Dog Days of Summer

When the sprinklers come on, Katie goes wild! I'm not sure if she's trying to attack them or just getting a drink of water. Probably a little of both.


She learned this behavior from her previous owner. Whenever I would water the flowers at the Breseman Street house, she would come after the hose in the same way.


But it's great fun. Attack...


...and then run away to fight another day.

Houses Then and Now

This is the first house Julie and I lived in, the parsonage in Walkerton. Jill snapped this picture as she passed through the little town. Looks kinda drab and unimpressive now, but when it was built in the late 1950's this would have been a very nice home. In fact, when we lived there in 1977, there were doctors and other professionals living on this street. The house was about 1200 square feet in size, had a one car garage, three bedrooms, one and a half baths for a family of four (and Michael on the way).


How times have changed. 3 car garage, five bedrooms (if you count my office), four baths, 4000 square feet for the two of us. And our place is modest compared to many where we live. Is it affluence or just easy credit that has changed the average American's expectations of housing? The more you make, the more you expect, and the more you spend. Who is shaping our consumer expectations anyway?

Hummer!

I snapped this picture of one of our hummingbirds. This is a female ruby-throated hummingbird. We have three of them who regularly visit our feeder in the cool of the morning and late in the afternoon.

We Have a Contract to Buy Our Cedar Hill House

On Friday we received an offer on our Cedar Hill house. It was a little low, so we decided to counter-offer. This morning the other party accepted. Of course, the mortgage business being what it is today, you really can't say you've sold the house until you've got the cashier's check in your hand.

But we have a buyer and we are moving toward a closing within the month.

Again, God has answered our prayers in his perfect timing.

Plecko Disappears

This is a picture of my new plecostymus because my old one disappeared from the aquarium. Maybe a pre-plecko rapture? But as I looked more closely, I did spot the remains of a a rib cage and parts of a spine on the bottom. I learned today that pleckos can starve to death and not show it because so much of their body is armor. Apparently my previous plecko had gotten lazy. They will eat the food the other fish eat rather than gnaw away at the algae because they don't have to work so hard. But then they don't compete for the food and so they starve. (There's a political lesson in there somewhere, don't ya' think?) I think other fish probably feasted on his remains. (Like most of life, it's only pretty from a safe distance.) So I bought Leo, a leopard plecosymous. He's much larger than the old one and probably a lot harder to miss.

But here's the thing for you fish lovers with pleckos: they love to eat zucchini. The guy at the fish store said you can cut a small zucchini in half lengthwise, fasten it with a rubber band to a rock so it sinks, the plecko will have it hollowed out by the next morning. I also learned that pleckos can live 20 years.


Here's a bala shark swimming just ahead of a red-tail tinfoil barb. My tank has two sharks and three red-tails.


The red-tail tinfoil barbs are really pretty. These have grown considerably since I brought them home nearly six months ago. They are about 4-5 inches long and will grow another inch or two.


The smallest inhabitants of my 72 gallon tank are the tiger barbs like the one on the left. Some of these have also disappeared. I started with five and am down to three.

I like my aquarium. It's not a lot of work, but it's pretty (from a safe distance) and relaxing.

Granbury's Only Steakhouse

Took Julie to Granbury's only steakhouse, and it's in Tolar. The Line Camp Steak House is about 10 miles out in the country, under a grove of trees. Driving in there reminds me alot of going to camp meeting as a kid. No parking lot, just park your car under the trees and smell the steaks cookin' on the grill. Yum! The food is really good. I had a great ribeye and sweet potato fries.


I didn't know it until we showed up, but Thursday night is "Battle of the Bands" night. You can see the stage in the background of the above picture. Whole families come out, like these kids eating hamburgers in the shade waiting for the first country-western act to get started.


The Line Camp is pretty rustic, including real cowboys in cowboy hats. I took these pictures with my iPhone so they're a little fuzzy. We left before the band battle got started. As we were pulling out lots of cars were driving into the Line Camp Steakhouse.

Odds 'n .. Just Odd

This was what I looked like when I went to work at the mission project in Guatemala. The locals burned cedar in their stoves and I'm very allergic to cedar. I can't think what those little kids must have thought when they saw this alien coming into their village.


My nephew, Luke, really, really likes ketchup.


Julie and I decided to use our heads outside Schmidt's restaurant in Columbus, Ohio.


I call this "Bad Taco in Sombrero."

Hey You Birdsah!

Today's entry is about some of the birds that visit the birdfeeder outside my office window. Here a red-headed House Finch comes in for a landing.


This is a Painted Bunting. It's belly is red, head and wings are blue, and there's dab of irridescent green on its neck. The details are a little hard to see in the picture, but here's a better photo.


Here's the male of a pair of cardinals who feed here regularly.


Here's the female Cardinal on top of the bird house with a female House Finch hoping to elude detection. I have tried to snap a picture of the many hummingbirds we have but my digital camera is too slow to catch them.

Summer Days

No one told me about the thousands of spiders we would have here at the lake. All kinds of spiders! And they love to build their nests on my back porch. They make these silky, feathery bags that look like you could just blow them away. But here I am with a power washer shooting 1500 pouds per square inch and somehow they still cling to the windows, the rock, everything!


Looking southeast, huge thunderheads under a perfect full moon.



Sun down.


I couldn't help but snap this picture of the beautiful crepe myrtles at the historic David L. Nutt home. This house was built in the 1870's by one of the founders of Granbury and was the town's first hotel. They owner liked to refer to it humorously as "the Nutt House." Some time later they built another hotel on the town square which is still called The Nutt House Hotel.

Julie Gets Her Transfer

What wonderful news! Julie will be transferred to Fort Worth South starting Monday! That means we get to live together for the entire week now. She's been transferred for a year initially. But we're hoping she will be able to stay.

This is something for which we and a lot of people have been praying and God has answered our prayers. Thank you everyone who interceded for us.

An Evening in Redbank, NJ

I've come to this old harbor town just south of New York and Newark to lead a workshop for one of our clients.
I won't be here long. I fly back tomorrow night after I finish my presentation. Michael and I have worked hard to try to come up with some business intelligence that we might share with these senior managers about how to improve their sales organization.


This is where I'm staying and where the seminar is being held. It's a pretty place on the little inlet that reminds me a lot of Annapolis. Molly Pitcher was the name given to a woman who suffered along with her husband at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. Her real name was Mary Hays McCauly or maybe not. Historical debunkers now say she was probably a legend compiled from a number of sources. I think they say the same thing about the Bible. Who you gonna believe?

Bad Technology Day

I depend on my technology a lot. It runs my business. I had been waiting anxiously for July 11. In spite of the fact that July 11 is my sister's birthday, it was also the day Apple was to release the software upgrade for my iPhone. Like millions of people around the world, at 8:02 am I plugged in my phone and launched iTunes (the program that connects the phone to the computer).

Things started out fine, but then error messages began appearing. It turns out I wasn't the only person looking forward to the upgrade. In a move that can only be described as Microsoft-esque in hubris and strategic stupidity, Apple had not planned for the tremendous load that would hit their servers. You may have seen it on the news -- thousands of people who had stood in line to purchase the new iPhone couldn't get their phone activated. But what was worse -- far worse -- were those of us who were upgrading our previous phone and suddenly realized we were the proud owners of an iBrick, a useless piece of technology that wouldn't work.

It took two and a half hours of clicking and re-clicking a link in iTunes before my phone was finally operational again.

But that wasn't the end of my technology hell. Late in the afternoon I couldn't access my email for two hours and we were in the middle of having 500 people complete our online assessment. I was supposed to provide technical assistance. After three calls to Yahoo I was finally put it touch with the right person who had no idea what was going on. But they must have eventually found the error and I was able to get back to work. Thankfully, no one had a problem.

As Alice Kahn once said, "For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. "

Views

This is the view of our place when you enter our subdivision, called Bentwater. Our house is at the very top of the rise.


Driving up the street, this is the view from the south. The driveway is our neighbor's.

This is the lake view side of the house. The upstairs apartment opens out on to the balcony from which you get great views of the valley below and spectacular sunsets.


This is looking south toward the lake. The blue-roofed building is the marina for boat owners in our sub-division. The butte in the background is Comanche Peak. Julie says this is the view she lingers over when she leaves for work on Monday mornings.

A Mystery Rock No More

It's time to solve the mystery about the orangish-brown rock I discovered just over the edge of the yard in the rubble of the upper cliff.
It is a piece of coprolite -- what scientists call petrified dinosaur poop (from the Greek word for dooty). Michael and Jill both went for the excrement angle and were very close. I don't know if this is sloth pooh, but I'm fairly certain it was a medium-sized plant-eater. You can see fossilized bark or something inside. The hole was probably made by a dung beetle.
This area is known for its dinosaur remains. Just down the road in Glen Rose they have unearthed dinosaur tracks left in the river bed.


When they put in the septic system (pictured here), they had to dig down about 15 feet into the solid rock. They dumped a lot of the detritus over the cliff. That's how I think I was able to find the coprolite laying on top of the scree beyond the grass.

Knowing how much they love dinosaurs, I'll give this rock to Trevor and today I found another piece I'll share with Ty -- two guys who really know their dinosaur pooh!

Good Summer Reads

I just finished reading (actually listening on an audio book) to a pretty good story -- a real page turner -- Jeffrey Archer's Prisoner of Birth.

Another good read was Hold Tight by Harlan Coben. Both are very entertaining fiction.

For non-fiction, Julie and I liked Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time. Jeff Shaara's Glorious Cause was a good history of the Revolutionary War written like a novel that made the characters come to life.

All time favorite so far this year was Ken Follet's World Without End.

Groomed

I finally was able to get the dogs in to see the groomer. Places are booked up months in advance around here. Ollie got her summer "do."


Katie got clipped and looks five pounds lighter. She has been shedding so bad that I'm hoping her grooming will cut down on the number of Swiffers I have to use in a week.


They were glad to be home and played together in the back yard after being gone all day.


But when it's dinner time, they head for the trough.