Over a Half Million Blog Visits...

One of my biggest blog fans was my late father in Law Bill Cooney. He urged me to monetize the blog with ads so I could make money off of it. Bill was a retired school teacher and I was honored he thought the writing was that good and apparently other people think so too because this year my blog has surpassed a half million visits.   

When Bill suggested this I was all pure and everything and at the time the internet was a different place but now after 3257 posts and seeing online influencers make obscene amounts of money in a month I almost think, Why Not Me?

This blog app does offer placing ads and with the clicks of readers the traffic will pay money. My wife says don't do it, you don't need to. Maybe after I'm gone the kids will do it and the legacy money will pay my great grandchildren's college expenses. Of course I'm assuming that college as we know it will still exist and not be free. 

Maybe no one will click the ads, whatever they might be, because the online world has moved on past blogs to TicTok, Substack and other things I don't know about or even use. 

What do you think? Give me the clicks, man!  

 

 

You Don't Need a Time Machine...

 We like to tour old houses, plantations and other historical sites when on vacation. On this last trip to Charleston South Carolina we took a look at the McLeod Plantation on James Island. 

The plantation is a recognized as an important Gullah Culture site, important because the isolation of the imported people on the Sea Island region stretching from North Carolina in to Florida  kept much of their African culture intact. You can easily see this today as the traditional sweet grass baskets are still woven by hand and sold in roadside booths. I'm interested in this because my ancestors were and probably still are in North Carolina and may well have some tie to the Gullah culture which I hope to uncover some day. Hopefully that tie will not be too embarrassing. 

My grandkids Parker and Cullen with the house in the background. They are very well behaved tour takers and hopefully the will retain some of the history heard here. This house is from 1858 though the site is first recorded on maps in 1678. It's not furnished but you can look around inside. 

Barn on the property. There are many beautiful oak trees and what's left of an oak ally along the original driveway. Usually I take photos of the oak allys I visit but with a modern highway in the back ground I passed on this one.  

Can you spot the fingerprints of the brick maker? These bricks were made from the local clay, shaped by human hands and then dried and fired to harden them and you can also see prints like this at nearby Fort Sumter. They have figured that these were probably from a child and the clearness of raised fingerprint ridges may have indicated some illness.   

This big live oak is estimated to be 700 to 900 years old. 

An interesting story told by our tour guide is that in the years following the end of the civil war despite the efforts of Jim Crow to keep the people oppressed without free labor the economy of the Charleston area declined. By the 1930s it was clear tourist were going to be an important income stream. Note the bell in the tree. 

Where tours of the 1930s were given by McLeod descendants they told the story of how the bell was rang so that the slaves returned from the fields and lunched under the tree while the McLeods dined on the porch as one big family group. Nothing was farther from the truth. Growing the crops of the plantation, cotton, Indigo and rice was brutal work. Later someone climbed the tree and from an inscription on the bell it was easily dated to the 1920s. It had not been rang while enslaved people lived on the plantation. The story was just a way to advance the untruths of the mythic, noble south. As the tour guide said you won't need a time machine to still find those attitudes around Charleston today. 

These slave houses are in their original location and were built when there was an influx of French planters and the slaves that came to American at the start of the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The descendants of the McCleod slaves were still living here in 1990 when the last living McLeod passed away. They were afraid to move because they mistakenly thought that occupancy guaranteed some monetary inheritance or burial rights on the property.       

It did not. One out of four imported people came through the docks at Charleston. 90% of African Americans can trace one ancestor to Charleston. As Faulkner said, "History is never dead, it's not even past."  

 

    

 

Seven Days on the Road and We Made it Home Last Night...

This has been the season of the great spring break celebration. First we camped at Beaver's Bend with our grandchildren Warren and Coraline and the Zamora family and this week we completed a tour that included a flight to see the Tulloch family in Chicago and a flight to see the Wallace family in South Carolina. It was nice that everyone had different spring breaks because if it was all at once the grandkids would have ganged up and been busy with each other but here we were able to spend time with each family not to mention the cooler late winter climate of Chicago, the costal spring of Charleston where we met the Wallaces as well as a good dose of government shutdown TSA screening line delays in Houston.   

The Tullochs downtown in Maggie Daly Park. 

With the Wallace family in Charleston.

It was a seven day, three flight trip with lots of good eating. Since Katie and Peter live so close to Chinatown the Asian food is great. 

In Charleston the southern seafood cooking is top notch. They have a saying, "eat till you are tired and wake up hungry." I had shrimp and grits for breakfast three days in a row. 

Some people had a dip in the Atlantic Ocean.

Some people were busy babysitting a friend's big lizard. 

We all had fun and the TSA lines were much easier in Chicago and Charleston for what ever reason.  This vacation was so good I'm ready for another. We don't have a big camper trip scheduled till mid May but a campsite by the water somewhere is calling me. 

 

 

 

Used Shirts...

 I have about three shirts that my parents gave me for Christmas sometime in the late 70s. They are good shirts, durable and besides needing an occasional button or slight mending by my needle and thread capable wife they have served well and I still wear them often. Besides a few other shirt gifts I have received such as the big foot and tuba shirts that everyone feels are so appropriate I get my shirts at the thrift store. There's one particular snap button western shirt I own, bought used that lately I have seen two others like it. 

Someone asked me yesterday the question, "when did you have it done?" I couldn't exactly say so I said, "before COVID," and they understood and it immediately cleared up all confusion. So this western shirt I got before COVID. I was standing on a French Quarter street corner. It was morning of a bright spring day full of possibility and I spotted a guy coming down the street pushing a wheeled clothing rack stocked thick with shirts. I stopped him, you can do that in the great southern cities. Try it in the northern towns and that person might fight you off. 

The guy had taken thrift store snap button shirts and embroidered various designs on each shoulder. I was having modest success playing music and making cigar box guitars at the time so I was on the look out for stage costumes so this fit the bill. I bought one with crawfish on each shoulder. 

I used to like crawfish. On trips to Louisiana it was old cheap food that didn't fill you up too much so you could drink plenty of old cheap beer. The salty, spicy taste also made you want to drink more old cheap beer so it was really a hand and glove kind of thing. They go together. Now days I don't drink beer and for the price crawfish sell for I usually spring for the lobster. I'll just wear my embroidered shirt when I eat it.

I don't know how many shirts with crawfish that street vendor had that day. I have never seen another one. I was walking across the parking lot of a big box building material store and I spotted a shirt of the same pattern on a skinny wizened up little guy. It looked in good condition. These are after all quality shirts. I didn't mention to him I had one just like it or take a photo because my wife has coached me not to talk to other guys about what they are wearing. Not that there is anything wrong with that it's just something that might not sit in the moment right, which is a moment in the parking lot of a big box building materials store. 

The second shirt I saw like mine was in an online video released by New Orleans based folk singer Mark Rubin. I follow him on Facebook and he's a banjo/tuba/punk/bluegrass/Jewish dude. Pro tip: when you follow stuff like this on social media it wrecks the algorithm. When I saw his shirt I headed over to his band camp page and bought his latest release. I guess I should have left a comment, nice shirt. 

Here's the shirt in action.

Once I was at a little BBQ festival and saw a band play. I'd say they played about 75% of the songs a band I was in planned to play at a different festival he next day. I told the singer about this and he said by way of explanation, "Them are good songs." I guess you could say, "Them are good shirts."

That morning in the French Quarter I also bought another shirt but it will be another blog post.

        

         

Must Have Let the Magic Smoke Out of the Home Stereo...

 

Electronic things such as guitar amps, public address systems, cell phones, riding lawnmowers and home stereo units have magic smoke inside. Sometimes this smoke gets out and occasionally I have seen it escape it's container in very visible ways and when this happens said unit does not work anymore. This happened to my home stereo receiver this week. It was a 1990s Teac model that had served well powering turntable, cd player, cassette deck, two sets of speakers and a cobbled together bluetooth apparatus that could broadcast to outdoor speakers. 

 I purchased the Teac brand new and it's demise started when I noticed the digital display no longer indicated which accessory was inputting the sound. No problem, I'll just push buttons till I get sound. I listened to my new Hot 8 Brass Band cd, "Big Tuba" and a couple more. I did notice there was no display on the volume level which is semi important as I set it by the number that sounds best according to my location in the house or on the property somewhere. Next time I tried to play music there was no sound and it brought to mind a rhyme I bastardized from an old tune by bluesman Son House. 

I've had four stereo receivers in my life,

One bought by my mother,

One from my sister, 

One given by that good girl,

And one from my wife...     

Actually I have probably not owned that many and the sad fact is in this mad modern world of enshitification you can't go into a store and put your hands on a unit, maybe actually listen to it and buy what you want. I browsed on line all kind of info on home theater systems, bluetooth, karaoke inputs and more none of that are actually things I want. I did see a promising unit of an unfamiliar brand that seemed to do some attractive things such as play USB drives and record directly directly to them which would be handy to get the tunes on my old records into a format that would play in a late model automobile but besides being throwaway cheap junk it seemed you might need a pre amp for the turntable. That's not a good look to the budget manager on location to buy something and then immediately buy it a present.

So for a replacement I browsed online at used gear. The exact unit I am replacing is available which is tempting in terms of the learning curve but at $100+ the argument could be made for buying new as the level of quality I require in the digital world has become cheaper. Instead of this I turned to ebay and purchased a Panasonic made in Japan unit (used to be a good thing) that looks pretty simple for $40 plus $20 for shipping. 

Hopefully this will last till I forget how to hook all this up or how I want to listen to music is no longer valid in this world.     

  

More Catfishing...

 Cathy and I along with her brother Matt spent a Saturday afternoon fishing on Big Sam Rayburn. Water is still low and recent rain have the level creeping up with the boat dock at Hanks Creek just barely starting to float. That's evidence of improvement as a few weeks back the boat grounded a few feet short of the end of the dock making it a big step over for a fat guy like me.  

Fishing was slow as our usual spring pattern is catfish on slip corks around bushes but the water is still not anywhere near bushes along the shore. We managed to catch 9 catfish with Cathy again taking most fish and big fish honors on a box of stocky channel cats. I managed one fish so I did have a meager supper while she ate big piles of fillet meat.  

A couple of trips back this was all fat blue cats holding to the shore lines but I think a warmer than normal March has led them to finish up shallow water activity and they have been replaced but the later spawning channel cats. Even thought the weather was fine for shorts on the lake yesterday the sun seem to beat down and after cooking fish in the garage I felt a few mosquito bites so I am predicting a long hot summer. 

Hazy smoke on the lake off down in the direction of a recent 6000-7000 acre fire in the Angelina National Forest. I have not seen any news of a new fire and it seemed to disperse with the evening wind. 

There were several pairs of ospreys in the area, the first we have seen this spring. I thought they were year round inhabitants but they have been noticeably absent. They were engage in feeding, diving and nesting behaviors in shoreline trees but we did notice this nest along the long boat cut. The full pool of the lake is 164.4 feet and the level is 155 right now or 9 feet low. That means with a return to full this spot they chose will be at least 5 or 6 feet underwater. Cathy points out she will probably be disappointed in him for choosing this stump. The nest seemed to be under construction, thinly built with no chicks or eggs. It was a temptation to knock it in the water so they would maybe choose another spot but we decided to let nature take it's course. 

If it ain't fried it ain't food! 

   

  

Camping at Broken Bow, Ok...

We made a spring break trip to Beavers Bend State Park in Ok. It was our second trip to this area and we really covered some ground this time with camping, kid activities in town, hiking, cooking, a bit of fishing and more. It was a multi-family trip, really all one big family as we took grandkids Warren and Coraline, Great Grandma Geneva, the Zamora family and the Smith family. 

The Zamoras' and Smiths' had planned on tent camping but with rain in the forecast and thundershowers through the night ended up splitting a rental place (very nice) and we camped along the river.    

Geneva will soon be 86 and traveled to Broken Bow pulling her own camper. 

Our campers at the dam. This was where we saw the most fishermen and the only place I saw someone catch a trout. Last trip I caught one trout be this time I really saw few fishermen at the community holes when they have periodic stockings. This makes me think trout had not been stocked lately.  

 

The Smith Family. 

We had a couple of good hikes over steep rocky terrain. I report no chest pains and Mary checked my pulse once and it was only 120 so not too bad. 

Last trip I saw some folks catching a mixed bag of fish on earth worms and I brought some but the coons ate them. 

One day I may look back on these hikes with the grandkids like I look back on that 2019 climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty. Glad I did it then cause isn't happening today. 

I took a bunch of scenery photos so ya'll will think I spent the whole summer camping. 

Did I mention the groceries? Thanks to Travis for all the cooking he did. 

We don't have another big trip planned till May but hopefully with the rains our lake comes up and we squeeze in a few local camping trips to fill our days.