Louie, I Think This Is The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship

This post originally appeared May 18, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

In the late 1970s, I was sitting at my desk, reading the latest issue of Science News, when I came across a remarkable advertisement. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was looking for a new kind of astronaut. Military service as a test pilot was no longer required. NASA was looking for scientists, PhDs preferred, to go up in a new space vehicle that NASA was designing, a vehicle called the space shuttle. I sent off for the application packet immediately, hoping to become a Mission Specialist.

A few days later a pack mule arrived at my Baltimore home carrying the 6,487 pounds of paper that I needed to fill out. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but the application packet was quite thick. Buried in that thick packet was a flyer giving the physical qualifications for the job, and a series of medical forms to be filled out by my personal physician. The flyer was bad news: the maximum height allowed was six feet, and I was a tad bit over six feet one inch at the time. Still, this was my chance to be Mr. Spock, and I wasn’t going to let one lousy inch, more or less, get in the way. When I took my physical, I cheated as best I could, slouching and bending my knees while they concentrated on the measuring stick at my head. The doc signed the forms, I filled out the other paperwork, and sent the whole shebang in.

If I look carefully in my footlocker, I’m sure I can find the rejection letter they sent me. It’s not something I would have thrown away. They were very pleasant, thanking me for being one of more than 7,000 applicants for the 20 slots, 10 of which were reserved for women and minority applicants. So, I would not be Mr. Spock, after all. I settled down to my mundane, humdrum existence as a research chemist at a corporate research center across the street from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Sidebar: Rejection was probably a good thing. Three of the Mission Specialists in that first class died on the Challenger.

The one thing I took away from the experience was the habit of an annual physical examination. Until the physical for NASA, I hadn’t had a physical since my senior year in high school. In theory, I received a physical exam before taking that job as a research chemist. In practice, the doctor listened to my heart and lungs, then gave me a drug test.

The physical was usually painless. The doctors never found anything wrong with me. Once, in the 1980s, a doctor gave me a flexible sigmoidoscopic examination. This was actually as bad as it sounds. According to Wikipedia: “Sigmoidoscopy is the minimally invasive medical examination of the large intestine from the rectum through the last part of the colon. There are two types of sigmoidoscopy: flexible sigmoidoscopy, which uses a flexible endoscope, and rigid sigmoidoscopy, which uses a rigid device. Flexible sigmoidoscopy is generally the preferred procedure.” Indeed!

I am not sure what the difference is between this procedure and a colonoscopy, other than the fact that I was wide awake during the procedure, over on one side, watching the monitor that displayed the doctor’s view. When I wasn’t looking at the monitor, I was looking at my abdomen. As the sigmoidoscope made its turn around sigmoid colon, I could see my abdominal wall flex outward. It was not what one would call a fantastic experience.

And that has a lot to do with why I stopped the annual physical. The summer before my 50th birthday I had my standard physical. The doctor looked at my chart, nodded, and said “I see you turn 50 soon. We have a few special tests for you next year, when you will be 50.” “Sounds good, Doc,” I said.

I never returned.

That was about 16 years ago, and I have never regretted my decision. But I am reliably informed that my no-physical streak will soon come to an end. You see, I have a cataract, and it is beginning to bug me. The folks I have talked with who have recently had cataract surgery tell me that a physical exam is now a prerequisite for surgery. I’ve got to get this cataract removed, so I guess I will be signing up for the physical soon.

And that is a shame. There isn’t a thing I can do about it. But if the doctor suggests a few special tests because I’m officially over the hill, it will be the end of the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I Love Lucy

This post originally appeared May 2, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Last week I learned from a Facebook post that a high school friend had to put his pet dog of many years down. I immediately felt the pain he must have been feeling. Pets, especially dogs, have a way of becoming members of the family. Danny, my heart goes out to you.

We still miss our beloved Ronnie. He was my dog, at least on paper. I owned him for a full five years before I met Kathy. I trained him, and we bonded as only a bachelor and his dog can do. But when Kathy arrived on the scene, he changed. Kathy thinks that she became his owner, but in fact, Ronnie claimed ownership of Kathy. She was his charge, his duty to protect, his love. When Kathy went back to the bedroom, so did Ronnie. When she got out of bed, so did Ronnie. She took him on long walks. He looked out for her.

Shortly before his death, we took him on a camping trip. Kathy would take him with her on her trips up to the bath house, and every time another camper would come down the path, Ronnie would stop, fix the camper with a gaze, and keep the other camper in his sight until the camper had passed well down the trail. We didn’t realize just how sick he was then, but illness did not stop him from doing his duty, which was seeing to Kathy’s safety.

Given that, it isn’t surprising that Ronnie’s death hit Kathy pretty hard. We both knew we wanted another dog, but I voted for a decent interval of mourning before adding another member to the family. Kathy, on the other hand, voted for a new pet immediately. So, as usual, we compromised, meaning we did what Kathy wanted.

One Saturday morning I received a call from Kathy, who was supposedly out doing errands. She was calling from the Humane Society of Morgan County (Georgia), a no-kill shelter in our beloved town. “You’ve got to get over here now. You must see this dog!” I stopped whatever Very Important Chore I was doing and hopped in the pick-up. Within a few minutes, I met our newest family member, the member we have named Lucy.

I should point out that the shelter called Lucy by a different name. As luck would have it, they called her by our granddaughter’s first name. Our granddaughter is, of course, amused by this coincidence, but we could foresee trouble ahead, having both a granddaughter and a puppy with the same name. Thus we set about to find a new name. I offered my selection, and once again we compromised by going with Kathy’s name. She called her Lucy, after the comedienne Lucille Ball.

Lucy is a Grosser Schweizer Sennenhund, or a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog. Feel free to do what the rest of the world does and abbreviate that mouthful to “Swissie.” The picture at the beginning of this post shows her in Kathy’s car, on the way home from the shelter, on March 28. At that point she was 11 weeks old.

She is going to be a big dog. On one recent weekend, as I lay in bed catching up on my sleep, Lucy decided that I had slept long enough. She came bounding into the room, and with a burst of puppy energy, flew through the air, landing on my chest. At that time, I believe she was only 31 pounds. Trust me on this one: I got out of bed. After, that is, I recovered my breath.

Lucy was aptly named. She may not be as funny as Lucille Ball, but she is trying hard. Puppies are funny creatures, anyway, and this one is hilarious. She fetches, of course, but refuses to return what she fetched. Throw a ball to her when she already has one in her mouth, and she will spend 10 minutes trying to figure out how to put both balls in her mouth. She has an expressive face that makes me laugh for no good reason.

She is not Ronnie. In the same way that no two children are alike, she is her own dog. I can tell already that she will not be the sort to protect Kathy with her life, as Ronnie would have done, but that is just fine. She is our new child, and we will see what personality emerges from the furious cyclone of puppy energy.

To my friend Danny: at the right moment, find your Lucy.

The End of an Era

This post originally appeared April 22, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

One week ago I received the very last Book of the Year annual update from Encyclopedia Britannica. The truth is, I received the last proper update last year, Book of the Year 2017, covering the events of 2016. This year's “update” was a celebration and retrospective of Britannica's 250 years of publication, from 1768 through 2018.

I bought my set of Britannicas in 1987, about which, more later. It was terribly expensive, though I can't give an exact price. I knew that they would not be able to continue publishing a bound volume for very long when, in the late 1990s, I purchased the Encyclopedia Britannica on 2 CD ROMs, for a price of $99. As I mentioned, I do not remember the exact price I paid in 1987, but I suspect the Britannica was at least $1,000, and probably more.

I have always enjoyed these yearbooks. My favorite portions of the yearbook are, or were, the month by month, day by day recap of the preceding year, and the obituaries. Every now and again I used the data portion of the yearbook (countries, forms of governments, GDP, population, etc.), but for the most part, these annual updates were trips down memory lane.

The price for these updates has been consistent over the years. This year's book cost $76.95, with another $7.95 for shipping and handling, for a total of $84.90. That is exactly what I paid last year. It is little wonder that these books are being discontinued. Why pay about $85 for an update, when you can pay $99 each year and get the whole kit and caboodle?

Back in 1987, I lived in a small mountain town in Virginia. It was so small that it didn't even have a bookstore. The community did a nice job of supporting a small library, but after living in Baltimore, and using the Enoch Pratt Free Library, I found the library to be inadequate. In Lexington, about 45 miles away, I could use the libraries on the VMI and Washington and Lee campuses, but that was a good 45 minute drive each way. So, I ended up in a variety of book clubs.

I had two sets of encyclopedias at that time, both published in 1957, and a shelf full of annual updates. Really, I needed a new encyclopedia, so I was overjoyed when, one day in the late spring, I opened my monthly catalog from the Library of Science and found that LOS members could buy the new, updated Encyclopedia Britannica at a discount. I filled in the return mailer.

My wife always accused me of being a sucker for a salesman, especially one with a hard luck story, so I figured I should head this one off at the pass. I told her that I had just sent in a postcard requesting a visit from a Britannica salesman, and that I intended to buy a set, so please, no comments about my ability to withstand a sales pitch. She informed me that the children were too young for the Britannica, and perhaps we should buy a child's edition. I told her that this set was for me, and we would address the kiddies' need for an encyclopedia at the appropriate time. She was not happy, but she said no more.

The salesman came on a Monday night. It was his third day on the job. I showed him to my living room, where he set up a small flip chart on the coffee table. Page one stated, in bold, capital lettering: “The New Encyclopedia Britannica”. I said, “That looks good, I'll take a set.” He looked at me with the funniest look, and flipped to the next page on the chart: “Completely Revised and Updated”. “Fine,” I said, “I'll take a set.” He looked at me again, and decided I was serious. He flipped through another dozen charts in search of an appropriate one. This chart talked about the three bindings available: the expensive one, the cheap one, and the one in between. “I'll take the one in between.” He finally decided I was serious, and pulled out a contract, which he began to fill out.

About that time my wife walked into the room, and a light bulb went off. “Hey, do you guys offer a child's Britannica?” He responded that normally they did offer one, but that the child's version was in the process of being updated and rewritten, so they did not have one to offer at the moment. But, he said, Britannica had recently purchased Compton's Encyclopedia, and they were selling that as a child's encyclopedia in the interim. I said, “Fine, I'll take a set.” My wife harrumphed, and left the room. The salesman looked at me as if I were completely nuts, decided I wasn't, struck through something on the contract, and began anew.

While he was amending the contract, I saw a brochure on the coffee table, advertising the Great Books of the Western World. I don't know why I hadn't put 2 and 2 together. The Great Books series was edited by a couple of University of Chicago fellows (Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler), and Britannica was headquartered in Chicago. So, I asked, “Do you guys sell the Great Books of the Western World?” The salesman looked at me with a wary eye, and nodded. “I'll take a set.” He tore up the contract he had been working on, pulled a new form out of his briefcase, and began again.

That night, the salesman's third night on the job, I dropped a bit more than $2,000. When they arrived in a few weeks, they included the 1987 annual update. I built a bookcase for the encyclopedias and updates, and a separate bookcase for the Great Books. They have given me great pleasure over the years. But that era is over.

I suspect that they don't even offer the CD ROMs any more. My guess is you pay an annual fee, and have access to a set of Britannicas somewhere in the cloud. Maybe, one day, I'll give it a try. In the meantime, I cherish those books, and feel somewhat saddened that I will no longer receive an update in the mail every April.

I really do hate change. I haven't been all that happy since Queen Victoria died.

A Little Dab’ll Do Ya

This post originally appeared April 13, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

I’m on my third tube of Brylcreem. No, I’m not on my third tube this year, nor my third tube this decade. I am on my third tube of a lifetime.

Originally, I needed no hair cream at all. For at least the first 10 years of my life, my hair style was the typical hair style of a 1950s male child. Some call it a buzz cut. I called it what everyone else called it: a GI haircut. Once a week my father would take me to the barber shop, and we would both get a haircut. His cost 75 cents; mine, 50 cents. The barber would run his electric clippers over my scalp, and voila, mission accomplished. It saved me the trouble of carrying a comb, and I’m sure we must have saved a ton of money on shampoo.

But you can’t keep a fashion plate down, so before too many more years had passed, I acquired a flat top hair style. This was a sign of maturity, as it was a more grown-up hair style than the GI. (I knew several men in the community who styled their hair this way, including, for awhile, my father.) The flat top did not require hair cream: it required wax. So, quite patiently, I used butch wax to train my hair to stand on end.

The flat top phase didn’t last that long. During the mid 1960s I began the transition to slightly longer hair, and the ivy league hair style. It requires a transition period to move away from the flat top. It takes awhile to train your hair to stand on end, but it also takes awhile to train it to go back to its normal position, next to the scalp. At this point in life I was introduced to Brylcreem.

The television commercials for Brylcreem were brilliant. “A little dab’ll do ya” and “they love to run their fingers through your hair” are lines from the catchy tune used to promote the stuff. In fact, it didn’t take very much Brylcreem to impart enough discipline to the hair to maintain something akin to order. As for the “they love to run their fingers through you hair” bit, well, the less said, the better. A pimply-faced teen will not find true love through the judicious application of a tube of Brylcreem.

I liked the stuff because it didn’t make my hair look greasy, and it smelled great. The current incarnation of Brylcreem has no smell about it, but the 1960s version smelled almost good enough to eat. Of course, we knew not to eat it. It may be that today the makers of Brylcreem decided against a candy-like odor for fear that some kids would change their food preference from Tide pods. Who knows?

I used Brylcreem daily until the early 1970s. During the 70s, big hair was in, and I went big (see photo, 1976). In the 70s men didn’t want so much to tame their hair as to live in peaceful coexistence with it. Hair cream was out.

Around the end of the 1970s, two things happened that drastically altered my personal hair style. First, C-SPAN began its life as a cable broadcaster, providing live coverage of the US House of Representatives; and second, politicians appearing on C-SPAN discovered the blow dryer. I liked the look, and promptly began the use of a blow dryer. I needed no hair cream, except on those days when I overdid it with the dryer. When that happened, the old tube of Brylcreem came out of the drawer to save the day.

During the 1990s I traveled extensively for my job, and found it convenient to give up the hair dryer. I would generally comb my hair while wet, and hope for the best. The only time I would use Brylcreem was when my hair became too long, and thus unruly. I used it as a band-aid until I could get a proper haircut.

And that has been my use of Brylcreem up until today: I would use it to get me by until the next haircut. Today, however, I made a change.

My hair was a bit too long, so I stopped by the barber shop I use when in Beaufort, SC, and had my ears lowered. Afterwards, I returned home and showered to remove those little bits of hair that cause me to scratch like a cat with fleas. And then, with a freshly cut head of hair, I did something unusual: I grabbed the tube of Brylcreem. I didn’t use much. After all, a little dab’ll do ya.

I now suspect that Kathy will love to run her fingers through my hair!

Nancy Batten, RIP

This post originally appeared April 1, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Nancy Carol Jones Batten

January 13, 1930 - April 1, 2018

Spring Has Sprung

This post originally appeared March 28, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I found a bit of doggerel that goes something like this:

Spring has sprung,

Fall has fell,

Summer’s here

And it’s hot as hell!

It certainly isn’t summer yet, but it is quite possible that spring has finally arrived. When I left the blustery weather of middle Georgia a few days ago, it did not seem very much like springtime. I hope that has changed. Here in the North Carolina mountains we find spring gradually inching its way towards the present. The deciduous trees are still bare, but the little shoots of growth at the tips of the barren limbs seem ready to open. It is quite brisk before dawn, but the temperature has been above the freezing mark, so spring may well be here.

The 10th grade class at my school is taking its annual trip to the Nantahala Outdoor Center, a heavenly place for those who enjoy hiking, camping, river rafting, kayaking, and pretty much any outdoor event. As for me, I enjoy the mega-zip line. It is composed of eight individual runs, the longest of which is ½ mile (805 meters, for you metric nerds), which I traversed in 40 seconds. According to my calculations, my average speed for that leg of the course was 66 feet per second, or 45 miles per hour. It is a blast, and I heartily recommend it to you.

At week’s end, my little charges will return to the school, and begin their spring break. We seem to have lots of breaks from school, breaks that I don’t remember from the dark and dismal days of my youth. We had the Christmas break, of course, but I don’t recall a fall break, a mid-winter break, or even a spring break. (It may be that we had a spring break, but if so, it has completely slipped from my memory.) On the other hand, we didn’t start the school year until after Labor Day, as opposed to the current practice of starting the school year early in August. I think I would prefer a later start with fewer breaks. Of course, what I prefer is generally that which will never happen.

Today’s expedition is a surveying class down by the river. We will measure the distance across the river without actually crossing the river, using nothing more than a transit on a tripod, a tape measure, and a little Euclidean geometry. Law of Sines, anyone? It should be fun.

Summer is my favorite season, but spring brings a joy that puts a period to the dead season of winter. I can put up with the pollen nuisance knowing that summer will soon be here. On the other hand, we can’t yet write off one last winter blast. I have lived in Georgia since 1989, and with the exception of the great Snowpocalypse of a few years ago, our most significant snowfalls have been in the month of March. So we still have a few days yet to survive before sounding the “all clear”.

I thank all of you who responded to last week’s post with kind words regarding the loss of our beloved Ronnie. I fear we are in for more pain, as my sister tells me that my mother is not doing very well, and is not expected to be long for this world. This is, in all likelihood, her last spring. However, spring brings the promise of new life, so Kathy and I will temper the loss with the joy of new lives, those of our grandchildren. Once again, the cycle of birth, life, and death repeats itself.

So I leave you this week with the joy that springtime brings. May you have a wonderful Easter weekend.

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

This post originally appeared March 20, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

The event that I feared has come to pass. My pal and faithful companion of 12 years, Ronnie, died last night at the veterinary hospital here in Madison.

Ronnie was my fifth dog. I barely remember my first, Rusty, a companion of the early to mid-1950s. I have seen a few photos of the two of us, and apparently we got along splendidly. We lived in town, and it became apparent he would do better on a farm. And that is where he ended his life.

Rusty was a bulldog. Canis, dog number two, was a lab mix. We got him when we lived in Baltimore, in the late 1970s. Canis was a jumper. He could clear our four-feet chain link fence with all the grace of a horse clearing hurdles. In fact, he looked as graceful as a horse, and somewhere there are pictures of Canis in mid-jump, legs tucked perfectly, with about a foot to spare as he gained his freedom from our back yard. Canis moved with us to Covington, Virginia, but soon fell ill. The vet called me at work, telling me he needed to be put down. I told the vet I wanted to see him one last time. He said, “You'd better hurry.” I left work immediately, but by the time I arrived at the veterinary hospital, Canis had cleared that last hurdle.

Quincy, dog number three, was also a lab mix, but with thicker hair. (With Quincy I began my habit of naming dogs after presidents or prime ministers.) We acquired her after a decent interval following the death of Canis. Quincy was sweet-tempered, and had a very good run, lasting from the early 1980s until 1996. She was an outside dog, and in Virginia often broke free from her restraints to explore the countryside. Most of the time she came back a mess. Once, I took her to a target range back in the woods. A deer nearby startled her, she gave chase, and I didn't see her again for several days. She finally turned up, dirty, hungry, and ready to resume her life.

Winston, a corgi, really wasn't my dog. He belonged to my son, Jason. But I loved him just the same. I knew that Jason had become a man by the way he treated Winston during Winston's last few months on earth. I saw compassion, gentleness, and sacrifice. A man needs a dog, if for no other reason than to become a good man.

My youngest, Reilly, found Pepper running around her school yard. No one claimed her, so Reilly did. Pepper passed away a bit ago, and we are guessing that she was somewhere around 16 or 17 years of age. Pepper was a chow, but as sweet as honey. And Pepper, through a union with a lab that jumped the fence in her back yard, became Ronnie's mother.

Ronnie was born on New Year's Day, 2006. Reilly took care of him for his first three months, and then we became pals. He was the best of them all (with the possible exception of Pepper), and we did most everything together. I tried very hard to treat him as well as I treated my children. When Kathy arrived on the scene, she set a new, higher standard. I treated him like a prince; she treated him like a king. I grumbled that she fed Ronnie more filet mignon than she served to me; she joked that if she died, she wanted to be reincarnated as my dog. We were a happy family: you, me, and baby makes three.

I have written about his recent bout of anemia. It wasn't that simple, of course. He suffered an auto-immune response that destroyed his red blood cells. At his last laboratory workup, we found he had about 1/3 the normal number of red blood cells. We spent a part of Sunday on the phone with the vet, trying to figure out what to do. We had a plan, and so we hospitalized him the next day, yesterday. The vet tried to stabilize him in preparation for a procedure. It turned out to be a futile attempt.

Ronnie hated thunder, as it scared him. Last night, in the midst of the worst thunder storm we have seen in awhile, he passed away, without his family by his side, in the veterinary hospital. I regret that he died alone, possibly scared.

But I regret nothing else about his life, except that it was too short. In human years, he made it to 85 ½, but that is still too short. We really needed another 12 years together.

We dog lovers are fools. We know full well that, when we adopt another canine into our family, we are most likely setting ourselves up for the type of heartbreak I am suffering now. And we do it anyway. Because man and dog are made for one another.

Good-bye, Ronnie.

It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Sting

This post originally appeared March 14, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Our festival season begins this weekend, March 17, 2018, at the St. Patrick’s Day festival in Dublin. That would be Dublin, Georgia. This is our 5th year there, and it is an excellent festival. Come on out and see us! http://www.dublinstpatricks.com/ You know we can’t miss this one: Kathy’s maiden name is O’Connor.

We sell a lot of chili pepper sauce and a lot of pepper jam. We also carry orange habanero powder, but that is not our big seller. It is hot: I once used it in a vegetable chili for my vegetarian daughter, at ¼ the recommended dose, and the chili was too hot for any of us to eat. For some reason, last week the website lit up with orders for orange habanero powder, and I found myself back in the production facility (i.e., our kitchen) filling little bags of the devil’s snuff.

It is a finely divided powder, and soon it was in the air, and up my nose. My eyes were watering, my throat and nasal passages were burning, and it made me long for my half-mask respirator. Which reminds me of a misadventure from several years ago.

After moving to Madison I bought a house that had belonged to a young couple with cats. Five cats, to be exact. I liked the house, and planned to put my computer, a table, and a few bookcases in what had been the cat’s lavatory, a room that had contained five litter boxes. But there was one lingering problem with that room: the odor of cat urine.

I tried everything to get rid of that odor. I shampooed the carpet. I bought bottles of urine-eating bacteria. Nothing worked. It appeared that I was going to have to rip up the carpet and sub-flooring to get rid of this foul stench. But before going to all that effort, I thought it worthwhile to do a little research.

Everything I read indicated that the problem was uric acid crystals. These crystals get deposited in the carpet and just stay there. You can’t vacuum them up, and they refuse to dissolve in the soapy solution spit out by carpet shampooers. My best bet, research indicated, was uric acid-eating bacteria. But I had tried the bacteria, and apparently they just weren’t hungry enough.

And then it hit me: get rid of the crystals by dissolving them. All I had to do was to find a liquid that would dissolve the crystals, and then I could suck them up into the belly of the carpet shampooer. Time to consult my trusty CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

Sure enough, uric acid can be dissolved in a sodium carbonate solution. I don’t recall the exact concentration required, but I do recall dashing into the laboratory to make up a couple of gallons of sodium carbonate at the right concentration. My plan was to add this to the carpet shampooer, and solve my problem. The nice thing about sodium carbonate is that it is pretty innocuous: it is the stuff that gives Alka-Seltzer its fizz. It would not harm my carpet or the carpet shampooer.

And I did just that. I poured the carbonate solution into the shampooer, cranked up the machine, made a pass across the floor of the room, and nearly died.

The air turned putrid. The stench was unbearable.

I staggered across the room to the window, threw it open, and retreated with a whimpering Ronnie to the fresh air of the great out of doors.

Uric acid crystals stink. Uric acid solution can double as Satan’s fecal gas. My plan was working, but too well. I could not breathe in that room.

So I made a quick trip to the laboratory, and grabbed my trusty half-mask respirator. I returned home, and with the help of the respirator was able to shampoo the rug, removing every trace of cat urine. I left the window open for a couple of days, and that was it. The cat’s lavatory was now my computer room.

You could call this “better living through chemistry.”

Oh, well, if you folks keep ordering orange habanero powder, I’m going to have to buy a new respirator.

Group Photo

This post originally appeared March 10, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

One day I convinced the cows to pose with Ronnie.

Our Dog Ronnie and the Cows

This post originally appeared March 2, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Our dog Ronnie used to like to intimidate the cows in the pasture behind our house. These days he barely pays them heed, dashing to the fence, letting loose with one bark, then returning to the house, to resume his nap. But back in the day . . .

Time, Time, Time, See What’s Become Of Me

This post originally appeared March 2, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

The seasons continue to turn. I, for one, am glad to see the end of winter. Winter has never been my favorite season (that would be summer), and it wouldn’t really hurt my feelings if I lived someplace with only three seasons (spring, summer, fall). The older I get, the less enamored I am of cold.

Of the four season markers, my favorite is the vernal equinox, the first day of spring. It wins out over the summer solstice for two reasons: the equinox marks the end of winter (good); and the summer solstice marks the beginning of shorter days (bad). We are still several days away from the equinox, but I am feeling spring in the air, even though today is a blustery, moderately cold day.

My friends in Australia are already into fall. For some reason, they do not wait for the equinox proper, but simply call the first day of the month the first day of the season. So fall begins March 1, winter June 1, etc. I suppose we could do the same, but it just wouldn’t seem right.

I suffer from the “why is that so – but I forgot” syndrome. I constantly run across things that bother me, that make me ask “why is this so,” only to forget to look them up later. Our naming of the months was one such problem. Take, for example, the month of September. “Sept” is a prefix denoting seven. Why is the ninth month named the seventh month? The same holds true for the 10th month (oct is the prefix for eight) and the 12th month (dec is the prefix for ten). That bothered me for a few years. It didn’t bother me enough to look it up, though, until I read a biography of Edmund Halley, the comet guy. There was a very curious timeline in that biography that forced me to dig a little deeper. Guess what? It just so happens that once upon a time, New Year’s Day was March 1. Why that was ever changed, I have no idea. Curious, isn’t it?

As the seasons progress, I become happier with life. I know folks who wish to be able to revisit their youth, to do it all over again. I am not in that camp. I have enjoyed every phase of my life – childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, somewhat advanced middle age – and have no desire to revisit any of those phases.

It seems that March 1 is an important date. It was once New Year’s Day, it is the first day of fall in the antipodes, and several outstanding folks were born that day. Yesterday, I celebrated the birth of one such person.

My wife Kathy, head honcho of Chile Today-Hot Tamale, and number one Red Hot Mama, celebrated her birthday yesterday. Prudence dictates that I not reveal which anniversary of her 39th birthday just passed, so we will leave that be. If I can figure out how to post a picture of her celebrating at Town 220 in Madison, GA, I will. (I am technologically challenged that way.)

Either way, please join me in wishing her a hot birthday and even hotter year to come. Happy Birthday, Love!

There's No Schweiger Like Braunschweiger

This post originally appeared February 23, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

This week was mid-winter break at my other job, that of high school math teacher, and I spent the week attending to the duties of life. I completed and filed the corporate income tax return for Chile Today-Hot Tamale. In addition, I gathered all the details necessary to complete our joint income tax returns. It was not, however, all work, no play. Monday evening we saw Darkest Hour and Tuesday evening we saw The Post. For the life of me, I can't remember a thing about Wednesday except doing the laundry. Thursday I began a project for Kathy, and Friday, we will visit the kids in Asheville, NC.

I needed a quiet week. If you have read my past blogs, you know that I try to keep it light and funny. Of course, not everyone understands my sense of humor, so it isn't always funny. But it has been very difficult this week to be humorous.

The recent stretch of time is one that we all have on occasion, and entirely unavoidable, if one lives long enough. It is a stretch of time pock-marked with death. A little bit ago I learned that my first cousin, Linda, had passed. She was a little older than I, but not much. It was apparent, the last time I saw her, that she was in poor health. Now she is gone. Just last year, in February, her father, my favorite uncle, passed away. He was something like 88 years old, or thereabouts. Linda did not have such a long run.

Then came news that the mother of a mate from high school, Alan, had passed away. That news came from another high school mate I hadn't talked to in probably 10 years. Between us, we figured out how to contact our old school chum, to offer our condolences. I hadn't talked with Alan since our 20th high school reunion, some 27 years ago.

The lady who cuts my hair (she is sweet: she doesn't charge a finder's fee) lost a brother a week ago. Then came a man I had never met. We had spoken on the phone several times, but that was it. He was in the hot sauce business, too, and he was by all accounts a great guy. But two weeks ago Bubber was in an automobile that hydroplaned, ran into a tree, and he is now gone.

Those of you who own a dog know that a dog is part of the family. At least, that is the way we feel about Ronnie, our Lab/Chow mix who loves Kathy to death. He turned 12 years old on January 1 of this year, and recently it became pretty apparent that something wasn't quite right with him. Kathy was so worried that she took him to the vet and authorized all sorts of laboratory studies so that we could get to the bottom of his illness. The result was that, aside from the arthritis that seems to afflict his hind legs more than his front legs, he is anemic. It appears that his bone marrow isn't doing the right bone marrow thingy, which is the cause of the anemia.

Last summer, the vet took a tick off Ronnie, and he speculated that the bone marrow thingy problem might be related to an infection from the tick. We gave the old boy a round of medication which lasted for what seemed like forever, but in reality was probably only 10 or 15 days, and he seemed to recover slightly. And then it hit me. If his problem was anemia, we could fix that.

I picked up a couple of rolls of braunschweiger from our local Ingles, and began topping his bowl of kibble with a nice thick slice at each meal. And believe it or not, I think the old boy has recovered! He seems to have more pep. He still wears out towards the end of the long walks Kathy takes him on, but no more that he did seven or so years ago, when he first met Kathy. Just today, he jumped up into the back seat of the pick-up without any trouble. He hadn't been able to do that in awhile.

I am not naive. Ronnie will not be with us forever. But in the midst of the death and sorrow from the past few weeks, his recovery, even if only temporary, is the bright spot.

Sweets for the Swede

This post originally appeared February 16, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

I want to learn Swedish. Or Danish. Or both. I also want to prove the Riemann Hypothesis. I figure the probability of doing any one of the three is zero.

We can set aside the Riemann Hypothesis and focus on language. (It isn’t that I wouldn’t be happy proving the hypothesis, it is just that I am totally unfit to tackle the problem.)

The late Jacob Bronowski, a British mathematician of Polish origin, once claimed that his facility with English was made possible by the fact that he had learned some language (in his case, Polish), prior to the age of seven. My conclusion from this observation, which may or may not be correct, is that our ability to learn a second language diminishes rapidly after the age of seven.

The small high school I attended offered only one foreign language, French. I started to learn the language a month or so before my 15th birthday. According to my theory, that was eight years too late. As for my desire to learn Swedish or Danish, I figure I am now 58 years too late. The attempt to learn either language would be a Sisyphean task.

When I settled on an undergraduate major of chemistry, I was tempted to learn German. The great chemists of the 19th century were German, and German-speaking chemists and physicists were well represented in the world of theoretical chemistry in the early 20th century. German was the foreign language recommended by the chemistry department at Wake Forest University. Given my troubles with French, I avoided the German temptation until my sophomore year. It happened that a young lady in whom I was interested was taking German, so I joined her in the class. It didn’t take long before I decided that she just wasn’t worth the effort. It was a good call, as I can no longer even remember her name.

Graduate school presented an interesting problem. I needed to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language in order to receive the PhD degree. I doubt that the language requirement is still in place. (Most scholarly publications are now in English. I contributed a research paper to a Swedish journal in the 1980s, in English, and I was not the Lone Ranger. It seemed to me that only about half of the papers were in Swedish. The rest were in English.) Nevertheless, in the 1970s, the archaic foreign language requirement was still in place. I had my choice of taking a couple of semesters of French, or of taking one of those 800-point standardized language exams, with a minimum of 500 points required to pass. I chose the latter, and managed to get by with 20 points to spare. A colleague of mine, who was on his last try, made it with a score of 503.

A few years ago, I purchased the book and tapes for the Foreign Service Institute’s French program. With all the good intentions in the world, I periodically pop a tape in my old tape player and take a shot at “brushing up on my French.” I did so prior to one of my trips to France, only to be laughed at by a dear friend there who considered my command of the language, as well as my accent, to be terrible. C’est dommage.

I must note that the seven-years-of-age rule does admit a few exceptions. Kathy lived for a year in Colombia when she was 10, and she has to this day a decent command of Spanish. My eldest daughter likewise has a decent command of Spanish, and I am pretty sure she didn’t start learning the language before the age of seven. My second daughter seemed to get along in Chinese quite well when we visited her in Taipei, and she didn’t begin Chinese lessons until she attended dear old Wake Forest. So there are exceptions, which just prove the rule, as far as I am concerned.

Recently I have been watching some very good television shows, some in Swedish, some in Danish, and I would really, really like to do away with the subtitles. I would also like to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, but as they say in Italian, “It ain’t a gonna happen!”

Travelin' Light

This post originally appeared February 10, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

We have returned from the 38th Annual North Carolina Jazz Festival, http://ncjazzfestival.com/, and we had our usual excellent time. If you love traditional jazz, this is the festival for you. Many of the jazz festivals I have attended over the years have folded, but this one continues with strength.

Don’t worry. Despite the fact that I’ve used the Young/Mundy/Mercer tune made famous by Billie Holiday as the title for this piece, I am not writing about music. These reflections, though, were inspired by the recent trip.

My very first commercial airline flight came relatively late in life. I was 25 years of age, and graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill with a PhD. It was time to go on job interviews, and that involved flying. My very first flight was from Raleigh-Durham Airport to Washington National. I checked my suitcase, and was pleasantly surprised to find it the first one on the luggage carousel when I arrived in DC. The return trip, however, didn’t quite work that well. I checked my suitcase, and it arrived the day after I did. It occurred to me that, had Eastern Airlines misplaced my luggage on the front end of that trip, my job interview might not have gone very well. This was the origin of my prejudice against checking bags.

In 1989 I moved to the Atlanta area, from the mountains of Virginia. At that time I had flown perhaps a grand total of 6 flights on Delta Airlines. Ten years later, I achieved Million Miler status with Delta, and am now a lifetime Medallion passenger. I averaged 100,000 miles per year for 10 years with Delta Airlines alone. Many of my destinations were not served by Delta, so my total air mileage is a good bit greater than a million miles. I believe I qualify as an experienced traveler.

And any experienced traveler will tell you not to check bags. Although my job periodically required me to check pieces of equipment I needed to do my work, I tried, whenever possible, to live with just a carry-on and a briefcase. Of course, that didn’t always work out. Once, flying from Charleston, SC to Roanoke, VA, I tried to carry-on an aluminum tee-ball bat that I bought for my kids. US Air freaked out and forced me to check it: something to do with its potential as a weapon. Still, I am proud to say that I haven’t checked a bag since late in 2007, on a return trip from Australia. So that means the two week trip to Hawaii, the two week honeymoon out west, the trips to Taiwan and Puerto Rico and other destinations, all were accomplished with a small gym bag and a briefcase. No checked bags.

(Until very recently I used a thin, hard-wall briefcase given to me in the 1980s. I overheard the following conversation about my briefcase in the Honolulu airport: TSA1: “What's that?” TSA2: “That's a briefcase. But, man, that's old school!” I have since upgraded to one manufactured this century.)

The secret to no checked baggage is intelligent packing. It is rare that I pack a pair of shoes other than the ones I wear to the airport. On long trips (one week or more) I seldom pack enough clothes. I generally end up doing laundry sometime during the trip. Thanks to TSA, liquids in my shaving kit are restricted to 3.5 ounces or less, but still there are opportunities to save space. For example, on the road I use the free tube of conditioner that most hotels give out as shaving cream. It works very well: try it sometime.

Which leads me back to the recently concluded 2018 NC Jazz Festival. We didn’t fly as it was only a five-hour drive. Still, I followed my rule: one gym bag and one briefcase. Kathy, on the other hand . . .

Four bags, a hanging garment bag, and a cooler. For three nights! This list does not include her suitcase-sized purse. I’m sure I’m missing something, but I recall these six items as part of her trousseau.

One of the reasons that business travelers generally travel light is that they have to schlep all their luggage themselves from airplane to car or taxi to hotel. One of the reasons wives do not travel light is that they have husbands to do their schlepping. At least, they have their husbands to do the schlepping until the husbands collapse and die from a severe case of pack mule-itis.

Oh, well, what can you do?

So, What’s A Beguine?

This post originally appeared February 2, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

Thank you for your kind words on last week’s blog, the first on the Chile Today Hot Tamale website. I received positive comments from as far away as Tokyo. Kathy thought the write-up was cute, but suggested that I write about something “hot,” given that we make chile pepper sauces and pepper jams. I happen to be in Wilmington, NC, at the 38th edition of the North Carolina Jazz Festival, so naturally my thoughts turn to Le Jazz Hot. But the truth of the matter is that “hot” jazz is not my favorite. Neither is “cool” jazz. Here comes a confession, which may shock even my closest friends and acquaintances: my favorite jazz is the swing music that reigned during the 1940s. That would explain why, when you ride with me in my pick-up truck, you find the radio tuned to Sirius 73, “40s Junction”.

Like many a child, I discovered this music through the record collection of my parents. Somewhere in their collection was a Longines Symphonette Society sampler of 1940s music, a two-album masterpiece of hits by various artists. I was especially enamored of Volume 1, and played that record until the grooves were worn out. A good friend of mine happened to own that exact same record, and he gave it to me a few years ago. I now get to wear out another set of grooves.

Far and away, my absolute favorite cut on that album was Where or When, a lovely Rodgers and Hart tune from an eminently forgettable 1937 Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie, “Babes in Arms”. What made the tune special was the swinging rendition by Artie Shaw’s 1938-1939 band. At that point in my young life, I became a fan of Artie Shaw’s music. (About his politics and personal life, the less said, the better.)

My favorite musical instrument is the piano. It doesn’t much matter whether the pianist is overpowering, like the late Oscar Peterson, or beautifully understated, like Rossano Sportiello, or just pure genius, like Dick Hyman: the piano is a one-piece orchestra, complete in itself. But the musician who earns the most respect from me is the musician who can conquer that devilishly difficult musical instrument, the clarinet. Artie Shaw was one such musician. So was Benny Goodman.

My friend and I enter into a pointless debate from time to time about which musician, Shaw or Goodman, was the better clarinetist. I go with Shaw, he goes with Goodman. We all have our favorites, and that is that. A few years ago, at a jazz festival, I heard a tale that involved both of these titans of the big band era, from another musician who experienced the event first hand. I suppose it doesn’t matter whether he was telling the truth, or not. The story is a good one, whether or not true.

Before I get into the tale, it would help if you knew that Where or When, my personal favorite Shavian tune, was not his most famous. If you look at any collection of Artie Shaw hits, you are sure to find the Cole Porter tune “Begin the Beguine” at the top of the list.

On to the story. This musician was visiting Benny Goodman one day at Goodman’s Connecticut home. He happened to look into the back yard, and he saw something interesting. Goodman had a bird feeder hanging from a tree, but the chain holding the feeder passed through the center of a 78 RPM record, which perched precariously on top of the feeder. He commented on this, and Goodman admitted that this was his own invention. The squirrels used to climb down the chain and eat the bird seed, but when he put the 78 on top, they stopped, because once the squirrels hit the record, it tilted, and the squirrels slid off. The visiting musician allowed that this was a bit of genius, and they moved on to other topics.

A bit later in the day, the musician’s curiosity got the better or him, and he slipped out the back door to investigate this record-protected bird feeder. As you can imagine, the record hanging on the chain was in rather foul shape, having been scratched by squirrels and used as a toilet by the birds. Still, he managed to clean off the center of the record to examine the label.

It was “Begin the Beguine” by Artie Shaw!

Whew! That was a close shave!

This post originally appeared January 26, 2018, on the Chile Today Hot Tamale! website. (www.chiletodayhottamale.net)

This whole megillah started because I wanted a replacement puck of Old Spice shaving soap.

I’ve used shaving soap and a mug since I started shaving back in the 1960s. My father was a shaving cream guy, but he did have a mug of Old Spice shaving soap (in an Old Spice shaving mug, of course), and a brush from prior to World War II. And that is what I used until, asserting my independence, I bought my own Old Spice shaving mug and brush.

But there is a problem.

A few decades ago it slowly dawned on me that it was getting more and more difficult to find replacement pucks of Old Spice shaving soap for the mugs. I attributed that to the fact that I lived in a small town with limited shopping options, despite the fact that I couldn’t find it on my excursions to the big cities I visited from time to time. The stores had shaving soap, just not the Old Spice brand. So, I made do with either Williams or van der Hagen shaving soap, always vowing to stock up on Old Spice brand whenever I ran across it again.

Which was never.

Just last night, a thought crossed my mind: I can probably find this soap on Amazon. You can find anything on Amazon, right? So I checked, and sure enough, I can buy Old Spice mugs and soap there.

But for a price.

First, you can’t buy the soap alone. You have to buy both mug and soap. The lowest price I saw for this combo was $40, which is pretty steep. But the worst part had to do with the aroma. The sellers could not guarantee that the soap would have that characteristic Old Spice, clove oil smell. You see, the soap was 30 or so years old. Apparently, I was having trouble finding the soap in stores because the company stopped making it. All Old Spice shaving soap for sale on Amazon and Ebay and other websites is very old product.

Sort of like me.

This is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by companies that no longer produce a product that I really like. I enjoy a good root beer, and one of the memorable root beers from the dark and dismal days of youth was produced by Worley’s Bottling Company, out of Selma, NC. It exists no longer, though you can buy an empty bottle for somewhere between $10 and $20 on the internet.

If I dwell too long on these, and other, items from a period earlier in my life that are no longer available, I get a little down. The temptation to curse the modern world is strong in those of us who are not very happy with change. I have been known to use the line “I just haven’t been all that happy with the world since Queen Victoria died.” Most people take it the way was intended, as a joke. But there is a kernel of truth in that line.

On the other hand, the modern world has brought us things that were unimaginable in the days of my youth. My old iPhone 4, no longer in service, is a better computer than the on-board computer used during the Apollo lunar missions. Who would have believed, back in the 1960s, that we would all be carrying this level of computing power in our pockets? And what of the medical miracles that we see today? Cardiac bypass surgery, perfected in the 1960s, is now passe, replaced with technology such as stents that do not require a chest-cracking incision, or the use of a heart-lung machine. Recovery from these procedures is remarkably swift, compared with the full bypass procedure. It is impossible to watch television for any length of time without viewing advertisements for drugs that promise new, effective treatments for medical problems that have plagued us in the past.

So change can be good. And sometimes, change happens that makes me very happy.

Lavoris mouthwash was the favorite of my family dentist 50 or more years ago. I haven’t seen it in the stores for awhile, and many years ago tried in vain to find it on the internet. I wrote this off as another lost product.

I just ordered four bottles on Amazon. They will be here Monday.