Los Texmaniacs at Summer in the City...

 

The Summer in the City Event Series featured the Grammy Award winning San Antonio Band Los Texmaniacs. I've owned a couple of their CDs for some years now and was very happy to see them come to Lufkin especially for a free concert (I bought their newest CD) in Cotton Square. It was a very enjoyable evening with a food trucks and booths, lawn chairs and an ice cream store just steps away from my seat.  

Los Texmaniacs takes conjunto music and mashes it all up with polkas, cajun, R&B and rock to create a worthy party and dancing sound. They are on the Folkways Smithsonian Record label and that says that this music is judged to be something that should be preserved and not forgotten.    

Cotton Square Park, with the surrounding streets blocked off, a new mural of Angelina, the Indigenous person our county was named after and the astro turf like surface make a great place for the grandkids to run around.   

Summer in the City has been a host for concerts by the Spazmatics, Dale Watson, local music by Lufkin Limminers open mics and up coming is the blues rock group the Peterson Brothers which I have seen several times and am looking forward to on August 9th. 

There were all kinds of people out for the evening enjoying this show. Thanks again for bringing music with a wide audience appeal and national recognition to our city. It's what makes us great. 

I Got Paid Musicians Union Scale Plus That Antifa Bonus...

I tried to look up on the internet if Congressman John Lewis ever did anything bad. Like all of us he was a fallible human mortal but apparently he was not a convicted felon, never sexually assaulted anyone, never defrauded anyone and never incited a riot to take over the government. John Lewis was a champion of non-violently protesting to represent the downtrodden and oppressed that American society that the billionaires buying influence want to leave behind. For this he was often beaten and arrested but believed in "making good trouble" and that "if you see something that is not right, not fair, not just you have to speak up."

Speak up is what people did at the July 17th, 2025 Good Trouble Lives on Rally, held at around 2000 places across America. Here in Lufkin, Tx we gathered on the steps of the Ward R. Burk Federal Building and for a couple of hours a group of local people consisting of some of my oldest friends, friends from church and other concerned citizens with common interests in the welfare of all met and displayed signs to express our dissatisfaction with Trump and his policies that is taking away healthcare, education, environmental protections and endangering human rights in America, a place that used to champion these very principles. 

We talked and laughed, listened to Bob Marley tunes, I played the tuba with my grand kids accompanying on percussion while Charlie and Jovina sang and we all moved off the grass and federal building steps when the U.S. Marshalls asked. 

This was the second local rally I had participated in. Last month we had the No Kings Rally at the county courthouse. I also played tuba there but in an effort not to wear out my welcome we plan on working up some guitar tunes for the next time. Several people around us allowed how they played or sang and it might be a good start for group.  

Nothing says protest like climbing the no parking sign poles in front of the fed. 

Good Trouble Lives On. Some get in bad trouble but it's pretty easy to tell the difference. 

  

        

A New Blog Character...

Here's a new blog character. Cathy got a tattoo of a tie dye rabbit playing a banjo as a memorial to her dad, Bill Cooney. 

In Old Irish legend and the Cooney family is Irish the rabbit is a mysterious otherworldly creature associated with the world of fairies, magic and shapeshifting. Cathy's dad played the tenor banjo. 

The roots of this come from a t shirt design by Miguel (rabbit by Mary) done in November 2016 for one of the jam sessions he like to host for his birthday. This happened to be his 85th. Bill passed in 2020 at 88 years old

Bill's sister Shelia and husband Art pictured front row left have also passed on. RIP to his brother David and wife Peggy, not picture here but also gone to just rewards. 

Bill puts on the I mean business banjo face. 

The jam session crew. 

Cathy has been calling the rabbit Bun-Bun. My advice for that tattoo is make it tell your story. 

 

If I Tell You What I Eat You'll Want to Eat it Too...

 Sometimes after I cook and I do most of the cooking except for scrambled eggs, fried chicken, spaghetti and fried wild duck breast which are Cathy's specialties and if the results are pretty I make a photo of the finished product. I rarely do this in restaurants unless I am eating with close associates Suzy and Charlie or Scott and Ellen and everyone has ordered something where they had to go out and kill the animal to make the dish special just for us but instead preferring to make photos of food I have cooked.   

The food I have cooked and photographed is often fried catfish or maybe a nice piece of otherwise healthy grilled catfish that has been topped with a cholesterol elevating cream sauce or a heavy marbled  fat beefsteak. Usually not apparent in the photo but hiding in plain sight is butter. I've began to feel a little bit guilt about all this. 

By all reports from my doc (who wishes he had hair as long as mine) I'm a healthy elderly man (ex smoker, that's their way of saying even though you quit 30 odd years ago it will kill you) and none of this heavy eating is having much of an effect on me. What if you ate it though and had a heart attack. It would be like us taking a dose of cocaine that I tolerated well but it fried your brain. I'd feel bad about that too. 

So I decide to confess here (not that I do cocaine) but that I usually eat one and sometimes two veggie meals a day. Breakfast is a bowl of fruit, yogurt and crumbled dried plantains and lunch is a salad. Here's the salad.

It could be considered a little on the big side and I did have the guilty pleasure of crackers with it.

Here's supper last night. Maybe the first time I have cooked a fish I didn't catch but I recently had grilled salmon at a friend's house and it was good and the fish in HEB looked tasty so I broiled in butter sauce and accompanied it with French bread, sautéed veggies and sliced avocado. Cathy likes salmon. 

Probably not too bad a meal if I cut a bit of butter and ate half of it. 

If I tell you what I eat I know you will want a snort of it too. Just be careful. 

   

       

A New Camera and a Fishing Report...

I went through a couple of those Canon point and shoot cameras and while I like them they don't stand up well to canoeing, duck hunting, catfishing and tuba playing for extended periods of time. It's usually the little accordion screen lens protector that goes and while that does not keep the camera from operation but without the lens gets scratched and photo quality suffers and we can't have that. For a while I have been using an old Kodak that seems indestructible but it's like stone age tech as far as digital stuff goes and makes the greatest tubing behind the boat photos ever but it has other shortcomings and Cathy has felt sorry enough for me to purchase a late Father's Day present, a Nikon D31000. It's used, bought from the Unclaimed Baggage website  and some might probably consider it old tech but it's the nicest camera I've owned. It lacks the zoom I'm used to but things far away are getting less and less important to me and on our fishing trip yesterday we took the first fish photos with it.    

Cathy with the first fish photo. She's seeing if the new Frida Kahlo bucket hat can catch fish. Lots of digital info on the photo file. I can tell by the upload speed compared to a cell phone pic but then some of ya'll might have a better phone camera than me.  

Grandson Warren has been staying with us all week. I know some of ya'll want AI but yesterday Warren learned where the long boat cut is and how to recognize it, how to ease the boat up to the dock and how to come around and stop for a swimmer in the water without running over them with the boat. If you don't need these skills pass on by. 

One of our favorite spots late summer through the winter is a stump that is on the edge of what I suspect is an old oxbow lake off the river channel that we named the dog walker because when we discovered it there was a dog leash tied to it. It was a poor producer last summer and on trying it this trip we found that it had been broken off (upper part is still held on short stump by the trotline string that is tied to every stump in the lake) but still had enough stump above the water for a tie off. The fish have returned and we had a good bite. 

I marked a GPS way point incase this stump breaks further and as long as my depth finder lasts longer than a Canon camera it is saved so I can remember it as WP025 so I can anchor and fish this spot. Big fishing secret revel: always tie to those stumps barely sticking out of the water. Human nature says everyone else is going to tie to the tallest stump. It's easy.  

Final count was 16 cats in less than an hour. Back of the boat where the transducer is said 39 ft with fish 4 reel turns up.  No great size but we could have had all we wanted. Cathy does not skin catfish anymore because of a shoulder replacement and arthritis and I told them I felt like I'd clean 20 today. They got pretty close.

Blue heron photo with head bent attending to his grooming as I learn to work the new camera. 

 

 

More Summer Tubing...

 The season is full on us and I have forgot all about catfishing...at least for now. It's just too much fun on a hot day to drag the kids around on a tube and I'm inching ever closer to that goal of just having to drive the truck and boat to the lake and letting them do the rest of the work. 

 

Everyone is handling the tube real well and maybe next summer there will be some knee board riders. Most everyone is handling that tube well, especially if their momma is there to ride it with them. 

I am offering $100 to the first grandchild that can back the boat in the garage. Of course when they do it I'll say I offered $75 just so I can hear them whine "Pop Pop!" till the adults gang up on me and make me pay the full amount. 

If you come up with anything to make them get back in the boat let me know. 

Had the Gang All In...

 I don't know what they were all in but you know what I mean. Rose and family from Lake Jackson, Katie and family minus Peter who was working from Chicago, Morgan and family from Greenville, SC and of course the local Zamora clan. We didn't really do much but cook, shoot fireworks and watch the kids play in the water slide but that was enough. 

One person does not have on pants in this photo. 

One person does not have on pants in this photo.