Another Year Down the Yellow Brick Road

I am another year in the journey.
I celebrated with various and plentiful shrimp in green
hot horseradish sauce,
sushi,
a trip to the Goodwill Outlet
and peace of heart.

If you play the video under here
you can guess how old I am!
Ta!

Little Bugs

It is a humid night in the Big City and there are little tiny flies cruising silently around the house. And an Idia moth on the kitchen wall by the coffeepot. I suspect this is the famous coffee moth, but I can't figure the tiny flies. There is nothing in the kitchen available that would attract them, no trash, no mold, just Pine-Sol and the smell of a clean army barracks.

I was in a place today with a psychiatric nurse and others and had to help restrain some lady who had gone seriously psychotic until the police got there. The psych nurse hid in the corner and I sat next to the lady wondering why everybody had their mouths hanging open. Whenever she twitched I shook my head No and told her I would break her arm. Actually she would have broken mine being in her early thirties and in her physical prime. Besides me being sixty-four and fat and having a bad leg. People who want to kill people are terribly strong! But the police came and marched her out and then we all worked on our adrenalin for a bit.

I thought it was very gracious of CBS-TV to air the season premiere of The Mentalist on the eve of my birthday. In addition, in case it bombs, I have an exciting volume on biological warfare and another concerning a murder at the G8 Conference in Scotland some time back. Possibly a new mystery will come out of the current G20 in Pittsburgh. I am eating Chinese for lunch tomorrow and probably McDonald-ese for supper later on, who knows.

All is quiet in the Big City. Ta!

A Picnic - Delco Park

My friend Theresa and I went for a picnic in Kettering. Her Bitch-and-freeze dog went with us. Name of Mimi. Chased all the ducks away, was rewarded with fried chicken. One fine dog! One fine girl!

EXPLORING - VINCENNES AND MAIN

New Albany, Indiana was a Big City when I was a kid on my bike. If you click on the pix you get big ones. Photos by Thomas Kepshire.

Top: the K&I Bridge to Louisville. Trains ran down the middle and cars and trucks in lanes at the side. It had a see-through metal grid roadway and made a funny noise under the tires when Dad drove over it. When I rode under it on my bike I could smell humid organic mud, vegetation, creosote and hot metal. I still can smell that today.

2: The tower at the New Albany end of the Bridge that controlled all the crossing gates. Two rail lines crossed thorugh the middle of a major intersection.

3. In the upper left where the silver metal signal box is, used to be a shack where a signalman sat all day and flagged down traffic on Main when the gates went down. It WAS a shack and I remember a skinny old man in greasy clothes sitting on dark greasy pillows.

4: A Monon diesel engine at the train station circa 1949. As a little kid I can remember hearing steam locomotives in the night at the station.

My dream for next spring is to save enough money to spend a week back there with no relatives, but exploring old haunts to see how they've changed.

Navigator

There was a B-17 bomber flying around the other day about noon, circling the City while I drove down Wilmington Pike. The glorious sound of propellers made me look up. You don’t hear those anymore like you did when I was a kid. If they were on their way to plaster Dusseldorf, somebody was certainly steering on the wrong compass heading. Eventually it disappeared.

Us one, scumbags zero. Two men with guns invaded a home last week on Burkhart Avenue. One of them got a silver bar and some prescription medication and the other got shot straight through the head once the resident got his hands on his own gun. Dead Fred! The other guy was traced through a pawn shop transaction and police went to his home where they found him dead inside with slashed wrists after a three hour standoff. Sorry Charlie! Two scumbags won’t do home invasions anymore. The resident got his property back. All is well in the Big City. No I am not a pussy-foot social worker.

Us one, scumbags zero, part 2. A high school kid went to the home of his girlfriend who had just broken up with him and beat her senseless, finishing off by dropping a concrete picnic table top on her. He had beaten her up once before. She is in intensive care with fractures of everything. He then deliberately walked out onto the freeway in front of a speeding car and was killed instantly. Bang! Sorry about your kid. One less person to beat up women when he’s unhappy. All is well in the Big City. No I am not a pussy-foot social worker. Ta!