Nurse Dora

Maria took a spill in the bedroom, slamming her right knee into the corner of the bed frame, that had her writhing in pain on the carpet at the foot of the bed for several minutes.

Both dogs were in their bedroom kennels having their breakfast at the time.

By the time Maria got up onto the bed, still in considerable pain, Dora had stopped eating and was yipping to be let out.

Once released, she jumped up onto the bed and devoted her full attention to licking Maria’s face and ears, obviously concerned and doing her best to help.

“There’s nothing like a dog tongue in your ear to take your mind off of pain,” Maria said later, after Dora spent several minutes licking and snuggling her.

It was clear to us that Dora understood Maria was hurt and was eager to do whatever she could to make things better.

A doctor friend came over and checked her out and put Maria in a knee brace and on crutches until she can get an X-ray on Monday. We don’t think anything is broken, but we have to be sure.

In the meantime, we have Dora.

Another reason to love Photoshop

Here’s a color photo my mom shot of me with a couple of Easter chicks, probably around March or April, 1950.

As is the case with most color prints of that vintage, the Kodak dyes have deteriorated badly, giving the image a washed-out brownish cast.

But turned into a digital image with a flatbed scanner and tweaked with Photoshop – mostly just Auto Tone and a little increase in color saturation – and it is restored to its original colors, maybe even a little better than the original.

And, of course, it can be cropped tighter to get rid of the extraneous detail.

Too bad the camera’s optics weren’t good enough to make a tack-sharp image.

Throwback Thursday: The fledgling Cub Scout

It was 1952 and I was in the second grade and joined the Cub Scouts (Den 7, BTW).

Here I am in my new uniform. Most kids just wore the shirt with jeans, but my parents bought me the pants too. Looking closely, I see that I hadn't acquired the official web belt yet and I had yet to earn my first award, the lowly Bobcat Badge. It was a little round bronze pin in those days. I think it's a fabric badge now.

I went all the way through the Cub Scout ranks - Wolf, Bear, Lion, and Webelos, but I stalled out when I got into Boy Scouts and never got close to Eagle.

I still have the ceramic items in the bookcase. The rectangular thing on the wall is a mail slot right next to the front door. My dad made the bookcase when he was in shop class in high school. Sadly, it does not survive today.

Jeannie and me

Here I am, looking dapper in my bib overalls and slouch hat, on my swingset with neighbor Jeannie Taylor, sometime around 1948 or 1949.

Jeannie lived in a big brick double across the alley from our house and she was my first girlfriend, or friend who was a girl, or something.

Her dad was a bombardier on B-17s in World War II and kept his Colt 1911 in a desk drawer. I didn’t understand how to work a semiautomatic pistol, so I never knew if it was loaded.

Jeannie’s family moved to Rossville, Ind. sometime in the 1950s and I lost track of her.

And now for something completely different…

A guest at my parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary reception in April, 1989, who shall remain nameless (mainly because I don’t know who she was).

I think one of my sons shot this sensitive portrait, but I’m sure I would have shot it if I had the chance.

My first BMW motorcycle

I bought my first BMW motorcycle – a 1971 R50/5 – from a guy in Brownsburg, Ind. in the spring of 1981. I think I paid $1,100.

It was originally sold by the now-defunct Roman Cycle Shop in Youngstown, Ohio.

I added the Plexiglas fairing and trunk. Here are a couple of photos from the summer of 1981 when Sean and I rode it up to my parents’ house in Delphi, Ind. from our Indianapolis home. (My mom shot the photo with, of course, was off-center. I cropped out all of the extraneous stuff on the right side of the frame.)

I think the longest trips I ever took on it were two rides from Indianapolis to Beulah, Mich.

My dad seemed to enjoy sitting on the bike, but I never got him to go for a ride with me. (I shot this photo which, of course, is properly framed.)

I sold it in the late 1980s to Steve Burford.

My next bike was a 1978 Kawasaki KZ650 that I bought from a friend of a guy I did motorcycle skills tests with for the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

It came with a clunky primitive fairing that I replaced with a Rifle fairing.

Here’s Steve and me with my dad on a subsequent ride to Delphi, probably around 1984. (Yikes, that’s 30 years ago!)

Great find

I found a Polartec fleece pullover at the Jonesboro Goodwill store for $3.50 yesterday. Killer deal!

Where I got my photography gene

During my parents’ lives together, Mom was the family photographer.

The only times I can remember Dad shooting photos was when he used a Polaroid to illustrate real estate appraisals.

I can’t recall a time when Mom didn’t own a camera. She did her best work early on when she had a Kodak double-lens reflex camera that was used at waist level and you framed the photo by looking down at a screen.

Things went to hell in a handbasket when she started using cheap cameras with eye-level viewfinders. For some reason I never could understand, her subjects always ended up skewed to the left of the frame. I was reminded of that this morning when I looked through a bunch of old prints from a box in the garage labeled “Flora Family Archive.”

She also made the classic amateur photographer mistake of standing too far from her subject.

Robert Capa, one of the truly great photojournalists of the 20th century, liked to say, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not getting close enough.”

I don’t think Mom ever heard of Robert Capa.

Mom was a Registered Nurse

My mother was the first in her family to go to college, graduating from the Indiana University School of Nursing in Indianapolis in 1939.

She worked briefly in a hospital, but most of her career was in the office of Dr. George Wagoner in Delphi, Ind.

She took her work seriously and always wore a starched white uniform and white cap. She considered today’s scrubs a scandalous relaxation of standards and hated seeing nurses wearing them.

She spent her last five months in a retirement/nursing center and often was seen with her wheelchair pulled up next to another resident’s wheelchair, checking their pulse.

Small wonder that we buried her in her best white uniform and cap.

Here she is at a reunion of her nursing class. I think it was the 50th in 1989 and that’s her holding the sign.

Chillin'

I'm holding down a chair outside of a fitting room in the ladies department of Dillard's while Maria shops.

Thank God for my iPhone.

20 years ago

I’m rooting through my travel albums, looking for photos to scan for various BMW motorcycle groups on Facebook, and I found this one shot by Jane Washburn in the spring of 1994.

And I also just realized that I have visited Devil’s Tower three times, on a different bike each time.

The first was in 1990 on my ‘81 BMW R100RS, the second was in 1994 on this gorgeous 1991 BMW K100RS, and the third was in 2008 on my current ride, a 2003 BMW K1200GT.

I’ve owned five BMW motorcycles and this was my favorite. It carried me more than 160,000 miles before it succumbed to a terminally expensive engine ailment that resulted in me parting it out on Ebay.

If memory serves, I rode this bike in every state west of the Mississippi and a whole bunch of the Midwest and Southeast, plus two Canadian provinces.

Looks like our back yard

Well, not quite, but it’s pretty bad thanks to Dora’s passion for digging.

Unless she finds a new hobby, I despair of ever having a decent, mowable back yard.

Happy 104th birthday, Dad

My father, seen here at Niagara Falls around 1954, would have been 104 yesterday. He died in 1997 at the age of 87.

I always loved this photo of him looking cool and stylish in his vacation duds. I was still a work in progress.

The last of the Old Guard

The last of the most senior early members of the Indianapolis BMW Club, Helen Byrkett (bottom right) died last Monday.

Helen was 94. She joins Charlie and Martha Thomas (left), Kenny Jagger (center) and her husband Paul in Eternity.

Godspeed, Helen. It was great knowing you.

Meet Batman

His nametag said Batman, had two phone numbers on it and the inscription: Please send the Batsignal to my mommy & daddy.

We heard him doing his characteristic beagle bark off and on all night as he chased critters – real and imagined – through our woods.

We noticed him just outside the chain link fence about 8 a.m. and coaxed him around into the garage, where we read his tag and gave him a scoop of dog food.

He was nodding off from his long night’s adventure by the time his mom showed up. She was visiting family just down the road when he wandered off last night and she was overjoyed to get him back.

Nice start to a weekend.

Vernal Equinox stuff

It’s sunny and 64 degrees and I’m spending a little time this first afternoon of spring on a ride to town and a free dark roast coffee at Starbucks (free with an empty Starbucks coffee bag).

This was the hardest winter we’ve endured in our 6+ years in Arkansas and I paid the highest electric bill we’ve seen yesterday. Then I turned off the furnace. Happily, April and May are some of the best months for electric bills, since we can go without heating or AC most of the time.

I gave both dogs their monthly flea/tick/heartworm meds and observed Dora digging with dogged determination in the yard – not an escape tunnel but an apparent search for the varmints that tunnel all over our property. Just to be on the safe side, I kenneled her before I left for town.

I may be getting a handle on managing my diabetic gastroparesis by following advice I found online to eat several small meals daily, rather than three larger ones. I’ve had a large lunch the last couple of days and just a grilled cheese sandwich for an early dinner and find I am sleeping much better with less acid reflux. Helluva way to live, but it is what it is.

We got our taxes filed yesterday, hiring an accountant to do it because of the complications of owning a commercial property and having an LLC partnership. The refund is dismally small, owing to the fact that Maria only worked about six months last year and, consequently, had substantially less taken out for taxes. Time to step up our efforts to improve our cash flow.

The speedo wiring is still wonky on the K75S. I fiddled with it in the post office parking lot and got it working, but I know it’s only temporary. The real fix will require a ride to a dealership, either Memphis or Cape Girardeau. The problem is in the connector under the right side panel. Either the connector is bad or there’s an iffy connection with one of the four wires going into the junction. I’ve considered removing the connectors and soldering the wires into a semi-permanent connection, but I think I’ll defer to a real BMW technician instead.

I was humping along on the treadmill at the fitness center yesterday morning when I glanced up at the big TV screen and saw Comrade Obama, grinning like the fool he is, filling in his NCAA brackets on ESPN. The Russians are taking advantage of our self-imposed impotence, the economy could collapse any day, high crimes and misdemeanors like Benghazi, IRS, Fast and Furious, etc. abound that ESPN is thanking Obama for taking time out of his “busy schedule” to play their little bracket game. I snorted at that remark and the other guy in the locker room laughed out loud.

And Michelle and her kids are going on vacation in China on our dime.

Is it time to sound the Deguello yet?

Still dogalicious and still available

In case you missed the initial announcement, the 2014 Adventures of Jack and Dora Calendar is still available from lulu.com for only $14.99.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/john-flora/2014-adventures-of-jack-and-dora-calendar/calendar/product-21360785.html;jsessionid=5902740C6DFAF661F95BD7B3893AB819

Tuesday morning

Busy morning – deposit check, get $13 haircut at Great Clips and cash in an empty Starbucks coffee bag for a free cup of dark roast.
And the barista just brought me a sample of their chocolate croissant. And some guy just offered me his newspaper (the mediocre Democrat Gazette). I graciously declined. Life is pretty good here in the last couple days of winter.
A couple of my Indianapolis BMW Club riding buddies checked in with me over the weekend to see if I would be interested in filling in the blank states on my map at the bottom of this page sometime this year. Our finances are unsettled, but I told them I was about 80% interested.
There’s no accident that New England is the last place I’ve wanted to ride whenever I have the time and resources. My only foray up that way was the 2006 BMW MOA in Burlington, Vt. That said, I enjoyed riding through the Adirondacks in upstate New York and the ferry ride across Lake Champlain was fun. I had ambitions to pick up several new states during the rally, but the weather turned ugly and I spent the whole time in and around Burlington.
So maybe this is the year for New England.
But I really would love to visit Sean and see his new digs on Sauvie Island and swing down to Vegas for some time with Steve and his family.
We shall see.
I can't believe how jowly I look in this photo.

BW3

The Jonesboro Buffalo Wild Wings (aka BW3) opened yesterday and we dropped in for an early dinner this afternoon.

The last time we ate at a BW3 was at the end of May, 2010 in Sierra Vista, Ariz. and much has changed with the Buzztime Trivia devices.

We were mildly surprised to discover the FLORAS account is still active and I miraculously remembered the password.

There was very little competition at that hour, so we had no problem dominating the scoreboard.

We look forward to the next time when we can demonstrate our trivia prowess to a larger audience.

Random Monday stuff

I didn’t blog yesterday because I was uninspired and felt kind of crappy – took a three-hour nap in the middle of the day.

Morgan and Ben came over last night for dinner an euchre and a good time was had by all. She got a good boost of self-confidence last week at a library conference in Indianapolis, in addition to visiting with her grandparents and brother and cousin. Looking at her photos kinda made us homesick for Indiana.

Apropos of nothing, I am inordinately please with myself for finally flushing the calcium deposits from our two water heaters. I suspected sediment build-up was compromising their efficiency and I was pretty sure the original owner of the house never flushed them in the two years he and his family lived here, so there was about an eight-year accumulation of calcium and other sediments to be blown out.

It was very easy: just cut the power at the breaker box, connect a garden hose to the spigot at the base of the water heater and open the spigot (with the other end of the hose outside, of course). About 10 minutes of flushing did the trick and now both water heaters are producing significantly hotter water on the same settings as before.

I just finished knocking out four product reviews for the Amazon Vine Program, so my plate is clear for new review items this Thursday.

And, yes, I know today is St. Patrick’s Day. I just don’t care.