And A 'Possum In A Pear Tree

I am getting soft in my old age. My Christmas shopping used to begin on December the 24th. This year I did my shopping on the 22nd.

Let’s begin with the one thing you should know about me: I hate crowds. For that reason, I have avoided shopping malls. My recollections from the dark and dismal days of my youth tell me that shopping malls are crowded places. But this year, what I wanted to buy was to be had in a shopping mall named, remarkably, the Asheville Mall. So, I girded my loins and entered into the pit.

I have lived in Asheville four years and change. In that time, I have been in the Asheville Mall perhaps three or four times, if we discount my trips to Barnes and Noble, which has its own outdoor entrance. Those three or four trips did not prepare me for what I found at 10:00 AM on the Monday before Christmas.

The place was empty.

I had heard rumors regarding the death of the shopping mall. Here in Asheville, there was news earlier this year about the departure of the J. C. Penny store from the mall, an event that followed the departure of the Sears store some years ago. Still, it was shocking to see so little foot traffic just three days before Christmas. I wondered just how long a mall can stay in business this way.

At any rate, the shopping experience was wonderful: no crowds, plenty of store personnel to help me with my purchases, no jostling by frantic Christmas shoppers.

The experience was slightly less pleasant at my next stop, Wal Mart.

I had asked a clerk at one of the mall stores about a gift I wanted to buy, and she suggested that my best bet would be Wally World. Thus I found myself at Wally World at about 11:00, and the traffic that I had expected at the mall materialized there.

Even with the increase in traffic, there was no jostling. All but one of the employees I interacted with were pleasant. I found my items, bought them, then faced the real challenge of the day: finding my pickup in the vast acreage of the Wally World parking lot.

At noon I took Lucy for her bath and mani-pedi. The trip to the dog beauty parlor was uneventful, but the trip home was less so. My return trip brought me to the intersection of Swannanoa River Road and South Tunnel Road (the road to the Asheville Mall). The traffic there was a mess. People turning left from Swannanoa to South Tunnel were blocking the intersection, thanks to a traffic engineer who didn’t sync the traffic lights on these two roads. Apparently the Asheville Mall is not dying: I just did my shopping before the Christmas rush. When I picked Lucy up three hours later, I used a different route home.

What about the title of this screed?

On Sunday night, Lucy wanted to go into the backyard. The moment I opened the back door, she caught a scent, and streaked out of the house, growling and barking. The times I had seen her do this in the past were associated with a nearby bear. Such was not the case Sunday evening: I had not seen a bear for maybe a month. They should be taking their winter naps now. I grabbed an old four-D-cell mag light, an excellent cudgel, and sprinted out the door after her.

The offending animal was an opossum. It was clearly scared of Lucy, for it found a scrawny sapling on the east side of the house and climbed halfway up it before pretending to be dead. Lucy looked confused as to what to do next. I intervened, and as far as I know, the opossum eventually came down the tree and beat a retreat.

From these observations I draw no conclusions regarding the state of the economy, the presence or absence of aliens in the comet that may or may not hit us, or the chances of dear old Wake Forest in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl (yes, there is such a bowl game). I simply wish you all a very merry Christmas, and the happiest of new years.

Day Two

I enjoy a wide variety of comedians. One of my current favorites is Nate Bargatze. He does a skit in which he talks about how much he enjoys processed foods. He refers to it as “farm to factory to table” food, as opposed to “farm to table” food. I agree with him.

Another favorite comedian is, or was (as he has now passed on), James Gregory. He was, especially in his later years, rather portly. He did a skit in which he made fun of the people who gave him grief about his diet of fried southern foods, always served with gravy. He said something to effect that he ate the way he did because he needed to keep up his strength, as he spent a fair amount of time as a pall bearer for his friends who dropped dead in the gym.

We have tried just about every one of those “farm to table” meal packages: Blue Apron, Green Chef, Factor, you name it. I hate them. Why, I hear you asking? Well, aside from the sameness (16 meals in a row with kale as a vegetable – don’t get me started on kale – followed by 16 meals in a row with purple cabbage as a vegetable), the time it takes to prepare a meal is ridiculously long, and the dish washing burden is large. Consider this: you spend 45 minutes preparing the meal, use two cutting boards, two frying pans, 4 mixing bowls, a variety of utensils, and at the end of it all, what have you made? Two hamburgers and a few French fries. Ridiculous. Give me some good old “pop it in the microwave” or “peel back the plastic layer and bake in the oven for 35 minutes” processed food.

Maybe my appreciation, nay, craving, of processed food explains why, from time to time, I just have to make a trip to McDonald’s. At times, nothing can take the place of a Number 1 Combo meal with a large Coke. And when I am a bit worried about my weight, I will skip the fries and just go with two Big Macs and a medium Coke. Yum yum. That’s good eatin’.

Of course, we have no shortage of McDonald’s in this town. There is one near my work, which is convenient for those times when I have to supplement the lunch Kathy packs for me with a Big Mac or two. Until Hurricane Helene came to visit us in the fall of 2024, we were within one mile or so of two McDonald’s. One could be accessed by turning right on Kenilworth Road, the other by turning left. I used the one on the right in the evenings, and the one on the left on Saturday or Sunday mornings. It is the one on the left that was destroyed by the storm.

The one that was destroyed was unique. It sat near the entrance of the Biltmore Estate, and was architecturally similar to the other buildings in Biltmore Village. It had a player piano in the dining room. It was a real pleasure to sit there on a Saturday morning, consuming hot cakes with sausage, the hot cakes slathered with butter and artificially colored and flavored corn syrup, while listening to the player piano play tunes from the Great American Songbook. I have missed it.

Construction of the new McDonald’s in Biltmore Village took a long time, a bit more than 14 months. To be fair, not much was done to the flood-damaged structure for the first few months, other than the placement of a chain link fence around the property, and eventually, demolition of the old building. But when the construction crew finally got down to brass tacks, the building rose fairly quickly, as did my anticipation of its grand reopening.

The grand reopening was yesterday, December 12, at 5 AM. I saw the cars in the parking lot as I drove to work. I made plans to have breakfast there this morning, on day two of its new life.

We arrived around 8 in the morning, and the place was packed. I had to wait for a parking space. The inside dining area looks to be about 75% of its previous size. Everyone was ordering at the kiosk (of which I am not a fan). The new player piano was playing, fortunately not Christmas tunes. Oh, and there were approximately one zillion kids there. As it happens, day two was also “Breakfast with Santa Claus Day” at the new Mickey D’s. There was a most genial Santa, sitting at a large table surrounded by kids, working on coloring those kiddie menus that magically appear at every restaurant. Santa’s helper was someone in a Grinch costume.

I hated the destruction that the flood caused in the fall of 2024, but at least two good things came from it. The first is the new McDonald’s, with its cozy dining area and wonderful piano. The second has to do with the Long John Silver’s that was on the other side of the Swannanoa River from McDonald’s. That building, under reconstruction now, will no longer house the purveyor of fish. Saints be praised! It will become a full service Dunkin’ Donuts joint!!

It's A Small World After All

The figure above is a photograph of the smallest post office in the United States. The Grimshawes post office, located some 6 miles or so from Cashiers, NC, measures a mere 6 feet by 6 feet 5 inches: less than 39 square feet. The post office was named for the first postmasters, Thomas and Elizabeth Grimshawe, who served in that position for 33 years, from 1878 until 1911. In 1911 the building was sold to Warren and Lena Alexander, who served as postmasters for 36 years, until 1947. In 1947 the building was purchased by the Alexanders’ daughter, Mae Alexander Passmore, who served as postmaster for the last six years of the building’s active life. President Eisenhower closed this post office, and all other third class post offices, in 1953.

There isn’t much left to say about the Grimshawes post office. It is small. And so is this post. Enjoy the photos.

A closer view of the front of the post office.

I knew I had found the post office when I saw the flag.

As seen from the street, this is the right corner of the back room. The total 38.5 square feet includes this back room and the “porch” seen in the photos above.

The door to the front porch. This photo was taken from the right back corner of the back room, the corner shown in the photo prior to this one.

The exterior siding was fairly easy to make and install.

Kathy was happy to be out and about, less than two weeks after knee replacement surgery. Thanks to her, I was able to visit Talbots and J. McLaughlin, instead of winging my way home to post these pictures.

Movies

When I was a child we did not go to the movie theater very frequently. The fact that there was not a movie theater in my hometown might have had some bearing on the issue. (I was told that the town once had a movie theater, but that it was converted into a skating rink, or some such thing. I do not remember that.) This meant that movies involved a trip out of town, either to Raleigh or to Smithfield.

This does not mean that I never saw movies, just that I usually had to wait for the movies to appear on television. And I saw some great movies that way: No Time for Sergeants and Mister Roberts, for example.

My first movie in a real theater was Old Yeller, a Disney flick that came out in 1957. We were visiting my maternal grandmother on a Sunday afternoon in Kenly, NC, my cousin, Donald Wayne, was not there, and I was bored. At that time, my grandmother lived next door to a movie theater. My father gave me a quarter and told me to go next door to watch a movie. I came in midway through the show, but stayed for the next showing. After seeing the movie all the way through, I stayed for a third showing until I was bored again. I haven’t seen the movie since.

Old Yeller had the imprimatur of old Walt Disney. The next movie I saw in a theater definitely did not. Tormented was a black and white thriller that came out in 1960. I was seven or eight years old at that time, and it made quite an impression on me, so much so that 65 years later I still remember the gist of the plot, and the dramatic last scene. There were no movie ratings at that time, but I hazard a guess that the movie was not appropriate for a seven or eight year old child. You can still find this movie on the streaming channels.

Watching a favorite dog get shot because of the possibility of rabies and watching a man attempt to kill a young child on the apron of a lighthouse, while being chased off the apron and onto the rocks below by an apparition, may be reasons why baby boomers are generally tough cookies, not given to emotional weakness. On the other hand, they may be why we have produced so many serial killers.

The remainder of my family movie-going experience as a child is limited to more Disney flicks: The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and That Darn Cat! (1965). In 1965 I saw my first James Bond movie with a friend’s family. It was Thunderball, the fourth Bond movie produced by Cubby Broccoli. Sean Connery was, of course, great, but Claudine Auger? Ooh La La! The movies played a role in my dating life. (Teresa, I apologize for taking you to see Barbarella!) I think I saw the movie Patton eight times when it came out, with five different dates. Taking a date to see Patton is not a good idea, and may explain why I had dates with five different young ladies. Nevertheless, it is the greatest movie ever made.

I don’t make it to the theater all that often these days. Kathy and I would go every now and again when we lived in Georgia. The last theater movie I saw there was Chappaquiddick in 2017. Since moving to North Carolina, we have seen a Fantastic Four movie, and maybe one or two others, in the theater. But, for the most part, we watch movies at home. I bought Wicked from Amazon streaming service for Kathy’s birthday. We had friends over. They stopped by the local theater to get a couple of buckets of popcorn. It was great, except for the movie. It was the weirdest remake of The Wizard of Oz I have ever seen, and it was a musical, to boot. I hate musicals. I own it, but plan never to see it again. The worst part of the movie was the ending. After nearly three hours of torture, I learned that we had seen only part I. I do not plan to see part II.

Although I am a curmudgeon, I must say that the invention of streaming television channels is the second-best invention ever, second only to the invention of root beer. I have seen some great movies on these channels, but they tend not to be recent movies. A couple of weekends ago, I saw a Hitchcock movie from the early 1950s that was absolutely excellent. If you get the chance, take a look at I Confess. It has a great storyline, excellent performances by Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, and Karl Malden, and beautiful scenes from Quebec City. We sat before the television, pointing at the screen, and saying “I remember that building!” The lobby of the Chateau Frontenac hasn’t changed in 70 years.

The fact that I do not see very many new movies means I no longer need to watch the Oscars. That saves a few hours every year but leaves me out of the Monday morning water cooler gossip about the host, the speeches, and whether or not the right movie won.

I have a few thousand movies on my external movie hard drive. Most are from the $5 bin at Walmart, movies that are old but still unseen by me. It is easy enough to collect these movies, but making the time to see them is another matter. That is why I have a few thousand on my hard drive. I have gravitated recently to film noir, an example of which is I Confess. If you are looking for a classic movie, check the dozens of decent film noir.

On the other hand, there is always Patton. At ease!

Odds and Ends from the Miscellaneous File

Nine Inch Nails

Hurricane Helene dropped a tulip poplar tree on our two vehicles and a trailer owned by Kathy’s company on September 27, 2024. The tree stayed on top of those vehicles until October 12, just a bit more than two weeks. At that time, a group of volunteers from a Mormon church in Salisbury attacked the tree with chainsaws and heavy tree-moving equipment.

We were grateful that these kind, hard-working volunteers were willing to give up their free time to help us out, and we pitched in to help where we could. That is when I discovered that I am not a lumberjack. While moving a sawed segment of tree, I managed to drop the damned thing on the big toe of my right foot. History repeats itself: I dropped a piece of railroad rail on that same toe when I was a five-year-old. Mamas, don’t let your babies play unsupervised near a railroad track. Back then I lost the nail: not so this time. I ended up with an ugly pool of blood under the nail at the cuticle. It hurt pretty badly for a couple of days, but after a while, all I had to remind me of the accident was this bit of dried blood under the nail.

Eleven months later, that patch of dried blood is up near the tip of the nail. I measured the distance from the cuticle to the trailing edge of the blood stain: 5/8th of an inch (16 mm for those of you outside the United States). Is that really how much a toenail grows in eleven months? Or is the dried blood being pulled along the nail bed at a slower rate? Why would that be so? Is there a mathematical model to describe the migration of dried blood on a nail bed? Questions, questions . . .

Hey BooBoo!

I’ve written a few posts, and posted more than a few videos on social media, about the bears here in Asheville. We see them fairly frequently. I have two animal cameras that periodically catch the bears on their journeys through our yard, or on their side trips up to the front porch, where they feast on birdseed and hummingbird syrup. In reviewing these videos, I conclude that we see the bears most frequently in October.

A colleague at work noted the other day that the bears are currently in a period of hyperphagia. Yes, I had to look that up, too. Here is what some guy who goes by the initials “A. I.” said on the internet: “Hyperphagia is the extreme and continuous hunger that bears experience in late summer and fall to prepare for winter hibernation. During this period, a bear's biological clock drives a feeding frenzy to consume and store enough fat to survive for months without food or water. The term combines hyper (over) and phagia (eating) to describe this critical survival mechanism.” My colleague at work says that during this time the bears will feed up to 20 hours per day, and put on an additional 20 – 100% of their body weight. (She added, “I can relate.”)

Because of Kathy’s knee, I have inherited the task of taking Lucy on a daily walk, but because I am still working, I take that walk around six in the morning, while it is still dark. (There are a lot of commas in that sentence. Should I have broken it into two sentences? Inquiring minds want to know.) The other morning, while walking Lucy, I heard a loud “pop” near a house on my right, the sound of a small limb snapping. I fished a tactical flashlight out of my pocket and swept the general area. Sure enough, there he was: a pretty good-sized bear up near a neighbor’s house, giving me the evil eye. We kept on trucking.

I always thought, like Mr. A. I., that bears hibernate in the winter. Recently, however, I was introduced to “torpor,” a word indicating reduced body temperature and reduced metabolic activity. A long period of torpor is often referred to as “hibernation” if it occurs in the winter. I wonder, though, if our bears here actually hibernate. A few years ago, in a nicely wooded portion of the UNC-Asheville campus, the campus police fenced off a section of the wood because a bear was sitting there, upright and motionless. The bear was there all winter, an attraction for curious humans. I think of hibernation as a bear curled up in a cave, not sitting upright and motionless out in the open. To my mind, that bear was in torpor.

It may have something to do with temperature. Back in the ‘80s, when I lived in the mountains of Virginia, the locals gave me a rule of thumb regarding when it was safe to assume that the poisonous snakes were hibernating: there had to be five consecutive days of temperatures below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I think we had such a stretch of weather in December of 2022, but I don’t think we’ve had a stretch of weather like that since then. Maybe temperature creates the difference between hibernation and torpor.

At any rate, I look forward to new bear videos next month.

Crickets

Even though I walk Lucy in the dark, I am aware of the animals around me. Yesterday morning I was serenaded by an owl. It might have been an Eastern Screech Owl. On the other hand, it might not have been so. I mentioned the bear. I cannot identify all the small creatures that cause the bushes and hedges to move when I walk past. And occasionally a human engaged in the torturous habit of running will cross my path.

The leaves have been falling for awhile, but these are not the colorful leaves. They remind me of the premature falling leaves I used to see in Georgia when the summer was dry. Our summer was anything but dry, so I do not know why these leaves are falling now. They haven’t changed colors yet.

But a sure sign, an even more sure sign than falling leaves, that summer is over and fall is here, is the sound of crickets invading the garage, and ultimately, the house. The crickets have been making an unholy racket for a couple of weeks now. I am sure that, at present, they have only invaded the garage. I am also sure that they will eventually make their way into the house. At that point I will engage in chemical warfare. I can’t take that noise year round.

I am writing this about three days before the autumnal equinox, the official beginning of the fall season. Most people I know wax poetic about fall, claiming it is their favorite season. I disagree. Give me summer anytime. In fact, the reason why I enjoy summer so much is immortalized in one of the few poems I remember:

Spring has sprung,

Fall has fell,

Summer’s here

And it’s hot as hell!

Happy fall, y’all!

The Musical Fruit

I began to feel out of sorts on the Thursday evening before Labor Day. At first, I thought it was something I ate, but I had my normal French Fryz meal that evening: two chili dogs with mustard, bottomless root beer, and a killer dessert. I forget what the restaurant calls the dessert, but I call it Diabetes in a Bowl. It consists of two fried apple pies inserted into a bowl of vanilla ice cream and topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. At any rate, I wasn’t feeling quite right by bedtime.

Friday morning I awoke to a full-blown end-of-summer cold. I was sneezing and coughing. Fortunately, that day at school was a ceremonial half-day, Convocation, and I was not required to teach at all. Afterwards, I repaired to my home, and suffered, though perhaps not in silence.

I stayed in bed all day Saturday. That is how Kathy knew that something was seriously wrong with me. I cannot remember the last time I stayed in bed a whole day. I didn’t even do that three years ago when I came down with the China virus.

By Sunday I was feeling well enough to take Lucy on her extended weekend walk, but that was all I was capable of doing. On Monday, Labor Day, I was only the slightest bit better, but capable of taking Kathy out to dinner at the Corner Kitchen, only recently re-opened after the fall flood of last year.

Tuesday began a shortened school week, and I made it through the week. The sniffles were gone by Friday, with only a hacking cough to remind me of my misery. But the cough was bad. It was worse when I was a smoker: the after-cold cough would last six weeks. I was just past one week, and the cough remained. It is greatly to be hoped that it goes away in a considerably shorter time than six weeks.

I have heard thousands of jokes over the years, but I remember almost none of them. I wish I could remember the one I heard recently, about how to get a wife to talk to her husband when she was giving him the cold shoulder. It had something to do with the husband sitting on the sofa, watching a football game, while looking satisfied. The fragment of that joke came to me on Saturday, the day I was looking forward to as a day to do nothing but recover from the cold. That was when Kathy declared that we needed to go to Sevierville to buy shoes for me.

I bought three pairs of shoes in Sevierville maybe three years ago. I have worn one of those pairs, the blue suede shoes, nearly daily since then. I don’t need new shoes. When the blue suedes finally give up the ghost, I have the other two pairs to fall back on. So Kathy didn’t really want to go to Sevierville to buy shoes for me. She wanted to eat at The Chop House, and to do a little shopping in the outlet mall there.

Normally, the drive to Sevierville is a simple 70 minutes down Interstate 40, but Interstate 40 is still recovering from the flood last fall. It is down to one lane near the Tennessee/North Carolina state line, and the DOT recommends a detour: west on I-26 from Asheville to past Johnson City, then south on I-81 to Beech Springs, where you pick up a Tennessee highway for the straight shot down into Sevierville. That detour has to add one and a half hours to the trip each way, and as you can imagine, it did not appeal to me.

So we took the back way, a route we have used before, a nice leisurely ride through some beautiful countryside, through Marshall, Hot Springs, Newport, and Chestnut Hill. Once again we passed the Bush Beans factory in Chestnut Hill, and vowed that one day we must stop at the visitors’ center there.

The Chop House was a disappointment, for the first time. Lunch was nothing fancy: two French dips, Coca-Cola, and coffee, which with the tip came to $61. The shopping seemed to make Kathy happy. I was fine, as the outlet mall provides several benches for the less-than-enthusiastic shopper.

We stopped at the Bush Beans visitors’ center on the way back, and it was lovely. Not only do they have a very nice center (where I managed to buy 13 cans of various beans), but they have a cafe there that serves home cooked food at a reasonable price. Our next visit to Sevierville will include lunch there, instead of at The Chop House.

I was completely bushed (pardon the pun) when we returned home, so much so that I slept through dinner. By Sunday morning, I was starving, so I had a can of baked beans for breakfast.

Kathy tells me I will be sleeping in the guest room.

Onan the Barbarian

Kathy is due for another knee replacement. The doctor has advised her to keep pressure off that knee as much as possible until he can get her to the operating table. One of the ways Kathy is following the doctor’s orders involves sitting in a recliner, feet up, ice pack in place, while watching the birds trash our front porch. The greedy little rascals have made such a mess of the birdseed in the feeders that I was reminded of Dorothy Parker’s pet bird. She named her bird Onan, because he scattered his seed on the ground. I mentioned this to Kathy.

She failed to see the humor in Parker’s witticism.

I suppose the Book of Genesis isn’t very high on anyone’s reading list today. I re-read it a few years ago in conjunction with an online course offered by Hillsdale College. Hillsdale offers a variety of free courses online, and I have taken several: one on mathematics and logic, one on chemistry, one on the Second World War. I was at loose ends one weekend, saw the course on the Book of Genesis, and decided to give it a try. It is in this book that we find the story of Onan.

It is actually the story of Onan’s father, Judah, and Tamar, the widow of his eldest son Er. Onan makes a very brief appearance in the tale. It is a strange story, for two reasons. First, it deals with an ancient custom, the levirate marriage: the compulsory marriage of a widow to the brother of her dead husband. The second aspect of this story that is a bit strange is the fact that the author plops this story down smack dab in the middle of the story of Joseph. It has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph. It is a distraction.

Back to the tale. Judah had three sons: Er, Onan, and Shelah. Judah arranged a marriage between Er and a Canaanite woman named Tamar. But Er was, well, let’s take it from the source: “And Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord; and the Lord slew him.” At this point Judah directed Onan, the second son, to engage in a levirate marriage. It was his job to marry Tamar and produce children that would not be his heirs, but would, instead, be the lawful heirs of the dead brother, Er. This did not tickle Onan’s fancy. If he produced children, he wanted them to be his heirs, not his brother’s. Apparently he did not object to playing “hide the zakila” with Tamar: he just refused to produce and rear children that legally would not be his. Let us go again to the source: “And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.” There it is: a biblical reference to coitus interruptus.

Needless to say, this did not please the Lord, who gave Onan the same fate as Er.

Judah didn’t know why his two older sons had been killed. He thought that Tamar was up to no good. He was required to give his third and final son, Shelah, to Tamar in marriage, but he was afraid that Tamar would kill Shelah, so he stalled.

Tamar tired of waiting. Some time after the death of Judah’s wife, Tamar approached him, disguised as a prostitute, and convinced him to sleep with her, for a price: his signet, bracelets, and staff. He did, and as a result, she conceived twins. When Tamar began to show, she was saved from death when she produced the signet, bracelets, and staff that Judah gave her. Thus the old man did the job his two elder sons could not do, and in sleeping with his daughter-in-law, produced sons that under normal circumstances would have been his grandsons.

Back to Onan. His name is now enshrined in the term “Onanism”. The original definition was, of course, coitus interruptus, but over time the term has picked up an additional definition or two. My 1979 Webster’s lists the second and third definitions as “2: MASTURBATION 3: SELF-GRATIFICATION”. (I have no idea why Webster put these two definitions in capital letters, while the first definition is not.)

The name “Onan” is not a name to give to your son, nor is it a name to give to a company. And yet there is a company named Onan that produces electrical generators. I remember seeing the name on a building next to a runway at some airport and thinking to myself that were I the CEO of that outfit, I would surely change the name.

The thing I find most interesting is how the punishment for onanism has changed over the generations. For Onan’s generation, the punishment was death. For my generation, the punishment was blindness!

All Hail The .32!!

Once upon a time, I bought a semi-automatic pistol. I was so enamored of it that I wrote a glowing review of the pistol. I should have waited before writing the review. Not too long after that, I got rid of the pistol. I am back to owning only revolvers.

I have a few revolvers in various calibers, ranging from a five-shot .22 Magnum derringer to a five-shot .45 Long Colt/.410 bore, with a few calibers in between. The pistol that is the most fun is the Smith and Wesson Model 29, the .44 Magnum pistol featured in the Dirty Harry movies. To avoid shaking myself to death, I train with .44 Special rounds. However, at the end of the training session, I fire off six rounds of .44 Magnum. When I finish, I almost always find at least two people looking over my shoulder and asking “What the hell was that?”

The big bores are pretty uncomfortable as everyday carry (EDC) weapons. My big bores are scattered around the house, hidden in locations that might prove useful in the event of an attempted home invasion. My EDC weapons are the .38 Specials. But that changed just this month.

Some years ago, we were looking for a pistol for Kathy, one that packed more punch than the .22 Magnum but didn’t provide the recoil of a .38 Special. After a considerable amount of research, we settled on a .32 H&R Magnum produced by Charter Arms. This pistol can handle a .32 S&W Short, a .32 S&W Long, or a .32 H&R Magnum. The Short is a useless cartridge, as it is underpowered compared with the other two. But the other two cartridges pass the James Bond Test.

What is the James Bond Test, you ask? In the early Bond novels, our hero carried a Beretta 418, which chambered a .25 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) round. Quite a few readers wrote to Ian Fleming to let him know that a manly, sophisticated agent like 007 would not be caught dead with such a wimpy handgun. (In the bad old days of misogyny, it was referred to as a “lady’s gun”.) As a result, Fleming upgraded Bond to the Walther PPK 7.65mm (.32 ACP). Now the .32 S&W Long is a more powerful cartridge than the .32 ACP, and the .32 H&R Magnum is more powerful than both of the others. Thus the little revolver outperforms James Bond’s iconic semi-automatic pistol with either cartridge, and passes the test. Take that, Jimmy boy!

Kathy prefers the .32 S&W Long, because it has very little recoil. I have fired her pistol with the H&R Magnum load, and I find the recoil to be less than that of a .38 Special. So I finally convinced myself to buy the same revolver Kathy carries.

It was easy to adjust from a .38 Special to the .32 H&R Magnum. It is very comfortable to carry. I use an outside-the-waistband holster, covered in the summer by a Hawaiian shirt. Comfort is key: if it is not comfortable, you will not wear it, which means you will not have it when you need it. My guess is that when it is no longer Hawaiian shirt weather, I will wear a jacket, or go for an inside-the-waistband holster.

If you are thinking about an EDC pistol, you might want to consider the .32 H&R Magnum.

PTSD

You expect certain types of weather depending upon where you live. If you live in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, or Nebraska you are not surprised when tornadoes pop up. If you live in a desert area you expect boiling hot days and freezing nights. If you live in the Rockies you expect snow in the winter, and in eastern North Carolina you expect hot and humid days during the summer.

If you live in the mountains, the one thing you do not expect is damage from a hurricane.

This is my second sojourn in the mountains. I lived in the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia from 1982 to 1989, and have lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina since 2022. Both times I experienced the wrath of a hurricane’s remnant. Once, I could understand; twice seems absurd.

In 1985 we experienced a very wet two weeks in the Virginia mountains. We lived within sight of the Jackson River (which, a few miles to our east, joined with the Cowpasture River to form the headwaters of the James River). About ten miles upstream a dam had been built for the purpose of flood control. The two weeks of rain filled the lake behind the dam to full pool. So when the remnants of Hurricane Juan decided to stall over us and drop an excessive quantity of rain on our waterlogged land, we experienced a flood. The folks in charge of the dam had no choice but to release water, which exacerbated an already dangerous situation.

Our house, though only a few yards from the Jackson River, was up on a hill, and so we did not experience any damage. Many of our friends were not so lucky. I saw very little damage from downed trees, but I did see quite a few hunting camps floating down the Jackson. The trees that did come down did so because of soggy ground. Wind was not a problem. The one thing I remember most of all was the major inconvenience caused by bridges that were hit by debris. These bridges had to be closed until they were inspected and pronounced structurally sound. Bridges are the lifelines in mountain communities. I relearned that lesson last year.

On September 25, 2024, the rain began, and continued through the 26th. The 27th brought us the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which was more rain, and a surprisingly high level of wind. I wrote about our experience with this storm last year. The wind brought down hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of trees. The Forest Service estimates that Buncombe County (excluding the city of Asheville) lost 40% of its tree cover, or some 89,440 acres of tree cover. And Kathy and I did experience damage from a downed tree. But despite the loss of all those trees, and the roads blocked by them and bridges damaged by them, I consider the major damage to be due to the flooding. In fact, Kathy and I never refer to “the hurricane”: for us, it is “the flood”.

Bridge damage was a major problem for us. I work south of the Swannanoa River but live north of it. There are five ways I can cross that river, but for quite some time, only one way, the one most out-of-the-way, was available.

Again, we live far enough up the side of the mountain so that the flooding of the Swannanoa River (27.33 feet above flood stage) did not affect us. Many people, though, were not so lucky. Our River Arts district is a bit below the point where the Swannanoa River joins the French Broad River, and at that point the river was 24.67 feet above flood stage. You can imagine the damage.

I have focused on the flood, because that is what impressed me most about the storm. The wind, however, has given many of my friends a case of post traumatic stress disorder. I can understand why, just by looking at the number of houses that were damaged by falling trees. I know a family that packs up and decamps to a hotel downtown whenever the National Weather Service issues a wind advisory. Others (including me) lose sleep at night if the wind howls.

Why am I dredging up old news that I have already chronicled in the past? June first marked the official beginning of Hurricane Season. Coincidentally, it marked the official beginning of PTSD Season.

Water, Water, Everywhere!

I had planned on writing about the return of the cicadas, but upon reflection, I decided against it. We are at ground zero for the hatching of this brood, and they have been aggravating my tinnitus for the past couple of weeks. But, so what? The nymphs sleep in the ground for about 17 years, come to life, exchange genetic material with their mates, deposit the eggs, then die. A few weeks later the eggs hatch and the nymphs drop to the ground to begin their 17 year dirt nap. When Kathy asked me what purpose they served, I had no answer. This convinced me that the cicadas really weren’t worthy of more than a paragraph.

So let’s talk about my recent Medicare check-up.

I go to MAHEC, the Mountain Area Health and Education Center. It is staffed primarily by residents, supervised by fully qualified doctors. The doctor I have visited for three years now, Dr. Dizon, is finishing his residency this summer and will be employed after that by our local hospital, Mission Hospital. He told me that, because my health is good and my visits are uncomplicated, I will probably be assigned to a brand new resident. That doesn’t bother me at all. These guys and gals are learning the trade, and tend to spend a good bit of time with their patients. I have certainly been very pleased with Dr. Dizon.

I was less than pleased with the results of two blood tests, tests that measured kidney function. I was borderline on each test. Dr. Dizon noted that these test results were not terribly bad, given my age. Still, he said, we should try a little experiment. The most common cause for these low test results is dehydration. Let’s try a little re-hydration, then repeat the tests.

That made perfect sense. At that time, my daily intake of fluids was two cups of coffee in the morning, and two soft drinks in the afternoon or evening. Kathy has been bugging me for a long time about my liquid intake. This is the same Kathy who has a glass of water in every room of the house, and who has every cup holder in her car filled with cups of water.

I love coffee, but I limit my intake, and not because the caffeine keeps me awake. I could drink a cup of coffee at 11:00 PM, and be sound asleep by 11:10 PM. I limit my intake because that 11:00 PM cup of coffee would wake me up at 1:00 AM for a head call. As a friend once told me, you never buy a cup of coffee, you just rent it.

The soft drink I prefer is root beer, which has no caffeine in it. The local restaurants generally do not have root beer, and my alternative, Coca Cola, does contain caffeine. The problem with caffeine and, for that matter, alcohol, is that both turn off the production of vasopressin, our anti-diuretic hormone. Do you remember those days of our youth, when you could go to a bar and knock back three or four beers before needing to hit the head? And after that, we would make two head calls for every beer? That is the interaction of alcohol and vasopressin. Without vasopressin, liquids just go through you.

I don’t sleep that many hours every night, and I prefer not to have those few hours interrupted by the need to tap a kidney. And so I limited my intake of fluids, especially those containing caffeine.

I decided to follow Dr. Dizon’s advice. I still have only two cups of coffee in the morning, but I’ve nearly tripled my intake of root beer. (Kathy suggested I cut back on the root beer and use water instead, but I prefer the taste of root beer to water.) After a month of this new liquid diet, the vampires at MAHEC drew another blood sample. And it worked. My kidney function tests have returned to normal.

There is a downside to this new diet of mine. I make a minimum of two head calls during my sleeping hours. And my first head call upon awakening? Well, Kathy now refers to me as Austin Powers.

Triggernometry

The parcel arrived this March. It contained a book and a hand-written, undated note. It was confusing: a date really would have helped. The note was from parents of former students of mine, thanking me for teaching their kids and offering me a book that they found in a bookstore in St. Louis this summer. This summer? I received the book in March!

I began piecing together clues: a reference to the fact that they will miss me at school next year (I left that school three years ago), and an oblique reference to Covid-19. The return address on the parcel was in their daughter’s name, but her last name was different. When did she graduate? Has she had enough time to finish college and get married?

My detective work led me to believe that the parents wrote the note five years ago, and handed both book and note to their daughter to mail to me. She graduated from college, was married, and moved to another state. In unpacking at her new digs she found the book and note, searched the internet for my new address, and mailed it to me.

Well, that puzzle kept boredom at bay yet one more day.

I have just finished reading the book, and it is the best book I have read thus far this year. The book is Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters, by Eugene Cunningham. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press, it carried a copyright date of 1934. I was not familiar with the author (born 1896, died 1957), but I could tell he had a sense of humor. The extended subtitle of the book is “with Technical Notes on Leather Slapping as a Fine Art, gathered from many a Loose Holstered Expert over the Years”.

Cunningham was a writer of westerns, but he did publish three works of nonfiction, one of which is Triggernometry. He was fortunate in that he was able to meet several of the gunslingers that he wrote about, and for some of those who were no longer with us, he was able to interview people who knew them. Of course, some of the profiles are based purely on the research he conducted. Most of the gunslingers he profiled were Texans, either folks who were born elsewhere but eventually settled in Texas, or native Texans, or those who spent the bulk of their lives in Texas. I forgive him his parochialism: he lived in El Paso for a long time.

I recognized many of the names: Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid. I learned about new heroes: John R. Hughes, James B. Gillett, Captain Bill McDonald, and others. I read about a miscarriage of justice (Tom Horn). And this just scratches the surface.

Throughout the book Cunningham presents the facts. Every now and again you read his opinion as to what the facts mean, but his main goal is to present fact, not rumor, not inflated reputation.

He confirms what I have come to believe about the Earps: they, and in particular Wyatt, were not as portrayed in the 1950s television series, the theme song of which I can still remember. For one thing, the television show never mentioned that Wyatt Earp was at times a pimp and at one time ran a house of ill repute. The clan seemed to walk the line of legality, spending time on both sides of it. While Cunningham describes the Earps’ participation in the shootout at the OK Corral, it is in a chapter on Billy Breakenridge, “Tombstone’s Deputy”. The Earps did not merit a chapter of their own. As for Wyatt, Cunningham describes him as an “efficient killer”.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I long for the westerns of my youth. Try to find a good old shoot-’em-up western on television these days. And maybe I’m just tired of living in a world where the only alpha males are street thugs and gang members. But for whatever reason, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.

New Car Fever

After driving two hand-me-downs and one used car (which I purchased for a whopping $600), I decided it was time for a brand-spanking-new-off-the-showroom-floor car. So it happened that in 1976 I bought a new Fiat 128. That boxy little car was a delight to drive when it was running well, which was some of the time. We traded it in six years later, when it was in need of its third valve job. One good thing about that car: it cured me of any desire to own a European sports car.

My second new car was a 1980 Chevy Citation. We were expecting our first child and we figured that the two-door 1972 Mercury Capri would be too inconvenient for dealing with a car seat. We had good luck with the Citation, so much good luck that, when it was time to get rid of the Fiat, we decided on another Chevy Citation. The count stands at three new cars.

In the spring of 1987 we were driving back to the mountains of Virginia after a couple of weeks at North Myrtle Beach. We lived in the mountains: who needs air conditioning in a car in the mountains? I guess we didn’t think that one through because two weeks at the beach, even in the spring, really required A/C. The two girls were in car seats in the back seat of the 1980 Citation, my wife was quite pregnant with our third child in the front seat, and every square inch of the Citation was packed with the detritus associated with two kiddies. All of them were asleep, leaving me with my own thoughts: a dangerous proposition. I was ruminating on the two weeks without air conditioning, the fact that the car that once seemed so spacious would simply not do for two children, much less three, and that I had to do something about it. We were about 65 miles from our home, passing through the southern part of Roanoke, Virginia, when I saw a sign for a GM dealership. I hit the turn signal, which awakened my spouse. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I’m buying a new car.” I pulled into the dealership, and a pleasant fellow came over to the car and said, “How can I help you today?” I replied, “I want the biggest G** d***ed car you have.” Without missing a beat he said “That would be the station wagon.”

And so it came to pass that I bought a brand new 1987 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon. It was a glorious vehicle: eight gas-guzzling cylinders, and a Holley four-barrel carburetor. Nine miles per gallon in town. I never complained about the mileage. When I was T-boned in 1995 by a 1989 Ford Mustang doing 45 miles per hour, my only damage was a subdural hematoma in my left leg. The wagon was totaled, of course, but all that steel in the door saved me.

That was the last brand-spanking-new-off-the-showroom-floor car that I owned, until late last year.

My ex-wife convinced me that a brand new car was a bad deal. They depreciate significantly when you drive them off the dealer’s lot. Why not let someone else take the depreciation hit? That made perfectly good sense, and was my philosophy for decades.

Given my experience with the 1995 accident, I tended to buy vehicles with safety in mind. Eventually I ended up with a used 1999 Ford Ranger, which began my love affair with pick-up trucks. I traded that one in for a used 2013 Ford F-150. I owned that truck for nine years. It had maybe 40,000 miles on it when I bought it. It died last year, courtesy of a tulip poplar tree that could not withstand the winds associated with Hurricane Helene. It had 275,000 miles on it, and was just getting broken in.

Hurricane Helene hit us at the end of September, and thanks to a son-in-law, I was able to borrow a Prius for awhile. I am not complaining: a free loaner is a wonderful thing. But that is not a car for a tall person. Kathy ended up buying another car first (she lost her car to the same tulip poplar tree), so I inherited her rented Jeep. Another fun car to drive, but not enough steel to suit me. By late November or early December I began to get serious about car shopping. It was pretty easy for me: I wanted another truck, and if possible, I wanted another F-150.

We were down to the wire at Ford of Spartanburg. The choice was simple: a used F-150 that looked a good bit like the truck that died on September 27, or a brand new sporty version of the F-150. I was ready to buy the used one, when Kathy suggested that a new car warranty would be nice. And with that, nearly four decades of buying used cars came to an end.

I am still getting used to the new truck. It has too much computer to suit me. The first time I tried to change lanes quickly, without a turn signal, the truck fought me. It took awhile to figure out how to disable that alleged safety feature. Ditto for the front collision assist. Ditto for the rear collision assist. I keep finding features I don’t want. Whatever happened to the skill requirement for driving a motor vehicle? Oh, well, just count me as one old curmudgeon who isn’t happy with all the change in the world.

But also count me as one old curmudgeon who enjoys his new F-150.

Worst Book of the Year

I was born in Johnston County, North Carolina, and lived there continuously until I left for college. Although I have not lived there for many decades, I still feel an attachment to the place and take pride in its celebrities. As best I can tell, the county has four major celebrities, living and dead: film star Ava Gardner; pop band The O’Kaysions; country musician Jim Thornton, the Barefoot Boy from Broadslab; and Percy Flowers, distiller and purveyor of quality, untaxed spirits.

Type “Ava Gardner” into the Amazon search bar under “books” and 16 web pages full of books on various aspects of her life appear. A similar search for “The O’Kaysions” yields no books, but three web pages of their music. Jim Thornton, who had a regional following, has no biography as best I can tell. He deserves one. He was an original.

That leaves Percy Flowers. Amazon shows two biographies of Flowers: a 2013 paperback from author Perry D. Sullivan (which must be out of print, given the $99.20 price), and the more recent (2024)  J. Percy Flowers: The Master Distiller, by Oakley Dean Baldwin, and priced at $15.99. I bought it. I read it. I regret it. It is my candidate for the worst book that I have read this year.

I could say I knew Percy Flowers, but a more accurate description is that I saw him once when I was a young lad. He was in my father’s television shop, either buying a television or getting one repaired. I had a brief conversation with his brother Jimmy (or Jimmie, if the author of this book is correct) sometime during my late teens or early twenties. I was driving to Kenly one night on Highway 42 when my 1966 Rambler Rebel crapped out. I threw it in neutral and aimed for the nearest driveway, coasting to a stop in front of a nice brick home owned by Jimmy Flowers. He let me use his phone to call my father and was a gracious host while I waited for my father to arrive and sort out my car problems.

I was hoping that the Baldwin book would be an informative biography. It is not. It is, at best, a 50-page manuscript padded and stretched into a 200+ page book. The fact that it received a review in the Raleigh News and Observer is surprising: the book is self-published, and most newspapers do not have the space to review self-published books. I should have read the review a bit more carefully. The review features snippets from Flowers’ life, as recounted in the book, but refrains from passing judgment on the quality of the book.

One of the reasons the book needs padding is that there are few details about Flowers’ early life. The introduction to the book starts on page 11, and the first several pages focus on Flowers’ ancestors and transfers of deeds to land, and a brief history of moonshining in the colony and state. Percy Flowers makes his first significant appearance on page 18, as an eleven-year-old. By the end of that page he is sixteen years old, and running from his father’s wrath. He escapes into the woods, encounters a moonshiner, and begins to learn his craft. This ends on page 20, where we learn that it takes him a year to perfect his craft. But the very next paragraph takes us to several years in the future, after Percy has given up farming as his major source of income and has replaced it with moonshining. He now has employees in the business. That is too great a leap for a biography. What I wanted to know is, did his daddy whup the tar out of him when he came home that night from his first moonshining experience? 

The lack of detail and the absence of some sort of chronological order make this book hard to enjoy. The lack of detail inspired the need to stretch the manuscript out. One of the devices that the author uses is double spacing between lines. I have no problem with that: my eyes are old. I do have a problem with triple - to - quintuple spacing between paragraphs. It was rare to encounter a page that had three full paragraphs. This gives the pages an amateurish look, which is fitting. One chapter was eight pages long, and was nothing more than a listing of Percy’s “rap sheet,” his adverse encounters with the law. The author admits the listing is probably incomplete. The author did not admit up front that the rap sheet included offenses by his relatives. 

Speaking of relatives, the author includes information on the next generation of relatives and their misadventures and brushes with the law. All interesting to the Flowers family, I’m sure, but not to one looking for a biography of the King of the Moonshiners.

And, of course, what better way is there to fill up printed pages than by recounting the history of moonshining that the author (a West Virginia native) had in his family, on both sides. That is probably of zero interest to anyone looking for a decent biography of Percy Flowers.

We humans are complex characters, and Percy Flowers was as complex as any of us. I knew him by reputation, and that was mixed. A few people I knew really didn’t like his vocation, but many people I knew considered him a bit of a Robin Hood. He deserved a better biography than this.

Now if I could only find a cheap, second-hand copy of the Sullivan biography.

Reflections on a Stapler

I earned my PhD in August of 1978, and began my professional career in October of that year. My first job was with a company that no longer exists, Westvaco Corporation. Among the office supplies issued to me was an ACCO 30 stapler. It was a heavy piece of steel, with a strip of tape on the top that said “DO NOT REMOVE FROM ROOM _ _ _” (I forget the number of the room). I never had heard of ACCO, only Swingline Staplers. Interestingly, ACCO owns the Swingline brand.

A few years later I was promoted and transferred to another laboratory. When I moved, I took the ACCO 30 with me. I justified this simply: Westvaco owned that stapler, and I was just moving from one Westvaco location to another. That’s not stealing. The interesting part of this story is why I had become so attached to that stapler. That, too, is simple: it never jammed. It may be that there was so much steel in that machine that a puny staple just had to succumb to the stapler. Whatever the reason, I had no intention of parting with that stapler.

A few years later I changed companies, joining the chemical division of Georgia-Pacific, which was incorporated at Georgia-Pacific Resins, Inc. By this time I had no reservations about taking the ACCO 30 with me. Surely it was fully depreciated by now, and of no value whatsoever to my former employer.

The stapler settled into my home office. I had one problem with it: the strip of tape that said “DO NOT REMOVE FROM ROOM _ _ _” (I still do not remember the number of the room). I thought it time, after 11 years, to remove that piece of tape that reminded me of my crime. Unfortunately, or perversely, fortunately, that tape was manufactured back in a time when tape adhesive actually adhered. The paper delaminated, but the adhesive held. To this day, there is a strip of delaminated paper firmly adhered to the back of the stapler. It will be there forever.

The ACCO 30 has been in every one of my home offices since 1989. It outlived the two companies I mentioned. Westvaco merged with the Mead Corporation, forming MeadWestvaco, which did not last very long. The combined company sold off the papers business group, forming a new company called NewPage. The linerboard and saturating kraft mill in North Charleston, SC was sold to Kapstone Paper and Packaging. The chemical division in North Charleston was sold to another company, which also acquired the paper chemicals portion of Georgia-Pacific Resins, Inc., my second employer! What was left of MeadWestvaco merged with Rock-Tenn, forming the company that sends me my pension check: WestRock.

The really interesting thing, to me, is that in 2012 ACCO bought MeadWestvaco’s Consumer and Office Products business. Hence the company that once owned my stapler is now partially owned by the company that produced my stapler.

I have to stop now. I can’t keep up with who owns what without a scorecard.

Cup Culling Time

Kathy and I are in our retirement home, even though I have not yet fully retired. We’ve both lived in smaller houses, and we’ve both lived in larger houses. This house is a bit like the final choice of Goldilocks: it is just right. Three bedrooms (one of which functions as Kathy’s office), two baths, and a half-finished basement that is my domain (office and workshop): I think it is perfect.

Kathy disagrees. She has two problems with the house: both the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen were last updated in the 1980s, and the kitchen is too small. Now, the 80s was a great decade, so I vote for not upgrading either bathroom or kitchen. (A funny thought just occurred to me. It seems the decades I really enjoyed were 30 years apart: the 50s, 80s, and the 10s. I need one more data point to confirm this trend.) As to the kitchen’s size, well, she may have a point.

I guess you would call it a galley kitchen, which isn’t large to begin with. One of the points that attracted me to the house was the booth built into the kitchen. We eat most of our meals in that booth, and I am sitting in it now while typing this screed. It is a great feature. But having a booth in a kitchen cuts out valuable counter and cabinet space. That is Kathy’s major complaint.

That does not worry me, for two reasons. First, during my single years I became accustomed to eating out, and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings a bit if the kitchen served only to warm up a breakfast or a lunch, with the major meal prepared for us (and the dirty dishes cleaned up for us) by someone else. Second, it was never my intention to spend my retirement years slaving over a hot microwave oven. The kitchen is big enough.

The cabinet space is becoming problematic, though. Which leads me to believe it is time for another coffee cup cull.

Ah, coffee cups. Companies give them away as promotions, friends give them as gifts, we pick them up because the graphics on the cups strikes our fancy. I remember, 30 or so years ago, donating a specific amount of money to a public television station just so I could receive a TARDIS thermochromic cup. For those of you not in the know, a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) is a time machine employed by the Time Lord known simply as the Doctor, from the television show Doctor Who. A thermochromic mug changes colors depending upon the temperature. The TARDIS cup had a TARDIS painted on it, with thermochromic pigments. When the cup was filled with a hot liquid, the TARDIS disappeared. As the liquid was consumed and the cup cooled, the TARDIS would materialize, just as it did in the television show. I loved that cup. Unfortunately, someone put it in the dishwasher one night, and the heated drying cycle zapped the thermochromicity right out of the cup. It never changed colors again, and eventually ended up (as one of my 1980s icons would have put it) on the ash heap of history.

We last had a coffee cup cull when we moved into this house, two and one-half years ago. With limited cabinet space, we felt we could devote only one cabinet to coffee cups, and the result of that decision was that both Goodwill and the Habitat for Humanity Restore ended up with a surfeit of very fine cups and mugs. I have not performed an accurate count, but my estimate is that we now have something in the ballpark of way over yonder too many cups and mugs.

The two cups you see at the top of this post are mine. (I actually have a third, a purple mug with the letters “NOC” in black imprinted on the mug, but Kathy is the one who uses that mug, even though she has her own mug from the Nantahala Outdoor Center.) I like the one with the owl on the bare branch, a full moon behind him, and it used to be my daily cup. It has a Halloween feel to it, but without the orange-colored theme. I still use it, from time to time, when the Grrrrumpy mug is in the dishwasher. The Grrrumpy mug is my current every-day mug, for a specific reason: Grumpy is the name my grandchildren have given to me. (Actually, my children gave it to me when they became parents, and it does seem to fit.) Every time I drink from that mug I think of my grand kids who are scattered quite literally around the globe.

The other 30 or 40 mugs in the cabinet are Kathy’s. And that, of course, is the problem with cup culling time: it is my idea, but Kathy’s cups. That doesn’t always work out well.

The best argument I can put forward is that culling the seldom-used cups is cheaper than a kitchen make-over. Methinks Kathy prefers the make-over.

Bah, Humbug!

This is normally the time of year that I give my “Book of the Year” award, which seldom goes to a book published in the same year. Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to do that this year. I read pitifully few books this year – eight in all – and all of them in the first half of the year. For the first time in my teaching career I am not teaching any mathematics courses. I am the new chemistry teacher at the school, and the latter half of the year has been devoted to getting up to speed with my four chemistry classes. Most of my reading this year was devoted to chemistry.

The book that I found most enjoyable this year was The Sky Club by Terry Roberts. Roberts is a local writer. The book was set in the late 1920s – early 1930s in Asheville, and the Sky Club (a real place) has since been converted into condos. We drove by it a few times, as it is near Helen’s Bridge, but there is not much to see, except for the massive gate that protects the inhabitants.

During the latter half of the year the thing I missed most was satellite radio. My old F-150 had its satellite dial set to channel 71, 40s Junction, a channel devoted to late 1930s and 1940s big band music. Hurricane Helene destroyed my truck, and while the radio still worked, it was no fun sitting in a seat covered with little glass fragments while listening to my jams. I do have a small satellite radio designed for use in a house, but I canceled the subscription to that years ago: radio really is for the car.

I bought a new F-150 in early November, and while it was definitely nice to be sitting in a vehicle that was designed for someone taller than 4 feet 11 inches, my major excitement was directed at the Sirius XM radio. 40S Junction, here I come! So you can imagine my disappointment at finding Christmas music oozing from channel 71.

They do this every year: they dump the good music on channel 71 and replace it with Christmas music. It used to be that they waited to do this until after Thanksgiving. Then it was the week of Thanksgiving. Now, it appears that they do it on November 1.

Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong with Christmas music, other than the fact that I don’t particularly like hearing it over and over and over again for two months. They just start way too early. It is overkill.

But wait, because I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that I was not able to sign up for my old Sirius XM plan at the old price. Surprise, surprise! Apparently, they ditched my plan some time ago, and I was grandfathered in. Now that I have to choose a new plan, I find that the selection of channels is expanded, including many channels I never listen to. (Baseball on the radio is fine, but I don’t need all those other sports channels that I now find I am paying for.) And along with an expanded selection of channels is an expanded monthly fee. (Which is another thing I don’t like. I used to pay annually and save a little money. Now it is a monthly charge, with no discount that I could find for paying up front.) Inflation did not pass Sirius XM by.

The good news? Way up in the expanded channels, channel 296, to be exact, I found 40s Junction! That is its new home until the Christmas music nonsense ends.

I am so happy! I will not have to give up Guy Lombardo for New Year’s Eve!

The Proof Is in The Pudding

I admired the late James Jackson Kilpatrick. He led an interesting life. He began his career as a newspaperman after earning a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1941. By 1950 he was the editor of The Richmond News Leader, succeeding the sainted Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman. A conservative, Kilpatrick was strongly opposed, on constitutional grounds, to the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He laid out his arguments in his first book, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (1957). He advocated for the doctrine of interposition, which he traced back to Jefferson and Madison, in 1798.

In 1964 he began his syndicated column, A Conservative View, and he gave up his editorial duties in 1966. From that time on until his death in 2010, he earned his living as a man of letters, writing columns and books, appearing on television, and giving lectures.

If you are a certain age, you remember his television appearances during the point-counterpoint segment of 60 Minutes. This was always the last segment of the show, pitting the conservative Kilpatrick against the liberal Nicholas von Hoffman, and more memorably, the liberal Shana Alexander. And if you do not remember the show, you may well remember the parody of the show that was a regular skit on Saturday Night Live. Jane Curtin played the Shana Alexander role (“Dan, you pompous ass!”) while Dan Aykroyd played the James J. Kilpatrick role (“Jane, you ignorant slut!”).

I once attended a Kilpatrick lecture, and he commented on the point-counterpoint segment. He said that he despaired of ever convincing Alexander of the superior characteristics of the capitalist system. Then, one day, he found that he had, indeed, convinced her: she left the show for a higher-paying job!

Towards the end of his career, Kilpatrick devoted his columns to only two topics: the courts, and the English language. In the mid-1980s he published a book entitled The Writer’s Art that provided a catalog of his insights on writing well. One of the chapters was entitled “My Crotchets and Your Crotchets” and consisted of a compilation of mistakes writers made in the choice of specific words. One example was the confusion surrounding “affluent” and “effluent”. I was working at a paper mill at the time: I knew the difference. Another was the frivolous way that “absolute” words were treated. For example, “unique” means one of a kind. Something is either unique, or it is not. To this day, my skin crawls when I hear someone refer to a thing as “very unique”. “Unique” does not admit of a modifier.

I have a couple of crotchets that Kilpatrick did not include in his book. Sadly, I acquired these crotchets after repeated exposure to mid-level and senior-level managers of corporations who really should have known better, but for some reason did not. These two phrases were at one time trendy, and we all know managers tend to be trendy. But they drive me bananas. The phrases, that is. And, come to think of it, the managers as well.

The first is “walk the talk”. Taken by itself, the phrase is meaningless, a sure sign of a modest if not a poor education. Or it could be a sign of terminal trendiness. The phrase should have been written as “he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?” Even this sounds silly. What it refers to is a fellow who is pretty glib when it comes to bragging about his abilities, but a fellow about whom we have doubts as to whether he can deliver on his promises. (I prefer the more succinct “Put up or shut up.”) Apparently “he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk” became too much of a chore for mid-level and upper-level managers to handle, so these captains of industry chopped the phrase down to something they could remember.

As aggravating as that phrase is to me, it pales beside “the proof is in the pudding”. This is total nonsense. Imagine Euclid beginning his proof of Book I Proposition 15, that vertical angles are congruent, with “We begin with a plum pudding.” The original sentence was “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” That does make sense. Is the pudding I made tastier than the pudding you made? We can answer the question with a few bites of each. This phrase is historical, and today is never used to judge the quality of puddings. Is the automobile that I designed superior to last year’s version? Let’s take it out on the track and find out. It is an argument against theories and an argument for hands-on testing. So why did this reasonable phrase get reduced to the nonsensical title of this post? See the paragraph above.

I am not happy about the extent to which our language is being corrupted. I have learned, however, that the world is largely indifferent to my unhappiness. And that applies doubly to mid-level and upper-level managers, to whom I am equally indifferent.

Well, That Certainly Was Exciting

Kathy and I are not preppers, but we do take certain precautions. We keep a few gallons of bottled water on hand at all times. We keep a reasonable amount of cash in the safe. And, when we bought this house in Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina, I had a Generac whole-house generator installed, powered by natural gas. These were reasonable preparations for the standard natural disasters that I figured we might face.

Then along came Hurricane Helene.

We had warnings. School was canceled Thursday, the day before the storm hit. I looked at our preparations and decided that my only additional preparation was to fill the F-150 with gasoline, just in case we had to evacuate. That was somewhere in the ballpark of $85 worth of gasoline. I’m telling you, that F-150 has really improved with age: four years ago it only held $60 worth of gasoline.

The storm hit Friday morning. I got up around 5 AM and checked the house. All was well. No water in the basement, no water on the ceilings, just noise from the generator. I went back to bed. When I checked the house again at 7 AM, I had about 2 inches of water in the basement, leaks in the living room ceiling, a broken window (double-glazed, so it still kept the rain out), and the furious noises of a generator running and a storm such as I have never seen.

Kathy saw it first. A huge tulip poplar tree in the front yard had toppled. I do not know just how tall this tree was, but I know that when it fell over, going from east to west, it took out one of the handrails on the first set of steps from the driveway. But that wasn’t all it took out. After the handrail, it crushed Kathy’s car (which she had owned for just under a year), then totaled my beloved F-150, finally coming to rest on the trailer. The trailer also was totaled, but that was due, I think, to the massive limb that fell from the other tulip poplar tree, the one under which the trailer was parked, and coincidentally, the tree that the arborist had thinned out in the summer of ‘23.

We had coffee, waited for the storm to subside, and then assessed the damage.

We do not live in a floodplain. According to my handy dandy iPhone altimeter, we live at somewhere between 2100 and 2200 feet above sea level. (It has problems making up its mind.) The closest river, the Swannanoa River, is perhaps a quarter mile away, but at least 100 feet below us in altitude. The water in my basement was not due to any flooding. It was instead due to the fact that the storm circulation piled up water against the east side of the house, which is where the water entered the basement. Nothing I can do about that, other than eventually installing a French drain. Likewise the ceiling in the living room: the water seemed concentrated on the west end of the house. That is where the chimney is located. A roofer should be able to fix that. So the really big problem is the damage to vehicles. And before we can do anything about that, we have to remove a massive tree from all three.

We had electricity, courtesy of the Generac, but the water pressure was very low, and in fact, soon there was no water at all. That led me to recall the 3-3-3 rule which states that on average a human can survive without shelter in hostile weather (think Siberia) for about three hours, without water for about three days, and without food for about three weeks. Our shelter was secure, and we had food in the fridge and the freezer. Water would be the problem. We had less than 10 gallons potable on hand, and the normal human uses about 3.5 gallons per day.

Ah, the hot tub, which holds somewhere in the ball park of 300 gallons! We can use that to flush, and bathe.

And so we were set for survival. Various places around town were offering free food. When this mess is over and our restaurants are back in full swing, I am going to eat at Thai Kitchen and leave a healthy tip. We were offered free food there just in passing. The Apollo Flame Bistro uses natural gas for its stoves and ovens, and thus was able to offer healthy portions of lasagna for a very reasonable price. They were probably trying to sell all their food before it spoiled due to lack of refrigeration. We live near the hospital and visit it twice a day to download emails and check text messages. (Of course the internet was down, as were many cell towers). We had a very nice hot dinner there one evening, just before curfew, provided by some nice folks from down in Saluda.

And then, on Sunday, the generator stopped working. The repairman didn’t get it up and running again until Wednesday. In the interim, I borrowed an inverter from my stepson, connected it to a deep-cycle marine battery, and managed to keep cell phones and computers charged with it. Remarkably, it ran the fridge and freezer for another day before it finally overloaded. It really wasn’t designed to run appliances.

Even with the electricity restored, Kathy decided that playing pioneer woman was not for her. She visited friends in the Atlanta area, and had the luxury of taking a shower. (I have been getting along with dousing myself with a bucket of hot tub water. It works, though the water is no longer warm.) Kathy was able to get away courtesy of her daughter, who loaned us two cars. I am now keeping tabs on a half-dozen houses belonging to those who evacuated. The gasoline situation is no longer tight, so (thankfully!) I no longer need to siphon gasoline from the lifeless carcass of the F-150. My palate really isn’t accustomed to 87 octane.

Friday’s briefing by county and city officials, carried on Blue Ridge Public Radio, featured a PowerPoint presentation on the progress the city has made in restoring the water system. Yes, I know, a PowerPoint presentation is useless on a radio program, but then again, so is much of our city government: useless, that is. The fellows working 12-hour shifts around the clock are providing a great service, but there is no estimate as to when the water supply will be restored. Lucy and I are just taking it day by day.

There is one big takeaway for me from this disaster, aside from the note to myself to sign up for Starlink Internet. I haven’t seen a single government official or agency on the ground. Rumor has it that FEMA sent four managers here, but couldn’t spare any more from border duty. That is fine: the last thing we need is more managers. The people here have been helping themselves, and helping each other. And that is the takeaway: you are not on your own, if you have friends or a real community. But you are in deep doo-doo if your plan is to have the government help you. It can’t.

Our first indication that we might have a problem.

Kathy’s car.

The F-150 is under there, somewhere.

There it is!

Reflections on Fifty Years of Membership

Back in January of this year, I received a letter from the American Chemical Society (hereafter, the ACS) congratulating me on fifty years of membership. That was a bit of a shock. True, some fifteen years ago they sent me a congratulatory letter celebrating my 35 years of membership, and a nice ink pen. I remember thinking then that the numbers did not quite add up. Soon I discovered the reason why: I was counting my years of full-fledged ACS membership, while the national office included my years of membership in the student affiliate chapter at Wake Forest University. That was a nice touch: I helped found that chapter, and was a charter officer (secretary, I think).

The big question remains: where did the time go? Was it really fifty years ago, during my junior year, that a handful of us were scurrying around, lining up a faculty advisor, filling out paperwork, and waiting for our student affiliate charter?

I remember the night we received the charter, at a local section meeting. I had been up late most of the nights during that week, and the meeting, held on a Thursday night, featured the late Dr. Ernest Eliel, world-renowned stereochemist. He was German and had a magnificent deep, monotone voice. Unfortunately, he had an impressive nose to go with it, and the deep voice seemed to amplify in that spectacular resonating chamber of a nose. The long and the short of it is that I fell asleep during his lecture to the sound of his mellifluous voice. This was somewhat embarrassing, as I was seated in the front row.

A little more than a year later I was reminded of that evening. I was sitting at the end of a long table, with Dr. Eliel at the other end. It was my first meeting with my temporary graduate committee (temporary until I found a research advisor), and Dr. Eliel was its chairman. I remember thinking that I really hoped he didn’t remember my snoozing at his lecture.

The good news is that now I am an Emeritus Member of the ACS. In plain English that means I no longer have to pay dues, which are currently running at nearly $200 per year. I also get into ACS national and regional meetings for free. This is not too exciting, as I have not attended that many of these meetings over the years. I have attended more local section meetings than anything else, and was, during the late 1980s, a local section chairman.

The ACS provides a fair number of benefits. The first is the weekly magazine, which used to be named Chemical and Engineering News. A little bit ago, the brain trust at the Washington,, DC office decided to pull a Kentucky Fried Chicken on its members. Kentucky Fried Chicken used to be the name of a company, but the company decided to change its name to KFC. (I think it was the word “Fried” that caused the change.) For whatever reason, the ACS decided to change the name of the magazine to C&EN. I have no idea why. Could it be that the general public was frightened of the word “Chemistry”? Either way, I read every issue. Which means that, over the years, I’ve read at least 2,600 issues of the magazine.

The ACS provides me with discounted insurance, a discount at FedEx (which really helps Kathy’s chile pepper sauce business), discounts on rental cars, and several free episodes per year with SciFinder, a program that searches out papers in the chemical literature. There are other benefits, but these are the ones I am most familiar with.

This past Thursday evening I drove down to Furman University, the site of the September Western Carolinas Section meeting, and was treated to a free dinner. Each of the honorees (which included 60- and 70-year members as well as us 50-year babies) was given a few minutes to recount the highlights of his or her career. They gave me a nice certificate, took my picture, and welcomed me back to attend future local section meetings.

You know, I think I will do just that.

The Vein Mountain Road Tunnel

As a rule, I am not usually interested in tunnels. They are simply holes in the sides of mountains or beneath bodies of water. They are usually fairly short, and given the sad state of engineering these days (think The Big Dig in Boston), they may or may not be safe to traverse. True, I did write about the Swannanoa Gap Tunnel last September, but that tunnel had some history behind it, and it was quite difficult to find, two things that made it interesting. To be perfectly honest with you, I really do not know why the Vein Mountain Road Tunnel grabbed my attention.

Both the Swannanoa Gap Tunnel and the Vein Mountain Road Tunnel are located in McDowell County, North Carolina, the next county over to the east. The former is the longest hand-dug tunnel in North Carolina; the latter, a one-lane tunnel that sees traffic of approximately 600 vehicles per day. The little hill that the tunnel disembowels can hardly be called a mountain. The top of the hill sports train tracks running at a right angle to the tunnel. I do not know if the tracks are still in use. I can report that no train ran across the tunnel while we were there.

What originally caught my eye was the fact that this is a one-lane tunnel, with traffic lights on either end. The tunnel is so short that I am not really sure that the lights are necessary, but there they are. What caught my eye when we finally arrived at the tunnel was the fact that a creek runs through it. There was no time, or no money, or no reason to put a second lane of roadway through the tunnel, but the builders found it necessary to build a concrete channel to divert the creek through the tunnel. I believe that is the first time I have seen that.

The tunnel is otherwise unremarkable. During our brief visit several vehicle traversed the tunnel, so I believe the 600 vehicles per day number. The photos below show the tunnel from both sides, and the creek flowing through it.

Kathy tends to enjoy these little outings, but there is no doubt in my mind that the thing she enjoyed most about this trip was lunch at the Black Mountain Bistro in nearby Black Mountain, North Carolina. Lucy seemed to enjoy that stop, as well.

Postscript: The “vein” in the name of the tunnel refers to a vein of gold.

Our view of the tunnel, looking towards the east.

A clear view of the tunnel, looking towards the east. The creek is on the right.

A close-up view of the creek.

A view of the tunnel from the other side (towards the west).

The creek enters the tunnel towards the west, while one of those 600 vehicles per day enters the tunnel towards the east.

At the Black Mountain Bistro, Kathy eagerly anticipates her lunch.

Lucy enjoys being adored, and she is practically everywhere we go.