I bought a car. Red. Compact. Wagon. Without the ton of features most of them come with. Another VW Jetta. I hated it — buying the car. The negotiating. The trade in. The trips the salesman made back and forth between where we were sitting to some sales manager in the corner. I just hated […]
Yearly Archives: 2010
The Weather Curmudgeon
Wed, 24 Feb 2010, 08:42 AM (-06:00)
It’s cold outside today, as cold in Central Texas for the weather curmudgeon as it is in northern Ohio where he imagines his son might be trudging across campus soon. (Although the weather curmudgeon privately acknowledges that he hasn’t the faintest idea about his son’s schedule.) The weather curmudgeon stands at the patio door surveying […]
Precipitation, Science and Toyota
Tue, 23 Feb 2010, 06:52 PM (-06:00)
When it rains, my car gets wet, the inside and the outside. And after a while of course it starts to smell. This has been a problem for a while. Trouble is, we’ve just come out of a two-year drought, and by the time I figured out I had a systematic problem that the dealer’s […]
Wintery Mix
Tue, 23 Feb 2010, 09:44 AM (-06:00)
The weathermen called for cold weather today with a possibility of snow. On the radio (and certainly on the TV too?), they talked and talked about dropping temperatures and projected lows and the possibility of 4 inches of snow accumulation. The paper said it, too. In big block letters across the top of the metro […]
Gripey/Whiney
Thu, 18 Feb 2010, 06:57 PM (-06:00)
I had something to say today — a gripy/whiney thing that came in these 3 parts: (a) What The Hell?, (b) The Root of All Evil and (c) How I Choose to Act. But given that some guy has just today flown his plane into an IRS building in northwest Austin — some guy with […]
Amateur Hour+
Wed, 17 Feb 2010, 09:02 AM (-06:00)
We did some work in the yard last week between cold spell #1 and cold spell #2 while it was sunny and warm outside. My brother bundled brush. I ran to the hardware store for lumber for another square-foot garden. Trudy prepared the soil, mixing vermiculite into the loamy garden blend sitting in bags in […]
Reporting Home
Wed, 17 Feb 2010, 12:40 AM (-06:00)
At the hotel now. Will explore campus tomorrow. More interesting info soon. So he said back in the fall when he arrived on campus for the start of his freshman year. More info soon… We looked forward to it. And two days later it arrived. So far so good. Getting settled in. Hopefully there will […]
Outside Turn
Tue, 16 Feb 2010, 08:55 AM (-06:00)
We left my brother at the starting line. He gave Trudy his sweatpants, and we agreed that we’d wait at mile 6 on the outside of the curve to take his jacket. It was cold, but it was going to be a nice day, and anyway he runs in snow and ice and 18 degree […]
Dr. Broucke
Thu, 11 Feb 2010, 09:27 PM (-06:00)
1. Why My mother reached over from her chair and picked up one of the books on the table: Nonlinear Ordinary Differential Equations. I bought it the day before along with some other technical books at a used book store. “Why do you need this?” she asked. Not a bad question, actually. I’m a fifty […]
Meatball
Wed, 10 Feb 2010, 04:47 PM (-06:00)
I wore a NASA sweatshirt going out to dinner the other night. I’ve become quite a wimp for cold weather, and the night was nippy, and the sweatshirt was swinging there on a hanger before me as I pondered my stay-warm options — a plain grey pull-over sweatshirt with a NASA meatball emblazoned on the […]