Pearl Harbor day and the man who delivered the payback

This is the 69th anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, so what better time to revisit this photo of me shaking hands with Paul Tibbetts, the man who many of us believe won World War II.

Tibbetts, for the historically impaired, was the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay (named for his mother) that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Tibbetts died in 2007 at the age of 92. He had no regrets about the mission, nor did he bear any animosity toward the Japanese. In his later life, his car of choice was a Toyota.

Here and gone

Austin and his girlfriend Jen just left for Indiana after a three-day visit.

He brought 2 and a half dozen Shapiro’s bagels and some Guinness Stout and took home his aquarium and a bunch of his other stuff from the garage, so we came out splendidly in that exchange.

The boy has turned into a man.

Uncle Ted

He has no time for fools.

Luger lore

I got a call from my Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity brother Oz Morgan in Indiana this afternoon who has a buddy who inherited a Luger and wanted to know whatever I could tell him about it.

I got out my Luger for reference and gave him a guided tour of the waffenamt markings, confirmed that all of the serial numbers on the parts match (including the magazine), walked him through the use of the loading tool and warned him against using any of the WWII vintage 9mm Parabellum ammo that came with it.

The holster was marked for a P38, so it wasn’t original to the gun, but it was still a genuine Wehrmacht issue holster.

I also referred him to Pistole Parabellum for reference information.

I kinda surprised myself with how much I know about these things, especially since I haven’t fired mine in more than a decade.

Company’s coming

My stepson Austin and his girlfriend are most likely on the road by now, heading down from Indiana for an extended weekend visit.

Consequently, Maria took today off and we’re doing our grocery shopping to lay in supplies for the visit.

I hung in with her at Sam’s Club but begged off of the Kroger experience, opting instead to get some coffee next door at Books-A-Million. It’s the first time I’ve been in BAM in months, but nothing much has changed.

It’s sunny and warm and I’m tempted to go for a motorcycle ride as soon as we get home and get the groceries put away. I’m eager to run out the 8-month-old gas from the tank on the K75S and replace it with fresh fuel. I think the guys at Grass Roots put fresh gas in the tank, but I want to be sure before I throw fuel stabilizer into the tank and let the bike sit idle for extended periods.

Maria wants some cooking wine for the weekend – something you can’t buy in this dry county – so I’ll probably ride over to the Missouri bootheel and Mr. T’s.

Cheaper than making a new car payment…

I spent much of today just hanging out and killing time, waiting for Gateway Tire to finish the Subaru tune-up.

It’s done now and the car seems a bit happier for it. It ought to for $279. Merry Christmas, Subaru Forester.

Christmas past

It’s pretty primitive, compared with the cell phones and iPods we give our kids today, but this is the Channel Master transistor radio my parents gave me for Christmas in 1957. (It’s not the actual radio, of course. Just a picture of the same model.)

It was AM band only and had a substandard speaker and a single mono earbud speaker that lived in the little leather pouch attached to the strap on the leather case.

I thought it was about the coolest thing in the world because it opened up a whole universe of personal listening. On a good night, it could pull in stations hundreds of miles from my upstairs bedroom in Delphi, Ind. That was back when Randy’s Record Shop in Gallatin, Tenn. sponsored programming on WLAC in Nashville. I can still recall listening to Little Anthony and the Imperials doing “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-ko Bop” on KOMA out of Oklahoma City.

I carried it with me on my evening newspaper route, shuffling down snowy Front Street delivering the Lafayette Journal & Courier while listening to WIBC in Indianapolis and thinking it couldn’t possibly get much better than that.

But it did, didn’t it?

Waiting for her boy

I was looking through some of the thousands of images on one of my external hard drives this evening and came across this shot.

It’s Ruthie the Wonder Dog standing on the couch and looking out the front window and waiting for Austin to come home from school back when we lived in Thorntown, Indiana.

Subaru troubles

My daily routine is off a bit today and will be tomorrow thanks to problems with the Subaru.

It reverted to its nasty cold-weather habit yesterday of faltering and stumbling and filling the interior with exhaust fumes. Maria wasn’t 100 per cent confident that it would get her home from work last evening, but it did.

So I drove it down to Gateway Tire this morning to let them hook up their diagnostic computer and ask the car what’s bothering it. Naturally, it ran fine and there was no trace of exhaust fumes.

The technicians concluded it just needs a tune-up, but explained the necessary parts couldn’t be found in Jonesboro and the earliest they could have them in hand would be 2 p.m.

I decided to just reschedule for the first thing tomorrow morning and let them have at it then.

Embearassing encounter

Hello, Mr. Bear.

Scanning negs and loupe-de-loupe

Once in a blue moon, somebody tracks me down to inquire about photos I shot in the distant past.
I got a query a couple of weeks ago, but then heard nothing and supposed that the interest had waned.
Nope. I got a flurry of calls yesterday that resulted in me rooting through my archival negatives to find the frames of interest and then make high-res scans of them this morning.
I’m not at liberty to say what the images are or what the project is yet, so stay tuned.
And, as a bonus, I found the really cool 5X Mamiya loupe that I haven’t seen since we moved from Indiana three years ago. It was exactly where I guessed it would be, which is nothing short of amazing. It’s so much nicer than the cheesy plastic Agfa Loupe I would have had to use if I hadn’t found the Mamiya loupe.

What the hell did you expect, kid?

Golf course etiquette.

Waiting out the storm with Pete

We’re in the middle of a thunderstorm and I noticed Pete the Aussie wasn’t flopped down on the living room carpet with Ruthie.

So I checked his kennel, which is his “safe place,” and found him bedded down and looking a little worried.

Pete hates thunderstorms because he got left outside during a particularly violent one when he was about six months old. Maria and I were out of town and my stepdaughter Morgan was at home, but she was up in the attic, cataloging her stuff and had music cranked up on a boombox. She had no idea it was storming.

Ruthie stayed on the back porch, but Pete fled in terror. A neighbor said he saw Pete streaking down the street amid flashes of lightning. He was gone all of that night and the next day and the next night. Early the following day, a woman who works at our vet’s office was driving her son to school when she recognized Pete along a road about a mile north of town. She called us and we sped out to get him.

He ran away for three days about two months later when a beefwit neighbor shot a bottle rocket across our property and it exploded over his head.

Pete followed me up to the office a few minutes ago. He’s now huddled under my desk after a loud lightning strike hit about 2 miles from here.

Monday morning report

Ruthie discovered she kinda likes tortillas yesterday.

I got in a 45-mile ride on Maria’s K75S yesterday afternoon and was reminded anew what a fun bike it is – light, nimble, low center of gravity, and lots of power. It was sunny and 55 degrees, but I was reasonably comfortable throughout. I rode up the Crowley’s Ridge Parkway from Jonesboro to Paragould, making loops through Frierson Lake and Crowley’s Ridge state parks.

Boscos mug day

  Yesterday was new beer mug day at Boscos in Memphis, so off we went with Charlie and Deb.

Charlie became a mug holder a year ago. For a modest fee, you get your own personal numbered beer mug that stays at the bar – in numbered rows on shelves above the bar. When you visit and order beer, it comes in your mug and in a greater quantity than the mere mortals get with their glass of beer. At the end of the year (yesterday), the mugs get retired and you can take yours home and get a new one with a new design for the new year.

I decided I’d like to join that beer fraternity and I supposed I could buy a mug at yesterday’s event. I was wrong. I missed my chance by a week or more and discovered the available mugs were all snapped up in a period of 20 minutes. So it goes.

I had a couple of glasses of Midtown Brown and a splendid Reuben sandwich, so it was a good day.

What’s on your mind, Pete?

I was looking at Pete the Aussie the other morning as he gazed out the bedroom window to the back yard. Watching the yard seemed really important to him and I found myself wondering what he was thinking. And for a moment, I wished he could talk.

Then I realized it’s a good thing that he can’t talk.

If he could, it would probably be something like, “Give me a treat, I want a treat, gimme a treat, treat, treat, Oh how I want a treat, give me a treat, pleeeeeeeease!”

Or, “Open the door, open the door, I gotta go outside, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, I gotta poop, open the door, open the fucking door. Hey, open the door.”

This kind of prattling would drive me nuts. But it would be even worse if Pete started jabbering libtard talking points, going on about man-caused climate change, or how Republicans are racists, or that Sarah Palin and George W. Bush are stupid and evil.

Yes, that would be much much worse. I can respect a dog who has normal doggy concerns, but not one who worries about carbon footprints, Walmart, and the rights of jihadists. I love my dog, even to the point of excusing the occasional accident on the carpet, but I couldn’t bear to think of him like that.

So I’ll be content just to wonder what’s on his mind.

Mom’s pumpkin pie

My mother made the best pumpkin pie I ever tasted and I am deeply thankful that Maria has Mom’s recipe and can replicate the experience for me.

And, of course, a scoop of vanilla ice cream completes the treat.

Portrait of a cold front

The advancing cold front brought rain and plunging temperatures yesterday evening and overnight.

The end result was 1.1 inches of frozen rain in the rain gauge.

The temperature dropped 30 degrees in 30 minutes late yesterday afternoon and then kept falling.

Just pretend

Pretend this is entertaining new content.

I’m taking the holiday off.

It’s 68 degrees at 10:15 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving, so naturally we have a Winter Weather Advisory

Issued by The National Weather Service
Memphis, TN
3:55 pm CST, Wed., Nov. 24, 2010

... WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM THURSDAY TO 3 AM CST FRIDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MEMPHIS HAS ISSUED A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW AND SLEET... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM THURSDAY TO 3 AM CST FRIDAY.

* ONLY MINOR SNOW AND SLEET ACCUMULATIONS ARE EXPECTED... HOWEVER MUCH COLDER AIR BEHIND AN ARCTIC COLD FRONT COULD FREEZE BRIDGES AND SECONDARY ROADS... ALLOWING FOR MORE ROBUST ACCUMULATION OF SNOW AND SLEET ON THOSE SURFACES.

* RAIN WILL TRANSITION TO SNOW AND SLEET BETWEEN 9 PM AND MIDNIGHT THURSDAY EVENING AND GRADUALLY TAPER OFF BY 3 AM.

* SECONDARY ROADS AND BRIDGES AND OVERPASSES MAY BECOME QUITE SLICK THURSDAY NIGHT.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY MEANS THAT PERIODS OF SNOW... SLEET... OR FREEZING RAIN WILL CAUSE TRAVEL DIFFICULTIES. BE PREPARED FOR SLIPPERY ROADS AND LIMITED VISIBILITIES... AND USE CAUTION WHILE DRIVING.

&&

More Information

... FIRST TASTE OF WINTER WILL ARRIVE THURSDAY EVENING...

.AN ARCTIC COLD FRONT WILL PASS THROUGH THE MIDSOUTH THURSDAY AND EARLY THURSDAY EVENING. A SHALLOW BUT MUCH COLDER AIRMASS WILL FOLLOW THE FRONT. PRECIPITATION SHOULD LAG THROUGH THE EVENING HOURS BEHIND THE FRONT... THEREFORE A TRANSITION FROM RAIN TO A MIXTURE OF SNOW AND SLEET IS EXPECTED FROM NORTHWEST TO SOUTHEAST THROUGH THE EVENING AND EARLY OVERNIGHT. ABOUT A 3 HOUR BURST OF WINTRY PRECIPITATION IS EXPECTED. DUE TO THE WARM GROUND... LITTLE IF ANY ACCUMULATIONS ARE EXPECTED IN MOST PLACES... BRIDGES AND OVERPASSES AND LESS TRAVELED ROADS MOST PRONE TO FREEZING MAY ALLOW FOR SOME ACCUMULATION.