Cows, at the Sandy Oaks Olive Ranch, near Elmendorf, Texas.
Sgt. Mom
A Book the Size of a Brick
Oh, lord, I thought on Monday afternoon, when I ripped opened the industrially-strong sticky tape that held the cardboard mailer closed around a hardbound book the weight and dimension of two bricks – did I really write all that? The UPS guy had just brought it, and left it on the porch after ringing the doorbell, and departing as swift as the wind . . . or as swift as one can be, working a delivery job at the height of the summer in South Texas. I wouldn’t want to linger on a doorstep either, when it’s over 100 degrees in the shade and towards the end of a working day.
Meeting With da Governor
So, my daughter and I have been terribly amused by Governor Rick Perry announcing that he’s going to run, since we’ve actually  met him face to face. It was a little over two years ago at a Tea Party event in San Antonio, and I will confirm that in person he is quite brashly charming. And I even have pictorial evidence, since there was a photog from the San Antonio Express news who commemorated the event.
The Grand Adventure
“You’ll simply have to read his books, if you want to understand about Greece,†my next-door neighbor told me, very shortly after my then-three year old daughter and I settled into Kyrie Panayotis’ first floor flat (which is Brit-speak for second-floor apartment) at the corner of Knossou and Delphon streets in the Athens suburb of Ano Glyphada, early in the spring of 1983. Kyrie Panayoti did not speak any English; neither did his wife, or his wife’s sister, Kyria Yiota, who lived upstairs with her husband. The only inhabitants of the three-story apartment house who did were Kyrie Panayoti’s middle-school aged sons, who were learning English at school. And I – dullard that I am with languages aside from my native one – only retained a few scraps of high-school and college German. Given the modern history of Greece, and the long memories of older Greeks, a German vocabulary was neither tactful nor useful.
Just For Fun on a Friday
… unfortunate urban signage, below the fold. Almost as funny as the juxtaposition on Grand Avenue in Escondido that my daughter and I spotted about ten years ago: a sushi restaurant right next door to a tropical fish emporium…