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Back off, Bright! I put in for HHS first! And I could really use the work.
http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/11/re-my-cabinet-post.html
I'm Tanned, Rested, & Ready! — Susie's Little Cabinet Appointment
From The Nation today, Laura Flanders writes: President-elect Obama's not making the big policy appointments yet... But what if he did? Bush put an affirmative action opponent— the former dean of the Pat Robertson School of Government (I wish that was a joke- SB) in charge of The White Hous...
Mine spends his last night at our house tonight. I took him out to dinner last night and told him that from here on out he was on his own when it came to solving his problems, etc...
In other words, I lied through my teeth. Just like I'm lying when I pretend that none of this gets to me.
We raise them to be independent. We don't need to burden them with the knowledge of how hard that is.
Time
It is time for this child of mine to kiss me and take her leave. My youngest, the one with the cocoa eyes and naturally curly hair who, on occasion, may still be caught walking around the house with her 'Big Pillow' snuggled to her chest, is way eager to make her way down the mountain to a d...
Mine spends his last night at our house tonight. I took him out to dinner last night and told him that from here on out he was on his own when it came to solving his problems, etc...
In other words, I lied through my teeth. Just like I'm lying when I pretend that none of this gets to me.
We raise them to be independent. We don't need to burden them with the knowledge of how hard that is.
Time
It is time for this child of mine to kiss me and take her leave. My youngest, the one with the cocoa eyes and naturally curly hair who, on occasion, may still be caught walking around the house with her 'Big Pillow' snuggled to her chest, is way eager to make her way down the mountain to a d...
I met Eustace when we were both working at Broadstone. Did the ropes course and a camping trip with him. He was wiry and spry and unnervingly quiet back then, not the media-savvy raconteur that I understand he's become. Anyway, I liked the guy back then.
In the years since I've spotted him in AP photographs from various cross-country adventures, in a big spread about Turtle Island in the WS-Journal, etc.
But that's the best photo of him yet. Reminds me of when he was about 19 and living off the land in a teepee.
Today's Tom Sawyer...
With apologies to the band 'Rush' for the title of this post, it is none-the-less more appropriate than any other. You see, today was Earth Day and I found The Last American Man working a piece of wild cherry into a utensil on Sanford Mall. Yup. I found Eustace Conway again. Don't know hi...
I turned 45 three weeks ago, and you know what? Life is just starting to get interesting.
Having a sunny disposition...
As of tomorrow, I am going to be half-way to ninety!
Listen: I just got you queued up on my Google Reader this week. If you quit, I'm going to be mondo pissed.
Got it? As we say to the kids: "DON'T MAKE ME COME UP THERE!"
Your fan,
Saved by the cat...
Lately I've gone through, yet again, another period of blogging 'doldrums,' If you blog, you know exactly of that which I speak. It is a time of intense self-doubt about the whole meaning and reasoning of blogging. At it's worst, the blog is in a hormonal mid-life crisis. Urges to hit the delet...
I walked out of East Dorm one snowy day in January 1982 and slogged my way to the top of the knob, then just sat there and froze my ass off. But it was this kind of day: blue skies and cold clouds and, if this makes any sense, just very clean.
Sorry to here about the kids. Bureaucracy sucks. Fought a few of those battles my own self.
In between the clouds and a hard place...
Today's photo is brought to you because I needed high elevation and fresh air to free my mind of some egregious bureaucratic blunders. Both of my children have been seriously affected by said blunders and I will leave it at that... I relieved much of my stress as I trudged through crunchy snow ...
Our USC freshman moved into his dorm on Saturday, too (his Dad drove him up). By the time we trekked up there to bring him his new bike on Sunday, the boy looked completely in his element, as in: He was happy to see us, but we were invading his space.
It's a big transition, but it happens fast. Good on 'em.
Hay!
We deposited eldest in Columbia, SC Saturday morning. The move in was neither as complicated nor as hot as everyone had warned us about. I'm beginning to believe that Columbians wear a 'hot' badge of honor the same way Boonies talk about surviving winter up here... Regardless, eldest did jump f...
Makes me homesick.
A magical place
Just past Cloudrise Lane, while traveling towards Valle Crucis on Broadstone Rd, if you look left is a fantastic patch of fringed phacelia in bloom. Every year this six acres or so of land burst into a fairyland for me. I imagine wee folk boulder hopping or perhaps a gnome taking refuge 'neath ...
I lived in Coffey Hall during the fall of 1982 and Ruth used to come over and visit me, sit up with me at odd hours while I wrote in the basement, etc. Ruth could make my day just by walking into a room, and she was very nice to me, very sweet. I don't remember that we ever had a fight or said an ugly word to each other, which in retrospect is really something. She probably doesn't remember me at all, but Ruth has a place in the pantheon.
Watching me watching you...
These guys would barely gave me a second look. After securing several 'safe' shots from my Jeep, I had to get out of the car, walk closer towards them, wave my hand above my head and yell, " Hey y'all, look at me dammit." Finally they did. Snap. This shot. Lots going on this weekend and next, b...
There are probably a lot of Ruth B.'s out there, but her name wouldn't have been Buddenbaum, would it?
Watching me watching you...
These guys would barely gave me a second look. After securing several 'safe' shots from my Jeep, I had to get out of the car, walk closer towards them, wave my hand above my head and yell, " Hey y'all, look at me dammit." Finally they did. Snap. This shot. Lots going on this weekend and next, b...
Tony Hagler, a Boone native I met in my first semester of freshman year, used to tell a great story about the windmill. He and some friends heard that the 1970s-80s TV show "PM Magazine" had a crew in town to shoot a story about the windmill. These townies/students moved quickly, donning bedsheets and beads, picking up drums and whatnot, and then racing up the mountain so that when the film crew arrived at the top of the Knob, they found a bunch of freaks sitting around chanting prayers.
When the TV people asked them who they were and what they were doing, the locals gave them the straight-faced answer that they were "Whooshies," and that they worshipped the great windmill god "Nay-zuh" (the windmill had "NASA" written on its support strut) because it "brought energy from the heavens down to the peoples of Earth." With the TV cameras rolling, these Boonenites proceeded to act the perfect fool.
According to this tale, the TV crew fell for the hoax and filed a piece on this strange religion they had discovered, rather than on the windmill itself.
So when NASA pulled the thing down, I wrote a script for a faux-documentary called "Whither the Whooshies?" which was to star ASU professor Bud Gerber. In the opening scene, Gerber was to pose the question (whilst walking among the scrap remnants of the windmill in the laydown yard): What happens to a religion when it loses the divine subject of its adoration?
And of course, the schtick was that the Whooshies morph into all the basic religious stereotypes we all know, including campus Whooshies who, when asked what they liked about their group, each answered: "Fun and fellowship."
Sadly, in those pre-video days, the costs of this short proved beyond my fund-raising abilities. I managed to score the camera equipment I needed on a loan from the communications department, but the cost of 8mm film and processing was going to run me at least $500, which was significantly more than the value of my car. So outside of casting and some early "production meetings," this never came to be.
The windmill on Howard's Knob c. 1983
This was the view of Howard's Knob during my college days at Appalachian State University. I dug these little gems out the other evening. Back then I used a pitiful Kodak 110 film camera. Here is a link to the Wiki which has a fantastic shot of the windmill which was taken down in 1983. In 1980...
So, back in 1984 I was working on a friend's car parked along King Street and I met a guy who had just gotten out of the Army and we worked on the car together and drank beer and as he talked about the Army experience I started thinking "Well, there's something I could do with my sorry ASU-dropout ass." When my girlfriend picked me up and I told her that I was enlisting, her first question was "what about us?" To which I said "Well, we'll just get married and you'll come with me."
A few minutes later we walked into the house pictured here (back in the day it was universally known as "The Stoned House"), where at least half-a-dozen of our friends were hanging out that summer afternoon. I beerily announced that "I'm joining the Army and we're gettin' married!" With those words, the course of my entire adult life was set in stone.
I have to admit that I sobered up the next morning and questioned the wisdom of that announcement, particularly the marriage part. But I had spoken publicly, and to me, at that age, that's what mattered. I wasn't going back on my word. O how pride goeth, first before a fall, and then just generally...
I did four years in the Army and that turned out pretty well for me. The marriage lasted 13 years, several of them quite good, and produced a son who is now 16 and doing just fine. So it is with a mixture of fondness and regret that I look at these kids in front of this personal landmark, so visually interchangeable with the kids we used to be, in a place that seems as untouched by time as the mountains themselves.
Hippie Hill in Boone, North Carolina
A sure sign Spring is in the air is the site of students gathering on the lawn of Hippie Hill. Yesterday, there was a pleasant little group chilling out, playing hackey sack and watching traffic flow on King Street. Cake was blasting on the boombox. I stopped and visited the students. I told th...
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