Category Archives: 2012

A Plethora of Pinatas

Posted on May 13, 2012 by | 7 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Mostly it’s just a hodge-podge here at the moment.  Got a call from Gale and Kay before sunset, they were on the way home, he’d been released from the hospital.  So things are good on that front.

The rainfall event following the most recent post was about three inches according to the new neighbor.  Below’s a pic of Ranch Road 385 crossing the Little Devil Creek [locals are adamant it’s a ‘river’, not a creek].  Provides some perspective about how frequent three-inch rain storms are in this vicinity, and how much more maudlin and sentimental another inch would have been.

The rock and brush dam survived.

There’s a goodly bit of silt  dropped ahead of it, the parts that washed out weren’t maudlin and sentimental enough to kill the deal.

Speaking of which.  Although there’s a surprising dearth of bumper-stickers for an election year, this [I conjecture] non-political one is still at the top of the charts on Texas bumpers and back windows.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what drivers who choose this in one form or another are attempting to convey about themselves to other drivers, but thus far it escapes me.  No parking lot in Texas is complete without a few vehicles decorated with some variety of the plethora that must be available from the bumper sticker/decal magnates of imagination.

A roll of toilet paper on the ground there under the hat would go a long way to clear things up, if that’s the intended message.  But most likely it ain’t.

The demand by Texas drivers that other drivers support undeclared Presidential Military Adventures might be becoming stealthier, though it was fairly stealthy from the start.  Replacing the red-white and blue with cammie at least, is an uncharacteristic approach to honesty in motivation.

But as for explicit political bumper stickers, I only saw three.  One for some wannabe king who isn’t, the other demanding the current king be dumped without confessing a preference for an alternative.

The other political bumper sticker:  SHAFFER FOR SHERIFF – The Next Generation In Law Enforcement, struck me as a bit ominous.  Evidently the candidate wants voters to know he intends to incorporate more sophisticated surveillance, cameras, cow prods, computerized profiling of drivers at traffic stops, weaponry with more fire power, and newer vehicles for deputies to ride around in.

Finally, I got my chainsaw back finally from putting it in to let a real person work on it, finally.  Haven’t fired it up yet, but I know from what it cost to get it worked on and how long it took, that it’s gonna be a bull-goose chainsaw now. 

You folks looking for an entrepreneurial enterprise to occupy yourselves might be well served by considering small engine repairs.  This guy had a parking lot filled with riding lawn mowers waiting to be fixed, and if the chainsaw’s any indicator, there’s a fortune waiting to be made.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, Country Life, Politics, Texas

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

900 Pound Gorillas, Kidney Stones and Dying Texas Towns

Posted on May 9, 2012 by | 4 comments

I talked to Kay on the phone last night.  Gale’s doing a lot better.  His marble-sized kidney-stone is still in there, but they installed some kind of bypass tube until they can identify what it’s made of, then break it up or do something else with it.  His fever’s down and though he’s still in ICU, looks as though this won’t be his excuse for exiting the vehicle.

Marble-sized kidney stones ought to be worth something, considering the trouble a person goes to in the growing of them.  The only one I ever had was only the size of a grassburr, but it was worth every cent I paid for it, plus some boot.  In Peace Corps training I’d passed some blood and the medico told me it was probably a kidney stone, so I thought I knew about them, but I didn’t.  If that Hawaii thing was a kidney stone I must have been living right.

This one came on suddenly, sometime in the mid-1970s, and for a few hours it got so the nearest thing to a painless position was upside down against the wall, bent at the neck, torso, feet and legs held up by the wall.

I decided I was dying fast and agreed to allow my ex-wife to haul me to Scott and White Hospital, 30 minutes away, to die there.  Someone in the emergency room suggested it might be a kidney stone and I emphatically declared it wasn’t.  “I’ve had a kidney stone.  This isn’t a kidney stone.   This is a grapefruit-sized tumor!”

They took me at my word and pursued other avenues for several hours while I demanded they check me in and begin cutting out that tumor.  Around midnight I began telling my wife I’d be dead in just a little while, “You’ve been a blessing in my life, Babe.  I’m sorry to leave you like this.”

But they finally dyed my bloodstream and proved to me it was a kidney stone.  Gave me a shot of morphine and I went around the ER shaking hands, thanking everyone, congratulating them on being genius-quality practicioners of medicine.  They assured me the morphine would wear off and offered the hope I’d pass the stone before it did.

But I’ve digressed.  Get a person telling about a kidney stone and he’ll tell it as long as you’ll listen.  Giardia and kidney stones have that in common, though giardia might be worse in the long haul.  Getting the Egyptian Ducksquirts and abdominal cramping for six months is probably memorable.  Then there’s shingles, which I could tell you about, but won’t.  But all those qualify as 900 pound gorillas, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.  Mostly people survive them.

Yeah, I digressed again.  I began this post to tell you about Junction, Texas.  The County Seat.  Gale and I went over there the day his world took the plunge into the planet-kidney-stone, so’s he could submit his application for the Agricultural Tax Whatchallit.

I was going to tell you how a mile of main street had half a dozen cars parked along it, how a few businesses are still struggling to survive.  How they have a lot of thrift stores, but the prices are too high.  How the town’s got a huge park on the river I’d like to fish in sometime.

But I won’t.  To hell with it.  I’ll tell you some other time.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Senior Citizens, Texas

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Do We Have a Plethora Yet?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 7 comments

A plethora, say, of pinatas?

Jefe: I have put many beautiful pinatas in the storeroom, each of them filled with little suprises.
El Guapo: Many pinatas?
Jefe: Oh yes, many!
El Guapo: Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?
Jefe: A what?
El Guapo: A “plethora”.
Jefe: Oh yes, you have a plethora.
El Guapo: Jefe, what is a plethora?
Jefe: Why, El Guapo?
El Guapo: Well, you told me I have a plethora. And I just would like to know if you know what a plethora is. I would not like to think that a person would tell someone he has a plethora, and then find out that that person has no idea* what it means to have a plethora.
Jefe: Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me? 

Three Amigos – circa 1980s

 

Mindless outdoors work gives me a lot of time for my thoughts to ramble into unexpected places.  Theyve been doing that a lot lately. 

I’ve found myself pondering how a governed population can escape resp0nsibility for the activities of the government they put up with.  No matter how oppressive that government might be, no matter how inclined the members of that government are to ignore the wishes of the governed [or responsibility for the consequences of their decisions as fragments of the governing body].

If any of us gave a damn about karma we’d probably be concerned.  Everywhere on this planet human beings are allowing themselves to be governed.  Tacitly approving and being a part of what those governments do.  The bedrock fact is there… those governments couldn’t do what they do without the consent, at one level or another, of the populations giving them support. 

Nanking, say, couldn’t have been raped by Japanese if some substantial piece of the Japanese population hadn’t actively or tacitly participated.  The gulags in the USSR, the NAZI horrors, even the killing fields in Cambodia weren’t just a government job of work.  The insane, lazy, entrepreneural capitulation of US education, industry, economic solvency, labor and energy leading to where we are now didn’t happen because of single piece of government idiocy, corporate greed,  educator incompetence, Chief Executive dynastic aspirations.

Those pinatas hanging in the pic at the top came to be there because the citizenry of the US snort coke and toke marijuana through one breath and pretend they don’t through the next.  And they’re going to remain silent and pay for more penal institutions so long as the folks filling up the prisons for doing it have enough pigment to their skins to keep them out of the equation.

The prohibition against their behavior runs the price of it high enough so’s thousands, millions of people world-wide who are blessed with fewer alternatives find themselves involved in one of the processes.  It offers a legion of lawyers a product cycling through a system of human cages to enrich themselves.  It provides a river of money to fund so many layers of copshops nobody can keep track of them. 

But the bottom line is that it ain’t the government, the copshops, the brotherhood of  judges, lawyers, jailers and private prison corporations doing it.

Fact is, it’s humble us.  The people who sit on juries. 

This entire damned selectively-enriching, otherwise-bankrupting, oligarchy-growing pretended attempt to control the behavior of adults in their private lives, crimes without victims, can’t happen without a dozen citizens on every jury agreeing to help it continue.  Those juries, soberly listening to the somber prosecutors, the judges, are pronouncing death penalties every time they sell their souls to an abstraction.

Those people hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo were convicted and sentenced by US jury members who allowed themselves to believe they were just sending some black guy off to the slammer to get himself raped by his fellow felons for possessing a controlled substance.

Jefe: Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me? 

Maybe Jefe was onto something bigger than the knew.

Old Jules

7 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Government, Police, Surveillance, Survival, War on Drugs

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

First Observations – Brush Berms and Rock and Brush Dam

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 1 comment

One of you expressed an interest when I was describing the project, so I’ll add a bit of detail on initial observations.

The effort appears to be doing exactly what it’s intended to do, the floating cedar leaves doing a better job than the Pinon I used in New Mexico.  The fresh cuts on the berms don’t appear to be doing much, but those where the leaves have dropped are blocking with dead leaves, slowing the water enough to cause it to release the silt.  And the dead leaves are sealing the parts of the berms where that’s far enough advanced to allow it.

Meanwhile, a rock and brush dam I constructed last week in the arroyo to the east is performing well, also.

The steel grille used to lie on the scoured bottom so’s to allow a truck to cross without blowing a tire on the rough bottom.  I stood it up and included it in the dam because earlier efforts have filled the bottom voids with silt enough to provide a comparatively smoother ride across, making the grille redundant as a bottom surface.

The brush and leaves on the right were what was left of the earlier effort, prior to the most recent rainfall.

Depending on the intensity of the coming runoff events, the grille might actually be knocked down and require some remedies if the water level goes high enough to put leverage on the top, but if it doesn’t I believe the bottom will catch enough to provide stability.  Those rocks are heavy enough to withstand water to a level of a couple of feet, catching more brush and dropping more silt.  Higher than that, they’ll probably wash downstream.

My thought is that the bottom might fill with enough siltation ahead of the dam to need that grille, again, to keep truck tires from going up to the hubs in mud, anyway.

Old Jules

1 Comment

Posted in 2012, Science

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Erosion by Time

Posted on May 8, 2012 by | 3 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  It’s raining again this morning and all that erosion mitigation I’ve been doing is in the slow process of sealing itself with floating cedar leaves, beginning to back up water and drop the silt burden.

There’s a timely, subtle irony in this.  While that miniscule effort directed at reversing erosion by time begins doing its job, my old friend Gale, [who owns this place] pictured above climbing a mountain in 1998 is in the intensive care unit of the Kerrville hospital.  He’s been there almost a week now, them searching for a different sort of erosion.

He was carrying a high temperature for an old man when he finally went to a medico, who sent him to Emergency.  In ICU they found he had pneumonia, a blood infection, and didn’t know what-all else.  Yesterday they finally discovered a massive kidney stone.  Today they’ll be doing surgery to remove it and hopefully he’ll begin the long climb to recovery.

I’ve been spoiled by good health and mostly robust physical condition.  I suppose, even though I’ve known he had a lot of aches, pains and vehicular problems, I still think of him as that young man of almost 60, climbing that mountain, or maybe younger.  I’ve probably been harder on him, less understanding of his limitations than I should have been as I watched him not doing a lot of things he knew he should, or I thought he should.

But it’s time I recognized he’s not as young as me anymore, that he’s grown to be an old man while I watched, not noticing.  Happened too slowly, I suppose, maybe like watching a kid grow up.

I’ve got to learn to show more respect and patience for old people.

Old Jules

3 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2012, America, Country Life, Human Behavior, Kerrville, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Survival

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mechanical Disadvantage – Fulcrums, Chinese Steel and Gorilla Glue

Posted on May 4, 2012 by | 15 comments

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The project outdoors seems simple enough.  Clearing the intrusive cedars from under the oaks. 

Establishing a gentle downhill grade across slopes.

Creating a series of rock and brush berms to intercept the runoff and direct it across the slope to slow the concentration times during heavy rainfall runoff.

I followed the grades with a carpenter-level and board, mainly, keeping it to about a quarter-bubble.

Filling the deep ruts in the road with brush to rob the water of the siltation load.

Even the tools are uncomplicated.  But of course, a person has to find a wheel barrow tire that isn’t flat.

I eventually found this solid rubber one – bought the wheel barrow from a garage sale for the solid rubber tire.

I was a long while getting to it.

But a solid rubber wheel barrow tire beats a dozen Chinese flat ones.

The arms on the loppers you see in the green wheel barrow don’t provide a lot of mechanical advantage and require a lot of stoop labor.  Naturally, I was elated when I found this one in a thrift store with telescoping arms.  $8 US bucks.  Cheap at twice the price.

When I got home I broke the first arm off in about 20 minutes.  After I cut off the break and put it back together I broke the other one off 20 minutes later.

Chinese steel rears its ugly head.

This was obviously going to require some modifications.  A sleeve to go over that weak point, something to fill in the space between the sleeve and the joint/handle.  Nothing to it.

I was going to melt down some old shower shoes to pour into the space, but Gale suggested silicone caulk. 

But my tube of caulk was dried out, so I decided on Gorilla Glue instead.

Here’s how long it took to discover the next weak point in the design.

The culprit.

Who but the Chinese could produce a bolt a man could spang break in half?

Well, Mister Commie, you might think this is over, but it ain’t.  I’ve got another dance or two left in me.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Texas, White Trash Repairs

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cacahuate Japones and Other Weirdness Among Townees

Posted on April 26, 2012 by | 11 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  This is the real, honest-to-goodness, 2012, worn down to a small nub ‘me’ coming to you this morning from the Middle of Nowhere.

I’m a bit stiff and sore, slow getting moving this morning, so I’m stalling the inevitable by sharing a few bits and pieces of a reality that’s becoming decreasingly real.  The package above might save me a lot of words, say it more succinctly than anything I could contrive.  It’s no surprise those things ended up hanging on a rack in the Dollar Tree store.  Maybe the lousiest marketing strategy for a food item in the history of mankind.

Then there’s this:

I’m the sort of person who naturally does everything bumper stickers tell me I ought to do.  Keeps me following a straight and narrow path in one hell of a lot of mutually exclusive directions.   So when I saw all those blue plastic drink cups pushed into the chainlink fence across from one of the thrift stores in Kerrville, I immediately resolved myself to quit using AB, whatever the hell that is.  I figured it must be the latest recreational drug of choice.

I thought on it a lot driving back to the Middle of Nowhere, tried all manner of words beginning with A and B, certain there was something out there I needed to quit using.  Got on the Internet when I arrived home and did a Dogpile dot com search on AB Use.  Couldn’t find a damned smidgen about it.

But I swear to you, if I ever do find out what it is, I’m dropping it out of whatever it is I’m doing with it.

As for everything else, I’m having a fine old time devising and constructing a watershed management plan here the likes of which very few of me in my past lives have ever done.  I’m tackling that runoff water from rainfall if we ever get any, making it stand up on its hind legs and whinny, then behave itself.

I’ll probably post a few pics of some of it, though it’s just mainly a matter of persuading water to treat the thin soil here with more respect than it’s done in the past, explaining to it about how the damned cattle aren’t fighting over every blade of grass anymore.  Showing it the error of its ways.

Other major events around here worth mentioning won’t bowl you over more than that.  The invader cat’s decided to demand a lot of petting when he’s here, which pisses off all the other felines.  But he’s only here Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, nearly as I can figure.  There’s a ranch woman a mile or so to the west feeding him sometimes, Gale’s heard, and I always see him coming out of the woods to the east.  Makes a series of stops, I reckons, trying to keep everyone happy.

Then there’s the other project, the subtle energy investigation.  Major steps forward, lots of learning, mind openings, having to go back and recalculate a lot of areas because previous premature assumptions stopped me before they were thoroughly tested.  But the doors are opening more daily and the corridors behind them are narrowing.

Any day now I expect to have a lot better understanding of the mechanism.  But it’s clear it involves reflective light from unlikely celestial bodies, and evidently includes interactions between the axial tilts of various objects and that of the sun.  With complications resulting from Old Sol’s communistic notion he doesn’t have to spin at the same speed at his equator as he does in his other body parts.

That’s about all worth mentioning for the moment.  Thanks for the visit.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, Science, Solitude

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Texas Ideaology: So Many Ideas, So Little Truck

Posted on April 18, 2012 by | 10 comments

And too few handicapped spaces

But otherwise

It’s mostly complete.

When Americans use bumper stickers to tell everything about themselves worth knowing they usually don’t need so much vehicle to do it.  Bumper stickers to describe the depth and breadth of their thought processes, their tastes in literature and philosophy, everything important about themselves don’t take up a lot of space:

“Pro- Choice“:  a telegraphic way to say, “I don’t have a fetus inside me, but if you are unlucky enough to have one I’m rabidly enthusiastic about your right to kill it and flush it down the toilet.”

“Right to Life“ – translates:  “I think abortion’s a bad choice and I’d like to kill, or imprison anyone who believes differently. Knitting needles in the bathtub were good enough for grandma and they’re good enough for you.” 

“Support the Right to Keep and Bear Arms”  Translates:  “I like guns a bit overmuch.  I’ve got them and, while I’m a patriot, probably a flag waver and mindless supporter of any unconstitutional war our prez gets us into, I don’t want them taking away muh guns.”

Ban (Firearms)(Handguns)   Translates- “I am an idiot and don’t know it, but I want you to know it.” 

“Support Your Local Police“  Translates:  “I’m either a cop, or I drive 75mph through school zones and figure anything might help.  Either way, don’t trust me.”

“Save the Whales“  Translates:  “I’ve never seen a whale, but I’m hoping this bumper-sticker will help me meet people who have seen them.  Or meet females who haven’t seen whales, either, but who would like to talk about saving them over drinks and maybe have sex afterward.”

“Proud to be an American“  Translates:  “I’m glad I was lucky enough to be born in a country where everyone’s fat, has MasterCard, and can talk in English about what team won the game last night.  I’m most especially proud not to have been born somewhere full of non-English-speaking poor people who are hungry and get the bejesus bombed out of them all the time by us.”

GAY (Pride)(Marriage)(Rights)  Translates:  “I want to tell you what me (the owner of the bumper-sticker  – not, ‘me’, Old Jules) and my friends do with our genitals.  I’m in your face about it because otherwise you mightn’t care.  I, the bumper-sticker-owner is saying, am a really shallow human being who doesn’t care what other people do with their sex organs, but believe everyone should care what I do with mine because there’s not much else about me anyone would be interested in.“

Bumper-stickers are probably dying, however,  in favor of the less-literary, shorter-attention-span next-generation.  The brave new world has little magnetic ribbon icons made in China of all different colors.  Each color makes a pronouncement about what the car owner thinks will interest other Americans.  Yellow means support the war (as though a person could pay taxes but not support the troops and the war).  Etc etc etc.

I saw one recently,  a brown one of those ribbons turned upside-down so the ends stuck out like ears.  “Support Bambi“  was printed in the center decorated with two doe-eyes with long lashes..

“You can take my pit-bull when you pry my cold, dead fingers from his snout” must have had defective adhesive so’s to not stay on the bumper.  I’ve never seen one.

I forgot to mention my favorite bumper-sticker:

“WHITEY WILL PAY”  Translates: “There’s maybe more pigment in my skin than some people have. Or maybe not. But I blame all my flaws, inadequacies and shortcomings in my life on what hypothetical dead white males did to my long-dead ancestors. If it hadn’t been for that my life would be a paradise.”

 

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in 2012, America

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Housekeeping

Posted on April 6, 2012 by | 26 comments

Hi everyone, Jeanne here. Please bear with me while I make a few comments on the status of things here at So Far From Heaven.

First of all, the blog site isn’t going away. I’m sure Jules will post from time to time, but he’s also relieved to have made the decision to post only when he feels the urge without any dedication to a schedule. So, less stress, fewer posts, but not going away. If you’re not already signed up for email notifications, you might consider it. I’ve certainly found it helpful on other blog sites that I follow.

I have permission to post some other things that Jules has written in the past, some items from previous blogs, poetry, some pieces from other projects. I would appreciate your feedback about this idea. I suspect I am biased about his writing and don’t have enough distance from the situation to really know whether our followers  want to see anything “old” or just wait for something current.

For anyone who wants a daily dose of Old Jules’ writing, please visit  Ask Old Jules, where you are still welcome to ask questions there through the comments.  Although I only post one question and answer per day, there is a lot of variety and randomness from day to day that you might enjoy.  The Facebook page So Far From Heaven: Ask Old Jules will also continue with shorter q/a posts more appropriate to the Facebook format.

We’re very gratified that at this point we’ve got a nice solid core of dedicated readers. I’m also following a lot of nice people that I never knew existed, and intend to keep doing so. We appreciate all the responses we’ve had so far and look forward to continuing in the same vein although not with the same frequency.

Until next time,
Jeanne

26 Comments

Posted in 2012, Admin., Communication, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

All Good Things.

Posted on April 5, 2012 by | 34 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I got an email notice yesterday that the domain name for this blog’s up for renewal.  I’m not certain what that means in terms of the fate of what’s here if it’s not renewed, but I’m feeling fairly confident I won’t fork over any money to renew it.  When the blog first began, Jeanne paid for it because she had a million of my old writings she wanted to post.  Mostly that hasn’t been the way it’s worked out.

The blog’s been fun for me, but I’ll confess the hard physical labor this spring’s already robbing me of a lot of energy.  I’m going to have to ration out what I’ve got, I’m figuring, if I want to get any of the things done I know I need to do this year.

If I want to write a blog I can do it on one that’s free, I reckons, and not throw away money, mine or Jeanne’s, to keep this one going.  Having money tied up in it injects an obligation to post on it regularly.  A self-imposed deadline in a reality where I’m truly not interested in having me back behind me cracking a whip, bludgeoning me to write when my old bod is insisting just sitting back sipping a cup of coffee would be time better spent.

I appreciate the interest all of you have demonstrated by your visits and wish you well.  If Jeanne decides to renew the domain name I’ll probably post occasionally.  If she doesn’t, likely the thing will just fade out of existence and I’ll post occasionally on some free blog site. 

Thank you, each and all.

Old Jules [Jack Purcell]

Today on Ask Old Jules:   Define “respect”?

Old Jules, how do you define respect?

34 Comments

Posted in 2012

Tagged , , , , ,