Regular Life

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The only major drawback to living in northern Texas is the pancake landscape. My two favorite hobbies before we moved here were hiking and nature photography. To do either now requires nearly three hours of car travel.

I don’t mean some nature preserve with paved running paths and hundreds of people bumping shoulders. Those certainly have their place, and they’re better than nothing. One even features actual trails through real woods. When the leaves are on the trees one can almost feel secluded for the three minutes it takes to walk a trail from one paved path to another. So, it gets a point for the rolling hills but loses one for the teeming masses.

For all its shortcomings, the flat terrain here affords amazing views of the sunset, and they have become my last vestige of nature photography. Yes, I’ve heard that air pollution is to blame for the array of colors found in today’s dramatic day-ending displays. I try to enjoy the colors without thinking of that.

To hike over a mountain and into a meadow, with nobody but my wife and son in sight, and then see a colorful sunset? That would be true bliss.

For now, I take what I can get.

There are many great, free programs I use in Windows. I thought some of you might like to know what they are. Here comes the corny intro paragraph.

When the software included with your computer just isn’t quite enough, and you don’t want to buy something off the shelf, or if economic times have knocked new software purchases off your spending list, then these products could prove especially useful.

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Teachers at a local school had noticed a little girl who brought a brown paper sack to school each Friday. Finally they asked her what was in the bag.

“My clothes for the weekend,” she replied.

The family the little girl had been staying with had told her that weekends are their “family time,” and that she needed to go somewhere else until Sunday evening.

She was homeless every weekend.

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I needed someone to pinch me. It was a man’s dream.

Driving back from the family holidays, I heard my wife say, “You know, I’m really getting tired of looking at that big, bulky TV in the living room. I like the nice, thin ones that my friends have.”

I nearly wrecked the van.

After we got home we didn’t discuss it again for a while. I didn’t take any action because I didn’t really believe it was a possibility. When we finally did take action, we wasted a lot of effort that involved much drilling. Let’s start in early February.

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Mexican restaurant chain Chuy’s just added a location fairly close to us. Here is the art work that hung behind me as I sat at our table. This offbeat sense of humor adorned every wall.

Benjamin and I stand next to each other in the restaurant’s men’s room, facing the wall. He’s at the low-rider, nearly drilling a hole in the porcelain. Ah, youth.

As I zip up and turn to walk toward the sink, I notice an older gentleman exiting one of the stalls. He’s half way to the sink when I notice his problem. From his lower back, starting at the waist of his pants, toilet paper trails down to about two feet off the floor and through the open door of the stall he just left. It was still connected to the roll in the dispenser.

“Um, excuse me, sir, you’re pulling something with you there,” I say.

He turns to look behind him. “Oh, my.” He reaches back and pulls the paper out of his pants and then rips the other end from the roll and throws it in the toilet.

“I didn’t want you to go out there with that.”

He laughs. “It would have made it an interesting evening,” he says. “But it’s probably for the best if I don’t.”

While Ben and I return to our table, I try to figure out how the man had tucked still-connected toilet paper into his pants, but the festivities of my mother-in-law’s birthday dinner break my concentration.

Have you ever tried to quit anything? Were you successful? What strategies did you employ?

If you arrived here hoping to read about smoking cessation, stopping alcohol abuse, or kicking smack to the curb, then I’m afraid the excitement level here might be too much for you. At the very least, you could get angry that someone wasted time typing this in the first place. At best, you could share your story in the comments.

I quit or cut down on three things at once — coffee, soft drinks, and desserts, with varying success. If you’re sure you can handle it, read on. Oh, and I quit using the snooze bar, too. (Told you, the hits just keep on coming.) Lately, I’m not doing too well on any of those fronts.

Originally there was a lot of sex and violence in this story, but in the interest of keeping it family-friendly, I cut out most of it.

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This is our five-year-old’s painting from kindergarten. He was quite proud of it and we hung it on our refrigerator. With that there, I’m pretty sure we’re safe from any intruders.

Although we know what it is, I’m taking guesses from the audience. Fridays usually are slow around here, but I couldn’t hold this one any longer.

Have fun.

(Note: I have a new banner for February. I also changed the stylesheet slightly, so please force a refresh in your browser — usually by holding shift or Apple and then clicking reload.)

We’ve become pretty good friends with a very nice couple next door to us.

They’ve lived there for about a year, if I’m remembering right. We had hung out with the wife some, either during impromptu driveway moments in nice weather, or at a backyard cookout. The husband always traveled a lot in his job, so we mostly had caught fleeting glimpses.

In the past two weeks, we kept their dog over the weekend, we had a blast at a Wii party at their place Saturday, and I watched the last half of the Super Bowl with them on Sunday. It didn’t take us long to discover that they’re fun and nice, and she finished out her high school band days playing the same instrument I did (that makes us members of a very small club).

Before that, all I knew was that she was an incredible baker and they bought way too much candy to hand out on Hallowe’en.

All of that combines to equal this: it sucks that they’re moving to Utah. They’ll be gone by Thursday, actually.

Through the magic of Facebook and e-mail, we’ll try to keep in touch. I hope we succeed.

Because then I can write about my first visit to Utah.