Category Archives: 2018

Amazing quilting

Posted on January 30, 2018 by | 14 comments

Hi readers.

During the coldest months of last winter a friend from one of my previous lifetimes heard about my situation here and sent me a fantastic, warm, welcome gift. Judy Van Hooser was so long ago I’d have thought she had forgotten I exist.

judy quilt1
Beautiful work and it all appears to be hand-stitched.

judy quilt3
Every year Judy makes one of these and gives it to a veteran somewhere.

judy quilt2
Last year she contacted my ex-wife, Caroline, and said she’d like to give this one to me.

judy quilt flipside

I was both dumbfounded and ecstatic. It’s almost too fine to use as a quilt. But these winter nights don’t leave a lot of room for the luxury of using a warm quilt for a showpiece. This one does what quilts and blankets were always supposed to do.

Thank you Judy. You’ve earned a place in my gratitude affirmations. And every time I use that quilt I remember.

Old Jules

14 Comments

Posted in 2018, America, Art, Human Behavior, Senior Citizens, Veterans

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Driving back senility with chess

Posted on January 29, 2018 by | 9 comments

 

Jerry’s been living on this campus on and off since the Vietnam War. We decided to start playing chess regularly in hopes to slow the approach of senility.

Hi readers

I’m guessing every older person begins to see the memory functions deteriorate with advancing years.    And probably most of us have wondered whether there’s anything we can do to keep it from becoming a conspicuous piece of our lives.   Conspicuous enough, I should say, so’s the medicos or people around us begin putting a name to it.

My buddy Jerry and I ….. along with a few other and more intermittent old guys living around here, are making a valiant effort at fighting  senility by regularly challenging our minds with chess games.

We meet whenever it’s agreeable in one of the waiting rooms at the main hospital.   It has the advantage [for me] of being a place where smoking is forbidden.   And if Jerry or one of the others wants to go outdoors to smoke it’s not that far.

But maybe it’s my imagination.   I think regular games of chess really are improving my ability to remember, reducing the frequency of those events where I walk into the other room for something and can’t recall what it was I was there for.

And Jerry believes it is helping him, too.    Wasn’t all that long ago he was mentioning almost every time I saw him he thought he was getting senile.   It’s been a considerable while since he said that.

On the other hand, I also load myself up with Ginko Biloba at every opportunity, too.

I’m not above trying anything that isn’t obviously a health threat of its own.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2018, Relationships, Senior Citizens, VA campus, Veterans

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Mister Midnight’s flaw

Posted on January 28, 2018 by | 6 comments

mr midnight bracelet 2 all

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by.

A cat only has so much dignity he can hold on to. We all know that. So imagine how tough life must be for a black cat forced to go through life with a silver bracelet of hair on one of his back legs.
mr midnight bracelet
Naturally I find myself trying to grab that leg for a closer look at it. And naturally he’s become particularly sensitive about it.

Oh yeah, I tell him it’s great, it’s what I like about him. What makes him special. But every time I grab for it to have a better look, the tries to jerk it away, sometimes even bites at me an hisses.

Because deep down, no matter what I say, Mister Midnight knows the truth.

Old Jules

6 Comments

Posted in 2018, Animals, Leavenworth

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Great big old ducks

Posted on January 28, 2018 by | 8 comments

Original Hospital and Lake1
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Back in the late 1800s when they dug that lake to excavate clay to make bricks for that original VA hospital they had to do something about the hole it left behind. So they filled it with water. Made a nice little recreation facility for the biggest piece of a century.

But what nobody could anticipate was that a time would come when nobody would give a damn about maintaining the lake. That it would become a sedimentation pond for the droppings of hundreds of waterfowl migrating in every winter, and some who just stay year around.

And over time the lake would mostly fill with those droppings until it was so shallow a person would have to work to drown in it.

That lake mostly can’t handle the biological oxygen demand because of all the manure. And nobody is about to spend the money to blow that water into the air to keep it alive. There’s a little bubbler at one end that sometimes works, but otherwise the pond turns over, stinks, kills a lot of fish, and is a sad reminder of how much maintenance man-made creations demand over the course of time.

great big old ducks

Nobody in my life has ever appreciated my sense of humor, and the same applies here. But at least I figure it helps make these drunks, derelicts, and opinionated old men feel better about themselves by being able to think me stupid. So anytime I get the chance to work it into a conversation I say something about those ‘great big old ducks’ running around crapping on everything.

And crap they do….. the grounds are speckled with them…. looks like someone ran one of those plugging things across the lawns. Yeah, and the streets, [and they do let fly as they pass over cars…. nothing like a splash of great big old duck droppings on your windshield].

But I digress.

A man staggering by knee-walking drunk will pause, gaze at me a moment, and shake his head almost every time if I remark to him, “Reckon where all those great big old ducks come from, anyway?”

Makes him feel better about himself. I’m convince of it. Yeah, I know they’re geese. But what the hell?

We all have our own small parts to play helping veterans, I figure.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2018, America, Leavenworth, Nature, Poultry, Senior Citizens, VA campus, Veterans, Wildlife

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A new way to write

Posted on January 28, 2018 by | 20 comments

typewriter

Hi readers.

A couple of weeks ago at the Gold River Auction in Olathe Jeanne found this thing for free because nobody bid on it. She gave me a call and asked if I’d like to have it. Seemed a strange concept to me, but I told her to snag it for me.

Believe it or not this thing is not electric, doesn’t require any software, and you can just type words into it to get them printed right away. No hassle with a printer, no hookups, no dried out printer-ink.

Jeeze! You just type into this thing and if there’s a sheet of paper in it, you end up with a page with what you typed right there already.

I love this thing.

Is this a great country, or what?

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2018, Communication, Jeanne Kasten, Leavenworth

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The curse of inheritance

Posted on January 27, 2018 by | 8 comments

feral hog
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

Those of you who have read this blog awhile probably know I’m inclined to think we’ve got to quit rewarding people for being born to wealthy, powerful parents. The practice has been around so long it’s almost impossible to force our minds to examine the issue. But when we are able to do it a lot of facets emerge that would argue to the unbiased observer it’s not the way to operate a society.

We all grew up on rags to riches stories and the generations before us had their Horatio Algers, Joseph Kennedys and other self-made millionaires. This country spawned thousands of them during the 19th and 20th Centuries.

But what we rarely consider is that the progeny of those millionaires and billionaires end up being the driving forces in the running of the country. An aristocracy based as thoroughly on inheritance as any European lords and nobles the people who founded this country did their best to assure would never rule here.

In the same way we know about self-made wealth and the men who have it, most of us also know about their offspring. The powerful insanity of the heirs to the DuPont fortune. Teddy Kennedy. Paris Hilton. And the list goes on and on. There’s no evidence at all that being born to conspicuous wealth lends itself to breeding better, more productive people. The opposite is more likely true.

So what, the next obvious question asks itself, should ‘we’ do with billionaire estates after it’s all been confiscated besides, say, a million dollars each to the heirs?

Well, how about this? Use it to finance those damned wars nobody has asked anyone but wealthy people whether they want?

Or use it to build that damned wall most sane people don’t want, but are being threatened with having to pay for.

Or sum it all up each year and divide it into equal parts as a sort of ‘tax refund’ for all the other citizens of the country who don’t have a million bucks?

And every one of these suggestions is certain to infuriate a huge piece of the public. The wealthy and powerful, of course. And those who think they might inherit sometime, somehow. And those who believe they’re clever enough to be a self-made millionaire and that this will keep them from creating a dynasty.

But the really strange ones are those down in the trailer parks, of out there in suburbia who toil for their survival and work hard for everything they get in this life. They are as protective of our power elite aristocracy as their masters who did inherit their fortunes.

There’s no understanding the human mind.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2018, America, Human Behavior

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Remembering the Fallen from All Eras who died for our property rights.

Posted on January 26, 2018 by | 23 comments

 

Kansas City VA Medical Center, Kansas City, MO.

Hi readers.    Thanks for coming by for a smile.

I was sitting in the Silver clinic waiting area at the KCVA Medical Center today and got some really good news!   Keep in mind that I was just a few dozen yards from the Hall of Heroes and fairly close to Valor Elevator.   So this guy doing all the talking really seemed appropriate.

He was a severely overweight old fellow with a lot of bends in the wrong places, hair coming out in patches.   Had the man next to me pinned to his chair as he went on bludgeoning the people of this country for not supporting the president more, for all the ‘snowflakes’ and cowards nowadays, and for the fact nobody is honoring our soldiers dying in these presidential wars.

Guy next to me, “I voted for Trump.   I don’t regret it yet.”

“They complain about him going to Florida!    Heck, Florida, at least, has a park where they honor the dead from all wars!”    He named the park, and I went back to trying to read my book.

But then I got to thinking.    All wars?   Wow!

Anyway, I looked it up.   He was right!

Field Of Honor Recognizes The Fallen From All Eras , Hillsborough Veterans Memorial Park.

By golly I think it’s about time someone honored all those fallen soldiers at Little Big Horn who got themselves killed trying to attack a lot more Sioux and Cheyenne than they thought were there.    And all those twenty-five soldiers killed when they massacred all those people at Wounded Knee.

Heck, when you  think about it, all those Indian wars have all sorts of fallen GIs who got themselves offed trying to kill Indians…… Apache, Navajo, Sioux, Cheyenne, Yuma, Ute, Comanche, Kiowa, Seminole.  I’ve never heard one solitary soul stand up in front of a podium and pronounce how those men died for our freedoms.   But without them we wouldn’t have farms and ranches scattered all over the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.   And condos and resorts all over Florida.  Those men died for our property rights.

And what about all the heroes who fell in the Mexican War when we were taking California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada away from the Mexicans?   Nobody ever stands over their graves, stares at the flag, gulps, and talks about how they fought for our Constitution, our freedom of speech, our property rights.

Then there was the Spanish American War, where we took Puerto Rico, Cuba, and all her other possessions away from Spain …… and the heroes who died in that war for our property rights.

There’s just no getting around it.    We’re falling down on the job honoring our fallen from all eras.   Good thing someone is at least remembering the guys who died for our freedoms in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq one and two, and various other places in the Balkans, the Middle East, Korea, and Africa.

In fact, probably having someone stand in front of a podium and explain how all those guys were protecting our freedom would be a good place to begin.   I’m inclined to think General Custer came about as close to protecting our freedom as anyone who died in a war after 1950.

Yeah, all those fallen heroes  killed by Geronimo and Cochise won’t rest until someone honors them by explaining how they died for our freedom.

Old Jules

23 Comments

Posted in 2018, America, Military, Native American, Native Americans, patriotism, Politics, US Army, VA campus, Veterans

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Amber waves of marijuana and shale oil deposits – Protecting the Mexicans from people like us

Posted on January 26, 2018 by | 2 comments

Re-blogged from September 18, 2013

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

Those damned Mexicans.  They refuse to protect themselves.  This time 150 years ago they had a damned Austrian monarch running the country and French soldiers keeping him in power.  A little before that the US Army had to go down there and whip the bejesus out of them because they wouldn’t give us New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California.

Heck, a century ago they refused to protect themselves again and we had to send General Blackjack Pershing to beat some sense into their heads.  Bastards had the cheek to kill 19 US Navy men when a US ship drove into Vera Cruz and started shelling the town.

Now they’ve got all that marijuana growing down there nobody can make any money from until it gets across the border.  Nobody making a penny off it except Mexicans until it gets up here where someone can use it.  Bad enough, you say?  Well, I agree.  But it isn’t all.

The shale oil deposits Old Sol gave us because we’re his Chosen People don’t necessarily stop at the Rio Grande.  There’s a better-than-even chance some of it’s down there where nobody can make any money off it except Mexicans.

We’ve been patient and we’ve tried hard, but those shiftless, indolent people down there keep having stuff we need to be making money from and they refuse to protect themselves from us.   There doesn’t seem to be any way we’re going to be able to avoid having to invade them to protect them from us.

People like that don’t have any respect for human life the way we do and it gets downright boring and tiresome forever having to invade them.  Time to put a stop to it.

Time to make them Chosen People with us, annex them.  Time to make Mexico a US territory so we can protect them.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2018, America, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, humor, patriotism, Politics

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All these free kids flooding into the country and they want to send them BACK?

Posted on January 26, 2018 by | 2 comments

Re-blogged from July 12, 2014

Sheeze readers, can you believe this?  Hundreds, maybe thousands of kids at loose-ends coming across our border.  Nobody for us to answer to, no matter what we do to them.  And whatever it is beats starving to death in some pesthole where they don’t even speak English.

Heck, we could send them to butler and house-keeper schools so’s when they grow up they’d have rent-free jobs they can’t quit in the homes of rich people.  Make slaves of them.  Hell nobody would notice or care.  Auction them off to Oriental pedophiles to pay the National Debt.

These kids are the future and we’re squandering it, haggling over how long it should take to send them back.  Sending them back is crazy.  Nobody has ever been more helpless than them.  We can do anything to them that makes us feel good.  Put them to work doing phone sales, teach them martial arts and how to shoot and give them to important people for a lifetime of free bodyguarding.

Hang signs over their shoulders advertising pizza joints or wearing statue of liberty suits waving people into tax joints.  Free.  Everyone could have one to wash the laundry, cook and do the dishes.  Curl up under the kitchen table when the work was all done.

Mostly these days a lot of people can afford to hire someone for menial tasks, but they still have to get up to get beers or change the batteries on the TV remotes.  Still have to carry out the trash.  Life still sucks for them.

And as always, God heard their pleas.  Sent all those starving, displaced kids up from Godawful places south of Mexico.

God has always taken a favorable view to slavery.  Time was He demanded His Chosen People of the time make slaves of all the neighbors they couldn’t kill.  And now we are his Chosen People.  He’s offering a free gift of thousands of slaves for us to do anything with we want to.  And they can’t do anything back.

Hell, they’d probably thank us.

Send them back?  What the hell is wrong with those people in Washington?  Right now they’re having to PAY illegal aliens to mow the grass.  If they relax they can have one for a slave and use him/her for a sex toy when all the work’s done.

And they’re helpless to keep it from happening.  Perfecto!  If we’re going to be God’s Chosen People we’re going to have to start acting the way God’s Chosen People acted when they were still getting their instructions.  And the way the ones who think they are, but aren’t anymore, are still behaving, though they’ve toned it down some.

But they don’t have any starving, helpless kids flooding across the border begging to be exploited seven ways from Sunday upside down and backward.  God’s pretty much cut them off for the last couple of thousand years.

Old Jules

In case you missed how we became God’s Chosen People and posts in that vein:

 

 

 

2 Comments

Posted in 2018, America, Current Issues, Government, Human Behavior, humor, Politics

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The four civilized countries in the world

Posted on January 25, 2018 by | 2 comments

Re-blogged from September 9, 2013

Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.

When I confided to you a while back that Old Sol told me the people of the US are his 21st Century Chosen People I knew some of you would be skeptical. So I held back part of what he said to give you an opportunity to digest it a piece at a time.

If you look at the maps you’ll immediately see Australia is just the 48 contiguous states of the US turned upsidedown and placed in the southern hemisphere. This is no coincidence. It’s proof of Old Sol’s intentions.

Old Sol wants the four civilized countries in the world, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to all be his own Chosen People. To accomplish this He wants those four countries to form a confederation which, once accomplished, will make them all Old Sol’s Chosen People!

Isn’t that exciting?

Naturally Old Sol wants the Promised Land to have secure borders easily defended. So He points out, as He used to do in ancient times with his former Chosen People, that a few pieces of real estate currently occupied by Non-Chosen People will have to be absorbed. Namely everything from Texas to the Panama Canal. Which shouldn’t be a problem.

In fact, Old Sol even suggests offering to move Israel to the new Promised Land and establishing them from the north shore of the Panama Canal north to Guatemala! Give them Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and northern Panama. Maybe even Guatemala if they behave themselves. That way they’ll be able to once again be Chosen People, same as the Jews in the four civilized countries already are.

Isn’t that exciting?

But what’s equally exciting is that Old Sol wants the southern hemisphere Promised Land to be occupied by left-handed Chosen People. Right handed Chosen People will be moved to the northern hemisphere Promised Lands.

There’s a lot more, but I’m going to allow you time to digest this before I pass it on to you.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2013, 2018, America, Current Issues, Ethnic Supremacy, humor, patriotism

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