All posts by djones

friday high five

Wishing Well,Wishing Well ….

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It’s Friday and thus time for

Five Odd Things I Really Wish I Knew How To Do
  • Embrace my enemies – in something other than a fatal bear hug! Revenge may indeed be a dish best eaten cold, but there are times when one just isn’t hungry.
  • Understand the thinking behind some of the decisions in the design of PulseAudio (Linux techie specific – non techies can ignore. {*grin*}).
  • Find gainful employment that doesn’t involve starting another company or being part of another start up.
  • Sleep more than five hours a night. Heck, just sleep for more than five hours at a time any part of the day.
  • Regain the pain free existence of youth, that halcyon time when nothing hurt and everything worked, no matter how hard I tried to abuse it.
mama kat, writer's challenge

Protect Me – Please?

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Time once again for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week the prompts are:

1.) My animals are making me nuts.
(inspired by Jody from Take Me As I Am).


2.) List the 5 best things about the first day of school.
(inspired by Lane from Sneaky Daddy).


3.) Tell us about your crush.
(inspired by Lisa from Just Lisa, No Filler)


4.) How did you break it?
(inspired by Brandy from Not Your Average Soccer Mom)


5.) Show us a favorite summer craft.
(inspired by Kristin from The Way It Is)

Some fun topics this week!

I’m going with #1 and #3. #2 doesn’t apply here and #4 I covered last week here. #5 isn’t really applicable unless you really want to see pictures of my renowned noxious weed crop. Something about Russian thistle and bind weed and sand burrs just don’t make for pretty pictures.

#1 – I don’t even need to go for plural here. Just the singular Molly is doing fine in making sure my sanity is slowly ebbing away. Molly is one of those dogs that combine the best and worst in one anxious body. She has developed a strong dislike and fear of thunderstorms. The subsonic noise from the distant storms brings her slinking in to my office to lie on my feet, periodically standing up on my leg looking for a reassuring word and a rub of the head. There is nothing like the sudden appearance of a a shaking and panting dog in your face to make it hard to continue working. Especially when her breath smells a lot like she intentionally gargles with a solution of garlic and onion mixed with hint of ripe road kill when she is scared. In the thunderstorm this afternoon I captured this part of the normal sequence.

C’mon, lets get into the office so I can lie on your feet! Can’t you hear that thunder?

See- I’m ready to lie still. In spite of my licking my nose like mad. (It’s a nervous tic she exhibits when she hears the subsonics from thunder.)

I’m just going to lie here on your feet and keep my head down.

Look, I’m off your feet and ready to go lay in the sun since the storm is gone. Are you going to stay here in case I need to hide again? If I don’t hear anything for the next fifteen minutes, I may even stop licking my nose for you.

So here she is laying in the sun, recovering from the stress of the storm. Doesn’t it make you want to rub her poor pitiful head?
In spite of the immense amount of fur she sheds on a daily basis, her neediness when thunder is in the area, and the fact that she snores at night, i find her oddly appealing. Maybe it is true love?

#3 – My first crush that I truly remember was in junior high school. Of course there had been Julie and Jackie and Beth and Kristi as I went from kindergarten through 6th grade. But then I hit a dry spell in the crush department until late middle school. That’s when I fell into deep like and crush with Annette. Annette was an older woman who seemingly inhabited other worldly realms, but I just knew that we were perfect for each other. I fell asleep at night dreaming of Annette and all that we would do together someday. I day-dreamed through classes with Annette sitting in the front of my mind.

There was just one problem – I could see no way I was even going to be able to talk to Annette. For you see, Annette was a person who appeared only in TV reruns, the movies, and fanzines. For my first real crush was on Annette Funicello, the Mouseketeer par excellence, the star of Disney beach movies with Frankie Avalon, the girl of my dreams. I still remember her fondly, and she hasn’t aged a bit!

So there you have it – another embarrassing admission of normalcy. {*grin*}

tuesday quickie

Tuesday Quicky

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This will be short since the city council meeting ran a bit long tonight and I’m just waiting for the last load of clothes to finish washing before I hit the sack. The trip down to the radio station will come early in the morning. Since it rained tonight (yet again) I can amuse myself by counting the number of people who didn’t shut off their sprinklers to save water. (I should have done the laundry this weekend, but i put it off. That’s what happens when you are a masterful procrastinator!)

One of the more interesting things that happened at the city council meeting was one council member  was rather insistent that we needed to do something about a particular intersection. He brought it up under miscellaneous business at the end of the meeting, which I run as  pretty free-form segment to handle all those odd things that people have asked us about that either don’t fit in elsewhere or which are more informational in nature.. After a long soliloquy by the council member in question about how we needed to fix that intersection, the director of public works had to gently point out that the intersection in question is not in fact in the city. It is at a juncture of the county boundary and a state highway – the city boundary is further down the the road. Nothing like an Emily Lattella-ish “Never mind.” to make someone appear thoughtful and well prepared. Especially given that he is the brother-in-law of the county commissioner that he should have been talking to about it. But given that we had our typical 3 reporters, 3 guests, and 3 department head audience in the chambers, it really doesn’t matter. That is one of the reasons that I’ve been happy that we don’t broadcast the meetings on our public service channel – there is no huge gain to orating up a storm or showboating, so people generally get to the point, state their reasoning, and then we vote. Maybe I’ll have to try a filibuster sometime before my last day as mayor!

Just so you can feel a personal sense of edification for reading thus far, a couple of quotations for you perusal:

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. — Ambrose Bierce

Liberal: A power worshipper without power. — George Orwell

As I said yesetrday, Little Ms Blogger of A Little Blog About Nothing fame gave me this Love Ya Award:

Here are the rules:

“This award is bestowed on to blogs that are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers. Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award.”

I thank her for the kind consideration and recognition. Since I’m running a bit low on time for the nonce, I’ll get back with my eight victims bloggers in a few days.

Nightly night …..

last.fm, music, picnic

Music and Picnic and Miscellanea

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I’m listening to some Tina Turner on last.fm and thinking how melancholy this particular version of the song Tonight seems. Somewhere around here I have a concert tape with a version that is completely different. The concert version is completely up beat and builds to a peak of elation; the version from the album could be played at a funeral without raising eyebrows. It is amazing how different two different performances of the same piece of music can be. And even more amazing is the fact we still recognize the piece and the artist. Here is the concert version with Bowie:

Speaking of good music, I just got completely distracted as The Animals version of The House of the Rising Sun played. That song is one of my favorite heavy ballads. But I suspect that those of you that knew of my Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin addictions might have guessed that. {*grin*} As a clue to how old I am, I can remember listening to that song on the AM radio in junior high school. A song about a house of ill repute and all the bad that can happen there sandwiched between daily reports of the death toll in the Vietnam war – made for really interesting times. (And it was followed on last.fm by Janis Joplin doing amazing things with her voice singing Down On Me with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Totally good stuff!)

In any case, this weekend was the city employee picnic. It is one of two all-hands events that the city sponsors so that the staff and personnel and elected officials can bond a bit. The other is a more formal sit down dinner; this is a family affair with kids invited and held in the park across from the city water park so that the whole family can swim and recreate. For the less energetic, we play bingo for lottery tickets from 5 to 6 and then serve the food at 6. After the meal, we draw employee names from a hat for various raffle prizes.

So here are some annotated pics from yesterdays event. First off is a council member caught calling a game of bingo just before the ball roller broke and before the eats:

 
(Click on the pictures to  enlarge enough to read.)
Another view of the crowd getting ready to stampede for the food:
 
Here’s one with the Chief of Police (otherwise know as the master of ceremonies for the picnic) calling a raffle name with the city water park in the distance.

Last but not least is the master of ceremonies raffling off the swag after everyone got stuffed on ham and chicken and meatballs and salads and fruit and bread and cake and ice cream and chocolate. It’s a wonder anyone was still able to move at this point.

That was how I spent Sunday afternoon/evening. You’ll notice I politely refrained from getting pictures of the carnage as we ate. {*grin*} The only bad thing was that there was something blowing in the air last night and so today I could barely see for most of the day as my eyes kept watering. Oh well, they’ll be fine by tomorrow.

P.S. Mom won the battle and accompanied me to the picnic; too bad MIL! If you know what to look for, you can spot her back in one of the pictures.

P.P.S Little Ms Blogger gave me an award, I’ll show it off tomorrow.

cancer, groundbreaking, walsh

Weekend Rarity

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A rare weekend post for your edification. L is in the mountains, so it is just Molly and me holding down the fort this weekend. Of course it is also the weekend of the city employee picnic,  so I let mom and MIL fight it out to see who is going to attend with me. At last count, it was mom by a nose.

One reason for posting now is that Thursday I spoke at the groundbreaking for the David Walsh Cancer Center and I wanted to get some thoughts “on paper”. I was honored to be asked to speak, since Dave was a classmate of mine. Dave suffered from metastatic esophageal cancer, first diagnosed on 1996 and fatal in 1998. He left behind two sons and a wife. One of the sons was about the same age as the Son and the other was a bit older.

Dave’s parents, Frank and Gloria Walsh, have been great benefactors to the community. In fact, they have made my three terms as mayor a real joy.  They donated an outdoor water park and pool at the city recreation center. They donated a new park across the street from the water park so families could spend all day together there. They donated a major part of the $3.2 million expansion of the city library. They donated a new dorm to the local community college.  Last year, Frank told me over coffee that he and Gloria were going to make sure the cancer center got built at the regional medical center here in town as a memorial to Dave. And so they donated $8.8 million to get the cancer center built. People like Frank and Gloria are what makes putting up with the hassles of being a mayor worthwhile.

There were four of us that spoke at the groundbreaking (me; Dr. Thomas Soper, Hospital Chief of Staff; Jim Ferando, Hospital Chain Western Region President; and Carlin Walsh, Dave’s oldest son). There was a big crowd in attendance (estimated at 150 to 300 people) along with Frank, Gloria, the family of their other son Bill, and Dave’s family.

I was the lead speaker, so the written version of my speech went like this (I often write out my speeches and then intentionally don’t take the copy to the event – that way one never becomes a zombie reading a speech to  bored audience.):

We are here today to celebrate with the Walsh family as we break ground on this wonderful memorial to David Walsh. I thank them on behalf of the community they have so generously gifted and on behalf of those future patients whose treatment will be so much easier and closer to home. I know that when my father was battling cancer, it was hard that he had to commute a 100 miles each way for treatment while suffering the after-effects of the treatment. This center will ease that burden for those in this entire region in the future.

As an aside, I find it hard to refer to Dave as David. He was always Dave to me in all the years I knew him. Dave was a classmate of mine; many of you already knew that. But I suspect that most of you didn’t know or remember that Dave was my opponent the very first time I ran for an elective office – that of treasurer of the student council at SHS some 40 years ago. Dave won the election by a landslide and yet the thing I remember most after all these years is that once the results were known, Dave sought me out to console me for losing. I suspect he felt worse about winning than I did about losing. That was the Dave Walsh I knew – caring, concerned, and involved. And that is why the David Walsh Cancer Center is such a perfect way to honor him.

Once again, thanks to the Walsh family for this wonderful gift. It is the perfect memorial to the Dave Walsh I remember!

I followed my own rule – keep it short and to the point. So did the other speakers leading up to Carlin’s speech. Carlin did a spectacular job. There wasn’t a single dry eye anywhere, including Frank and Gloria as he honored his grandparents for honoring his father. A truly heartfelt speech that inspired us all.

All in all the best groundbreaking I have ever been to. A number of classmates were in attendance and I don’t think any of us had a dry eye during Carlin’s speech – it was that heartfelt and moving.

Time to get on with real things – later.