Yes... I'm still alive!

Sorry I haven't been posing for a while... the truth is that my life hasn't been all that fun lately...

You see, I've been working 6 day weeks. 4 days driving the dang truck and 2 days at the flea market... except it isn't really two days as much as it is 1 1/2 days, because I go to church on Sunday morning, and then go directly to the flea market... but what it all boils down to is that my only day off is Monday, and I have to do everything (ie: laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc.) on Monday, and, quite frankly, thsi schedule is not really working out all that well for me.

But, when I left the house this morning, I was bound and determined I was gonna find something to take a picture of...

Here's a house in Ft. Worth... (Yes, I'm taking pics of other peoples front yards. I justify this by telling myself I'm looking for gardening ideas.) These Agaves scattered over the front lawn look kinda cool... but I don't know that I want to do this in my yard... quite frankly, I can think of better ways to spend my time in the garden than weed-eating around agaves...

This is one of Ft Worths street trees... more specifically a Yucca aloifolia... you see a few of these in the area... but this is the only one I know planted by the city... and it had to have been planted quite a while ago, as it's now about 15 feet tall... quite possibly the largest one I've seen locally...

And this is just one of those rocks that you see by driveways in shopping centers. The purpose is to keep cars off the lawn. Of course, they also tend to turn minor roadway accidents into major ones, but that's a whole other arguement... the only reason I was really interested in this lump of sandstone is because if you look really-really close....

you'll see this...

I have no bloody idea how that echeveria got there.

The entire landscaping in this shopping center consists of small strips of grass and these huge rocks and this single, solitary clump of echeveria.

It's very puzzling.

Anyway... I hope everybody out in blogland is doing well... have a great day!

Cisco, TX...

I was shocked and appalled to realize that I hadn't posted here in just over 2 weeks...

I'd like to say that my absence was due to being over worked. Couldn't be further from the truth. Work has actually been very very slow... right now due to the fact that nobody wanted anything delivered because they don't want stock on their year-end inventory.

I can't blame my glamorous and dramatic social life either... If I'm honest, and I really have no reason not to be so I might as well, I'm sitting around like a lump. Less money coming in means less money for entertainment... sure, I could put it on a credit card, but I've never trusted credit cards in general, so it's not exactly an option...

The truth of the matter is that 1) nothing worth mentioning has been happening... and 2) The mouse on my computer had developed some sort of electronic schizophrenia and I could never seem to drag my lazy butt into Wal-mart to get a new one...

So when my dispatcher called with an order that had to be delivered 156 miles to Cisco, TX I jumped on it like a goose on a june-bug... which is rather surprising, as I don't think anybodies been really excited to go to Cisco for years.

Cisco, like many smaller Texas towns, has been slowly fading for decades... in our modern world, populations are going more urban, and quite frankly, with cars so predominant, many people would rather drive 30 to 50 miles to go to a mall than shop in a small downtown.

But Cisco was one of the original Texas Oil boomtowns in it's day. It is also the home of the original hotel owned by Conrad Hilton. If you're interested, go here for the wikipedia entry...

After I made my delivery, it was obvious that I wasn't going to get back into Dallas-Ft. Worth in time to pick up any more jobs, so I drove around to see what there was to photograph.

Of course, they do have a Chamber of Commerce, with it's own website but the pics there are much prettier than the reality of the place... The truth is that you have classic Americana, in a rather sad state of disrepair...

This next pic creeped me out and fascinated me at the same time... Just how long does it take to get this many cob-webs...

An old Coco-Cola advertisement on the side of a building... it says Relieves Fatigue - 5 cents... I'm reasonably certain that when this sign went up, Coco-Cola still had actual cocaine in it, and it's safe to say that you would be quite perky after a couple of bottles...

Feed store... notice the old brick road... don't see these much anymore...

This building is empty... love the old fashioned fire escape crawling down the side of it though... and more brick roads...

Small towns like this always make me feel a little melancholy. I always wish I could see them in their hay-day, when they were busy and productive.

So, now I've produced an actual post... later...

Ambling around...

Well, I haven't had a lot to post about lately, so I guess I'll talk about a cemetery. This is one of the Pioneer cemeteries in Dallas, on the edge of an old township called Letot that was swallowed by Dallas in the late 50's. For a bit of information about this cemetery go here.

Basically, this is a family cemetery containing 15 graves. The Mooneyham family settled in this part of Texas in 1844, making them one of the earlier settlers. One member of the Letot family is buried here, but most of them are in the "Old Letot Cemetery" about a mile away. Both are wedged between warehouses now... The only remnants of the community of Letot are these two cemeteries, and the Letot Baptist Church, which was sadly in need of repair the last time I drove by it. The Letot Elementary School was still standing at the beginning of this year, being utilized as a warehouse, but was torn down this summer.

This particular graveyard is not listed as a historical marker, while the Old Letot Cemetery is, and is under the control the the Dallas Historical Society.

It's been a rather interesting week... The most interesting experience I had this week was delivering human body parts to a research laboratory. Now, I've done that before. Or I'm assuming that's what was in those boxes. It doesn't really bother me, they have to get to the labs somehow, and it might as well be me... to be perfectly blunt, I've delivered Haz Mat that was far more hazardaous than this...

Usually you pick up a box that say Hazardous Material on one side and Human Tissue Samples on the other and you just take it. You don't know exactly what it is, and you just get on with it. It pays well, and it has to get there in a hurry. This job however I picked up at the airport. Now, any Haz Mat that is on the airplane has to be clearly marked as to the contents.

So, I'm driving around a box with "Human Eye Tissue" sitting in my front seat.

I don't know if it's just me, but as far as disembodied people parts go, eyes are right up there on top of the creapy list. Probably because when you talk to somebody, you look into their eyes, and you can communicate with someone with just a glance... eyes just seem more alive and human than other things. I don't know exactly why it's creepier than other things, but I do know that halfway to the delivery, I suddenly got a feeling that that box was STARING at me.

Anyway... that was the highlight of my week.

I so need a new job...

A wonderfully boring day...

howdy! It's been a strange day delivering. Lots to do this morning and absolutely nothing in the afternoon... litterally spent from 12.56 pm to 3:35 pm sitting in a park in Euless TX. Now, Euless is just north of Ft. Worth... actually it's part of the H.E.B area, (that means Hurst, Euless, Bedford) and the southern edge of those three towns edge on Ft.Worth. Now Euless is actually a nice little town, despite the fact that people in Ft. Worth tend to refer to it as Useless.


It was a nice little park, but after about 30 minutes or so, every park gets a little boring when you're by yourself waiting, so I remembered something that my Grandma used to say. "Everything is interesting if you look close enough." So I decided to look closer.


First I noticed the trees... Mixed varieties... some ancient gnarly old mesquite, which I really like...
There's also some very nice native scrub oak, but not terribly old, they don't have the 4 foot wide trunks and twisted branches of the real old timers, some good pecan trees... small nuts on them though so probably wild ones rather than the larger fruited orchard varieties, and a few live oaks scattered around, but these were between 25 and 50 years old, practically adolescent for a live oak.

Of course in the trees, there were more than our fair share of squirels chattering away, more that our fair share of grackles, a few cardinals and even a red capped woodpecker, who let me get fairly close until I tried to lift the camera. Guess he's had enough of the paparazzi... Under the trees, especially the pecans, there were some mushrooms, and close inspection shows that there's two different kinds here... Both Amanitas and both poisonous... the smooth one...


and the furry one (which hasn't opened all the way yet...)

So, anyway, I kept walking around and noticing things... It's really amazing what's all around you all the time, but you don't see because you just don't look. Now, the lawn of the park itself is really about one of my favorite kind of lawns around... It's part bermuda grass, mixed with St. Augustine grass, mixed with weeds. I like weeds. They're interesting. I know, it's absolutely un-American, but the sight of a dandylion in my yard doesn't give me fits. So, there I am, and there was a plastic shopping bag blowing by, so I picked it up, then I started picking up little pieces of litter, which are inevitable in about any park and which I always pick up. Grandma again I guess, but I always feel compelled to make sure that everyplace is a little bit better when I leave then when I got there. I'm not a nut about it, but if more people were like that, imagine how much better the world would be?

Anyway, it's good that I was picking up things, because I found a 4-leaf clover.

Now, I used to be an absolute demon 4-leaf clover hunter. I used to have about 30 of them pressed in the family bible... I used some of them on the matte around a pic of my niece once, and I don't know what happened to the rest, but this is the first one I've found in probably 20 years. The problem is that I'm in Texas... this really isn't clover country. There are a few native varieties, but they're clumpy, rather rank plants, white clover really requires less heat and more winter than we get here... but when I was a kid in the midwest, people used to sow white or pink clover in their yards. The clover would catch nitrogen in the air, feed it into the soil and help keep the lawns nice and green. Of course, now that everybody seems to be trying to grow a golfing green, anything not grass is forbidden, but when I was a kid clover in the lawns made a nice soft and green lawn to run barefoot through... unless the clover was blooming and you stepped on a bee.

I stepped on lots of bees growing up. I stepped on everything growing up, they had a hard time making me wear shoes, or anything much besides shorts for that matter. Mom would always cover all the cuts and scrapes with mecurichrome or iodine... so when I was a kid I looked like some National Geographic illustration of some wild brown-skinned, fuzzy headed native who for some anthropological reason painted his feet purple and red... but I digress...

Now I know that a four leaf clover is really not that remarkable. Any gardener knows that any plant may, for reasons unknown, throw up a wonky leaf. I personally have an opuntia in the yard that threw up a pad with variagated white stripes on one side of the pad. The variagation constricted the growth on that side, and contorted the pad into a strange taco shape. These little genetic glitches happen all the time, to plants, to animals and even to people... they're really not that big a deal... but regardless of the fact that I KNOW it's just a fairly common and harmless mutation, it doesn't change the fact that I found a four leaf clover and it really wasn't that bad a way to spend 2 1/2 hours in the middle of the work day...

And now, this post is entirely too long... so I guess I should let you get on with your life.

UPDATE: The smooth mushroom up there is evidently not an amanita but most likely a Chlorophyllum molybdites, a poisonous relative of the edible parasol mushroom... but I'm not completely certain.

The shaggy mushroom in the lower mushroom pic is an Amanita thiersii. Most sources say it is poisonous, or that the edibility is unknown, but under no circumstances to try it... There is one documented case of poisoning caused by it... evidently it's poison causes kidney failure. It was origionally thought to only exist as a southern mushroom, in Texas and parts of Mexico, but was recently found in Illinois and Lawrence, Kansas. Despite the fact that I found it growing near Pecan trees, it actually doesn't seem to be associated with any tree, and is usually found growing in lawns as solitary specimens or occasionally in rings.

hello, nothing much...

had a decent day at work. Kind of.

Had to drive 95 miles to Bonham, TX in a really bad thunderstorm. I actually saw lightning hit a tree! I mean, I know lightning hits trees, you hear about it all the time, but until you actually see it, it's just theoretical. Kind of like Iceland. You know Icelands there, but you never once think that it has anything to do with you...

So, anyway, I obviously didn't get to take any pics, as I was too busy trying not to wreck, and I didn't see anything worth taking a picture of. I'm sure that Bonham has plenty of photogenic sites, but not in the middle of a thunderstorm. Then I had to drive back down south, and then to Midlothian, which is about 30 miles south of Dallas, then back up north, and you're probably getting a general drift of my day...

Finally got back to Arlington and decided to go thrift store shopping. Found a great pair of Luchesse boots, which I could sell on ebay for mega-bucks but I'm keeping them for me. They need to find their own dang boots...

There's more big storms coming tonight supposedly, and they'll probably be hanging around tomorrow.

Just wanted to check in.