For whatever reason Emma has not been pooping every time we take her out, which is fine.  Yesterday afternoon I took her out for her 5pm walk and she laid some SERIOUS cable!  I’m here to tell you, Great Danes would give her a wide berth out of admiration and respect.  I swear her weight is down a good 3 pounds.  Poor thing, I can only imagine how miserable she must have been before.

Tonight K and I went to Cafe Express for a lite dinner, then walked the neighborhood for a while.  It is absolutely perfect here tonight.  What’s the deal with the weather in the northwest?  I heard it hit 100 degrees in Seattle today.  I’m sure people there were dropping like flies.   More rain and cool forecast here tomorrow, too.  I don’t know what’s goin’ on, but I LOVE this!

S

Were you aware of this?…..  I heard that New York (not sure if it’s City or State or both) is paying to send homeless people, and even their dependents, back home to wherever they came from or have extended families.  For example, they sent a family of ten back to Puerto Rico via a non-stop Jet Blue flight, a couple back to France to live with their children, and gave $400 worth of gas vouchers to a couple to drive back to Michigan(?).  These were people who came to NY but were unable to find work or for whatever reason make a go of it there.  This is apparently very common.  They arrange passports if needed, visas, pay for transportation costs, drop them off at the airport….everything.

They claim this is cheaper in the long run than to pay for the homeless to live in a shelter, feed them, etc.  Homeless advocates are incensed saying this solves nothing long term but just pushes the homeless problem off on someone else.

I can see both sides.  What do you think?

S

So I made it through high school without drawing any attention to myself, which, when everyone in town knows you and your family, perhaps isn’t a bad thing.  My dad had always been a big University of Texas fan (football, of course) and I had been, too….until it was time to choose a university and I got hold of a map.  Let’s see….Austin, 200 miles from Dallas.  Lubbock, 350 miles from Dallas.  The light bulb that went off in my head could be seen for miles.

Yahoo!  I’m a Red Raider!  Other than it’s distance from Dallas, I didn’t know squat about Lubbock.  Later I learned entertainer and Lubbock native Mac Davis wrote a song titled, “Happiness is Lubbock, Texas in your rear view mirror.”  But when you’re an 18-year-old guy 350 miles away from home, with a few bucks in the bank, and you find yourself on a campus with 10,000 young women who are looking for fun just like you….jackpot!

Back in those Dark Ages the men had no curfew, but the women had to be in their dorms by midnight M-Th and 2am F-Su.  They figured if they could control the girls, they could control the guys.  Oh contrare!  It didn’t take long to learn how to sneak into the girls dorms or how to get them “checked out” for the weekend.  Football season was fun, of course, but so was roaming all over west Texas and eastern New Mexico.  One friend had a private pilot’s license and we would chip in and rent a Piper 180 (?), then take extended road trips with our ladies.  (Getting weathered in in Colorado sucks, though.)

My best friend at the time was…ummm…I’d better leave him nameless as he’s now a State Representative. I really don’t want to scuttle his political ambitions.  (We made Bill Clinton look like a choir boy!)  Cases of Boone’s Farm were consumed, cartons of cigarettes smoked, and “higher education” was just a term you could drop in a conversation when you called home to schmooze the folks.  Some classes I enjoyed and did well in, others…well…  A small group of us became adept at “dumpster diving”, which came in handy during final exams.

I first majored in pre-law studies, but it didn’t take long to realize the law was not about “right vs wrong”, but about “legal vs illegal”.  If something was legal, screw right or wrong.  I knew right then I wasn’t going to be a lawyer.  Smartest decision I ever made.  I gravitated to business which I picked up easily.  By my senior year I had maxed out all the hours in my major and minor I could take, so I just played (academically).  I took a course in the School of Home Economics (because of the class male/female ratio), geography (which was actually pretty interesting), and a few other grade point courses I knew could pass in my sleep.

Fraternities and sororities were not a big deal back then as the school didn’t allow frat/sorority houses.  They wanted us on campus to fill all those dorms they built.  I wasn’t eligible to move off-campus until my Junior year.  Until then a few of us guys chipped in and rented an old dumpy house as our party house. Several friends worked at KLBK TV, so I spent a fair amount of time there.  When concerts or televised football games were in town they would hire the technicians from the TV station to help set up the equipment, so through them I met a number of artists and athletes, such as Sonny & Cher and Alabama coach Bear Bryant (great guy!) who was there coaching an all-star game.  Once John Denver, who went to Tech years before, came to a party we had after his concert.  In honor of his days in west Texas he sang a tender love song he wrote, “You done stomped on my heart and mashed that sucker flat“.  That’s the honest truth! 

We were airport ramp rats and knew pretty much everyone at the airport, including the air traffic controllers.  We spent many hours in the tower (this was long before the age of terrorism), and the radar room watching tornadoes scoot across the barren countryside.  A few times we even chased after them, before we’d ever heard the term “storm chasers”.  (The day after I left campus for the summer a tornado actually hit Lubbock, killing 26 (?) and damaging my old apartment building.)  Once a guy doing avionics checks on the company Learjet gave us a tour of the panhandle from 35K feet, even dropping down to buzz a few cows.

Spur-of-the-moment road trips took us to places like Palo Duro canyon ( a mini-Grand Canyon) for some camping and rock climbing and to (ski-area) Ruidosa, NM, where we had to sleep in the Post Office because we couldn’t afford a hotel.

The money for all this came from two sources.  I worked summers and saved almost all I made, then used that to pay for my partying and fun stuff…oh…and for tuition, room & board, and books, too.  By the second semester I was broke, so the parents had to cover my “higher education” expenses.  They would never quibble about buying books, so I would always buy a few more (very expensive ones) than I needed, then I’d sell them back during the semester when I had a “special” date and had to feed her more than tacos.

Everything considered, I had a great time, TOO great a time actually.  Later I regretted not taking my education more seriously.  The good thing was I learned all the tricks I knew my daughters would try to pull on me when they got to college. (Turns out they were amateurs by comparison.)

I graduated with a sympathy BA degree, somehow squeezing in 130 hours in my four years.  It’s a good thing the movie Animal House didn’t come out until several years after I graduated or else it would have taken me five years.

Next:  the REAL world.