…and going straight to summer. It’s forecast to hit 82 degrees today, according to the National Weather Service, for what surely has to be the first time in three or four months. I’ll have to check this out. But that sounds right.
UPDATE It’s 80 degrees in the city at 2:30 p.m. KVUE’s Mark Murray says Saturday is the last average freeze day for the area, but some cold Canadian air could arrive late next week to change that. Rather have rain, but none to speak of forecast yet.
Preparing for what might become our annual spring break trip to West Texas, in March, this time to Fort Davis, in the Davis Mountains, whence the above scene, circa 1870s. No stagecoaches nowadays of course. It’s Interstate 10 almost all the way, to Balmorhea, anyway, then a 31-mile, two-lane jog south to Fort Davis. About half of the old fort has been restored as a tourist attraction, which we’ll take in, along with the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas. All this primarily for Mr. Boy and Mom who have never been to either spot. Ft. Davis was never your Hollywood stockaded log-cabin frontier fort, but rather made of planks and brick. Set there in the 1850s to fight Indians, primarily the Mescalero Apache, it was home to, among others, the famed black Buffalo Soldiers. Much more, with pictures, maps and art here/Painting "Fort Davis" By Melvin Warren.
Comments Off on Fort Davis trip
Posted in Texana
Tagged Buffalo Soldiers, Fort Davis, Melvin Warren, Mescalero Apache, Texana, West Texas
It’s a little outrageous the amount of homework piled on first graders. The usual write-the-spelling-words-one-more-time (all twenty of them) and copy two long sentences; read a picture book on George Washington (whose birthday was Monday) and another one for a weekly reading test on Friday. All well and good. Except we also had a poster project due tomorrow on President Gerald Ford, and five more facts to write out in complete sentences on baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson. So, with Muckdogs baseball practice shoveled in, we didn’t finish it all until 8 p.m., which still allowed bedtime stories, but just barely. If it’s this bad in first grade…
Comments Off on First grade homework
Posted in Mr. Boy
Not what you’d expect to find in an opinion poll after so much MSM and congressional bashing, but that’s where this Public Opinion Strategies poll of voters is going:
More here, which includes a link to the complete poll in pdf. Via Instapundit.
Comments Off on Majority support Bush and war
Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops
Tagged American voters support Bush and war, Public Opinion Strategies poll
Should be the crack of the bat. But that’s for traditional, wooden bats. Metal bats ring like a bell. Practice this afternoon went pretty well. Mr. Boy was about as silly as last year in T-ball, dancing around in what he likes to call Karate moves, and occasionally flopping on the ground. But he plays better this year. Hits well, throws well, still needs to work on catching. Overall, his team, the Muckdogs, is about the same, though most are not as silly. Coaches seem more intense this year, rules of the game being explained for the first time, but so far the kids seem to like it.
Comments Off on The ring of the bat
Posted in Mr. Boy
Teflon Don gets down as he preps for patrol:
"You can think of it as duty- you have a job, and that job requires violence. You can hate- the easiest of all excuses, and the most exhausting. You can look at it as simple survival- if you don’t kill him, then he’ll kill you. However you justify it, you are still in a war, and people will still die. It wears on everyone- the American deaths, the ‘collateral damage’…the innocents killed when some faceless murderer blows himself up in a crowd. Yes, even the enemy dead take their toll."
Comments Off on The view from the dark side
Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops
Tagged preps for patrol, Teflon Don
…ain’t hardly PC. But it’s a rich helping, as The Fat Guy demonstrates better than most:
"…the tales told, over a glass of shine in the glare of a Coleman lantern with a deck of cards on the table, were nice. They might have been all lies, but they were my lies, and they always will be."
No better lies than Texas lies. Lot of truth in them.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 