We took Maria’s parents, Gene and Sandra Bayless, to dinner last night at Avanzare in Paragould for some serious Italian cuisine.
That was the conclusion to a relaxed day that included lunch at Morgan’s house, a trip to Barnes & Noble and a visit to the Arkansas State University Museum.
Maria’s parents, seen here on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in November, 2012, are on their way from Thorntown, Ind. and could show up in our driveway any minute now.
It’s been a couple of years since their last visit.
Maria is substitute teaching today. I think she has 5th or 6th graders at a middle school.
She posted this image on Facebook, saying:
Just caught this note being passed. Told you they all think I'm their grandma. She apologized. I told her I'm 51.
It this kid thinks Maria’s 80, I shudder to think how old she would guess me to be.
Last weekend was all about quilts and fabric.
Maria and I set up shop Saturday morning at the Craighead Public Library’s arts and crafts fair where she made some good contacts and sold a couple of things.
The weather was perfect, but most of the musical groups were too loud and short on talent to the point where it seriously interfered with customer communication.
We drove to Batesville yesterday for the first visit to Marshall’s Dry Goods in about two years where Maria bought some fabric to use/resell on Ebay.
Morgan shot this cell phone portrait of Tucker wearing his cone when she went home to let him out at lunchtime.
Tucker got neutered Tuesday morning and, since he’s supposed to take it easy for a few days, we’re hosting his big girlfriend Samantha this week.
He was a little loopy Tuesday night and yesterday, but seems to be getting back to his old self today. He looks remarkably happy for a boy who just lost some important parts.
Dallas Peak, a doctor at Indiana University Health -Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis and a stalwart member of the Indianapolis BMW Motorcycle Club, is in the hospital as a patient today after getting hit by a car while riding his bike to work yesterday.
Here’s what he posted to Facebook last night:
I just want to say thank you to everyone who helped me today and to have me in their thoughts.
First of all, I'm fine. You can see the fracture. Fortunately, that is all. The gear really did its job so well. I was on my way to work.
It was the classic car turning right into my path of travel. It all happened so fast. I was on the ground is the next thing I remember. I knew my (left) arm was broken. But otherwise fine.
And wonderful first responders took great care of me. The ER staff was, horse, just absolutely awesome. Because it was compound, I went straight to the OR and had surgery. I am in my room now. I need to sleep! More to come later. Thank you to everyone here who took care of me,all of you rock!
He was up and on his feet by 8 a.m. today, walking laps around the fourth floor of the hospital where his room is.
His wife Pam is also an M.D., so he’s in good hands in and out of the hospital.
In the meantime, club member Andy Clark, who suffered serious brain injury a couple of weekends ago when he was hit in the head by a spare tire that fell from an oncoming horse trailer, is showing some progress.
Theresia Shearer wrote on the club’s message board:
It's been a rough two weeks for the Clark family but Andy is showing some improvement. They have moved him out of ICU. He's no longer on a ventilator but does have a trach. Friday he had surgery to place a more direct feeding tube.
The medical team is working towards getting him strong enough to move to a rehab center, though at this time he's not ready for an aggressive therapy facility like RHI.
So, a few more steps forward in a long recovery.
Your prayers are working so keep them coming.
It’s news like this that – as Hunter S. Thompson used to say – gives a man paws.
So when the Amazon Vine Program offered me the Samsung VU10H3021PR/AA VU3000 Lift and Clean Bagless Vacuum Cleaner, Red to review a couple of days ago, I jumped on it.
The UPS guy delivered it a little after 2 p.m. yesterday.
I unboxed it, read the owner’s manual that is mostly pictures with little text, and turned it on.
Using suction only, with the beater bar turned off, I made quick work of the tile kitchen floor. It did a great job of sucking up dirt and the little fur tumbleweeds that come from having dogs that shed.
The canister wasn’t full, but I emptied it anyway, holding it over the kitchen waste basket and pushing the button that opens the door on the bottom. Nothing to it and way easier than the nasty, messy job of changing a bag on our Hoover.
When Maria got home from work, we removed the beater bar attachment and used the hose and canister to go after some long-neglected dust that had accumulated on the tops of the kitchen bay window frames and into crevices along the baseboards.
I plan to see how it works on carpets later this morning and then I’ll get busy on my review, which will likely include some of the observations recorded here.
Here’s a photo I shot at the Rock Hut in downtown Leadville, Colo. back in the 1990s.
It’s just down Harrison Street from the Golden Burro where John and Sally Mohringer and I had breakfast one fine summer morning. We strolled down to the Rock Hut and bought gold panning kits before setting out on a fun, but fruitless, afternoon of panning.
Sorting through my filing cabinet this weekend, I came across some photos including this shot.
It’s my 1981 BMW R100RS at a campsite at the Hammond, Louisiana KOA. I sewed the tent from a kit that came from Frostline, a Colorado company that catered to backpackers on a budget who wanted to make their own gear.
The date was Nov. 9, 1986 and I was embarking on a fool’s errand that I will not detail here. The best I can say about it is that I would not be who or where I am today if I had stayed home.
At least four of the people among my 400-some Facebook friends are deceased, yet they live on in Facebook.
They are (from left) Leslie Collins, Becky Harris, John Mohringer and Wendell Trogdon.
Leslie was one of my best correspondents when I was chief of The Indianapolis News Metro North Bureau.
Becky was a respected member of the Log Cabin Democrat staff in Conway, Ark. We met at an Associated Press Managing Editors conference and discovered we both knew Ted Simon, author of Jupiter’s Travels.
John was a member of the Indianapolis BMW Motorcycle Club and a Boone County neighbor when we lived in Thorntown. He would occasional fly over our house.
Wendell was managing editor of The Indianapolis News. He was the city editor in 1967 when he hired me and launched my Indianapolis newspaper career.
Tucker, the red Australian cattle dog, is officially a member of Morgan and Samantha’s pack.
Morgan has been looking for a companion dog for Sam for several months and wistfully wishing she could have Tucker, ever since he and Sam struck up a friendship at our house.
Tucker, who will be a year old in May, came to live with our neighbor Chris and his wife in their house down the hill from us in late January. He became a frequent visitor to the outside of Jack and Dora’s chain link enclosure and he and Dora spent hours chasing each other around the perimeter.
Tucker became a neighborhood favorite and got treats and pets at several of the houses around here.
But he didn’t back down from an unprovoked attack by a cranky Chihuahua-Dachshund mix – an encounter that prompted Chris to install buried electronic fence around his property.
The problem was that Tucker associated the electric shock with Chris rather than the fence. His response was either to run away from home for extended periods or to hide from Chris under their back deck.
Chris and his wife came to us last evening to say they were ready to give Tucker up. We had made it clear over the last few months that Morgan would love to have him if things didn’t work out for them.
So Morgan came up and took custody of Tucker, his igloo dog house, bag of food and some toys and took him home to play with Sam and have a well-needed bath.
We all accompanied Tucker to the vet’s office this morning where he got checked out and got his shots. He’s scheduled to be neutered on Tuesday – something I realize is probably a good idea but can’t feel happy about.
After the vet visit, we had lunch on the outdoor patio at Chik-fil-A and Tucker was the perfect gentleman, sitting attentively at Morgan’s feet.
I mowed most of our 1.23 acres this afternoon. The only thing yet to do is the fenced dog zone and a patch of saturated ground on the downhill slope west of the house.
I was accustomed to wearing my in-ear monitors – the ones I use to listen to my GPS and SiriusXM radio on the K1200GT – but I do so at the risk of carelessly yanking the wires out of the earplugs. It’s happened 3 or 4 times since I got them in 2002.
Now that I have the Parrot Zik 2.5 bluetooth headphones, it’s a different story. The noise cancelling isn’t as effective as the earplugs, but it’s not bad and going wireless is supremely liberating.
According to my Kindle Paperwhite, which tracks my progress through books, I’ve read about 70% of John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley.”
If you’re not familiar with it, the book chronicles a road trip Steinbeck made in 1960 in a pickup truck with camper shell with his standard poodle Charley, doing a lap of the U.S., starting from his home on Long Island. The point of the trip, he wrote, was to meet people and reacquaint himself with the soul of America.
His son Thom, however, said Steinbeck made the trip because he knew he was dying of heart disease and wanted to see the country one last time. As it turned out, he lived another eight years.
I remember 1960 quite clearly and the book arouses feelings of nostalgia for that time 55 years ago. So much has changed.
Early in his travels, Steinbeck discovers and is enchanted by the growing mobile home culture in the Northeast, marveling at how it was revolutionizing the way Americans thought about housing.
By the time he got to California, however, he realized the downside to a phenomenon that was growing population, but not the property tax base, putting an unexpected strain on government to maintain infrastructure and schools.
Steinbeck was from Salinas, Calif. and spent a lot of time in Monterey. Perhaps his most famous novel is “Cannery Row,” set in Monterey. Cannery Row is a real place, but the fish canneries have been replaced by a world class aquarium and several blocks of shops and boutiques. Maria and I visited there a couple of times and she photographed me with a bronze bust of Steinbeck at Wave Street and Drake Avenue. I let Steinbeck wear my BMW sunglasses for the shot.
They date from the late 1950s or early ‘60s, so they’re easily a half-century old. The lamps, a couple of leather-topped end tables, a coffee table and a round table – all matching and from my parents’ living room in Delphi, Ind. – make up the bulk of our living room furniture.
I know Maria would rather have new furniture and lamps more to her taste, but there are other demands on our cash flow that come before furniture.
Over the course of the years, the three-way switches on both lamps have fatigued from daily use. The one that lives on my side of the couch crapped out about six weeks ago and I repaired it with a switch from Ace Hardware.
The switch on the lamp that sits on Maria’s side of the couch flickered and died this week, so my to-do list this morning included picking up a replacement switch and installing it, which I did, as evidenced by the photo.
We had some brass lamps that came from a friend’s parents’ house and we used them in our Thorntown home, but they were thrown away or given to someone in connection with our move to Arkansas seven and a half years ago.
My to-do list also included getting a couple of little plastic bear-shaped bottles of honey for my milk-honey-cinnamon nightcap and a cartridge of black ink for my Canon Maxify printer/copier/scanner/fax because it ran out of ink while printing copies of the new lease for our Thorntown tenant.
The honey was easy, the ink was not.
The kid at Office Max/Office Depot (they’ve merged, you know) searched diligently for a PGI-1200 cartridge and came up empty. So I followed my first impulse and ordered one from Amazon.com.
Two out of three isn’t bad.
Tucker is back in his yard.
It turns out the red heeler who lives down the hill from our house wasn’t nearly as lost as we supposed yesterday.
Apparently, he just went walkabout for a day or so.
The biggest surprise was that I didn’t see him hanging out with our Aussies.
We were greatly relieved to see him back in his fenced yard when we left for dinner last evening.
As instructed, I called PartsZilla.com today and confirmed that Tucker Rocky has pushed back the delivery date on my size of the Firstgear Kathmandu riding pants until at least the middle of next month.
Consequently, I cancelled my $260 order and went to Plan B.
MotorcycleGear.com has their $300 breathable and waterproof ICON Patrol pants on closeout for $240 and they have them in my size, so I end up saving $20. They come in black and what they call Mil-Spec Yellow, which should come close to matching my Hi-Viz Firstgear Kilimanjaro jacket and Hi-Viz CamelBak hydration system.
Features:
And, the inseam of the Patrol pants can be shortened by up to 5 inches using a 3 position snap system.
My aging old version Kathmandu pants have no pockets and a broken zipper fly, so this will be a significant improvement.
Let the UPS vigil begin!
My stepdaughter Morgan Sallee is 30 years old today.
It’s easy for me to remember her birthday because it’s on Tax Day, and the anniversaries of the sinking of the Titanic and the death of Abraham Lincoln and I’ll always remember her age because we 40 years apart.
She’s a remarkable young woman with a brilliance she tries to hide. I’m proud to be her stepdad.
My neighbor Tony Micenhamer reports that Tucker has been missing for 24 hours.
Tucker is a red heeler from the house down the hill. He is a playful, friendly little guy who loves to hang out with our Aussies. He and Dora spend hours chasing each other around the perimeter of the chain link fence – him on the outside and her on the inside.
Apparently one of the neighbors complained that Tucker was playing too rough with their dog, so his owner has kept Tucker in their chain link-fenced back yard for the last couple of weeks.
Morgan’s dog Samantha loves Tucker and we’ve told Tucker’s owner that Morgan wants the red heeler if he doesn’t.
Eighty-five percent of the respondents to yesterday’s MSNBC poll said they do not plan to vote for Hillary Clinton for president next year.
Couple that with her pathetic book sales and it becomes obvious that she is all media hype and no substance.
Then I got an email from them this morning advising me that they expect to ship my order on Thursday. WTF?
So I called them again this morning and the customer service woman said my pants are, indeed, on back order, but that they expect them to arrive at their warehouse tomorrow.
I’d like to believe her, but they’re out of stock at MotorcycleGear.com also. That vendor initially said they would be available in mid-April, then revised the availability date to “late May.”
Could it be that PartsZilla is in the same boat and won’t see them until the end of May? Or will they actually receive them tomorrow.
The customer service woman told me to call back after noon EDT tomorrow to find out if they actually came in.
My self-imposed deadline is May 14, the day before the European Rider Rally begins in Burkesville, Ky.
In the meantime, I’m sitting here listening to the grass grow after the start of what promises to be a very rainy week.
It’s dry at the moment, but the rain gauge had 2.6 inches of water in it this morning.
My to-do list for the day includes picking up the mail, taking a hike on the treadmill (either here or at St. Bernards Health & Wellness) and dropping off Maria’s entries in next weekend’s annual St. Bernards Women’s Council Threads of Life quilt show.
Now, I must be off.
I went to my Orders listing on Amazon.com this afternoon to see if my Kathmandu riding pants had been shipped and was stunned to learn that, despite the vendor listing them as available, they are out of stock and my order has been cancelled.
I went online and found another vendor – PartsZilla.com – whose web site showed them as available in my size, so I placed an order there.
Then I got to thinking… How do I know that their web site is an accurate reflection of what’s in their warehouse?
So I called PartsZilla.com’s toll-free number and after several minutes of horrible music-on-hold, found myself talking with Robert.
Robert did a thorough search and confirmed my worst fears – my size is out of stock.
Consequently, I’m cancelling this second order.
I did notice that Firstgear, the manufacturer of Kathmandu riding pants, is distributed by Tucker Rocky. My old friend Rick Dorfmeyer of Indianapolis is a Tucker Rocky guy and a Facebook friend, so I sent him a private message on Facebook asking if he can work some Tucker Rocky magic and hook me up with some Kathmandus in 40 Short.
Stay tuned.
Kathmandu Pants – old on the left, newer on the right.
The Firstgear Kathmandu riding pants that I bought in the summer of 2011 for a mere $125, are showing their age and mileage. My chief complaint is that the fly zipper is tearing away from the surrounding fabric, making the zipper prone to jamming.
A jammed zipper is a bad think when nature is calling loudly and clearly.
I was prepared to soldier on with them for another riding season until I noticed that MotorcycleGear.com, which deals in out-of-date old stock, was advertising the 2012 edition of the Kathmandu pants for $260.95.
I ordinarily would hesitate to spring for pants that expensive, but the Kathmandu pants are waterproof and reasonably comfortable in a wide range of conditions. And, the newer version has pockets! That was one thing I detested about the old version – no pockets. And the waist closure looks to be better designed and more robust.
The only problem was the size I need – 40 short – is out of stock at MotorcycleGear.com. It was promised for mid-April, so I’ve been waiting impatiently. When I checked the web site today, I found the date has been pushed back to “late May.”
Crap. I really wanted them in time for the European Riders Rally in five weeks.
So I put Google to work, searching for “Kathmandu pants 40 short.” I found several other vendors offering them at the same price as MotorcycleGear.com, but they, too, were out of stock.
Finally, I found Raging Moto, a vendor on Amazon.com, has 40 short Kathmandu pants in stock for the same price as MotorcycleGear.com and also with free shipping.
One mouse click and the deal was done. Woo-freaking-hoo!
We received word this morning that another good and capable journalist has been fired by the most abusive newspaper management I have seen in my nearly 50 years of association with print journalism.
I suspect that sooner or later – sooner, I hope – he will feel the exhilaration of a galley slave who broke the chains to his oar and went over the side to freedom.
And I am heartened to know that he has powerful friends outside the newspaper who will see to it that he ends up with much better pay and far better working conditions.
I’ve spent most of my adult life watching idiots ruin perfectly good newspapers. I am filled with schadenfreude when I see them shoot themselves in the foot.
I took another run at clearing out junk and consolidating boxes of things I consider keepers in the garage yesterday afternoon and rediscovered my Secret Squadron decoder badge from 1955.
Captain Midnight’s Secret Squadron was a very big deal for me when I was a kid. I even wore my decoder badge on sixth grade school picture day. (Boxed in red.)
This was the 1955-56 version of the decoder badge. It was supplanted by a different version in 1957.
The fact that I still have it is testimony to my Cancerian refusal to part with anything I ever considered important. That’s why clearing out the garage is such a monumental challenge.
I did manage to throw away a whole bunch of VHS videotapes, being careful to save anything that might have footage from my, or Maria’s, past.
The weather is unsettled this week with rain off and on every day. But the high temps in the 80s make it warm enough to shift my big jar of coconut oil to the garage to restore it to its liquid state. The melting point of coconut oil is 76° F and it never gets that warm in the kitchen cabinets. I prefer the liquid state because it’s easier to spoon into my morning mocha cappuccino.
I hyperextended my wrist a few weeks ago when Jack caught me off balance in front of the living room couch and I went down on my right knee and left hand. The knee abrasion healed without incident, but the wrist remains achy, as does my right shoulder from a stumbling fall at the post office earlier this year. And, yes, I know falls are a big deal for people my age. It was a broken hip suffered on driveway ice that put my dad on the downward spiral when he was in his 80s.
I’ve been seeing a chiropractor for the wrist and shoulder discomfort, but I think I may be aggravating the wrist when I pull in the clutch on my bikes. So be it. It will take more than that to keep me off the bikes.
I sent it to him yesterday and he replied: “Omg, I’m wearing a watch!”
Andy was critically injured when
he was hit in the head by a spare tire
that flew off of an oncoming horse trailer.
He was flown by LifeLine helicopter to Eskenanzi Hospital in Indianapolis with a head injury and breathing problems. His daughter Piper was taken to Bloomington Hospital to be checked out due to knee pain and swelling. She was released to her grandparents.
Jonathon Fishburn and his passenger, Angela, narrowly missed being hit by the same tire.
Sunday night, doctors worked to reduce the swelling on his brain and to clear his
lungs. As of 3:30 a.m. Sunday, Andy had started to come out of a coma. At that time they were preparing to move him to ICU. As of 9 a.m. his numbers were improving but there are still grave concerns as he continues in critical condition due to his lungs and the continued swelling on his brain.
Club friends were with the family until 3:30 a.m. Sunday and the family continued to hold vigil at the hospital.
Please keep the Clark family in your prayers.
So during a bout of insomnia last night, I rummaged through the Kindle bookstore and found myself reading a sample of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.
I think I’ve read a little of Steinbeck’s fiction, but it didn’t light me up, mainly because I don’t enjoy fiction.
Travels with Charley is a whole different kind of book and I was instantly hooked.
Makes me want to load the bike and hit the road again.
We just couldn’t stay away from our new favorite restaurant – Avanzare in Paragould.
The initial idea was – since we had a very large late lunch – to run up to Paragould for a tiramisu dessert.
Then we lost control looking at the menu.
I had a bowl of Chicken & Gnocchi Soup (A creamy soup made with roasted chicken, traditional Italian dumplings and spinach).
Maria had Eggplant Rollatini (Breaded eggplant stuffed with Ricotta cheese, rolled and topped with Marinara sauce and Mozzarella cheese.)
We could only eat about half of our orders and ended up taking tiramisu home in a box.
Morgan got baptized this morning at the Rock Church's Easter at the Convo at the Arkansas State University Convocation Center.
Maria mentioned making deviled eggs for our Easter dinner the other day and I asked if she had ever colored them with beet juice.
That’s how my mother did them for special occasions, but it was a new idea to Maria.
Always ready for a challenge, she asked me to pick up a can of beets from Dollar General on my way back from the post office this morning.
The result is this beautiful array of a half-dozen eggs on my mother’s antique deviled egg dish.
I am charmed and impressed.
I think Avanzare in Paragould is Morgan’s favorite restaurant too.
Here we are with a fried ravioli appetizer before getting serious about diving into more exquisite Italian cuisine.
The Bang & Olufsen H8 Bluetooth headphones sit on my head a little too loosely for treadmill use, but the Parrot Zik 2.5s are perfect.
They sit snugly and the active noise cancellation assures that all I hear is the music.
This is by far the best workout music setup I’ve experienced. And it’s wireless! I hate wires!
I’m trying to stay out of it and just wear my Indiana flag t-shirt as a symbol of solidarity with the non-emotional thinking people of my home state.
Neighbor Misty Micenhamer dropped by last evening with a supposed peace offering of a rain gauge from Tucker, the free range neighborhood red heeler.
We're 99% sure it was Tucker who snatched my new rain gauge that was staked into the ground outside our garage door.
Everyone in the neighborhood loves Tucker and I bear him no ill will. Thanks for the thoughtful gift, Misty.
