Category: Uncategorized

I know that it is important to get aerobic exercise a few times each week, but I’ve avoided getting an exercise machine because I figured the best thing for me and the dogs is to take the dogs for a walk. I think dogs can be overwalked and that is one reason Austin started getting pretty stiff legged, but when we cut back from 2 miles to 1 mile, he started doing a lot better (I was thinking he might need the same surgery Katie got, but never went through with it). Now with Katie ailing, we are lucky to get a mile, even though we probably spend more time out. So the intensity of our walks, which wasn’t great to begin with, is very low.

I really don’t like running and when I have run regularly in the past I would actually start to ache while putting my shoes on. And I’d procrastinate all night. It was terrible. So I thought an exercise machine might be good, but they are expensive and the cheaper ones maybe aren’t that great. I still have an old Nordic Track cross-country ski machine that I never thought was that good, partly because I bought the cheapest one they had. You don’t hear much about Nordic Tracks anymore. Instead it is all treadmills and elliptical trainers. Well, a treadmill is just running, so I wasn’t crazy about that. Elliptical trainers are lower impact and supposed to be better for your joints, so that seemed like a good way to go. I thought it would be good to get a used elliptical trainer that someone had bought and never used. But it wasn’t like I was pursuing this.
Continue reading “Elliptical Trainer”

I’ve mentioned this before, but my friend Jenny goes through computers like crazy. She bought a Dell in 2011 and it failed just after the 1-year warranty expired. She paid to have the hard drive replaced by Dell in May, with the repairs being warranted for 90 days. So promptly when that time was up, the hard drive failed again. I have no idea why, but when the computer tries to start up, the hard drive makes a clicking noise, which I told her is the “click of death.” Continue reading “Computer Shopping”

On July 4, SyFy ran a Twilight Zone marathon. I recorded all the episodes I could and have been watching them when nothing much else is on. Twilight Zone is one of those great shows where many of the episodes have become famous cultural icons, often imitated or referenced in other shows. One famous episode is “It’s a Good Life” featuring a little kid who sends people “off to the cornfield” (his mother is played by Cloris Leachman, who became famous on the Mary Tyler Moore Show). Another is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” an early role for William Shatner (who would become Captain Kirk a few years later), where he sees a gremlin on the wing tearing up the plane he is in.

It had to be difficult to make a show like this. You needed a different plot, a different cast, and different sets for every show. With TV seasons much longer back in those days, Rod Serling and the other writers had to come up with an awful lot of ideas, held in check by a pretty low budget and a 30-minute timeframe. Honestly, some episodes didn’t need the full 30 minutes. One famous show, “Eye of the Beholder,” was about a horribly ugly woman whose face has been treated to make her look normal, but spends almost the entire episode under bandages. Only at the end do they remove the wraps, and in horror discover that she still looks gorgeous by our standards (played by Donna Douglas, who would become Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies), but terrible by their standards since they are all ugly (explaining why we haven’t seen any characters’ faces the entire show). That was probably a 5-minute idea stretched out to a whole show. Continue reading “Twilight Zone”

I saw a link today for an article about work starting on the 17th Street bridge. I clicked on it because I had worked on coming up with plans for the repair. When I got to the article, there is an embedded video and the picture shows a finger pointing to the plans. I drew that!

Here’s the article.

The caption for one of the pictures says:

Georgia Department of Transportation engineers have drawn up plans to reinstall decorative fencing on the 17th Street bridge using what they say is a more secure method involving bolts secured by nuts and steel plating. Previously, the structure was attached by a fast-set epoxy.

But it wasn’t “engineers” plural, it was just me! Actually the vast majority of the plans were drawn by our consultant under the original contract for the 17th Street bridge, and all I did was modify those drawings.

Last week I looked out the back window of my house and saw a baby robin hopping around back there. I have learned that this is normal and they aren’t supposed to be in the nest, so the best thing is to leave them alone. The mom will keep feeding them while they are on the ground until they can fly and feed themselves. It hadn’t rained in a while and I thought maybe that bird could use some water. I put a cookie sheet with edges on it on the back patio and poured some water into it so that there was a shallow source of water. I would look out there but didn’t see the bird drinking. I thought maybe that the bottom of the pan would be too slick and found a pan for a paint roller that had a little traction to it and had varying depth. But it was bright orange plastic and the bird didn’t go near it either. The next day it was supposed to be even hotter and would reach an all-time record of 106 degrees. I told Carol about what I was doing and she said I should put out a sprinkler because birds love sprinklers.

I put my old-fashioned harp sprinkler back there and set the water so that it was only going up maybe a couple of feet in the air (it wouldn’t even move back and forth). When I went back inside I noticed there was a bird already eying the sprinkler and ruffling his feathers like he was imagining taking a bath. Within a half hour a juvenile robin came hopping along. He could fly, just not all that well. He and his mother came along and would drink water off of the wet grass. It is probably the same one I had seen on my patio. Then a juvenile mockingbird and its mother stopped by. The sprinkler was right next to a fig tree in the back yard and the mockingbirds seemed to hang out there. They are territorial and I think they were trying to intimidate the robins away, but the robins are little bigger and there was enough water for everyone.

Continue reading “Backyard Oasis”