Out and Gone

This morning after introducing the Governor for his Town Hall meeting, I sat silently in the audience and let everyone else try to make a political statement. (There are seldom actual straight questions at such a meeting, just a lot of people trying to get their view out there. Generally in the manner of the old "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" type questions. There were finally a couple of good questions from the high school government classes in attendance.) The new mayor and I sat side by side exchanging sarcastic comments about many of the evasive answers from the Governor. You could sure tell the Governor was an attorney!

As we walked out of the auditorium, groups of people came up to congratulate me, checking to see if I was overjoyed to be free at last, then offering condolences to the new mayor. Larry (the new mayor) and I thought it was hilarious.

Tonight I opened the city council meeting as normal, then led the council through accepting Larry's resignation (so he could take office as mayor) and then turned it over to the judge to swear in the new council so they could be seated (during which time we outgoing dinosaurs repaired to the gallery to watch). The first act of business was to call me back up to get my plaque and chamber name tag from Larry. So this is what I got for serving the maximum three terms as mayor (sort of like a repeat offender sentence):

All in all not a bad haul.

It was  interesting to watch Larry discover the difference between attending a meeting as a council member and running the meeting as mayor. I think he'll soon settle in and do a great job. Here's wishing him and the new council a successful future!

Now I have to edit the sidebar spiel and I can return to my normal sarcastic self just in time for Thanksgiving. {*grin*}

Short Week Monday

The air carried a definite tang of cold and the clouds in the distance were looking a lot like snow all day. It was the perfect day to complete my Thanksgiving shopping, and the store was packed with others in a similar mind. Thanksgiving looks to be a small crowd here, consisting of Mom, MIL, L, Uncle J and Aunt J, possibly cousin D and me sitting down to pick the carcass of the bird. (Which is currently residing in the refrigerator waiting for a nice warm up on Thursday morning.) Looks like L will be getting into town on Wednesday, so a lot of the cleaning and prepping has been left in my dubious hands. The Son has to work in the mountains over the holiday, so he won't be here. Maybe we'll save him a drumstick or two since he really likes them.

Preparatory to making the official announcement about running for a partisan office as first mentioned here, I spent part of the afternoon filing the necessary pieces of paper with the county and the state. Come December I hope to have my finance committee up and running along with all the other things needed to be a real candidate. Now all I have to do is write the press release announcing my candidacy for early December release. Then it is a matter of getting people organized and ...

As regular readers know, tomorrow will be my last day as mayor. After three terms, it is going to be different to be able to blame someone else. {*grin*} But before I depart, there are still a couple of last acts. In the morning, the Governor and his Town Hall Meeting will be in the area and I get to do the honors of introducing him. That will be my next to last official act as mayor. (The incoming mayor and I flipped a coin to see who would do the honors since he will be sworn in and me out as mayor in the evening city council meeting. Given that the governor is a {*gasp*} Democrat out here in a rural Republican area, I leave it up to you to guess whether I won or lost the coin toss to introduce him.) My last duty will be to convene the city council meeting tomorrow night so that the new members can be sworn in and assume the meeting. I'm still waiting to see what the surprise I have been threatened with is going to be.

Time to get back to reality. Besides, I may have to rewrite my sidebar after tomorrow night.

Glossophobia and Beer

In lieu of watching the Broncos lose yet again, I did the crossword puzzle. What to my wondering eyes should appear but the clue "Overcome glossophobia." The appearance of that particular word made my day.

Why? I can't tell you the number of people who have stated to me that they suffer from glossophobia. Usually in a meandering manner because they don't know that what they suffer is called glossophobia. And usually directly after I have evinced an utter lack of the affliction. Have you caught on to what glossophobia means yet? Here's the definition from Wikipedia: glossophobia. Clearer now?

Now that you know what it means, you have probably figured out that the answer to "Overcome glossophobia." is orate. I.e. if you have a fear of public speaking, the cure is to speak in public.

I suffered from glossophobia in my teens and twenties. Speaking in public had some aspects of pulling teeth without anesthetic. Not pleasant at all. But then somewhere along the path of life, I realized that most people dread public speaking and are just so happy it is you standing up there in front that you could recite the alphabet and they would applaud. That recognition coupled with the realization that I have already embarrassed myself in almost every way possible and survived leads to a complete lack of fear of blithering in public.

I'll leave you with a section from this post of long ago.

• You have lost all fear of public speaking, no matter how small, large, friendly, or angry the audience. (You figure that by now you have already embarrassed yourself in every way possible. The challenge now is finding creative new ways of attaining embarrassment. After the time you drunkenly recited the Beer Prayer, nude, from the second story balcony, to an audience of thousands, everything else is simply anti-climatic.)

For those who don't know the Beer Prayer:

The Beer Prayer

Our lager,
Which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink.
Thy will be drunk,
At home as it is in the tavern.
Give us this day our foamy head,
And forgive us our spillage,
As we forgive those who spill against us.
And lead us not to incarceration,
But deliver us from hangovers.
For thine is the beer, the bitter, and the lager.
Barmen.

(This version from Ted Guhl)

P.S. No, I haven't ever recited the Beer Prayer in the nude from a balcony. Close, but not quite.

Fun and Oddities

I was visited this afternoon by another member of our Boy Scout committee to do some bookkeeping (I am the treasurer and he is the leader) related to the popcorn sales. Thank heavens the annual popcorn ordeal is about over. Once we completed the business at hand, the conversation began to drift. He and I were both Scouts in the troop some 40+ years ago and his sister was in L and my high school class, so we go back a ways. There is never a shortage of hot air to be exchanged.

The conversation went from hunting (and how neither of us does much of it anymore) to changes in the meat eating patterns of society at large. Sparing you the lean versus fat and wild versus range versus feedlot arguments, we finally landed on meats of our childhood that have become scarce to see in the stores. We both noted that you don't see the huge displays of cow tongue anymore. (And we both agreed that we neither were big tongue fans.) But then we went on to note that we both love beef liver and onions, but don't eat it anywhere near as often as we did in our youth. That led naturally to beef heart. He loved it in his youth but seldom finds it on the meat counter now. I am neutral on the topic since I can't remember eating all that much of it at any time. That in turn led to a whole slew of foods like venison salami and antelope sausage and ....

Which leads me to some questions for you. What cuts of meat from your youth do you no longer find in abundance in the store? And what wild meat concoctions do you remember fondly from your youth?

Now on to the amusement of the day - a story courtesy of the local paper about another Colorado town of similar size to ours about 450 miles from here.

DURANGO (AP) — A person in a chicken costume ruffled the feathers of Durango's city council as its members discussed rules for backyard fowl.

At a council meeting Tuesday, someone in a chicken costume quietly entered the council chambers just as the mayor was discussing a recently-passed backyard hen ordinance.

The costumed chicken took a few turns, flapped its arms, then took a seat in the nearly empty gallery.

Several minutes later, the big bird left — without identifying itself — after laying an egg on the floor.

Council members told The Durango Herald they were perplexed by the costumed chicken but found the visit humorous. The council voted 3-2 earlier this month to make it easier to keep backyard chickens.

Makes me think I'm leaving the mayor business at the perfect time.

Dream Awakening

Do you ever have dreams that feature something just so wrong that it wakes you ranting out of a sound sleep? I sometimes do. In fact I had a dream like that last night.

It was a very detailed dream in which an elderly German gentleman was trying to convince me to buy and market a fluggenmuffler. What is a fluggenmuffler? In my dream it was a device that that performed some sort of factor of 100 conversion. I.e. if you put 100 lbs. of junk in one end, only one lb. came out the other. If you put 1 lb. in the other end, 100 lbs. came out the original end.  An amazing device that would solve world hunger and pollution in one fell swoop. After all you could put 1 grape in the front and out would come a 100. Sort of like the loaves and fishes in the bible. But you could also put 100 tons of industrial emissions in the other end and have only 1 ton come out the other. The ideal purification device. Just feed the pollution stream through it a few hundred times and your pollution issue is no more.

So what did I wake up ranting about? Well, the device neither heated nor cooled the local environment and drew no power. My poor physicists mind was immediately up in arms about the apparent violations of the laws of thermodynamics. So I woke up ranting that no fluggenmuffler can violate the laws of physics like that. Once I was awake enough to realize it had been a dream, I was busy looking around to make sure no one had heard me ranting in the night. Fortunately Molly slept right through my awakening and ranting. Since only the dog and I were in the house, my rant remained a secret.

Shortly thereafter I fell back to sleep, only to awaken with the same rant from the continuation of the same dream. I can't tell you how vivid the dream was. I finally fell asleep for the rest of the night, but, in a rarity for me, I could remember the dream in detail when I woke up this morning.

The embarrassing thing is that most people wouldn't even think of comparing the parameters of a dream to the possibilities of reality. I guess that is what happens to us physicists when our dreams intersect with the laws of the known universe - the known universe always raises a fuss.

So what wakes you ranting at the wrongness of it all?

Five Experiences of Today

Time once more for

Five Experiences of Today

• Getting a phone call from the local businessman who wants to develop a software application. He calls every nine months or so and once I explain the costs of what he desires, he always says he'll just have his son who "works for Google" do it. I always pleasantly wish him good luck and he hangs up. He doesn't know that his son and I have discussed the matter several times and are in full agreement on what it will cost to build his dream.

• Discovering that at least one of the Honey Dew melons I picked back at the start of October when the weather was turning freezing was edible. Note that I said edible, not necessarily the tastiest. Made a good alternative for breakfast.
  

• Sitting in a community development / community assessment meeting and realizing it is the same gripes and ideas I have heard every year, just a new group vocalizing and planning. But the real key is that I could just serenely smile, since it won't be my problem anymore come next Tuesday.

• Seeing the woman whose husband is deathly ill make the effort to attend the meeting because she feels so passionately about it. Her husband's illness has aged her tremendously, but she is still fighting the battle to ensure a better life and community for all. People like her are what has made the job of mayor so rewarding. (Of course, they are also often the sharpest thorns in the side as well.)

• Meeting the gentleman with the most gorgeous German Shepard / Wolf mix dog I have ever seen as I walked home for the above meeting. The dog was 15 years old and deaf as a stone, but still had that absolute erect carriage and majesty so emblematic of the breed. The owner communicated entirely by hand signals with the dog due to the deafness.

I'll leave you with the lonely Honey Dews trying to ripen in the shop:

Pet Foibles

This week's Writer's Challenge from Mama Kat tickled my fancy with the topic:

2.)Describe the most destructive thing your pet has done.
(inspired via Twitter by @alisha41481 from A Day In The Life Of Okie Rednecks)

L and I have had three dogs so far in our married life: Sam, Beau, and Molly. All have been either adopted from animal shelters or given to us. And all have had their foibles and destructive moments.

Sam (short for Samantha) was the first, a pit bull mix we adopted as a very young pup from the city pound in Los Angeles. She was a tiny piteous creature who looked forlornly like she desperately needed us, so we adopted her. As she grew, she was not too destructive until she hit the doggie equivalent of teething. And then ...

I came home from work one day to discover that her wooden dog house was gone - literally gone. All that was left was a couple of nails and a few splinters. She had gnawed it all to pieces, leaving nothing behind. We waited anxiously for Sam to get sick and die after consuming the dog house. We also bought a really tough plastic dog house that survived all further attempts at gnawing.

Not long after that, I came home to find all the rose bushes in the back yard were gone, thorns and all, right down to the root. Sam had gnawed/eaten them all. Not one of the finest moments in human-dog relations.

The piece de la resistance - the last act as the teething phase faded - was the attempt to install her own doggy door.  I came home to discover the a hole in the stucco beside the patio door. A certain dog had gnawed through the stucco, through the wire mesh, partway through the 2x4 framing the door, and then gotten distracted by the aluminum frame on the sliding glass door. The tooth marks were distinctive and pointed directly at the culprit - Sam.

That was fortunately the last time that the teething woes were to surface for Sam.

After the passing of Sam, we acquired our next miscreant - Beau (short for King Beauregard III). Beau was a Bassett Hound given to us when he was three. Beau was perhaps the dumbest but most devious dog we have ever owned. Beau was a closet chewer. You could be sitting at the table eating a family meal when a moment of silence would be filled with the distinctive sound of wood being munched. A quick look to the floor would show a Beau lying on the floor happily chewing on the legs of the chair. If you threw Beau off the couch, you could count on catching him calmly chewing on the fabric skirt later in the day. Slippers were never safe. Even shoe racks were an occasional target:

Fortunately, Beau turned into less of a chewer and more of a hoarder in his latter years:

After the passage of Beau, Molly came to live with us via the local Humane Society. Molly is a bit different in the mischief she gets into. Being a Border Collie mix, she is the most intelligent and most visual of all our dogs. She has an impish sense of humor and loves to play. If you have laundry sorted on the floor for washing, she will pick out a piece to come rub on your leg to see if you will play. Have anything that will roll with in her reach, she will get it and try to convince you to play, but if you won't, she'll throw and catch it all by herself. She always has the glint of fun and mischief in her eyes:

One like Molly shares with Beau - chewing on the kitchen table chairs. But unlike Beau, Molly is sneakier about it. You can be sitting there and in the sudden silent break you do not hear the distinctive chomping sounds of Beau. Instead you hear the wet sloppy mouthing and dainty nibbling of Molly, often times laying on her back so that the rungs to chew on require minimal work. And if you scold and ask her what she is doing, she just looks back at you as if to say, "I'm not the first to do this, so why the brouhaha?"

In any case, the end result is kitchen chairs with the distinctive doggie seal of approval:

I'll leave you with that.