When Your Age Rounds to Fifty...

I woke up yesterday and realized that my age rounds to fifty. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been aware of this for quite some time. I have actually gone to great lengths to and taken great pleasure in reminding my brother of this fact.

However, I somehow thought it would feel different. I can’t exactly put my finger on just how I thought being closer to fifty than to forty was supposed to make me feel, I guess I just didn’t feel very enlightened. Whatever that means.

So far life closer to 50 is not all that much different than life closer to 40, with the possible exception of my hair.

I’m 45 and my hair is the longest it has ever been in my entire life. I don’t know why I decided to grow my hair long…I just did.

So in a nutshell, that’s what is happening in this old man’s life.

As for the hair, I’ll keep you posted. I may even tack some before and after pictures.

Wouldn’t that be kooky!

Faux Pas

Yes, you may have heard of,

What some other folks saw

Of that which I speak,

Is Hugh’s verbal Faux pas

I was tying the bow,

On my UPS lesson

When I strayed from my plans,

And my thoughts started guessin’

We’ve all had that happen,

At least from time to time

And the truth is that usually,

Things work out just fine

You start to say one thing,

And your brain turns to wood

Your thoughts take a twist,

And don’t work like they should

Most times you just mentally,

Shuffle each word

And the message you meant,

Is the message folks heard

But then there are times,

When your brain turns to goo

And you say something that,

You just didn’t mean to

You sense your mouth moving,

And your thinking just falls

Then you hear yourself mutter,

About “Bob’s two balls”

You try to stay cool,

But you look up to see,

Your whole team’s eyes widen,

And then they all flee

You sense the night’s over,

So you bow low your head

Then you exit stage left,

With your face very red

Last night, as I was talking with a group of parents about our math problem solving strategy, I was trying to make a point about the difference in the amount of reading comprehension involved in math these days as opposed to back when I was in elementary school. I said something like;

"Back in my day, math word problems would be like Bob has two balls and Dave had 3 balls, how many balls do they have all together?"

Laughter is the last thing I remember.

Isn't life just a wonderful thing?

A Visit From A Farm Animal

There aren’t all that many farms or ranches in Dallas anymore these days. Oh sure, we live less that 20 miles from South Fork. The former Ewing ranch made famous decades ago by the mildly popular television show Dallas. Perhaps you’ve heard of it…

Anyway, other than that I don’t really even know where you’d go in Dallas to find an actual working farm. (South Fork hasn’t been a working farm in years)

However, even with the lack of farms here in Big-D, we found ourselves on the receiving end of a visit from a rather pesky little farm animal.

The animal in question is both pink and plump with a flat nose and a curly tail. And no, I’m not talking about Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web…for us it was nothing than mundane!

Our little friend goes by the name “H1N1” and carries with him a basket of little goodies with things like a cough, sore throat, fever and chills.

That’s right it’s everyone’s favorite, the Swine Flu!

To tell the truth, for now, only my daughter has gotten to see our little pink bundle of joy, and the rest of us are washing out hands constantly in an effort to avoid any pork related illnesses.

So far, so good.

When did the other white meat get to be such a nuisance?

Fun with Head Injuries...

Our daughter was having what we could only assume was some form of migraine headache. After several months of visits to the pediatrician, the pediatric neurologist and a sleep deprived EEG, we were finally at what we hoped would be the final doctor’s appointment for at least six months if not a full year.

Doctor Zinser, the pediatric neurologist, was walking us through all the ins and outs of the “Alice in Wonderland” migraines that our daughter was experiencing.

To make a long story short, especially since this isn’t the true crux of the story, she’s doing fine and hasn’t had a migraine is quite a while.

The real story is about a funny thing that happened while the whole family was with Doctor Zinser.

He had a medical student with him who was simply there to get her feet wet, as it were, in the field of pediatric neurology. Suddenly, Doctor Zinser fires off a question to the student doctor.

“So at what age is the frontal lobe fully developed?”

All eyes shoot across to the student who we had all but forgotten about for the last 20 minutes. “Um…20?” Was the timid, stuttering answer.

“Nope, 25.” Was the somewhat stern reply from Doctor Zinser.

Turning back to us, the parents, but really speaking to the medical student, he said, “Now this is pretty amazing. I’ll gently tap the forehead and due to the fact that she’s only 14 and the frontal lobe of the brain is not fully developed we will see some twitching in her lip and under her eyes.”

He went into much greater detail than this, but it’s not like this happened yesterday, so I have no idea what he said.

Using his reflex mallet he tapped her head and sure enough, the twitching began. I don’t mind telling you I was VERY intrigued.

“What would happen if you did that to me?” I asked without ever taking my eyes off her face.

“Nothing at all. Do you want me to show you?”

The words weren’t even all out of his mouth when, sounding somewhat like a girl who was just ask out for her first date, I gleefully shouted, “Are you kidding? Of course I do!”

As he began tapping my forehead I started to experience what felt like twitching under my eyes.

Melissa told me later that my eyes were actually twitching more my daughter’s had.

He paused, obviously more that a wee-bit puzzled. Melissa said that, while his face never changed expression, she saw in his eyes a look that said, “Oh Crap, something’s wrong, what do I do now?”

That’s when Melissa jumped in and blurted out the words, that saved the day for our doctor friend, “Hugh probably should have told you that he is a diffuse axonal head injury survivor.”

In a blink of an eye, the good doctor's demeanor went from panic, to relief, to interest. And I had to give the streamline version of my head injury story. One I’m sure he’s all too familiar with, but was intrigued by all the same.

He explained that my brain’s frontal lobe must have been pretty severely damaged and other parts of my brain took over and learned to do whatever it is that the frontal lobe does. Therefore, my frontal lobe didn’t have the chance or really even the need to fully develop.

It’s not very often that you get to snap a doctor to attention like that.

Yep, as far as practical jokes go…this head injury thing is turning out to be a gold mine!

And So I've Got This Tree...

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. It is a red oak tree that’s tall with a wonderful spread of branches that create a nice, comfortably shaded sitting area. We have some patio furniture under it and everything looks nice.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. A few months ago this tree, after I rather stupidly cut a low branch off, started leaking sap onto our nice new patio furniture. The sap was leaking out of the spot where I cut the branch off. I simply moved the furniture, and sprayed some black pruning sealant on the stub of the chopped off branch, then went about my business.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. Some days go by and I discover, much to my chagrin, that insects have come and not only eaten through the pruning sealant causing it to leak again, but they have also started boring through the bark on other branches and now my tree is leaking sap in half a dozen other places.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. As it turns out, this tree is becoming somewhat of a sap sprinkler. Each and every day there are new spots on the patio and the furniture and we have bugs of all kinds all around the tree. At this point I begin to get concerned that there may be a chance we could lose our wonderful tree.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. A friend suggests that we call an arborist (or tree doctor as I enjoy calling him) to assess the condition of our now ailing tree. Dr. Matthew, the arborist, comes and makes a “yard-call” to check out our tree. He inspects the sap on the ground and furniture, takes a look up through the branches and says, “Yep, you’ve got boring beetles. They bore holes through the bark and the tree creates the sap to fix the holes. However, the sap is what is attracting all the other bugs, plus more boring beetles. It’s an endless cycle. We could give the tree some injections and that would kill the beetles as well as make the sap that the tree makes taste bad so the boring beetles won’t come back. It will cost about 160 dollars.”

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. After weighing the cost of the anti-boring beetle injections against the cost of dead tree removal and replacement, I decided to go ahead and have the tree doctor administer his medication. He came, made the injections and in 48 hours the tree was leaking much less sap and things were getting back to normal…or so it seemed.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. A couple of weeks pass and the tree’s sap leakage is right back to the amount that it was before the injections. So I call Dr. Matthew and he comes back for his second yard-call. He couldn’t find any trace of the boring beetles, but after scraping, smelling and probably even tasting several bark samples, our tree doctor came back with this diagnosis. “What you have here is a fungus, but not just any fungus. Now, this isn’t a fungus that is usually found in red oak trees, that’s what’s so fascinating! Your tree’s bark smells like apple cider that means it’s in the fermentation process. What’s happening is the insects that have been coming to eat the sap have introduced some kind of yeast to the tree. And so the sugars in the sap, combined with the yeast from the bugs is fermenting to create alcohol. Basically, your tree is making beer.”

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. And now, living in my tree are a bunch of alcoholic bugs who are spending their days lapping up keg after keg of my homemade tree beer. Not to mention the fact that our two baby opossums, the ones from the grill, have made this tree their home and have also been eating the sap. Which explains why their little squeals sound slurred and they’ve been seen staggering around with bloodshot eyes.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio. According to my tree’s doctor, this condition isn’t life threatening for the tree and there’s nothing you can do but wait and hope it stops. Our tree is just an easy fix for all the alcoholic critters I’ve created in the neighborhood.

And so I’ve got this tree growing right in the middle of my patio.

And for now...it’s open bar!

Somebody Moved My Cheese

I played around with the settings a little bit...even added a picture!

May do more later.

Hugh

Fun With Wildlife

School starts tomorrow and we decided that it might be fun to grill some steaks for dinner.

Now, while I haven’t actually used my larger grill in well over a year, I do in fact own two grills. Don’t ask why, because I’m not actually sure what the reasoning was behind getting two, suffice it to say, I’ve have, or rather I used to have, two grills.

I usually use the smaller, newer of my two grills. It just works a little bit better. However, we decided that grilling some corn sounded good, so I went out to see if I could even still fire-up the big grill. We moved to this house in May, and I hadn’t done anything more than push the large grill into a corner on the back porch and forget about it.

I pulled it out from the corner, opened the top and was greeted by not one, but two hissing opossums!

Slamming the lid shut, I did a ten-foot, standing long jump. After I landed I’m sure I looked like Fred Sanford as I stood there holding my chest and panting.

They scared the crap out of me!

In my defense, opossums are really ugly! And even if you were expecting to be face to face and six inches away from one of these little guys, I dare say you’d be on pins and needles. So, when it’s completely unexpected you’re lucky if you don’t need to change your pants.

Being the loving and concerned wife that she is, and thinking I had just blown myself up, Melissa started outside to check on her husband.

When I told her what had happened any concern for me flew right out the window, and the new object of her affection our were newly discovered grill squatters. Carefully reopening the grill, we found that the two opossums were actually babies who seemed not only extremely frightened, but also somewhat malnourished.

This is the point at which Melissa begins talking about, only kind of in jest, us keeping them as pets. I don't think I ever even responded.

We called animal control and explaining that we had two opossums in our grill. A somewhat perplexed operator explained that animal control doesn’t actually provide grilling instructions. After a hearty chuckle on our end of the phone, we did our best to help her understand that, while lighting the grill did cross my mind, varmint extraction and not food preparation was the actual reason for our call.

It was about then that we noticed, as we peered through the window, that the sicklier of the two youngsters was actually beginning to venture out. After comically breaking several laws of physics, she somehow managed to move from the grill to a nearby bush. Seeing this, we started rooting for the second of our grill’s residents to move out as well. However, he didn’t seem to be ready to leave the nest. At this point I rushed to the garage and found a stick about four feet long. I came back and poked a now very irritated opossum until he finally got the hint that he had worn out his welcome.

As soon as both were out I closed the lid and pulled the whole grill around to the front of the house for tomorrow’s scheduled bulk trash pick up.

I know what you’re thinking…we still have two baby opossums under a bush in our backyard.

Let me tell you that that is the least of my worries. You see, behind out house is a creek that is surrounded by all manner of plant life, not to mention snakes, armadillos, opossums and who knows what else. We’ve found snakes in the pool and seen both armadillos an opossums roaming the yard. So now that these two trespassers are free from their grill prison, I’m sure they will have no trouble finding their way back to their real house, or their mom, or their whatever it is they have out there. At least not after it gets dark.

While I’m on the subject, how in the hell did they get inside my grill in the first place?

I couldn’t find any openings large enough for them to fit through. If they did happen to somehow squeeze in from the bottom, then they would have to lift the grill rack and then climb up through a small gap to get on top. I know they have opposable thumbs, but come on…that’s a bit much!

In the end, the opossums are gone, I didn’t get bitten and we still grilled steaks!

I guess we can say that in the end a good time was had by all!

Well, maybe not the opossum I poked with a stick…but he as being stubborn!