also, I still had 56 of my 80 use-it-or-lose-it holiday hours left on the books, to be burnt no later than September 30th. This gave me some leverage to get a weekend off, and my supervisor was kind enough to make it happen.

As we were down to one car for the weekend, and that one sans air conditioning, my bride declined to attend the event. So it was that I called Ambulance Driver, en route from Louisiana, and caught a ride with him and Katy Beth.

It was remarked upon by someone that the 120 year old renovated B&B that some of us were staying at during the weekend may have quaint and rustic, but also seemed to be designed (with its hardwood floors and tin ceiling and transoms and brick walls and such) to magnify the acoustics of amorous endeavors. Thus it was rather ironic that I should have drawn the most remote of the upstairs rooms for my solitary chaste self.

We shot at LawDog's club range on Saturday (a write-up of the Mustang Pocketlite later), and discovered that some fathers don't parent their kids at the range. Another patron of the range, intent on showing off to his buddy, corralled his 7 year old son only once, that I saw... when the boy ran some 15 to 20 feet forward of the firing line during a hot range. The boy then continually ran among us as we unpacked firearms, spraying us with volleys from his very real-looking electric MP5K sub machine gun toy. This made us twitchedy. In fact, Stingray found himself raising his voice at me about TIME TO GO! YOU SAID AN HOUR! IT'S BEEN AN HOUR AND A HALF! And pointed at his watch, inquiring if I in fact knew how to use one of these. Stingray is not a noted fan of juvenile humans. (Katy Beth is a noted exception.)  We left, and enjoyed good cheer again for the departure.  (It's a decent range. But Annoying Kid was Really Annoying.)

While I was driving us back, I whipped into the drive-through a Braum's for some ice cream for AD, KB, and me. This of course was the only thing that made us immune to this beautiful piece of marketing by Dairy Queen, just moments later:

(Click to embiggen.) (Photo Credit: Ambo Driver.)

Well played, Dairy Queen. 

The next day, I went to training in Addison, TX, for a silly court officer class. In our small department, all the patrolmen have to do a monthly or bi-monthly rotation as bailiff, and we all serve municipal warrants. I was NOT looking forward to this school, even though it was held at a rather nice hotel. Actually, the classes were pretty good, and I got some ideas for skip tracing and for grants that I'll import to my regular job. The food was superb, too. I called my wife and asked her to take a day off of come join me. When I got out of class the third day, she and I went to a movie. Moonrise Kingdom, which I'd never heard of before, was actually a nice dry comedy that gave some nice tastes of what summer Scout camp was like. It's set in 1965, and even though it's got some big names, it seems to be something of an art house flick.  My wife and I gave it two thumbs up. 

When I got home on Wednesday evening, it was storming. I got the fire page that a house was burning, and I went in and suited up, still wearing my business casual work outfit from training. We fought that fire for hours, but we lost it. 

Though I crossed the threshold of it pulling a hose to attack flames within, I certainly wouldn't claim that I made an "interior attack" on a fire, because there was blue sky above me while I did it.

The next day, I had lunch with Mr. Fixit, a firefighter and Texas lawman his own self, whom I'd spoken with on the phone several times before, but never met. It's embarrassing to be late to meet a guy for the first time. It's more embarrassing to discover that you've forgotten your wallet for lunch and have to beg off of him. It's MORE embarrassing to afterwards discover that your best slacks were badly split open, from the events of the night before.

Friday, I went with my partner to do some work on a grant that we received, and assisted my coworkers in the briefest possible way on a warrant that they put together on a child molester. (Always a satisfying thing to do.)  Then, leisure man that I am, I went to go see Promethius. I was very impressed. Go see it in 3D. Go see it in the theater. Do not do any research about it. Don't let anyone tell you anything about it. I will only say that it is a science fiction flick with an easy-to-follow plot, that it is visually stunning, and that it has some scary scenes in it.

After the movie I had some beers with Scott, and we debated yet again the issue of the contents of a classic martini (which neither of us drank).

Today, I dropped off my elder daughter to go on her youth mission trip (she was so excited that she couldn't sleep last night) and my wife took my younger daughter to stay with her grandmother down in Austin.

Beers tomorrow night with my partner. One might almost wonder if I ever work. :)

What a great week.

Monday bits.

--Saturday we practiced drafting and water movement at the fire department. It was actually pretty fun. First, we threw up a temporary pool, made of a folding steel frame and rubberized canvas. It was about 10'X20'X3'. I pulled the lever over the chute at the rear of the tanker truck, and we had the tanker emptied in under three minutes, and 3,000 gallons in the pond. We then practiced drafting water from it through the engine, and had guys practice handline technique, refilling the pond. We also nursed the tanker, and used it like an "engine" to pump to a handline. We were taught to have the nozzle man backed up by a hose man, both leaned forward into what looks for all like a stance for shooting SMGs and shotguns. But it was just a piddlin' 1.75" attack hose, so the guy in back wasn't strictly necessary. (NOTE: The guy at the nozzle gets all the glory, but it's the guys behind him that do the real work. If they're doing their job, the nozzle guy has it very easy.)

--When I got on the nozzle, I asked for more pressure. I had my backup guy step away from the hose. I called to the engineer: "More pressure! MOAR!!"  They took me to 170psi (100 foot hose), and I finally felt it feel like it might push me over. I wasn't doing it as a stunt; I really wanted to know how much I could handle on my own. Frequently, we arrive at a fire with nobody much to help. An engine might arrive with one engineer and a hose man. I feel very confident about handling a 100 foot 1.75" hose with 150psi. 170, I could do, but I want a really firm place to stand, and I want the engineer to have eyes on me. More than that, and I'll look like this guy, but not having as much fun.

--I noticed that the round analog gauges showed some space for negative pressure, and showed us somewhat above zero when the pumps were off. I asked why. The captain explained that they showed atmospheric pressure. He snapped his fingers to recall it. I mentioned that it was 14.7 pounds, or about 30 inches of mercury.  He said, "Yeah, I knew it was somewhere around 20 psi." Later, in the firehouse during whiteboard talk, one of the young cocky guys looked up from his iPhone and announced happily that atmospheric pressure was 14.7 pounds, unlike what I had said. "You said it was about 20 psi!" He crowed. I found myself surprised at irritated this made me. "Look, you might not have been paying attention in school, but my A's in college physics were earned, you little piss-ant," I began. "I could no more forget SATP than I'd forget the speed of c or the distance of an A.U.!" He scurried off.

--My old college roommate had the cork break in his bottle of MacAllan sherry-casked 12 year-old. He called me over. After we reduced the volume, it was filtered and decanted. What a fine way to spend a Saturday evening off.

--My neighbor has offered to put up the rest of my fence for a case of Budweiser. I bought said case, and learned that he drinks longnecks only. So now I've a case (minus two) of Bud red in cans. Maybe we'll cook with it, or just keep it around the house for friends. Eh.

--My daughter was upset that her tennis coach had told the kids that if they skipped the tournament that he set up tomorrow, they were off the team. This after he had changed the date of it. Lots of kids had planned to go on a trip to see a play with the school, and had a mandatory band practice. I found myself sitting in the office with the principal today, saying, "Look, I refuse to slam the instructors in front of my kids, but can we PLEASE back the pressure off my kid a notch, here? She loves it all." She assured me that this would all be worked out to my satisfaction. This would be the first time that I've ever been in the principal's office on either of my kid's behalf. I really meant it when I said that I support them whole-heartedly. I suspect that that sentence is uttered in that office with somewhat less sincerity by some.

--This week we have a board of review for a new officer, which I am to sit on. I'm picking up my partner to have him sit on the board, too. It'll be good to see him back in the saddle in some way, again.

--Asparagus is shooting up out of the ground in our garden at such a speed that one should wear eye protection while about the garden. I'm only sorta joking.

Random Wednesday thoughts.

--I went to visit a friend in Waxahachie (by-Gawd) Texas the last couple of days. We wondered around the Ellis Courthouse on the square. That's a beautiful courthouse, and I'm picky. Every time that I go to a Texas county that I've never visited before, I try to get a size-up of their courthouse. There are 254 Texas counties (many of which are ~30 miles square, but not all), and most of them have a courthouse, many of which are over 100 years old and still in service. Some have retired their old courthouses but still keep them for other uses. Some counties share their judicial district with another local county, and thus use their that county's courthouse.

I enjoyed the detail of the stonework over the porticos at the entrances:



I also dug the turrets:

Forgive my poor photography. I was using a crappy not-Smart phone at dusk.

--I'm still liking Sallie Ford And Sound Outside. They've got a rough retro sound that I enjoy.

--I went to a pub last night to get a (wife-approved*) pint with an old friend from high school. I enjoyed our chat. She's extremely liberal. I'm a bit right of center. We disagreed about gun control. We're still really good friends. It's not all about politics, friends.

--Pubs are nice places to get a drink and chat. I've hardly ever done that. However, at 9:00PM, the place basically turned into a club, and the music went all doosh-doosh-doosh-dooshdooshdoosh, doosh-doosh-doosh, making us old people find it hard to hear each other. These kids, with their techno music, these days. . .

--This past weekend, I borrowed a flatbed trailer and picked up 3 cubic yards of enriched compost  humus dirt. They said that it was about 1900 lbs when I picked it up.

 I had mediocre tarps, and the wind kicked up, to 50 mph gusts, which meant that I probably lost almost a half a yard. But given the sheets of rain that fell on it over the next couple of days, I'll bet that we shoveled 3000 pounds of the stuff into our raised beds. My wife had gotten out the nail gun and thrown together some 8'X4' beds with doubled 2"X6"s, and lined the sides with black plastic. We put down layers of newspaper under the beds, and shoveled in the compost dirt, mixed with cow manure, vermiculite, and peat moss. While it's organic, it's also basically not much like any soil found in nature. We should be able to grow some stuff in this. It was a dirty job that even my nine-year-old got into.

--We filled Mom's raised bed frame and her front yard flower beds with the stuff, too.

--After all that rain, there seem to be some ruts in my yard from where I backed the trailer onto the soft dirt, and then back out. At least I didn't get the van stuck. This time. I need a yard roller.

--I go in tonight to see how I did on my Homeland Security test in grad school. I'm not enthusiastic. Then again, I'm not really enthusiastic about the state of our nation's homeland security, either.

--I had my daughters do without TV or computer for two days. Given the results, I think I'm going to do this some more.

--My chickens are back to laying about an egg a day. Two of them are laying eggs the size of duck eggs.

--I got to take the weekend off from fire training. It was the first weekend off this year. It was very nice to have the weekend off from training, because I worked at my paying job all weekend. This stuff makes you tired, when you don't get any sleep on top of it.

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*You think that "wife approved" part is silly? Not me. I'm in this thing for the long haul, friends.

What a pleasure it was

What a pleasure it was to have my dad ride along with me last night.

What a nice day it was to do some fire training on roof ventilation. I never realized before how dangerous that stuff could be, even in training.

Showing some 3/4 CDX plywood decking who's boss with a fire axe can get out some great pent-up aggression. *

Getting home to a nice bowl of my wife's beef stroganoff after dropping off yet another person at the jail who insisted that they would have [my] job is good for a bit of schadenfreude, especially when you know what that person is having for breakfast.

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*NOTE: More fireman talk in comments.

Random Wednesday Thoughts. Day after V[F]D.

--I'm older than I've ever been. And now I'm even older.

--There was a "BuyCot" yesterday, as you may have heard. Folks wanted to boycott Starbucks on Valentine's Day for going hands-off on gun-carriers and refusing to impose more restrictions than the state laws already did. Gunnies around the web decided to show support for Starbucks by giving their business. When I went in to get my wife a Great Big 'Un* coffee drink and myself a pound of coffee, I noticed a couple of middle-aged guys sitting about the place wearing vests, and unwinding with their coffee. I'll bet good money that I wasn't the only armed guy in the joint. While Starbucks reports their shares were "flat" yesterday, I'll bet that their revenues for the day took a little jump. But I don't expect them to volunteer such information. If I were Starbucks, I'd be of the exact same position that they've been taking, lately: "Look, we make and serve coffee. Don't drag us into that battle." That's all I want.  

--Valentine's Day was yesterday. I heard more backlash over it ("It's just a corporate-induced holiday to sell things and make the fat cats money!", "It's a damned quid pro quo by the women, who expect the man to do something for them if they expect the women to be physically affectionate!") than I ever had before.

--My 13 year old daughter came home with two carnations yesterday. One was from her girl friend, but another was from a boy. She insists that he's "just a friend," and it's true that he hangs with her circle of girl friends a lot, but still, it's her first flower from a boy. She reported that another one of her friends received from her boyfriend a necklace with a diamond and ruby pendant on it. These kids are in 8th grade. I explained to my daughter that if she received such a gift from a boy, she would be returning it.

--My 13 year old had made home-made chocolate truffles in four flavors to give to her friends at school. She then made cute origami boxes with separators and lift-off lids to give them in. That kid's got skills.

--My 9 year old daughter made dinner last night. She pulled out her Mollie Katzen cookbook the other night and  reported that she was making the meal, and we were all expected to attend. So, after school yesterday, she set about to making a hearty soup (she modified the vegetable soup to be vegetable beef soup, because she likes meat), a Mediterranean salad, and a rich chocolate desert. She then set our table thusly:

That kid's got skills, too**. Very good soup. I am told that the soup was better this morning, but I was not left so much as a bite.

--I didn't get to finish my bowl of soup. I got a fire page during dinner. It was an alarm at an apartment complex, and those can be nothing, or very, very nasty. I got up and said, "I'll probably be right back," I said. "No, you won't," my wife said. "But go, anyway." She smiled at me. I got there in time to gear up and jump on the engine. This was the first time that I had ridden in what is traditionally the Captain's seat, front right. As I got in, the air horn went crazy. The driver mildly informed me that I was stomping on the horn button on the floor. I moved my foot off in a hurry. The mechanical siren cranked up, LOUDLY, with us still in the firehouse bay. I had moved my foot to another button. How many buttons were there, anyway? (Three, it turns out.) Given the size of my fire boots, the best thing for me to do was to try to tuck my feet up under my seat, which is how I rode to the call. At each intersection, I called out traffic conditions to my side, and tapped the air horn briefly. It was only as I arrived on scene that I realized that I had forgotten to put on the headset.

The fire alarm was inconsequential. It was my first run.

--After going home and getting the girls to bed, I got toned out for another pair of calls. I went back to the station, and found that most of the apparatus and all of the crew were gone to the calls. I checked in on the radio, and was advised to stand by at the station, in case we received another call. I hung out with a lonely brush truck for an hour, while the other guys worked a wreck several miles out of town, and staged for a police call just out of town (but in our fire district). Here I was: a guy that barely knew where the bathroom was (literally, I had to ask last week. I just hadn't needed to use it before, there), and yet I was the sole guy with the penultimate piece of apparatus in the city (there was also a tanker) there to answer fire calls. I laughed at myself (I know I've got a LOT to learn, and don't take myself too seriously). But it made me feel good to be there for the city, if something DID happen. Like a gun of minor caliber ready in a closet or a drawer. Not ideal. Probably not even adequate. But serviceable, and a hell of a lot better than nothing. This is why I volunteer.

--If you're shocked to read that a rookie volunteer firefighter would be given such a responsibility, don't be. That's how lots of volunteer fire departments are. By area, most of our nation's land is served by VFDs

--I've made a vow to myself to be the slowest, most careful apparatus driver in the department.

--I'm waiting for the mail. I have a small paper presentation due in class today, and the text book that I'm referencing for it, which I ordered a week ago, hasn't arrived. I know that it's been en route for two days. If it doesn't arrive by the time I finish this post, I've got to download it on my Kindle, and effectively pay for the same book twice. That galls me. My fault, though. My class starts in three hours. Better hurry, Matt!

--Just checked the mail again. The book has arrived. (And Matt is again rewarded for procrastination, which might not be best.) Got to run.





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*I refuse to use their silly terms for size. A big iced mocha is served in a cup that is closer to a quart than to twenty ounces, so "vente" is just stupid. As a bonus, I got to watch the barrista flinch when I said it. I liked it so much, I ordered a second one. Damn, but those things are tasty. My bride liked her afternoon coffee pick-me-up  more than the two dozen tulips that I brought to her office.

**Yes, I see the error in the place setting. No, I didn't see it last night. Not sure I would have said anything.