Buca!

We withstood an hour of medium pressure salesmanship this morning and finally persuaded BlueGreen and RCI that we are just not timeshare people and are not giving them more money. They gave us an $80 VISA card and presumably won’t trouble us further.
We promptly applied the $80 to the purchase of two tickets to EPCOT, to be used probably tomorrow.
So after a Denny’s breakfast, I drove Maria to a couple of quilt shops and thence to BMW Motorcycles of Orlando, where I bought a shop t-shirt. Garmin found the quilt stores easily, but failed miserably on the bike shop because it moved two years ago and Garmin failed to update the address.
By then, it was time for a late lunch or an early dinner. On an impulse, I checked to see if there is a Buca di Beppo in Orlando. There is, but Garmin is completely wrong about its location in the sprawling Florida Mall. Fortunately, in the case of the bike shop and Buca, the Garmin listings do include correct phone numbers.
We had the best meal of the trip, including an enormous bowl of tiramisu, and left with a couple of meals’ worth of leftovers that now repose in our condo fridge.
Buca di Beppo is one of our all-time favorite restaurants and we were almost giddy to find one so close.

Burning time share points in Florida

I’m sitting on our seventh floor balcony at The Fountains, a BlueGreen timeshare in Orlando, Fla., checking in before our mandatory 8:30 a.m. sales pitch.

We bought a BlueGreen Sampler package last year when we spent three days at one of their resorts on Table Rock Lake south of Branson, Mo. and  one of the conditions of the deal was that we consent to endure another sales pitch when we used our travel points. The fact that we had to apply for an extension of the one-year travel period underscores how his program just doesn’t fit the way we vacation. We’re only here because we didn’t want to waste the $695 we invested last year. That’s what I’m going to tell the BlueGreen person in about a half-hour.

We left home Saturday morning and made it to Midway, Fla., in the Florida panhandle that night, driving down to Flagler Beach for a shrimp and scallop linguine lunch and some beach time yesterday before continuing on to Orlando and The Fountains.

The access to our room is an exposed walkway that triggers my acrophobia bigtime. Nice of them to put us on the fucking top floor.

The good news is that the weather forecast is splendid – warm sunny days with little or no chance of rain. The bad news is that it’s killing me to be here without a motorcycle. Oh, well. There’s always Daytona Beach Bike Week.

Jackson

The Subaru had a flat tire a few weeks ago, so I rolled out the mechanic’s stool and the air compressor to put on the spare.

Jackson, our neighbors’ 4-year-old, is fascinated by tools and all things mechanical, so he assisted.

Here he is supervising me as I crank up the jack. His mom, Sophie, shot the photo with her iPhone.

Naturally, I thanked Jackson for his help.

44 years ago

Christmas, 1968

Sean, my firstborn, was only about six or seven weeks old for his actual first Christmas, so the Christmas of 1968 was the first one he had any real awareness of.

We lived in a townhouse apartment at 1306 Sandy Ann Lane in Indianapolis at the time.

Notice the gifts included his first musical instrument – a toy xylophone.

Breathtaking!

Meet the new mug, (not the) same as the old mug

Last Sunday was “Mug Day” for members of the Boscos Mug Club at Boscos Squared in Memphis. That’s the day new and renewed Mug Club members receive their mugs for 2013, which will spend the next year in racks above the bar, waiting for their owners to come in and have a beer at a reduced price. If you were a member in 2012, you get to take your 2012 mug home on that day.

I was unable to attend last Sunday because we were in Indiana, so I drove down to Memphis this afternoon to meet my new mug.

Maybe I’ll grow to like it after I have a taste of Hop God Ale. One of the guys drinking at the bar opined that it looks like something from his grandmother’s kitchen. Maybe something to pour gravy out of. That’s not exactly high praise.

At least the first mug of Midtown Brown was free.

The 2012 mug, with its Mayan calendar motif, was a brilliant design and a very hard act to follow. Mine now resides in my stein collection display case here in my upstairs office.

This is what a REAL newsroom looks like

I saw a photo of a newspaper newsroom on Facebook a few minutes ago and I couldn’t get past the vision of cubicles.

Whoever came up with the idea of cubicles in a newsroom should be banished from print journalism forever (although they probably retired a long time ago).

This (substitute computers for typewriters) is what a real newsroom looks like – wide open with lots of give-and-take and cross-pollination of ideas among the reporters and editors.

This cubicle idiocy is now the rule, rather than the exception, at newspapers across the nation. It was present in the suburban bureaus of The Indianapolis News and The Indianapolis Star, at the Crawfordsville Journal Review and at the Jonesboro Sun.

I think it’s stupid. It promotes isolation and inhibits camaraderie and makes a newsroom look and feel like a goddamned insurance office.

For the record, the guys in this photo of The News City Room are Terry Curry, who is now the Marion County Prosecutor in Indianapolis, and Phil Allen, who is probably retired from public relations by now. He moved to Colorado to do PR for the phone company decades ago.

Perspective

Kerstan and Raph Bayless converse after the group photos on their parents’ porch Sunday.

Snowdrift Vanilla Porter

We cruised the newish Walmart Supercenter in Lebanon, Ind., Friday evening.

The visit was ostensibly to pick up disposable plates, cups and plasticware for my in-laws’ Golden Wedding Anniversary on Sunday, and I was shopping for a wireless router so my in-laws could have Wifi at home.

At one point, we found ourselves in the beer, wine and liquor department. Earlier that evening, we’d had dinner with my stepson’s girlfriend and her parents at an Applebee’s where I got my first taste of Leinenkugel’s Snowdrift Vanilla Porter.

(After five years in Arkansas, living in a dry county, finding booze at Walmart seemed deliciously, wonderfully sinful.)

So when Maria pointed out a 12-pack of the stuff, I naturally had to buy it.

Here’s what Leinenkugel says about it:

Introducing Leinenkugel’s® Snowdrift Vanilla Porter™. Where roasted malts and real vanilla reveal layers of cocoa, coffee and caramel. With its creamy body and smooth finish, Snowdrift Vanilla Porter makes winter easy to drift into. Available November 1st - January 31st.

I like it. I really like it. I just had my first of the evening and, when I finish this blogpost, I’m going downstairs to have another.

I will, of course, need more to get through the winter – or at least to the Mayan apocalypse next month. I hope my favorite liquor stores have the good sense to stock it.

The gang’s all here

The entire extended Bayless family assembled on Gene and Sandra’s front porch Sunday afternoon for a group photo to mark Gene and Sandra’s Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Happy 50th Anniversary

We drove home last night from Thorntown, Ind. where we celebrated Maria’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary yesterday.

We organized all of the grandchildren for a group photo and here it is.

And here are the happy couple – Gene and Sandra Bayless.

Back home again in Indiana

We’re up in frozen Indiana for Maria’s parents’ 50th anniversary.
At the request of her brother Raph, we stopped at Boomland 10 miles east of Sikeston, Mo., and bought a big bag of fireworks for Raph and Deb’s sons Marek (left) and Lucien.
The bottle of bourbon is included in the photo just for effect.
We had a delightful dinner last night with Austin’s girlfriend’s parents and then met Lauri and Jim and their kids for brunch this morning at the new Crawfordsville Cracker Barrel.
I just installed a wireless router for my in-laws and will now turn my attention to other computer stuff to make their lives a little easier.

At last–a freezer in the garage

Our new Maytag 15.8 cubic foot freezer is humming away in the garage, lowering its internal temperature to 0ºF.
We bought a freezer Sunday at the Home Depot with delivery scheduled for this morning. Sure enough, the phone rang about 7:45 a.m. with the driver announcing he would be here soon.
He unloaded the freezer and went on his way and I set about unboxing it. That’s when I discovered it was damaged. There was a puncture in the metal on the starboard side that, upon inspection, coincided with a hole in the cardboard packing box. I would live with a small dent, but this was through the enamel and would eventually rust.
So I phoned the Home Depot and, to my surprise, the woman in charge of deliveries hunted up a replacement, unboxed and inspected it and sent it our way pronto. The replacement freezer was in our driveway by 10:45 a.m. and I had it unpacked, leveled, door handle attached and running by 11 a.m.
A-freaking-mazing!
I could be wrong, but I don’t think I would have gotten the same quick response out of Lowe’s on the day before Thanksgiving.

Giving thanks

I’m in an early Thanksgiving mood this afternoon and I’m thankful for a glorious warm sunny day, a fine German motorcycle to ride and a six-pack of Spaten Oktoberfest.

Mr. T’s Riverside, just over the St. Francis River in Missouri is my go-to place for good German beer and it made for a soul-satisfying ride.

I took back roads, riding east from Brookland on Ark. 230 to Dixie, which amounts to a few houses clustered around the intersection of Ark. 230 and Ark. 135.

I paused for a shot of my bike in front of the Dixie sign. (I think I’ve blogged it before.) Then I turned north on Ark. 135 and rode up to U.S. 412 on the east edge of Paragould where I turned east and rode the short run to Mr. T’s.

The guy behind me in line said he liked my German POLIZEI leather jacket, asked where I got it and was surprised when I told him it was only $179 from SportsmansGuide.com. This jacket has won more compliments than any I’ve ever owned.

Now I’m home, having poured three bottles of Spaten to fill a one-liter seidel.

What’s a seidel, you ask”

A Krug is an earthenware or stoneware beer mug with a handle. The litre version is called a Mass Krug. A glass version of the Mass Krug is called a Seidel -- this is the one you see in Munich beer gardens. Some people tend to call both the Mass Krug and the Seidel "steins". In fact, a Stein, or "Steinzeugkrug" is a stoneware beer mug with a hinged, thumb-tabbed pewter lid. It is widely believed that the lid was introduced as a hygiene measure after bubonic plague, or "black death", killed about a third of Europe's population in the fourteenth century. Some areas made lids on beer mugs compulsory after plagues of flies caused understandable concern about hygiene in the sixteenth century. Decorative steins, often with ornate relief decorations, became a symbol of status and can be quite collectable. However, some of the steins you'll find are modern corporate marketing gimmicks and have no connection to German beer whatsoever, including some that are produced by industrial lager giants like Anheuser-Busch and Coors. I'm not a fan of steins, as I think you can't appreciate the appearance of a beer if you drink it from an opaque vessel but there are many other websites dedicated to beer steins and stein collecting (see, for example,www.steincollectors.org). – From http://www.germanbeerguide.co.uk/glasses.html

A little morning romp with Jack & Sam

Mitch does it with style

Mitch Daniels, the smartest, most personable guy to ever occupy the Indiana governor’s office, opened a 60-mile stretch of the new I-69 extension, riding his Harley-Davidson from Evansville to Washington, Ind.

When complete, the I-69 extension will create an Interstate route diagonally across the state from northeast to southwest and create the first four-lane divided highway link between Indianapolis and Evansville.

Barred from seeking a third term by Indiana’s term limit law, Mitch will become president of Purdue University after the first of the year. His successor Mike Pence is a smart guy, but Mitch will be a hard act to follow.

Blogging, 1960s style

This is where it all started. The genesis of my blog was a cheesy little five-year diary that I bought in July, 1959 – the summer before my freshman year of high school.

It had a lock that was inconvenient, so I ripped it off.

I kept a daily log, condensed into four handwritten lines, from July 6 to Aug. 16, then took a break from journaling, making occasional entries until June 6, 1960. From that point on until Dec. 31, 1963, I kept a regular daily account of the events in my life – mostly trivial, but most of the entries trigger a specific memory.

Like, for instance, on this date in 1960 (a Saturday) a tree service cut down the elm tree in our front yard – killed by the Dutch Elm Disease epidemic that swept through the U.S. at the time – and I went to the Roxy Theatre in downtown Delphi, Ind., with friends to see “The Time Machine.” It was a forgettable movie, even though George Pal’s special effects won an Oscar.

It’s astonishing how many memory triggers a teenage boy can cram into such a little book. There’s also a lot of embarrassing adolescent emotion there that can make me cringe a half-century later.

Here are a couple of pages with the embarrassing stuff redacted.

No excuse for stains and rings on tables

I haven’t been to the post office yet today, but the USPS online tracking says I have a package of 100 brand new Spaten beer mats waiting for me there.

I bought them on Ebay, throwing out a minimum bid on impulse and not expecting to win.

I like Spaten beer and I think their logo is cool, maybe because I’m a German history buff and it evokes images of the Reich Labor Service.

So now I have a lifetime supply of Spaten beer mats.

Inflation

My dad bought a building on the north side of the courthouse square in Delphi, Ind., in 1955 for an insurance agency.

It was a very old building and had once been a tavern and hotel. When we explored the vacant upstairs, we found lots of interesting artifacts including a carriage clock and this bill of fare for Waddell’s Dining Hall.

Click on the image to see it larger.

Tommy, can you see me?

This is Tommy at Lowe’s, cutting shelves for our new bookcases.

Rather than depend on a tape measure, I took one of the shelves to make sure the new ones were cut to the right length.

Tommy cut nine shelves from three 8-foot-long boards. None of them were exactly the same length. He couldn’t seem to figure out how to compensate for the width of the saw blade so they were all slightly short, but no more than 3/8 of an inch, so they should all be usable.

Based on our experience with Lowe’s carpet installation, precision just isn’t their thing.

My longtime friend Lonnie Miller, who lives in Lafayette, Ind., offered this observation:

 

I ran into the same thing at Von Tobels on Earl Ave. Found two things the kids don't get trained to understand. First, the run-out, or wobble of the blade at high speed makes the real world cut wider than the width of the blade itself. Then the kids make the initial measurement with the blade cranked up way too high for the thickness of the material being cut which makes the cut even wider. The safe bet is to figure the actual cut to be twice+ the thickness of the saw blade.