The Ice.

Woof, Woof!

These last two days have been rather trying, and I expect I’d better tell you my version of what happened, before My Lady decides to tell tales.

I was surprised yesterday when I bounded out the door in my usual fashion and my feet landed in this cold white stuff that was on the porch. Well that made me slow down, I can tell you! 

Airmail on a nicer day

 I always enjoy going to the end of the sidewalk. That’s where I stop and I sniff the air in three directions. My Lady says that I am reading the airmail.  That first step off the porch landed me in belly-deep snow, so I just turned around and headed back to the door where My Lady waited. The airmail could wait and that brief dip in the white stuff left my belly kinda shivery. Later I was allowed to go outside without the leash. Of course it didn’t take a genus to know that I wasn’t going to run off in all that white stuff. Later,I sneaked out again while My Lady was picking up wood. That was not the smartest idea I’ve ever had, but it sure was fun watching those cats hunt a hiding place. Still, I remembered the time once before, that had me mediating in my quiet corner for hours, so when she really yelled in that certain tone of voice, I scooted for that door pretty fast. I guess I was lucky to escape a whack with one of those sticks of wood!

It turned into a long afternoon. We couldn’t go get the mail, we couldn’t go shopping and that long cord to allow me to meander around the yard was buried three inches below the snow.  Anyway, I finally got so bored that I couldn’t stand it any longer so I begged and begged until My Lady consented to take me out again.

Now the moment we went out the door I spotted this piece of bread lying on the porch. Now to my way of thinking, that was an unexpected trophy, even if I don’t like bread. Well, I grabbed tha bread and away I went down the length of the porch. Okay, okay, I knew it belonged to the cats! That made grabbing it even more fun. Anyway, I was moving along fast, when I met a cat, so I did what my instincts told me, and I turned to chase that fellow.

 That’s when it happened!  I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that when I wheeled around, my feet lost traction and I did a belly flop right there on a patch of ice.  Oh my! My feet went every which way and I just wiggled along on my underside until I reached a dry spot. By that time the cat was out of sight so I very carefully turned and picked up my bread and continued on my way.

Of course, a trophy is meant to be saved, so I found a likely spot in the snow and started digging. That turned out to be a poor choice, so I moved to another spot which turned out to be perfect. Digging a hole in soft snow should be easy, but it wasn’t. The hole kept filling up with more snow but I finally got a decent hole and dropped that piece of bread in it.  I’d had enough of digging with my poor cold paws, so I just used my nose to start nudging enough snow over to cover my prize. That took a while and my nose got cold. When I was through I could feel snow all over my face. I think I heard My Lady snicker, but I just ignored her and headed for the door.

Now that it’s dark I’m ready for a long nap , It really hasn’t been such a bad day, considering that I got to chase a few cats and didn’t get scolded and, and I snitched a piece of cat-bread and got it buried, and have had a nice fire to lye by most of the day.

Woof.

Dandy

NOTE:  Always have a camera at hand when around the animals. The burying of that slice of bread was  hilarious! 

Magazines

      Some browsing on a long, long day, took me to Facebook where I found a recent posting by Karen Rutherford telling of her love of the New Yorker magazine. I was  reminded of the magazines of my younger days.

     As a child, I remember the Saturday Evening Post, which came bi-monthly to our mailbox.  I don’t know what we did without in order to subscribe but my father always managed somehow. I Googled the Saturday Evening Post and found that in those days the newsstand cost was 5¢ so he had to dig up about $1 for a one-year subscription! Remember that these were deep depression days when the listing of flour on the weekly grocery list always threw him into a panic; a 24 lb. bag cost almost $1, a loaf of bread was 8¢, a quart of peanut butter was 23¢, and a can or pork and beans was 5¢.

      The Post always had three or four short stories: several, featuring characters such as Tugboat Anne and her rival Bullwinkle, appeared often, and there was always one serialized novel. The one I remember most vividly was Mutiny on the Bounty, which my dad read to me while holding me in his lap.

     Today, issues of the Saturday Evening Post from that era are priced at $35 to $65 dollars; what a pity the mice made nests of all those old copies!

     As a beginning reader, one magazine that I looked forward to carried a children’s short, one-page story featuring Peter Painter and his magic paintbrush. With all the information that the Internet makes available, I cannot find a trace of this feature.  I did learn that there is an old Chinese folktale that could have been the basis of the stories I enjoyed so much. 

     Other magazines of those years were Colliers and the Country Gentleman. Another periodical was the Progressive Farmer. A Progressive Farmer salesman often appeared at the door with his subscription pad and seldom left without a new subscription, for if cash was short, they would take almost anything in trade.

     In the ‘60s a salesman stopped by my husband’s business attempting to make a sale and apparently did not understand “no.” He finally proposed taking an old radiator in trade so my husband said “Go for it,” since there was about half an acre of old car parts behind his shop. The salesman worked over half an hour trying to collect his payment and finally had to be helped. The stack of Progressive Farmer issues that collected on the desk were never read but somehow my husband got some satisfaction from the hard work the poor salesman did in order to get something of value for the subscription.  

      Changing interest and increased publishing costs have changed our world of magazines. The Cosmopolitan changed drastically and Good housekeeping, Redbook, Lady’s Home Journal and others that we enjoyed so much in the ‘60s and ‘70s no longer feature short stories or novelettes.  The much thinner publications of today, have large sections of recipes, “how to “ articles, or decorating features. Another loss from the good ole days!

     

  Dannie

Mr. Dandie Dinmont

Woof, Woof.

All Right! You can make a note of this day, because I’ve established myself as a lean, mean, cat-chasing machine.  I know what every body has been saying: “Just wait until one of those cats gets serious about standing and fighting! That’s when we’ll learn who’s boss!”

Today was the day. At feeding time one of those silly, overeager felines rushed into the house for some reason. Silly thing has never been fed in the house. Well, here I was, staying just as I had been told, and this big boy comes rushing by. Now, he wasn’t supposed to be in my house so I went after him, just to remind him, you know, and there he was in a corner!

I’ll admit that he put up a good fight before he streaked past me and joined his buddies who were yowling around My Lady who’d forgotten to empty her dish of food into their pan! I guess she just couldn’t tear herself away from the disciplinary action going on inside.

It ended quite well, I thought. There’s no sign of damage and maybe that tabby learned that it takes a lot more than a puffed up tail and a few claws to come out a winner a fellow with a Dandie Dinmont heritage.  You betcha!

Here’s a photo of two of my distant (very distant) kin, all duded up.  He doesn’t look like he’s done any hard work lately does it? On the other hand, I’ve heard that in show biz, it takes a lot of hard work to become a winner. This other guy doesn’t look at all happy. I guess he needs some cats to chase.

I’m not exactly into this genealogy stuff, but there is sure a lot of good stuff about my family background on the Internet.  It’ll make a fellow proud.  OOPS!  Willful? Does that mean I’m hard headed? 

The Flying Fortress

 

After its 31 years of residency in Fort Worth, the B-17 is leaving Texas.  I regret that I never went the short distance to view it on the ground.

The B-17, or Flying Fortress, as it was generally called, was an icon of WWII. It was massive, for planes of those years, and it steadily and effectively carried out its mission as a bombing machine. It soon became known as a very tough plane, sustaining terrible damage and still managing to return its crew home and then be repaired and returned to battle.

War is a terrible thing with its death and destruction and the B-17 was made for war. However, when freedom or servitude, life or death, are at stake, as they were at that time, this B-17 tough fighting machine soon became a heroic  symbol of  our nation’s knowhow and determination to do what was necessary for our survival,

Bombing raids were carried out
often with more than a hundred
Flying Fortresses

 One of my most memorable moments of the wartime years, was the day a deep roar brought the entire neighborhood to their yards to gaze upward as the sky was filled with these monstrous planes passing overhead. There were too many to count; there were probably hundreds, for the flight went on and on and the air vibrated with the awesome roar of the engines.

 We had no hint of their designation but we knew their purpose and the sight and sound of these Flying Fortresses going about their   business of saving the world from Nazism was sobering.

Photos are from Wikipedia's files and from a Federal Government page. Many of the stories found in the Flying Fortress archives and other wartime pages, told by the men who survived,  make a good argument that none of our movies or novels have been exaggerated....except, perhaps the female character, who seems able to always  appear beautiful.

Why Do They Hate

It has been less than one month since the scandalous behaviour of the Westboro church attracted public attention. Today, this group has again seized a tragic event to express their opinions in a sickeningly manner.

This group is apparently filled with hate toward many things and have chosen to express that hate in  unacceptable  behaviour of their own. Is it possible to hate everything but themselves? Apparently they hated everything about Elizabeth Edwards and her life and went so far as to assume that they were qualified to judge her state after death.

Now, with the death of six people by a shooter in Arizona, this group has the audacity to post on its website the words "Thank God for the shooter..6 dead."  Why are they saying this? What do they think this random group of people were guilty of to make their death a matter of thankfulness? How could they dare to include a 9-year old child in such a proclamation?

We need to know some facts about this church. How did such a church get established? What motivated its beliefs? Who taught this group their beliefs?  Who failed to teach them some basic rules of decency.

With the freedom of speech that our Constitution guarantees, there appears to be no ready answer to curtailing the methods these people use to express their hate other than using existing laws preventing their making a public disturbance near their targeted area of hate. We can, however, concentrate on  teaching future generations some rules of conduct. Who, among us, would want their children to be a part of such effrontery?

Combined with the tragedy of the circumstances of the shooting: the troubled shooter, his problems in school, his access to a gun, it is obvious that those in our present generation has years of dedicated work ahead of them.


 Leave your thoughts in comments below.

More Cars

  
     Remember the Studebaker with its great gas mileage? We had several. We also had small children loaded into the back seat where there was absolutely no air circulation when the car was stopped at a traffic light or for anything else. My husband remembered those fondly, a sentiment I did not share.
     The first new car was a '48 4-door Chevrolet to be delivered the next day. My husband was wide awake at 11:00 trying to understand why he'd taken the plunge to spend $1600 of his hard-earned money for a car.  At 12:00 he was still fretting and so it went for a few more hours until he finally decided what was done was done and went to sleep.
     Ah-h, the lure of that new car scent! It had reeled him in. That and a good friend who was a salesman at the dealership where they both worked.
     For a short time these two friends were partners in their own car lot. All went well, but they had one experience neither ever forgot: A dairyman interested in a car on their lot, stopped by to see if they could work out a trade so after a lot of circling each car and checking under the hoods and kicking the tires, a deal was made and a happy dairyman drove away.
     The two salesmen pocketed their money, also well pleased with themselves. They were busy for a few hours before they decided to clean up their newest acquiescence and calculate their hoped for profit. Upon opening the doors, they were almost knocked over by the reek of spoiled milk.  The car had been used to transport the dairyman's cans of milk and a few hours in the hot sun had made the smell one they never forgot.
      This was in the days before some many forms of deodorants were available so they did the best they knew how...they went to Duke & Aryes and stocked up on Evening of Paris  perfume in hopes of disguising the sour milk odor. It was quiet a while before we wives learned about the dairy car.
     Despite having a steady supply of clunkers, there were also new cars. One was a great bargain because it had slight hail damage and we drove it for several years and another that we had for only one day.
    We were coming home from a vacation when we decided to stop at a car lot in a neighboring town. My husband found a new Plymouth at a price he couldn't resist and although he wasn't a 'Plymoith man', he did  appreciate a bargain so we brought it home with us.
     A local dealer spotted him driving it to work the next morning and it seems he had a customer looking for that exact model, color, etc. so another irresistible deal was made and my trader husband returned home that evening in a new Chevrolet.
     With the new cars, my opinion was always asked. The clunkers just appeared!
      Many of our unusual and temperamental vehicles were ones for the kids to drive. They were "good ole cars" but always had a few peculiarities. There was an old Mercedes that when the ignition quit working, Papa furnished a pair of pliers with instructions on which wires to twist together.
     There was a Volvo that our eldest teen aged daughter drove and which had the peculiar habit of dying at red lights on the square. Fortunately, enough teen aged boys always appeared to move her out of the traffic lane until the car would again start and move on its own.
     The youngest daughter had an old BMW that she drove the 286 miles to Texas Tech for four years.  It was remarkably dependable and had a simplified  owners manual that enabled the girls to fix a few problems on their own. After graduation and a job that had her working late hours it seems sensible to upgrade to a more secure system with automatic windows, locks and that wonderful luxury...air conditioning. An old car collector bought it to restore.
      Another vehicle with character was an old green wrecker. It was a dependable old thing, maybe of the early '50s and after the shop was closed it was kept it parked here at the house.
     My husband was now pursuing what he loved: raising horses and a few cattle and went daily to the farm to do whatever needed doing out there. It was late one afternoon when he called and said that he'd like for me to bring the wrecker out in order to lift a cow out of a ditch.
     My reaction was definite: "No way!"  He assured me that I could handle the chore, that the cow had fallen into the ditch and had landed on her back and could not get her feet under her enabling her to rise on her own. And it would soon be dark, so hurry!
       Okay, we had a lot of space in front of the house so I tentatively tried out the gears...it was a stick shift, of course...and found everything slightly familiar so we growled our way out of the yard and on to the road and off  for the 14 mile trip and  then located the trouble spot far down in the pasture. Feeling pretty cocky by that time, I quickly lost my confidence when I was instructed to back toward the ditch where the unfortunate cow lay. Me? Back toward a ditch?  It got worse. I was instructed to push this or that doodad to lower the cable down to the cow.

     Well the cow was hoisted up, the wrecker stayed on solid ground, and I never drove it again.

The end of the car tales...I think!

Dannie