Early dawn hours 01.11.17

                It was a dark damp morning when I turned the corner, never suspecting that I would be…

                I have been surprised several times lately, but in most instances it has been perpetrated by my present spouse. Imagine it you will, sitting at my desk here in the Fords computer room, not typing an outstanding article into my 7 year old computer, instead I was having lunch, secure in the knowledge that I was alone at the Homestead!

                Typically, when surprised I react in a non-aggressive way, possibly jumping a little due to the surprise. In all mammals there is an automatic, “fight or flight reaction” when surprised. Example; a rabbit will run away when surprised and that is, “the flight reaction”, where a lion will attack when surprised and that is, “the fight reaction”. If our school systems were teaching the three “Rs”, instead of indoctrinating students into a socialistic and liberal society, I would not need to explain these things to you!

                I digress, for some reason today was different. Knowing I was alone in this huge house, and that my wonderful first wife was in town shopping, may have subconsciously brought on the fight not flight reaction. Food in front of me, TV on, watching the Fox news channel program, “Outnumbered”, the ladies almost always have short skirts on. I never know what they are talking about but I like to look I mean watch.

                Now that I think of it, I also had my HF rig on.                                                                           

                No, HF does not stand for some slinky article of clothing that some people keep hidden in their closet, and only put them on when they are alone, it is a Ham Radio (aka Amateur radio). They are called amateurs because they don’t get paid. Most of the ham operators know a heck of a lot about radios and other equipment. They are not amateurs when it comes to knowledge!

                Having to explain all this to you, has almost caused me to forget what I was presenting.

                Let me once again set the scene for you. I am alone at home. I have lunch on the desk in front of me. The TV is on, and the HF radio is on, both producing sounds. There is a door about two feet to my left, which when opened leads in to the garage. All is well, and my leftover turkey chili is excellent!

                Suddenly, and without warning, the door next to me began to open! I, without thinking reacted! My fist clinched, ready to take out this invader, I spun in my chair. I am still surprised at my quick and aggressive reaction! It was my wife, so I did not need to fully engage in the attack, but I did admonish her to make some noise when approaching. Her response was, “didn’t you hear me drive up, or the car door slam shut?” My response was, “No mam”.  She had brought me an ice tea from Bushes, so I forgave her.

                Well, I see my time is up, so I will attempt to present the original theme of this article, “Early dawn hours”, in a later posting.

Flight if you can do so safely, otherwise fight.

                ^{Advice for situations where crazy people are attempting to hurt people.}

Don Ford

# Mustache it or not 01.10.17

 

I am demonstrating my start of a handlebar mustache. The glasses are there to enhance the photo and to distract you from the large Ford nose. Click on the photo to enlarge the nose I mean photo.

A friend, upon seeing the start of the handlebars noted, you shaved your chin. This person was correct, but I had shave the chin about a month earlier.

There is another famous Ford who has a scar on his chin similar to mine. Harrison Ford is almost as famous as I am.

Start something new, make life better!

Don Ford

Obsessions 01.09.17

                Do we all have obsessions? I say yes!

                Am I going to tell you about mine, nope!

                You don’t need to know all my secrets, but now that I think of it, if you have read many of my posts, you probably know of most of them. I do have an obsession with writing these posts. There, I confessed, and I feel better, but I am not going to stop!

                Why did I get started on this subject this morning? It may have been due to the morning TV crap I mean so called news shows. This unnamed female movie person was talking at an awards program. I don’t know why anyone would watch awards programs unless they had a family member getting an award. She talked about an unnamed person who may be sworn into office in a few days. It should be noted that she did not use this person’s name but everyone knew who she meant.

                She has the right to say whatever she wants to say! In part, my comments about obsessions is in reference to the elected official who takes office in a few days. He can’t seem to restrain himself (not respond, tweet) when something is said about him by others! That seems to me to be an obsession. He, like most of us, probably has many obsessions and those obsessions are probably why he is rich.

                Having these obsessions is one thing, (we all have them) controlling them is something else.

                Consider if you will, someone has an obsession with eating. If they can control it, then they are ok. If not, they will likely be obese. If someone has a cleaning obsession, there home, car, work place will be immaculate. If they can’t control this obsession, they may never enjoy relaxing with a good book, TV show or just sitting around with family and friends.

                There is a difference between desire and obsession.

                Desire, I would like to have a nice restored 55 Chevy, the key word is like!

                Obsession, a person spends many thousands of dollars to have the 55 Chevy.

                As I see it, controlling ones desires and not letting them turn into obsessions, is an important part of one’s life. Understanding that one has an obsession is difficult for the individual, but not for those around them.  Recognizing an obsession is the first step, and may very well be the most difficult step in controlling it. 

                Think about the above comments. Maybe you can help someone control their obsessions!

May your desires not be obsessions!

Preacher Ford

                        ^{I signed it as preacher Ford since I was preaching again!}

Protection 01.07.17

                We here, in the state of Texas pay taxes! I thought these taxes were in part spent on protecting the public, obviously I was wrong!

                What am I speaking of, I will tell you. This morning when I awoke and popped out of bed, I was aware that there was a chill in the air. Where had this chill come from? We live in the south and it isn’t supposed to get cold here! It is obvious to me, the Yankees, instead of invading with an army, have sent their cold weather to harass the real Texans and the naturalized Texans. It is 15 degrees, which is ridiculous!

                Why were the authorities not prepared for this invasion? Maybe it is because we don’t pay state income taxes! If we paid state income taxes, the politicians might be able to syphon off their portion of the tax money, and still have enough left over to protect us from the northern invasion!

                If they can’t protect the state from the cold weather, then what can they do?

                These politicians don’t understand that I added this computer room on and there is no heat duct in this room. My only way to keep warm is to wrap myself in an old worn out blanket, (my present wife will not let me have a good blanket) and I have a small space heater, but being on a fixed income, I can’t run it as much as I would like. 

                Pay all those taxes and still the northern weather comes south. I should move to Canada, at least I would have a reason for being cold.

Stay inside, and you may stay warm!

Don Ford  

School 01.06.17

            I have recently written about an event that happened in 1957, and the fact that we were on my former school grounds, “May Green School”. It isn’t a school any longer, it is now a church or at least owned by a church.

            I will attach a photo that was taken at the may green school in years past. I acquired this photo from the Southeast Missourian Newspaper (I get daily highlights from the paper via email). It is not important but, I was employed by the Southeast Missourian paper right out of high school, for about 2 years.

            Kind of odd that I worked for the newspaper, as I was interested in anything mechanical as a young person. In high school I took Auto Mechanics and made outstanding grades (possibly the only time I made good grades). My teacher told me and one other student, that he had given our names to the local Chevy Dealer, and we had a job after high school, if we wanted it. I went to work at the newspaper? Odd!

Below is a photo taken at my old grade school. This is at the south west corner of the school. They spared no expense when making play grounds. Click to enlarge, I am not in this photo.

 

Climb to the top and have fun!

Don Ford

Nothing to do 01.05.17

            The title statement isn’t true, there are plenty of things I need to do, but it is too cold for a retired senior citizen person to get outside and do them. Think it is cold today (32), wait until tomorrow, it is predicted to get colder (19).

            The prognosticators were trying to get the Real Texans and us Naturalized Texans to think we might have a chance of some winter mix. (Winter mix means, there could be snow flurries, or sleet, or freezing rain.) The prognosticators get our hopes up and then nothing but cold weather! They do it for ratings!

            I took a photo this morning, when I ventured out of the Homestead to retrieve my spouse’s so called newspaper. Yes, I was forced out the front door without a jacket. She did allow me to wear my old, and may I say, “Well-worn house shoes”, (Well-worn means they have seen better days, donations may be sent to the Ford Homestead web site).

            As I shivered in the cold, attempting to retrieve the newspaper from the cold wet and almost frozen grass, I looked to the south east. There must have been a terrible fire, possibly due to someone having built a fire in their living room attempting to stay warm (without a fire place).  Photo below.

 

            I am sure you can see the red glow from the many fires early this morning.

May you not need to have a fire in your living room!

          (If you have a fire place, it is ok to have the fire in the living room!)

Don Ford

Surprise, surprise 01.04.17

            It is unusual that I would ever be surprised, but today, I was!

            Today was a normal Tuesday, my first wife and I had planned to remove the rest of the decorations from the front yard. When I say, “The rest”, that is an indication that some of the decorations have been removed. The removed decorations have not been put away as of yet, and can be found lying in the back 40.

            You see, when I go to the out building I want to remove those items that are in the way and then place all the decorations in the building all in one day. We were unable to remove the decorations from the front yard today, as my present spouse was reportedly sick. She didn’t have an excuse from the doctor, so there will be a written warning put in her file. Yes, I require a doctor’s excuse of any illness.  

            Gabi and Alex were here again today, due to the Christmas school vacation. We kept them away from the reported sick person, as we did not want to take any chances that she might actually be sick.

            As I was sitting in the old recliner pondering what I might do the rest of the day I heard an unusual sound outside. Now we are accustom to the sounds of rocket testing, but this was a different sound. It had a sound of a very large mower or some similar piece of equipment.

            I sprang from my chair and dashed to the front door. There it was, my surprise of the day! There was a street sweeper sweeping and vacuuming the streets. Had he made a mistake, or was he supposed to be cleaning our streets? Whichever, I was happily surprised. There were lots of leaves and some small sticks all up and down the street. The street sweeper was doing an excellent job! The street in front of our house is clean enough that one could eat off the street, almost! Nice job Mr. Sweeper.

            As we know, the neighbor to the south of the Ford Homestead, never cleans the limbs leaves or other trash I mean items from the street in front of their house. I thought how nice it would look after the sweeper clean their portion of the street. The sweeper had to go around the vehicle parked in front of their house, and was not able to clean up their leaves, crushed pecans and small limbs. The entire street, except for where their vehicle was parked, looks great.

            The chance of a life time lost to a parked vehicle!

            That was my surprise of the day! Oh, in case you are interested, my first wife is feeling much better! J

May all your surprises be good surprises!

Don Ford

1957 Sputnik 1 01.02.17

            As I sit here watching an old movie about time travel, where the fellow from 1899 builds a time travel machine and he travels into the future. In this movie, one of his stops is in the 1960s. When he gets out of the time machine, everyone is running to air raid shelters. One of the characters tries to get him to go into the shelter saying, “The nuclear powered satellites are coming”!

            I have seen the old movie several times in the past, and although it was probably somewhat interesting in its time, it isn’t very exciting in today’s world.

            The old movie kick started my brain. (Old motorcycles use to be kick started so I was trying to use that analogy, and now I see it didn’t work, why do I even try?)

            Back in 1957 when I was just a little children, the Russians sent up the first man made satellite to orbit the earth, “Sputnik 1”. That was something that had everyone’s interest, and the TV news, (TV news was actually news back in the olden days) was broadcasting the times that one could see the satellite go over after dark. 

            One should understand that there were very few reasons why I would ever be allowed to miss church, one reason was if I was on my death bed, or if both of my legs fell off, other than that I had to go.

            For some reason, I was allowed to stay at my nephew’s house on a church night, and at the appropriate time, we, along with many neighbors were outside looking up in the night’s sky. What would we see in the night’s sky? 

            There it was, a tiny spot of light, looking somewhat like a small star moving through the night sky. We were seeing history in the making in October, 1957.

            If you must know, I was 10 years old. 

Something odd; as I finished writing the above, I came back into a reality state. I truly felt as if I had been back in Missouri, on the May Green School grounds, looking up at the night’s sky. I guess I do get deep into my silly writing rants.

Could I have gone so deeply into my memory bank, that it seemed as if I were back in 1957,      or, did I just travel in time using only my mind? I was totally unaware of being in my computer room, it was dark with the only lights coming from houses along the street as there were no street lights in that part of town. We were on a paved portion of the playground where the basketball goals were, I could see many stars in the dark night sky! There it was, “Sputnik 1”, moving through the darkness!   Consider that statement for a moment. Is it possible to time travel using only our mental abilities?

            There will be a test tomorrow, after you have had time to consider the possibilities, of time travel verses memories!

Make your own history, be nice to someone!

Don Ford