A LITTLE OF EACH, PLEASE

Rainy morning.

Sunny afternoon.

FRIDAY FUNNIES

That music!

Do you hear it?

Is that "Hail to the Chief"?

No, no, no.

It's "Hail to the Friday Funnies!"

And to the continuing saga of how cats and dogs stay warm.

The control on the left is set to "Toast the Cat".

These little rascals are risking a slow burn.

The rest of these, cats AND dogs, are looking for warmth in the light.

Then there's artificial light.

And THIS cat even climbed into the lizard's cage to share his warm light.

Before we go, a reminder about the upcoming Special Day.

Still laughing?

Good.

Have a great weekend!

THROWBACK THURSDAY

It's finally over and for the first time all week we're smiling!

The 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas.

(For those who care: left to right, Photographer Gary Stafford, Reporter Ron Talley, Producer Al Macias, Photographer Howard Shepherd, Photographer Wally Athey, Anchorman Kent Dana, Producer Bruce Taylor)

We all miss the late, great Howie, gone long before his time.

WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

TUESDAY TRAVELS

When I was a younger man I liked to get on top of things.

Like buildings.

It started, I believe, when I was a little kid.

I liked to climb trees.

I had a favorite place in what I called "the big tree" in a weedy alley a few houses away from ours in Stanley, North Dakota, where I grew up.

I would climb up there and, sheltered and hidden by the leaves, sit for hours, some times reading a book, some times just looking out over "my realm" and living in my imagination.

Some years later I became an amateur radio operator and climbed on various roofs to string antennas.

Being up on roofs never lost its fascination for me.

The views from above were fascinating to me and made me feel somehow powerful.

I remember once in Phoenix during an evening with friends, Timmer and Beaner, I climbed to our roof to get a better look at a distant lightning storm.

My wife and my friends refused to join me and only got me to come down when I "needed" a cigarette.

(I smoked in those days as did everyone else.)

But old age and the infirmities it brings have put a stop to my climbing.

So this rang a bell with me.

As one of my heroes, the late Kurt Vonnegut, would say - "so it goes."

CHANGING TIMES

Our neighbors are having their house painted.

The painting crew arrived this morning, set up ladders and began work.

Here's what I'm faced with. (Be sure to turn up your volume.)

Right now they're sanding various surfaces with some kind of power tool.

I sort of remember the good old days when the painting crew would arrive with a boom box blasting music out into the neighborhood.

¡Ole!

SQUARED UP

SWMBO hates what I call "Beverly Hills" yard care.

She thinks shrubbery should grow in a natural state, with only occasional trimming of the wild or outlying branch.

She hates this:

Like many plantings around our library and city hall, these have been trimmed into these square shapes.

I must agree with her: they don't look natural.

But still, they're kind of neat.

I call them Beverly Hills yard work because of a walk I took in that tony area of Greater Los Angeles once many years ago.

I was in town for a convention but decided one day to take a walk around in the residential enclave to see what was there.

(At the time I had lived all of my life in the Dakotas and this Beverly Hills was pretty strange in appearance to me.)

I was walking along, checking out the big mansions but also marveling at the lawns and the shrubbery, all of which looked to me like they had been manicured with a nail clippers.

Imagine the surprise of this naive North Dakota boy when a police car pulled up beside me and an officer asked me just what I thought I was doing.

We had a conversation, I think he looked at my driver's license, saw that I was from Dakota and politely informed me that this was an exclusive conclave and people got nervous about some stranger walking around looking at the big houses.

Even though I was dressed in a suit and tie.

But I guess my attire and manner pegged me as . . . . . a square.

Some times it's good to be a square.