Country Fun

The wife and I each were raised by old-school, old-fashioned conservative parents, and we are doing the same with our kids. That means being conservative on the ultrafiner things in life but liberal on the structure and discipline, in a loving, nurturing way, of course.
Sure, we let them watch DVDs and play on the computer, including games, but there isn't any of that stuff in the car. As kids, the wife and I looked out the window and used our imaginations, and our boys will have to do the same.
I try to get the boys interested in the simple things, such as wild-looking bugs, trips to the country store to get ice cream and making up our own fun. The boys on weekends and during the summer will not be sitting in front of the TV or computer screens like drooling zombies, getting fat on bad snacks and slipping into a world of high-tech disconnection from reality.
At the house, there are all sorts of implements of aquatic enjoyment, such as slippy slides, an inflatable ring that shoots water and this goofy blow-up dog that blasts water out of flapping ears, tongue and tail.
But my boys' favorite - aside from the makeshift water slide, which I'll get to in a minute - is the noble sprinkler. They loved the water nozzle with the multiple settings, but the puppy made quick work of that, so the sprinkler, also with multiple settings, has become the new favorite. The puppy is disinterested in it.
The nice part about the sprinkler is that it entertains and waters, and the boys are good about moving it around.
But the funnest of all backyard water fun came following a conversation with Curt, 6, who is mildly autistic but has an uncharacteristically wild imagination anyway. He tossed around the idea of burying the cheap plastic pool so we'd have an in-ground pool. He also suggested turning the concrete basketball court in our back yard into a spray park.
My idea of running a water hose to the giant yellow slide attached to the treehouse sent his brain a-whirlin'.
The next morning, he was on me at sunrise like a cockroach on a pork rind. I told him the water slide would have to wait until his cousins from Houston arrived for a family Father's Day celebration.
So I set up the slide that afternoon and wondered how slippery it would be. On the first trip down, Curt shot out the bottom and landed flat on his back in a growing mud puddle. He laughed, scrambled up the ladder and went again, only this time incorporating speed control. The water slide remained in use the rest of the day.
So this is how it is in the sticks. Sure, the new park down the street is nice. There are lots of DVDs and videos in the house, and computer games will get played.
But I know on Saturday morning, I'll crack open one eye at dawn to find a bouncing 6-year-old a couple of inches away from my face and excitedly asking when I'll set up the water slide.

Take Me Out To the Bawl Game

This notes America's filthiest professional baseball parks:

http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2008/05/Foul-Ballpark

You'd think Minute Maid Field in Houston would do a little better, but the Lastros/Disastros aren't helping much by stinking up the place lately.

Time To Bring Back The Train?

Perhaps the time has come for America to rekindle its long-lost love for the noble train.
Imagine seeing America through the window of a train, as thousands of Americans did for so many years throughout our history. Imagine enjoying the experience as opposed to the hassles of air travel. Imagine not being cooped up in some compartment. Imagine spending less money and using less gasoline.
The Europeans got it right when it comes to trains. Passes for 15 days worth of travel range in price from $49 to $795, according to http://www.eurail.com/, with passengers able to travel all over Europe and to up to 20 countries.
These passes have existed since 1959, and their trains can run faster than 120 mph. There is high-speed rail all over Europe.
In the news business, we avoid using Wikipedia as a source, but according to this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_States - high-speed rail development in the United States can be traced back to the 1930s.
However, today the Acela Express in the Northeast is the only high-speed rail service in America, operating between Washington, D.C., and Boston.
A map on the above link shows proposed highs-speed routes nationwide, include a route that runs out of Houston and presumably runs through Beaumont. If that comes to pass, I'd use the hell out of it, taking the train instead of the plane for our annual sojourns to Richmond, Va., home of my wife's family.
Opponents of high-speed rail say the costs of building the system outweigh the benefits. In one report I saw, from 1992, it was estimated that it would cost $18 million per mile. Obviously it would cost a lot more than that today.
There are a lot of pros and cons floating around out there. I'm just trying to generalize the topic at a time when high gas prices are making travel by car and aircraft more expensive.
I couldn't find any studies that detail how high gasoline prices would have to be before building a high-speed rail system can be justified, but I did find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation
Here, it shows fuel efficiency, and you get far more fuel bang for your buck with trains than you do with jets.
But even if we don't build a high-speed rail service, more of us should be using trains at a time when gas prices are soaring and airlines are hurting, passing their hurt on to consumers.
I did a quick check of http://www.amtrak.com
I found a couple of travel options that would cost half of what I'm paying this year to take the family to Virginia.
Sure, you have to change trains, and, yes, there's an overnight stay in some place like New Orleans (Bummer!).
But I would look at a train trip as more a part of the vacation adventure than I would just a means to get somewhere. Instead of arriving at the destination with a belly full of stress, we'd pull into a quaint station with a head full of fond memories.

Timewaster Of The Week-June 17

Drop. Shoot. Kill.

http://www.vivalagames.com/play/canyonshooter/

Puppy Vs. Bunny

The backyard bunnies added a sense of pastoral tranquility during the early days of Pinewood living about two years ago.
They'd come out along the back fence, wriggling their noses, cautiously moving about and keeping alert for threats from above.
Their appearance generated excitement in the household. The kids jumped up and down, and the wife stared at them with a faraway look in her eyes, finding some sense of peace in their presence.
Around fall 2006, just months after we moved in, the bunnies disappeared. We figured it was a seasonal thing, or perhaps an owl thing, but they never returned. We haven't seen them for about 18 months.
Yesterday, the wife called with the news 0f tragedy in the forest. Yes, a bunny had appeared, but our puppy, which we think is some kind of runt Rhodesian ridgeback, about the size of a small beagle, made quick work of it.
The dog, whom we named Jill after we acquired her a few months after our other puppy, Jack, escaped the back yard and got pancaked on State Highway 105, has been terrorizing and narrowly missing squirrels for the past few months.
It was only a matter of time before she made her first kill.
She made quick and painless work of the bunny, snapping its neck with an instinctive move. My wife saw her parading around the yard with the bunny and gnawing on its little bunny leg.
Considering my wife's love of the long-lost bunnies, I can't imagine how she felt seeing one of them go down in such a violent way, after all this hope that the critters would return.
Nevertheless, she knew what she had to do: dispose of the bunny body.
My advice to her was to take a shovel and just toss it over the back fence, where it would fall into the natural food chain.
The lifeless bunny and its lolling head proved to be a challenge, though, and the wife barely managed to get it over the fence. It lay just out of reach of a puppy that badly wanted her bunny back.
Jill, a supersmart dog with the sense of hearing and smell of a cinder block, went straight to the back fence this morning to see if the carcass remained.
I followed her out, and there was no trace of the bunny, not even a tooth, hair or eyeball. Something in the night had dragged it away.
I feel a sense of sadness that as long as we have a dog, those early, halcyon days of bunnydom will never return.
However, there is comfort in knowing that if something more sinister appears in the back yard, such as a venomous snake, that Jill will be on it like bunnies on lettuce.

Timewaster Of The Week-June 9

Simple.

Tranquilize sheep that are making a break for it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/sheep/reaction_version5.swf

Don't jump the guy. It'll cost ya!

Of Boys And Frogs

My two boys last night brought home a frog from the new neighborhood park in Pinewood.
They smushed him down into an empty water bottle for transport. I'm not sure what kind of frog he was. He looked like one these:
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/research/txherps/frogs/smilisca.baudinii.html
I couldn't extract him from the water bottle by finger, so I used an X-acto knife to behead the bottle and retrieve the frog, which then sat happy and unafraid on my thumb.
The boys wanted to keep him overnight in their plastic bug box, but a lid malfunction made an escape a high probability.
Besides, it was dusk, and froggie needed to go outside and eat.
My youngest, 4-year-old Luke, broke down in tears upon being informed that the cute little bugger was better off outside, where he could get fat and happy on the ungodly amount of bugs that populate our porch after the sun goes down and the light goes on.
To smooth his ruffled feathers, I reached into my bag of boyhood stories and told him and his brother, Curt, 6, the one about the horny toad.
Every summer after I was just a little older than Curt, my dad and I would travel to Brady, which is almost the dead center of Texas, for the annual state muzzleloader championships.
On the first trip, somewhere far west of Austin, my dad pulled over, got out and used his cowboy hat to trap something on the roadside. It was a horned toad.
For the next week, I kept that toad in a Folgers coffee can out there in the unrelenting Central Texas sun. I fed him tomatoes and thought I was doing a great job as caretaker.
However, on the last day in Brady, heat and starvation claimed my toad. I cried half the way back to Houston, and we buried that toad along the road somewhere out there in the Hill Country. My dad tried to explain that the toad was just sick, but I knew better.
After I told my sad story, the boys agreed that the porch would be a better frog home. The porch already is a Woodstock for toads, huge ones that live under nearby rocks during the day and come out to feast on the insects. Some of these guys are almost the size of baseballs.
We put froggie on the wall next to the light, which we then turned on. About a half hour later, just before we put the boys to bed, we went out to check on the frog, which was still hanging out by the light and had a bug leg sticking out of his mouth.
This morning, we checked again, and froggie was gone, most likely co-habitating with those mac-daddy toadies under the rocks.
Hopefully, this lesson to the boys in setting things free - something I'll have to do with them in a dozen or so years - will save a reptile from meeting its fate at the bottom of a seething coffee can.

Office Meltdown Of The Century

There should be some kind of prize for this sort of thing:

http://www.break.com/index/office-worker-goes-absolutely-insane.html

A different angle, with color and sound:

http://break.com/index/office-worker-meltdown-second-angle.html

I had to laugh at people getting in on the photo and video action, and then he gets tazed.

Of course, it could be a fake, but it's entertaining regardless.

Timewaster Of The Week-June 4

Falling:

http://arcade.itch.com/games/falling-forever/

Not my favorite game ever, but it certainly cuts the mustard when it comes to wasting time!