The Revenge of the Tree Rats!

     We previously reported the consideration of harvesting and consuming some of our local tree chickens in a desperate moment.   Unfortunately, we now suspect that a few of the fluffy little pine cone bandits might be able to read, an advantage they would hold over many of the human residents of our proud state.  

     This unnerving possibility was raised just the other day.  As you know from previous posts, Paula and I enjoy cycling and are presently putting in some miles in preparing for an adventure later this year (stay tuned for probably-snarked-out posts on THAT).  

     On a usually-pleasant downhill stretch, I heard Paula screech and when I fell back to see what was wrong, all she could say was, "A squirrel!  A squirrel!  It jumped out and hit my leg and almost knocked me over!!"

     This is not the first time that our fuzzy-tailed arboreal 'friends' have tried to sabotage cyclists.  Here is an example of a felled bicycle with a kamikaze tree rodent stuck in the front wheel.

     And another.

     At this point, we are pretty much convinced that the squirrels have found the internet address of this blog and are out for revenge upon us for suggesting that they might supplement our diet.  

     Unusual times call for unusual measures, such as 

or an airbag helmet, complete with the cute model, Paula says.

or even this, complete with the front Squirrel Guard™ which I am about to patent, by the way (don't even TRY to snipe me on this one!)

     We have considered calling for a truce in the confrontation, but through my binoculars I saw something that made me think that the rodents are in no mood.

     Stay tuned for further developments.  Meanwhile, if you are a local tree chicken reading this, we desire peace and are ready to offer peanuts as proof of our sincerity.  If they seem rancid and/or stale, that's Paula's fault and make sure you go for her bike and not mine.

David

Fixing leaky bladders

     OK, I admit, the headline was click bait.  I really did fix leaky bladders surgically, but I haven't done one of those operations since July 2011.  Now I'm plagued by another kind of leaky bladder.

     This is a (borrowed, stolen) diagram of a kitesurfing kite.  The leading edge is hollow, and the whole thing is given shape in part by inflatable bladders within it and the struts. 

     They are only inflated to about 7-8 pounds per square inch, so not a lot of pressure.  However, they are subject to all kinds of trauma.

     Though probably not a politically correct term, slamming a kite into the water is known as "tomahawking" the poor thing, and the sound it makes causes every head to turn and see who messed up this time.  

     Where my brother kites on the lower Potomac River, there have been forlorn kites in trees, a warning to those foolish enough to brave Mother Nature.  

     Add to that the 'foot cacti' found on the Outer Banks,

and the life of a kite bladder can be hard and short.

     Unfortunately, on our last outing in April to Hatteras, it became clear that my beloved 15-meter kite had suffered a slow leak.  This was not a happy moment.  You see, fixing a leaky bladder on a human is WAY simpler, and I'm close to serious.  You don't actually have to remove the human version, a lengthy and trick procedure on a kite.  The thing is skinny, about twenty feet long (OK, careful, I'm talking about the kite version, not the one in the person), and attached to all sorts of things, and that holds for both kind of bladders.

     And just like with the human version, the bladder is a bit delicate, and you have to make sure you're not making MORE holes while you're fixing the first one.  So, I scrubbed up, donned my surgical gown and gathered my instruments.  Meanwhile, the kite was already unconscious and ready for the procedure.

     Though Paula refused to mop my brow or even address me as "Dr. Henderson," things went well, and after longer than the person version took, I got the bladder out, found the hole, patched it and got everything back together again, which step is also necessary in the human procedure.

     I cautiously blew the kite back up, and was relieved that it held pressure.  Ready for the next "tomahawk" or cactus or whatever awful thing lies in its future.  

     We hope that your bladder isn't leaking, and if it is, that you can find someone to put a good patch on it.

Dave

It's good to have a good brother

     My brother Mark is three years younger than I am, and we have an unfortunate sister trapped between us.  We had the usual love/dislike relationships growing up, and there were times when I was unkind to him, which I sorely regret.  He was usually better to me than I was to him.

     Mark came up with all sorts of lunatic stuff.  At one point in our childhood, he made a rule that if someone was hurt inadvertently while we were playing, someone else could say, "Laugh, my child!" and the injured party had to laugh, which usually set things back on track.

     He convinced our baby sister that there was a secret rail system in the attic by which we could be transported to the neighbor's house, but that she couldn't use it until she was six.  And on and on.

     Mark has always thought bigger than me.  I had a minibike, he had a Yamaha dirt bike.  I had the ratty old VW Beetle, he had the ratty old Triumph Spitfire.  I have five kids, he has eight.  I was an OB-GYN, he was an orthopaedic surgeon.  

     There has been somewhat of a fun arms race since we've grown up.  We had always ridden bikes, but he got a nice one in residency, so I had to find one also, and we've had some classic rides together since, and while I've done a lot of 'century' rides (100 miles), for a while he was doing 'double dimes,' meaning 200 miles at a throw.

     During residency in Philadelphia, Mark noticed someone windsurfing at a nearby park lake, and he had to do it.  That meant that I needed to figure it out also, and we had great fun windsurfing together for twenty-five years, all over the East Coast and even internationally.

     Scuba diving slipped in there somewhere, along with underwater photography.  

     We shared whitewater kayaking with our sons, and did many of the great and challenging rivers in the East, though again, he was always up for bigger stuff than I was.

     From what I've said, you could think that it was all fun stuff.  Mark has become a solid pillar in his community and the Church, and we have paralleled each other in many assignments and activities.  

     The latest chapter in the fun category has been kiteboarding, which we picked up at the end of windsurfing a dozen years ago or so.  We've had a lot of laughs doing that together, though as usual, Mark gets 25 foot jumps while I'm lucky to land fivers.  

     It's great having a good brother.  He's always someone I can bounce DIY engineering plans off of, or revel with about some new activity, or use as an excuse with my long-suffering wife; "Well, Amy let Mark do it!"  Doesn't always work, but it's worth a try.  

     I hope that your siblings are anywhere near as good as my kid brother.

David

Crazy ideas of (fairly) old guys

       When we lived on a 'gentleman's farm' in then-rural Fairfax County, Virginia, my parents raised lots of different animals, including goats, specifically milk-producing Saanens.

     Mom had a friend named Bob Black who raised Saanens also, and who owned a Piper Cub.  One day he noticed that our fields might make a decent runway.  He flew his plane in, and Mom charged him $5 instead of the $10/mo. tie-down fee at Manassas Airport.  

     OK, maybe not so flattering a picture (that's me in the middle, probably not destined for swim suit model), but that's the cub in the back field.

     A normal Cub only has a 65 horsepower engine and no starter, so when I was about seven years old, Bob taught me how to sit in the front seat, hold the toe brakes and operate the engine controls while he swung the propeller to start the thing.  That was terrifyingly cool, and although Bob never had a license and couldn't take anyone up (and was probably not to be trusted anyway) I became an airplane nut.

     When I was fifteen, my friend Lloyd Hill and I convinced our parents that we should get a job at the Warrenton-Fauquier airport and in a weak moment they said OK!  We would open the office of the Fixed Base Operator on Saturday mornings, and we were often the last ones to leave in the evening.  We fueled and washed airplanes, changed runway lights and of course cleaned the bathroom, but in the end, we both earned our Private Pilot license, mine when I had just turned seventeen, the legal limit.

     I flew some that summer, and a little in Utah when I went to college that fall, but less and less because of the cost.  When I returned from my two-year mission for the Church, I visited Lloyd in Florida, and one of my last logbook entries involved flying to one of the Keys with him.

     Then life intervened with college, marriage, medical school, residency, kids, private practice, etc., etc., etc. and when I brought the subject up once, Paula wisely put it back down; "You've got five little kids!  Are you nuts?!"

     She must have picked up a brain-eating parasite in South America, because while we were there, she mused one day, "You know, I think I'd rather have you auger in flying when you're 75 than change your diapers when you're 90."  I wrote it down, but didn't actually make her sign it.

     Over the last year or so, the idea has entered my mind again, though for what reason I'm not sure.  

     Luckily, I know a guy.  One of my four close friends from back to Cub Scout days, almost 60 years ago is a fellow named Dave Nelson.  I had the honor of giving him his first flight in a small plane, although he had flown plenty commercially, his dad being head of operations for United Airlines at the (then) Washington DC airport and Dulles.  He liked it, did Air Force ROTC at BYU, and eventually ended up as one of the chief test pilots at Edwards AFB, with the most hours in the F-22, which was being developed at the time.  After retiring, he was hired by Lockheed and became the chief test pilot of the F-35, from which he retired about four years ago.  He has flown, as far as he can tell, seventy-seven different aircraft, and actually flew with Chuck Yeager.  Twice.

     For my 68th birthday (that many?!) Paula let me travel to Palmdale, California where Dave lives, and we went flying! 

     He turned out to be the best instructor I have ever worked with and he did a lot to tune me up and get me back on track legally.  With that good start, I've been doing some local flying here.  Again, the reason for all of this is unclear, but it feels like a good thing to do at the moment.  It has at least led me to study a lot, never a bad thing for an aging brain.  

     So, I guess the moral of the story is this - if you want to learn to fly, tell your mother she needs to get some goats.  Saanens, that is.

Dave

A large box of photographic slides

            It has fallen to me to go through my dad’s thousands of photographic slides and digitize the important ones.  They begin in the early 1940’s and end after the turn of the century.  After his death, I became the curator of the slides, as well as scrapbooks of prints.  Dad died at age 95, several years after my mother’s passing while Paula and I were in Peru, .  I had previously packed up the large collection and shipped them back to North Carolina, where they have stayed in the back of a closet for well over a decade.

            There are things that are apparent from the pictures.

            First, he had a good eye for, and found beauty in landscapes.  There are many examples of the discipline and it's clear that he appreciated natural wonders.  It saddened me to discard most of these pictures, but I knew that they wouldn’t mean much to future generations.  The colors in the slides are still glorious; many of them are now 75 years old.  If nothing else, they testify to the stability of the Kodachrome color process, especially in its early days.

            He also loved flowers.  It bothered me discarding literally hundreds of beautiful pictures of beautiful flowers, knowing how much he had enjoyed them.

            My father was an engineer, and valued precision.  His neat handwriting on the well-organized divisions of his slides testifies to this.

            Many of the pictures are of memorials and cemeteries.  It reminds me that the terrible Second World War was still a very recent and fresh memory when these slides were taken.

           He loved us kids.  Yeah, I'm the fat kid in the middle.  There were eventually six of us.

            He loved my mother.  I always knew it, but it is emphasized by how he framed her in his camera.  There are very few images that aren’t flattering to her.

            In keeping with Paula's and my desire to let things go, she persuaded me to finally let my father’s slide projector leave.  An hour or two before it was picked up by a photography enthusiast, I pulled off the worn cover of its box.  As always, I found it clean and in orderly condition (the fan and bulb still work), and I breathed in its aroma one last time.  It instantly brought back memories of sitting in the dark with my family as my dad went through favorite pictures of previous trips and Christmases and people we should remember, and we laughed at how funny we looked when we were younger.  You could feel the heat being blown off by the fan as my father opened boxes of slides and placed them in the spring-loaded tray.

            I’ve tried to pick out pictures that will mean something to future generations, and there are plenty of those.  I have stored them ‘in the cloud’ as well as on two hard drives; it has taken a lot of work to scan and organize them, but far more than that, they are important to the family as it branches out into the future.  They need to know more about this good man, and the pictures that he took will help them understand him better. 

            The hours that I have spent with them have done so for me.

David

Then they started eating the squirrels

When our children leave, they LEAVE!  With one in Seattle, one in Portland and one in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, only two are in our time zone.  Brynn and Chad and their four live near the coast of North Carolina, while Mike and Adrienne and Kate live in Delaware.

The two in the East came for Thanksgiving, braving I-40 and I-95 respectively.

Paula appreciated the good help of her daughter-in-law in the kitchen.  This lady peels a mean potato.

There were no pictures of the feast.  I was either too busy grilling the turkey, setting the table, or grabbing things as they went by during the free-for-all known as Thanksgiving dinner.

It turned out to be a beautiful day, not unusual this time of the year for Raleigh.  The grandkids headed straight for the school playground afterwards.  We did several trials of Spin the Three-Year-Old to see how soon she could walk after about thirty revolutions.  Luckily she didn't throw up.

Annie, the bespectacled kid on the right, was very proud of her stick collection, and insisted we arouse ourselves from our post-prandial stupor and marvel at the shapes she had made with them.

Paula pulled a fast one and got help decorating the tree.

If the tree leans slightly toward the right, it's because the three-year-old concentrated on that side, and considering her reach, most of her ornaments ended up on the bottom half of the right.

Paula has always mocked the long, tapering glass ornaments and calls them "torpedoes."  Through the years, somehow, and I'm not saying how, they have had a much higher-than-normal mortality rate.  It's kind of weird how she'll say "Ooops!" and after a pause, a torpedo will shatter on the floor...Just sayin.'

Kate, the lopsided three-year-old has inherited her good taste from her grandfather, and appreciates the torpedoes.

She has also inherited important talents from him, including the following:

And no, the old myth about getting your eyes stuck when you cross them is not true.  I hope.

My grandson Nathan wanted to do clutch clinic, even though only 2.4% of cars nowadays are sold with a manual transmission.  We took the Miata to the church parking lot.

Anyway, the car did make it home.

So, Thanksgiving dinner was great.  However, with a bunch of extra people and two of them teenagers, we noticed that the provisions in general were disappearing at an alarming rate.  Cereal boxes were empty in minutes.  Leftovers weren't left over.  We were throwing comestibles at them to keep them at bay, but it wasn't holding them for long.  Pretty soon, they started looking around for other things to consume...

Now, I'm not saying that Paula and the tree rats haven't had their disagreements.  They love to drop empty pine cone shards on her front sidewalk, and she no longer tries to grow tomatoes after they got a taste for them.  However, this was getting ridiculous.  Battered and fried squirrel steaks, while admittedly a Southern thang, are kind of a mess on the stove, and the neighbors start talking.

Plus, even our tomato-fed plump little tree chickens weren't going to last very long with this horde.  

Luckily, work, school and other awful things were becoming more urgent, and while gazing hungrily up into our pine trees, the kids and grandkids packed their cars and took off, figuring MacDonald's would be an OK second-best.  Even if they don't serve squirrel ribs.

We hope that your Thanksgiving worked out all right also, and that they left you something more than some relieved rodents in their wake.

Dave & Paula

Man, if I was an eight-year-old boy!

 This would be really cool!  Great big machines! Flashing lights!

Dump trucks!  Stuff twice as big as cars!  Big holes in the ground!

Yeah, except that its the street in front of our house that's undergoing replacement of the storm sewer line.  So far, only one blown transformer for about an hour.  So far...

Being fall, the yard was aerated and reseeded last week.  Fine, except that the construction guys have their stuff all over it.  They were taking a break on Paula's nice grass at about 4 PM yesterday afternoon when the automatic sprinklers kicked in to keep the new seeds wet.  

They quickly decamped to the yard across the street, probably convinced that the cranky old people had turned on the sprinklers to chase them off.  No, it was just programed irrigation karma.

The sewer project is supposed to only take three weeks.  Yup, for sure.  Uh huh.  I'm figuring I'll be able to string Christmas lights on the backhoe parked in front of the house.  

Meanwhile, the new house next door gets turned over to its owners next week after eight months of construction, just in time for the next empty lot across the street to swing into full building mode.  

We need an eight-year-old boy to enjoy this!  For a couple of 60+ year-olds, it's not that cool.

We hope that your neighborhood is more boring for pre-adolescents.

Dave & Paula