January 30
Darn! I didn’t get to go work at the Bluff Wednesday. I was forced to stay inside and watch it snow from the sky room while I drank coffee. Many times, during my working years I was forced to work on days like this and I always thought how nice it would be if I could take a day off, or part of day, whenever I wanted. We got maybe as much as three inches which melted down to .16 inches in the rain gauge. If this pattern of weekly snow keeps up, we may actually get some decent moisture. By Saturday the weather was pleasant, and I helped K&C run their cardboard accumulation through the shredder so Kari can use it in her compost.
January 23
My favorite piece in Friday’s symphony concert was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s opus 26 (Fingal’s Cave) from the Hebrides Overture. Flutist (fludist, flaudist) Jake Fridkis performed Concerto for Flute and Orchestra with the orchestra and he was pretty good, too. Can’t say I’ve ever listened to a flute concert before. There is good flutist that is part of the orchestra and he has played some nice solos, but hasn’t performed as a soloist. Old Jake did a pretty good job. After intermission the orchestra performed Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 by Jean Sibelius. No disrespect to Mr. Sibelius but I got a case of the fidgets and was glad when the third movement ground to an end. John-head was there but the crowd overall with thinner than usual. The weather was cold and windy and maybe that caused some to stay home.
We got a little snow Thursday. It was windy and cold Wednesday so I skipped the Bluff. Art and I met for coffee Wednesday morning and swapped yarns. Art was told he has low blood pressure and the medicine they gave him for it makes him nearly pass out when he stands up. Such are the joys of age. In the course of our visit we discovered that we are both Hampton Sides fans I had only read Blood and Thunder but Art has read most of his books. He dropped a couple by Saturday for me to read.
While in the music store buying guitar strings I bumped into Benny again. He told me he is 87 and was going to a blue grass festival in Amarillo that evening. He’s from Quitaque and, of course, knew the Dudleys and McKays. Not a shy fellow, is Benny. He asked if he could play for me so we went into the guitar room and he banged out a couple of tunes. He’s pretty good and I gather he likes to perform.
One afternoon this week as I sat a my desk, I noticed a bird in one of junipers in the backyard. Looking closer I saw that it was a hawk and it was eating something. Directly it dropped whatever it was it was eating and came down to the ground to continue with its meal so I could see it much better. My bird book identified it as a Cooper’s hawk. It could be a sharp-shinned hawk;, the two are very similar with the Cooper being larger. Since I didn’t get a close enough look at its shins, I’m going with the Cooper’s. I’ve seen that hawk around from time to time for years but until that day I never got a close enough look at it to look it up in the bird book. Hawks in general and certainly this one are shy and keep their distance from people. I was glad to finally get a closer look.
January 18
Excellent day, today, similar to ones we had last week that a cold north wind blew away. That is forecast for tomorrow, too. Back in the day, Siberian elms were planted around the perimeter of SA, including along the west side. Dad had an irrigation ditch running along there and when he stopped irrigating, most of those elms began to die off. They were used to better, you see, and couldn’t tolerate dry conditions. There are only a couple left. I run water down the ditch for them and the junipers along there as well, but maybe not as often as they need. I don’t recall when the dead ones were removed and maybe I never knew, that being done while we were still in Garland. Anyway, most of stumps were still there but had decomposed to the point where they wouldn’t be too hard to remove. Today I got around to doing that, at least, I got around to digging them up. Digging isn’t really what I did. I used a pick to whack them good enough to loosen their moorings so I could pull them up. I will have to haul them to the brush site, along with the accumulation of other trimmings and then I’ll have to fill in the holes but that won’t be difficult. The stumps made it hard to mow down through there so it should be a lot easier now to run the mower down that stretch without having to dodge the stumps.
January 15
We knew it couldn’t last, of course. Our pleasant weather has been blown away by a cold north wind and Friday and Saturday, though bright and sunny, have been downright disagreeable. Chris was going to help Kari shred cardboard for composting Saturday. They order a lot of things online so the get a lot of stuff in cardboard boxes. People that do a lot of composting say cardboard is a good thing to use along with other things like leaves, table scraps, and so on. Trouble is, it isn’t easy to shred cardboard. Our shredder will do nice job of it but the orifice for the material being shredded is only a few inches in diameter, maybe the size of a baseball, or maybe less, so the shredding part is easy. It’s getting the cardboard into a shape the machine can accommodate that is the problem. Anyway, it was decided we should wait for more pleasant weather and now we are looking at Monday, maybe. It is a holiday for Chris so maybe that would be a good time to tackle it.
The Wylies gave me a picture frame for Christmas that displays pictures digitally and I finally got it going. They had preloaded it with 250 or more pictures and it cycles through them based on different criteria, date mostly. It also combines pictures it thinks would go well together, which is kind of interesting. That could make for some odd pairings but it probably does it well for the most part. People can be allowed to put their pictures on it. All that is needed is the app on a device and permission from whoever is the administrator, so to speak, for a particular frame, which is me in this case. The process goes like this (I think): First person has a frame; second person gets added to the list of people that can submit pictures; they submit their picture or pictures to the company which stores it in their cloud and puts it through a process to determine suitability and quality; if it passes muster the company loads it to the appropriate frame. I haven’t added any pictures myself yet but I will before long.
Kari shared this video of a man who injured his hand trying to open a coconut with a machete.
January 13
Two calm days in a row; I should mark the calendar. Some moisture would be nice but in lieu of that we’ll take pleasant weather. Monday was even nice and Tuesday wasn’t bad, just a little breezy. Last Saturday we (Kari, Chris, Rebecca and I) went to a performance of the chamber orchestra. Pepe Romero was the guest artist. He’s a classical guitarist. I had heard of him and his brothers and he didn’t disappoint. The orchestra bills itself as Chamber Music Amarillo and is affiliated with the Amarillo Symphony. The performance was in the Globe News Center where we go for Amarillo Symphony performances, so the evening was similar to going to the symphony. The chamber orchestra is just smaller, maybe 80 musicians while the symphony will have around 120, and the chamber orchestra doesn’t always perform in the Globe News Center. There was a pretty good crowd.