Sunday, April 30, 2006

In the Vineyard

Heather came to our house for Sweety's birthday and on Saturday afternoon Sue organized a trip to Los Pinos Ranch Winery in Pittsburg (Texas). This is a nice little winery in a very unexpected location in Northeast Texas. They were hosting the East Texas Wine and Food Festival. They had representatives from other East Texas Wineries (who knew there were so many?) along with food from area country clubs and restaurants.

We have been there several times in the past, and the winery appears to be flourishing. It has many more vines than the last time we visited. We like their wine as they have developed several styles which are easy to sip and not too dry for my taste. Sweety liked the Pinky Tuscandero and Heather liked Sweet Rodeo Red. My favorite was the Syrah.

This is Heather studying the grapevines.


Sue's back and Doug's front. This picture should have been taken from the opposite direction!



Steve and Eve applaud the musical entertainment. BTW, Eve was drinking WATER!!



I'm looking for a potty.

When it started getting cool, we headed home for birthday cake. Eve made a wonderful chocolate praline cake that made you want to slap your mammy.Posted by Picasa

Monday, April 24, 2006

Fly Fishing on the Little Mo

We finally got a weekend without storms in Arkansas, so Sweety and I went with Sue, Doug, Eve and Steve to Murfreesboro to fly fish on the Little Missouri River. The state stocks the river with nice rainbow trout.


Here are the guys waiting on Eve to get her fishing makeup on so we can catch supper. Sue and Sweety don't fish, so they shop.



This is Doug and me casting into the Wall Hole. It was teeming with fish, but they didn't want to eat what we were feeding. By late afternoon, we only had five fish to feed six people.




This is excellent technique for standing in the water and not catching fish.



What the heck? A dead carp floating by. Maybe I can put this on the stringer and no one will notice.

It was almost dark and we still needed some fish for supper, so Eve came up with a plan to use Power Bait to catch fish. She saw two old ladies and another female catching fish on Power Bait and this sparked some kind of competitive instinct in her. She came to the bank and said,"If those three can catch fish, I can too." So she rigged up her line and caught a fish in about one minute. When Steve saw this, he grabbed the other spincast rod he had brought and he caught a couple of fish. We fished all day for five fish, and then Eve and Steve caught four more in ten minutes. We now have a new strategy for the next trip.

It was a lot of fun, and although I only caught one fish it was HUGE and really fought. It was the kind of battle one would see on some outdoor fishing show. Very cool.

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Full Alert!


Sweety got a new Sony DSC-H1 camera so I tested it out on Bubba. I figured you probably didn't want to see the pictures of him peeing on the lemon tree, so I present this view of him ready to bark at (or attack) the little kid next door. OUT!!! Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

OUT!!!

We went to Big D for Sweety's appointment with the nutritionist and Bubba's appointment with the his trainer, Bryan. The nutritionist was very nice, but could have mailed us the information on low protein diets. All we got besides the one page chart of protein in various foods was the fact that Sweety needs 50 to 60 grams of protein per day. This is about half of what I've been giving her. So this was not a very informative trip. We could have handled it over the phone.

Bubba's appointment, however was VERY productive. We talked about his recent indiscretions when he attacked my students. Bryan asked if I used the "OUT" command, and I told him I didn't know about the "OUT" and that I had used "OFF". Sweety and I agreed that Bryan had not told us about the "OUT". Bryan also listened when I described how Bubba barks at strange vehicles such as bicycles, baby strollers, golf carts, etc. Bryan asked if Bubba had ever been around a wheel chair. Of course he hasn't. So Bryan got one of the helpers at Man's Best Friend to roll by the open door of the room where we were working with the Bubster. Immediately, Bubba went ballistic. YEAH! Bryan had never seen this dark side of the Bubster's character.

So Bryan got to work on the "OUT" command with Bubba and we got to see how to implement it. It is going to take a lot of work, but now we know what to work on.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Ready for the Tour?

As the Master's Golf Tournament kicks off today, I think it is appropriate to announce that this blog may be idle for a few months as the blogger might be going out on tour after turning in a 3-over-par 75 today at the treacherous Oak Forest Sports Club. And yes, I played ALL 18 holes, smarty pants!

No double bogeys, one birdie, and one EAGLE! I couldn't see the second shot on the par four hole #17 because the green is elevated above the fairway. When I hit my lob wedge, I thought I might have hit it too far, but when I got up to the green, no ball was in sight. Only one other place it could be--in the hole!

Woohoo!

BTW, the golf question for today is:

If one under par is a birdie, and two under par is an eagle, what do you call three under par?


ANSWER: An albatross. Look it up.

Tiger Who?

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

I substituted in a math class yesterday for a good friend who is the girls golf coach at HHS. She is also the teacher who rescued our kid's academic career after a terrible experience with a 7th grade math teacher at HJH. But, as Alton Brown says, that's another episode.

Anyway, this is a very long day because this teacher has helped take the place of another teacher who was forced to retire due to illness. Three math teachers gave up their conference periods to take one block each for this retired, ill person. So my friend has four 1 1/2 hour blocks in a row with 30 minutes for lunch. Pretty much solid kids from 7:45 to 3:20. Then she coaches golf (not a bad job if you can get it) until the sun goes down, or something like that.

So while she was away at a golf tournament, I had her classes. Everything went well and I had several kids who are now Juniors that I had taught at HJH when they were 8th graders. It is usually fun to see those kids again and we laugh about some of the crazy things they did. And I did.

Last block though I had one kid, a girl, who just irritated the heck out of me. First, before the tardy bell rang, she asked if she could go to the restroom. Of course, she passed three restrooms to get to class, but I said sure, and she left. When she got back, her class was taking a test. She informed me that she shouldn't take the test because she had been absent. I told her Mrs. C had not left me any message about her not taking the test, so she needed to do the best she could and then work it out with the regular teacher. She took the test paper, wrote down an "A" in every multiple choice answer blank and handed in the test. I just smiled at her and told her that she needed to start on the review booklet. She said her booklet was in another room. I told her no problem, I had found several unused ones and she could just work in one of those. She said hers was already filled out. I said she needed to do it over again and not leave her books in the wrong rooms. So she took the booklet and filled in every blank with an "A", closed the booklet, and turned around to ask another student for earphones. I told her no, no listening devices in the classroom. She would just have to sit there for the next hour and fifteen minutes.

I'm now grading some work from the previous class as a favor to Mrs. C (for $60 a day, I don't grade) when this same girl asks if she can go to the nurse for some medicine. I said sure, get the pass and I will fill it out. I guess she was expecting another answer as she told me she had hurt her back and she was in pain from her neck to her waist. When I handed her the pass, I said, "Be sure to have the nurse sign and put the time you leave her office on the pass."

When she got back, the pass was not signed and I said "What was the last thing I told you to do about the nurse signing this pass?" She said the nurse signed it on the line above because it hadn't been signed. I think she was correct about this, because one of the reasons (besides the fact that I could tell this was no innocent cherub I was dealing with) that I told her to get it signed was that the line above had not been signed. When I looked at the signature, it didn't look quite right, but it was the pretty close to the other nurse signatures on the page, so I felt I had no leg to stand on as far as accusing this kid of faking the signature.

As luck would have it, another kid wanted to go to the nurse so I sent a note asking the nurse to sign the pass in the correct place for both the new kid and the one who claimed to have the aching back.

It wasn't two minutes before I get a call from the nurse's office. They haven't seen the broke-back kid today.

UH-OH. Busted!

I reamed her out pretty good and laid a little Dr. Phil on her about lieing and not working and a couple of shots of keep your mouth shut.

Poor little thing doesn't know I'll be back next week for round two. OOOwww. This is going to be fun!

Monday, April 03, 2006

Site Meter Is Fun

H introduced me to the Site Meter. It gives all kinds of statistics related to the visits that are made to one's blog. I love to see how people find this little blog from all the billions of blogs that occupy cyperspace.

Most of my visitors come over from H's Garden Obsession blog. She really has quite a following of friends and fellow gardeners who keep up with her activities re "flora and buga" (Latin for "plants and insects"). That's cool and I am glad to have them visit.

Weirder though, are the people who "google" some word or words or phrase. Boy, I'll bet they are disappointed when they wind up here! Some poor person googled "dog kennel banff jasper" and wound up at Bubba Bites. What's even weirder is they had to go about three pages deep into the search to get here. Wouldn't you think that if you wanted info on dog kennels in Banff or Jasper that you would have found what you were looking for in the first 40 or so results? They sure have too much time on their hands.

They must be retired. Or they work from home. :)

Sunday, April 02, 2006

The Garden Path

This is the new house in the spring. The trees are showing their first new leaves and grateful for the recent rain. I really like the bright red dwarf azaleas under the tree in the round bed. I think they are "Raider Red". I am not as impressed with the dwarf pink azaleas under the unknown variety of fruitless fruit tree on the right side of the front bed. I think an Aggie must have propagated this variety.

I also like the hang tag that remains on the tree form Yaupon Holly we planted in front of the window. It looks like a hip-hop guy's gimme cap with the tag still hanging from the top button. It still shows the retail price of $22.95. We got it last fall for half price at Smotherman's. It really is a great $11.48 tree.

This morning we went to Lowe's (where people were still p.o.ed at the check out lines-see the first post of this blog for details) and sweety bought (but I paid for, so I guess I bought) the components of the pathway to the backyard through the front flower bed. I think it looks very nice and points the way to the only outside entrance to the backyard. The rock is called "egg rock", obviously very white and rounded like river rock. In between are some tiles sweety made a few years ago by glueing stained glass on plain terra cotta tiles.
Further down the side of the house are some hydrangeas we bought at Smotherman's last fall also. They are really tough plants as we did not water them enough during the drought. I didn't think they would survive, but as soon at it warmed slightly, all three put on new leaves. This is my kind of plant. Posted by Picasa