Running Like An Old Man While Looking Like An Old Lady At Mallard Cove Park

I know, I said I was done with the selfie thing, but I found this cool setting on the phone that makes the selfie taker look like an old lady. So, I had to try that and must say I was impressed with how well the "Look Like An Old Lady" scene setting works.

This selfie was taken under the shade of a big oak tree in Mallard Cove Park.

I was at Mallard Cove Park to participate in my new running pastime.

The recent return to hill hiking on the Tandy Hills has had me surprised at how much easier the hill hiking has become. I think this is due to the post morning swim habit I have had for months now of doing a lot of slow deep knee bends, as in 100, give or take a bend or two.

I first realized I had developed an extra spring in my step last  week when running up and down the stairs at Oakland Lake Park.

Years ago I was a regular jogger. I would run for miles. It took me awhile  to get to the point where I could go for miles. But, that all ended in early 1985. I was pretty much off the exercise wagon til I took up mountain biking in 1994.

I have not fallen off the wagon ever since.

Recently I have been impressed with this guy named Mr. Spiffy. Mr. Spiffy is a runner and a biker. Mr. Spiffy posts his run and biking info on Facebook. Last weekend Mr. Spiffy successfully completed the Wichita Falls Hotter Than  Hell One Hundred. As in Mr. Spiffy rolled his bike's wheel's for 100 miles in the HOT Texas August heat.

Now, Mr. Spiffy is younger than me. He looks to be, at the oldest, 39, so I don't think it realistic for me to aspire to a Mr. Spiffy level of running or biking, but I think it is realistic to try to return to enjoying running.

My first return to running attempt happened on Wednesday, running with the Indian Ghosts who haunt Village Creek in Arlington.

It did not go well.

I felt like a plodding walrus.

If I remember right the only person I mentioned this to was Elsie Hotpepper, who did not seem too sympathetic to my plodding walrus plight, simply asking me why I felt like a plodding walrus.

How does one explain why one felt like a plodding walrus? This seemed to require no explanation.

So, remembering my long ago experience with getting in running mode, I knew it got better with each subsequent attempt.

Which is why I went to Mallard Cove Park today.

Where I did not feel like a plodding walrus. I ran twice around the paved trail. Running in bursts, then walking, which, from past experience, for me, is the fastest way to get in shape for running a longer distance.

With today's running I can see where this is far more aerobic than riding my bike usually is, unless I'm going up a steep hill or a challenging section of mountain bike trail. Running is way more aerobic than I ever manage whilst swimming.

So, I was rather pleased with how good I felt after running today, as opposed to how I felt on Wednesday.

Apparently The Blue Bell Cult Perplexes Liberal Yankees With Social Consciousness

Way back on August 18 I asked Why Is Anyone Happy About The Return Of Blue Bell Ice Cream? because it truly perplexed me.

Since 2010 three sloppily run Blue Bell ice cream manufacturing facilities had been churning out listeria tainted ice cream. The company knew they had a problem, but did nothing about it until people began dying, which turned the problem into something Blue Bell could no longer avoid.

Prior to the Blue Bell ice cream death scandal I thought Bell Bell ice cream was made by some sort of old fashioned method, using all natural high quality ingredients, using cream from very contented cows in the heart of Texas in a town called Brenham, with that town being a major tourist attraction due to its famous ice cream.

I thought Blue Bell only was able to produce enough ice cream to supply Texas.

Hence, I thought this to be the reason for the fixation, by many Texans, regarding Blue Bell as being a really special ice cream.

When the listeria scandal erupted, with the news that Blue Bell ice cream producing facilities in Oklahoma and Alabama, in addition to Brenham, Texas, were making ice cream with deadly bacteria, was when I learned that I was wrong about Blue Bell being some sort of special to Texas thing.

Instead Blue Bell is like some sort of con job that way too many people bought into, and continue to buy into.

As evidenced by all the verbalizations of excitement at Blue Blue being back on a few grocery store shelves, with the latest goofy governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, being photographed with his happy horde of Blue Bell ice cream cartons.

The Blue Bell ice cream that has returned to Texas stores has come in from Alabama. The ice cream making in Brenham has yet to resume.

What I don't get is why have so many Texans become like cult members worshiping a tainted ice cream? Blue Bell's shoddy manufacturing standards resulted in an unknown number of people getting sick from listeria, with four dying, with ten still in serious condition.

Many people are perplexed by the Blue Bell fandom.

That is a Facebook  screen cap you see above, posted by the Dallas Morning News. The Facebook post led me to a Dallas Morning News article titled Why Blue Bell qualifies as "mediocre" ice cream in which the article's author wrote, in part....

The foregoing is not an attempt to unnecessarily pummel Blue Bell ice cream, a company that amazes me with its ability to instill ferocious brand loyalty for a humdrum product.

Call this a reader service: What you’ll find here is fuller data underlying my reference yesterday to Blue Bell as “mediocre.” I also wanted to respond to blog commenter John Leddy, who wondered about details of the taste test in question.

The sad news for Blue Bell fans is this: BB’s vanilla was rated lower than Costco, Walmart and Walgreens house brands by an expert panel employed by Consumer Reports.

Overall, Blue Bell came in 12th out of 18 samples. This was in 2014, after Blue Bell had evidence of the deadly listeria bacterium on plant property and before it began a stealth withdrawal of products. CR’s panel may be lucky they survived the taste test.

If there’s any solace for Blue Bell faithful it might be this: At least Blue Bell managed to edge out Kroger’s.

____________________________________________________

Both the Dallas Morning News Facebook post and the online article generated an amusing collection of comments, which show how rabid the members of the Blue Bell cult are, and how much the cult perplexes those who have not drank the Blue Bell Kool-Aid flavored ice cream. A few examples of the comments....

Lane Meyer
THANK GOD! ... Finally a sense of reason.. It is VERY AVERAGE ice cream. Hey look you wanna spout of Texas Pride and all and love Blue Bell for that reason go ahead.. I get it.. I Drink Lone Star beer most of the time. Doesn't mean its the best beer on the planet.

Kent Underwood
This article is a joke!  I've tasted almost all of the above mentioned brands and most of them don't come even close to being as good as Blue Bell.  Some are just plain bad and/or taste cheap.  Roger Jones, this article could very well rate you as a mediocre reporter.

Dan Kiniry
Come up with any BS Consumer Report Survey you want, it's obvious you're not from Texas. Unless you're some left leaning Yankee, Blue Bell will ALWAYS be the preferred ice cream in Texas. Keep enjoying that lefty stuff from Ben and Jerry.

Chris Kidd
Seriously, I haven't been a fan of blue bell in years. I prefer Ben & Jerry's not only for their inventive flavors, but their social consciousness as well.

David
Never once purchased a product due to a company's "social consciousness".  Have to be a lib.  Blue Bell does good things too.

Pop Jones
I've eaten Ben & Jerry's ice cream.  I never once tasted the "social consciousness".

_________________________________________________

See what I mean? Blue Bell does good things too? Like what? Like acting responsibly when it is learned they have a problem in their system that is killing people?

Unless you are a Yankee lib, Blue Bell will always be your ice cream of choice, no matter how many people it kills?

Very perplexing.

From what does the Cult of Blue Bell come? As we just learned from Consumer Reports, it has nothing to do with the quality of the ice cream.

Is it because way back when Blue Bell first began churning out ice cream they were the first ice cream churners in Texas? I imagine ice cream likely came late to Texas, what with the state being so hot and freezing technology likely being difficult in a climate so hot, back early in the last century.

Or does the Cult of Blue Bell come from it being of limited availability for a lot of years? Causing a sort of mystique, like Coors Beer used to be for people on the west coast, back in the 60s and 70s.

But now, in 2015, with Blue Bell being a corporate monster, with the ice cream being churned out in Oklahoma and Alabama, in addition to Texas, shouldn't the mystique of this ice cream having some sort of special Texas connotation begin a quick fade into history?

Methinks so.....

The Shadow Of The Tandy Hills Thin Man Was Not Captured On Film Today

My ineptness with using my phone's camera found a new way to be inept today.

I was back on the Tandy Hills, once again parked on the summit of Mount Tandy, for my now regularly scheduled Tandy Hills hill hiking, attempting to reverse the weight gain that yesterday had me plodding like a lumbering walrus when I attempted to jog with the Village Creek Indian Ghosts.

I was on the hills for an hour and a half, give or take a minute or two, today, hiking eight of the Tandy Hills hill climbs. I think that is one more than the number of hills I climb when I visit Rome.

So, I was at the top of one of the hills, and I looked down and saw that the high noon sun was casting a very short shadow.

When I saw the short shadow I thought, well, it's been a while since I took a picture of the Shadow of the Tandy Hills Thin Man.

I took the phone out of my pocket, turned it on, tapped the camera icon, aimed it at the shadow, but I could not see the shadow, all I saw was a mirror reflecting back at me, of me looking at the camera.

Not the first time I have encountered this problem, which is a problem I do not have when I use my digital camera to take a picture of the Shadow of the Tandy Hills Thin Man.

I aimed the camera where I thought it would capture the shadow and took several snaps.

When I got back to my photo processing device, also known as a computer, I used the computer to open the phone files and started clicking on the photos to find no photos of the Shadow of the Tandy Hills Thin Man.

Due to being unable to see the screen in the bright sun, I did not see that the camera was in selfie mode, so when I snapped a picture of what I thought was the shadow, what I was actually taking a picture of was me trying to take a picture of the shadow, which is what you see above, an inadvertent selfie.

Like I said, today I found a new way to be inept with the phone camera....

Proposed Dallas Skyscrapers Cause Cyberspace Stir But Not In Fort Worth

Today we are going to have an extreme variant of our popular series of bloggings about something I have read in an online west coast news source which I would not likely be reading in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram regarding something similar taking place in Fort Worth.

Today's variant is that it was not via a west coast news source online where I read something I have never read in the Star-Telegram about something happening in Fort Worth. Today it is in the Dallas Morning News online where I read something I have never read in the Star-Telegram reporting a similar thing happening in Fort Worth.

That being a stir of interest caused by proposed skyscrapers such as what is taking place in Fort Worth's neighbor to the east, Dallas.

A couple snippets from the Dallas Morning News Pictures of proposed skyscrapers north of downtown Dallas cause a stir in cyberspace article....

Some eye popping pictures of planned Dallas skyscrapers have been getting tons of clicks on architecture and real estate Internet fan pages.

The drawings of fanciful high-rise buildings look like a chunk of Hong Kong or Vancouver has landed just up the road from the El Fenix restaurant.

Vancouver? Unless Vancouver has changed since I was a neighbor, that town has height restrictions on its downtown buildings, hence no high-rise skyscrapers. Even without skyscrapers Vancouver has an impressive skyline. I think Vancouver limits the height of high-rises so as not to block the views of the nearby mountains.

Nearby mountains, or blocking views, is not a problem in Dallas or Fort Worth.

Ironically, when the project, then known as Trinity Uptown, was breathlessly announced via a HUGE headline in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the headline read "Trinity Uptown To Turn Fort Worth Into The Vancouver Of The South."

I remember reading that and being completely bum puzzled. And then when the details of what is now known as the Trinity River Uptown Central City Panther Island Vision, or America's Biggest Boondoggle, became clear, the idea that this project would somehow turn Fort Worth into the Vancouver of the South, became even more bum puzzling.

Before the Great Recession hit I remember being in Dallas and being surprised by the number of construction cranes all over the downtown zone. Last Saturday's visit to downtown Dallas again saw a lot of construction cranes.

One sees no construction cranes in the downtown Fort Worth zone, unless one counts as downtown the area where America's Biggest Boondoggle is building three simple bridges over dry land in a four year construction timeline.

In a recent blogging titled Why No Residential Towers Are Currently Planned For Fort Worth's Imaginary Island I opined as to what I thought was the reason downtown Fort Worth was a construction ghost town, repeating what Mr. Spiffy had previously opined, with Mr. Spiffy suggesting no developer is going to want to develop anything in downtown Fort Worth while America's Biggest Boondoggle has the status of downtown Fort Worth in a state of confusion.

The Dallas version of the Trinity River Vision is a bit further along than the Fort Worth version, with one signature bridge completed, built over water, and another well underway, also over water. The Dallas version of the Trinity River Vision has implementation problems, just like Fort Worth's version has implementation problems.

But the two town's vision implementation problems are different. And the Dallas implementation problems have not been exacerbated by having installed a local Dallas congresswoman's unqualified son in charge of running the Dallas vision.

Hence, the Dallas vision currently has a new bridge to drive over. But no beer drinking inner tube music parties, with e.coli, in the Trinity River, no drive-in movie theaters, no ice skating rinks, no music festivals at imaginary pavilions on imaginary islands, no beer breweries, no beer halls, no failed wakeboard parks....

Miss Puerto Rico's Coco Baby Takes Her First Selfie

This afternoon, on my way to Albertsons to collect this week's Fort Worth Weekly, I stopped by to visit the two young ladies Miss Puerto Rico and I refer to as "The Babies".

Coco and Bella.

Bella is also known as Belly Baby.

That is Coco you see here. For some reason today Coco insisted she wanted to take one of those selfie things she is always hearing about.

Coco and Bella started out being about the same size, with Bella the smaller of the two. That is no longer the case, with Bella having grown a rather substantial belly, hence the nickname, Belly Baby.

Coca and Belly Baby are now early teenagers in cat years. Worried that being overweight as a young teenager might be bad for Bella's long term self esteem, a cat obesity doctor, well, veterinarian, was consulted.

The veterinarian put Bella on a less fattening diet, which so far has not caused much belly reduction.

Due to being self conscious about being a bit overweight, Belly Baby usually is not as sociable as her sister. For instance, today when I arrived Coco greeted me at the door. Belly Baby was down the hallway, quickly retreating to hide under Miss Puerto Rico's bed.

I picked up Coco and we sat and visited for a bit. Then the taking a selfie subject came up, so the selfies were taken.

Before I left I looked under the bed to say hello to Belly Baby. She did not say a single word back to me....

Why Is A West Coast City Honoring Santos Rodriguez The Way Dallas Should?

Several weeks ago I first learned of the shocking murder of a 12 year old Dallas boy named Santos Rodriquez.

Santos was murdered by a Dallas police officer who was investigating the theft of some coins from a vending machine. The cop, Darrell Cain, entered Santos' home, where he was sleeping, yanked him out of bed, then stuck the handcuffed boy in the back of his cop car where he tried to force a confession from the boy by playing Russian Roulette.

A few paragraphs from the Dallas Morning News Editorial: Another city honors Santos Rodriguez the way Dallas should...

Even in 1973 Dallas, it was a shock to the conscience and led to downtown rioting amid the city’s largest civil rights protest to that time. Cain was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to five years. He served less than three.

How could you have known? As the years passed, Santos’ memory was left to his mother, Bessie, and older brother David. It would not be until 2013 that Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings issued a public apology and spoke personally to Bessie. This year, Rawlings was the first private donor to the Santos Rodriguez Memorial Scholarship at Southern Methodist University.

Laudable acts, certainly. This newspaper, in 2008, suggested the city take the more permanent step of naming a street for Santos, about the time some sought that honor for Cesar Chavez. Today, we have a Cesar Chavez Boulevard. But we have nothing to remember a boy whose death marked such a pivotal moment in our city’s history.

Then, just this week, we learned of Santos Rodriguez Memorial Park, so named “to remind us all of the importance to respect, love, care for, and protect all of the children of the world.” About $350,000 in city parks funding helped redevelop it into a welcoming open space next to El Centro de la Raza.

Please stop by the next time you’re in Seattle.

________________________________________________

How could the murderer of this kid get only five years, out in three? Is the murderer still alive?

I have a really good idea what could be re-named in memory of Santos Rodriguez.

Get rid of the clunky Margaret Hunt Hill name of the newest bridge in Dallas, and name it Bridge Santos, or Santos Bridge. This would seem very appropriate since Bridge Santos crosses from downtown Dallas to what looked to me to be a Latino neighborhood.

Naming a bridge for Santos Rodriguez which connects two disparate parts of Dallas, uniting them, would seem to be a bit suitably symbolic.

I really do not think Margaret Hunt Hill would mind the name change. She was a well known, highly regarded Dallas philanthropist, after all.....

Stenotrophomonas Has Me Back Hiking From The Summit Of Mount Tandy With Washington & Texas Earthquakes

Yesterday I hiked the Tandy Hills for the first time in a week or  two or three.

I cut back on my Tandy Hills hiking for two reasons.

One being I was not liking the HOT heat as much as I have summers previous in Texas.

The other reason is I was no longer feeling welcome parking on the summit of Mount Tandy, which necessitated driving over the bumpy Meadowbrook Drive, which has been being worked on in slow motion for a long time, to get to the View Street access to the Tandy Hills.

On yesterday's blogging about hiking the Tandy Hills I said....

I walked Tandy Highway for the first time since, for some unknown reason, the summit of Mount Tandy was peppered with No Trespassing, No Parking, No Loitering, No This That and Other Things Signs. Few people used this as a parking location. Why did anyone go to the bother of putting up all those signs?

To which Tandy Hills hiking aficionado, Stenotrophomonas, commented with some valuable, to me, information...

Stenotrophomonas has left a new comment on your post "HOT High Speed Tandy Hill Hiking On The Last Day Of August": 

The "no trespassing" signs went up after some fool was using the land north of the cop shop to spin some donuts. Chesapeake, fearing that some vehicle would end up as a Tandy Hills curiosity, while its owner engaged a hungry lawyer, put up the signs, whose phone number will ring in Oklahoma. Being Chesapeake, they also put up a sign south of the road, on land it did not own. But that's OK with me - once I saw a jeep full of morons go tearing south along one of the trails there near the old TV station. But the signs only cover Chesapeakistan land; Broadcast Hill is a public roadway. 

After Stenotrophomonas informed me the No Trespassing signs were Chesapeake nonsense only affecting the Chesapeake land Chesapeake bought, long ago, when Chesapeake still believed it could poke holes in the ground anywhere it wanted to in Fort Worth, I knew it was safe to park at my regular Tandy Hills location without being prosecuted for trespassing.

Which is why at the top you see a photo of my motorized hiking delivery vehicle parked on the summit of Mount Tandy.

I felt compelled to return today, once I learned it was okay to do so. I felt so good after yesterday's hiking induced endorphins that another dose today seemed like a mighty fine idea. I think I may be going Tandy Hill hiking day after day after until I lose all the extra weight which has been dragging me down.

I have said I was done with that taking a selfie thing. But then as I walked west from the summit of Mount Tandy, on the old wagon train trail which heads towards Fort Worth, I felt compelled to once again try and take a selfie, with the stunning skyline of beautiful downtown Fort Worth behind me.

Well.

This time the location of the sun was such that looking at the phone camera's screen it was reflected back at me like looking in a mirror, with me unable to see what the camera lens was seeing.

So, I gave up and continued on my way. A couple miles later I came upon the new Tandy Hills outdoor lecture room where I sat on one of the classsroom's slightly shaded benches.

I got out the phone again. This time, with the shade, I was able to see what  the camera was seeing, for the most part.

Now, this is the final selfie, unless I change my mind. Maybe on a cloudy day.

Changing the subject to something totally different.

Eastern Washington was shaken by an earthquake today. I learned this via a headline which said "A light 4.27 magnitude earthquake was detected today near Grand Coulee Dam."

Having experienced strong earthquakes, I think the strongest was a 6.5, it  has long amused me how the Texas locals get all shook up by gas drilling caused quakes of a small magnitude, like 2.1. I think maybe one or two have gotten somewhere in the 3 something range.

Now, having said that I must also say that a 2.1 quake can be quite jarring, if you are near the epicenter. A couple years before I moved to Texas there was a multi-month period of light quakes in the 2 to 3.0 range, epicentered at Big Lake, a couple miles east of my abode. Those quakes were jarring. I remember during one of them I was laying on my waterbed and about got tossed to the floor by the ocean motion. Another time I was watching TV when one hit, scaring me bad due to how the windows all seemed to flex inward, and the tall fir trees outside shook violently. During that one I heard loud cracking which I soon learned was caused by the quake causing the tile in my kitchen to break in one long fault line.

Those 2-3.0 range Big Lake quakes that I experienced have long had me perplexed as to why people here in Texas, near the epicenter of the local light quakes do not describe it as scary, as doing damage or as being noisy. Earthquakes are very noisy.

Back to the Tandy Hills. If you have never seen an earthquake fissure and have always wanted to, haul yourself to the Tandy Hills. The dried out trails have what look like earthquake fissures in many locations.

Be careful not to trip on one like I did today....

Is Fort Worth Happy To Be The Scrappy Little Sidekick Of Dallas?

Last night I read a sort of amusing article in the online version of Texas Monthly.

Texas’s Cities: One Big, Dysfunctional Family
CHRONICLING THE RIVALRIES OF HOUSTON, DALLAS, FORT WORTH, SAN ANTONIO, AND AUSTIN.

My Texas experience is only about a decade and a half long, so a lot of the rivalry stuff between Texas cities was nothing I had experienced, or thought.

However, I have long made note of one rivalry. That being what comes across, at times, as Fort Worth's sort of, well, inferiority complex, caused by Dallas being the big kid on the Metroplex block, with Dallas getting bizarrely demonized by many Fort Worthers.

Three paragraphs from the dysfunctional article, with the first paragraph mentioning the Fort Worth hating Dallas dysfunction, and with the third paragraph including another of the few mentions made of Fort Worth, with that mention being an example of the type thing that riles some Fort Wothers...

Small towns have their vicious football rivalries, but for sheer volume of insults and homerism, the five cities of the Texas Triangle offer the most fertile ground for discussion today. Here it is in a nutshell: Fort Worth hates Dallas. Houston hates Dallas and Austin. San Antonio hates Austin. Austin wishes all the rest of us would just go away, and Dallas pretends that none of the rest of us even exist.

Dallas and Houston are warring fraternal twins. Houston has always resented Dallas for being better at football, hates how global pop culture sees Dallas as the world’s oil capital when it is not, and thinks he is a little materialistic for Houston’s taste. (You know what really galls Houston about Dallas? Creator David Jacobs was inspired by Blood and Money, an epic true-crime tale that took place in Houston.)

With the exceptions of Austin, which Dallas loves to try to impress with a new-found impetus toward coolness, and scrappy little sidekick Fort Worth, the city gaslights every other Texas locale. But especially Houston. “Rivalry?” Dallas asks. “What rivalry? We don’t have a rivalry with Houston. Nobody up here ever even thinks of Houston.”

Fort Worth is the scrappy little sidekick of Dallas?  Well, the scrappy part of that line is sort of a compliment, isn't it? I would take it as such if someone called me scrappy. Calling me little, that I would not like so much.

That paragraph where we learned Fort Worth is the scrappy little sidekick of Dallas took me some parsing before I think I figured out what was being said.

If I am right the writer is suggesting that Dallas plays mind games with most other Texas towns by acting as if Dallas does not feel any rivalry with them, with Austin and Fort Worth being exceptions, with, Austin being an exception because, apparently, Dallas hopes to impress Austin that Dallas is also a cool town, and with Fort Worth being an exception due to the town being the scrappy little sidekick of Dallas, like a little buddy.

I may have totally misunderstood that scrappy little sidekick Fort Worth gaslighting paragraph.

Could an article like this Texas Monthly article be in Washington Monthly about the dysfunctional rivalry between Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, Spokane, Yakima and Olympia?

Likely not. I don't think one would read a line about Tacoma being the scrappy little sidekick of Seattle. Or Spokane hating Seattle. Or, well, you get the point....

Is There Really Something Called National Brothers Week?

I saw that which you see here on Facebook.

One can never trust what one sees on Facebook without running it past the Snopes filter.

But, in this instance, I am just going to choose to believe that it is true that we are currently in the midst of National Brothers Week.

I did not have a brother for the first 13 months I was on the planet. And then, there he was. I actually don't remember those 13 months before I had a brother. So, in my memory I have always had a little brother.

According to this thing, above, my brother was my first male friend for life. Actually, I think that was my dad.

My brother and I go through periods where we are not all that friendly.

Like the current period.

A couple months ago, out of the blue, my brother sent me a Facebook Friend Request. I wondered why now? We haven't spoken for a couple years. But I immediately confirmed the Friend Request.

This was most fortuitous, because that very day a mutual friend going back to our early childhood emailed me a message she wanted me to possibly share with my brother.

Because we were now Facebook Friends I was able to Facebook message my brother the message. My brother did not acknowledge receiving that Facebook message.

I figured he had not received it.

And then a few days later I get a call from Spencer Jack's dad, my favorite nephew Jason, who is also my brother's oldest son, telling me that that Facebook message from me to my brother led to my brother sending a letter to the party mentioned in the email from our mutual childhood friend.

Several days after that I saw that my brother had de-Friended me on Facebook. I don't think he likely understands the massive social faux pas he has committed. I think he probably does not understand how the Facebook Friending and un-Friending thing works.

I forgive him. This is what brothers do. We forgive and forget. At least that is my Brother Policy.

My brother and I have always been our own unique characters. My brother was what is known as a jock in school, mostly baseball oriented. While I did not get what was so special about playing baseball. Or throwing, catching and hitting a little ball.

I have never been a jock, of the team sports playing sort.

I have always been in fairly good shape, without playing any sort of team sport. My brother was in good shape when he played baseball, decades ago. But the baseball playing resulted in multiple sports injuries, resulting in multiple surgeries, resulting in the 2015 version of my little brother not being in quite as good a shape as the 2015 version of his big brother, the non-jock.

My little brother and I have gone through periods where we get along just fine. I remember driving my brother and his now wife, Jill, down to Lake Cushman, so Jill could meet mom and dad for the first time. This was shortly before I moved to Texas.

My brother and Jill married after I had moved to Texas.

I do not recollect if I was invited to that wedding.

I think my brother and Jill should take a Roadtrip to Texas. There is much they would enjoy here. Like the Fort Worth Stockyards. And Jill loves hamburgers. I think the Dallas/Fort Worth zone may be the Hamburger Capital of the World. And if the timing worked out we could go watch the Seattle Mariners beat the Texas Rangers in the very cool Ballpark in Arlington.

But, be warned, I have never made  it past the 7th inning without being bored to death, and leaving.....

HOT High Speed Tandy Hill Hiking On The Last Day Of August

In the picture you are looking west at the stunning skyline of beautiful downtown  Fort Worth.

Longtime listeners likely can intuit that this particular view indicates I was on the Tandy Hills today for an increasingly rare bout of HOT hill hiking.

I did not bring my digital camera with me today due to a pocket shortage. Which means this photo was taken with my phone, that being the device which has been taking selfies, of late.

I walked Tandy Highway for the first time since, for some unknown reason, the summit of Mount Tandy was peppered with No Trespassing, No Parking, No Loitering, No This That and Other Things Signs.

Few people used this as a parking location. Why did anyone go to the bother of putting up all those signs?

Anyway, I was pleased to see Tandy Highway has had some roadwork done since last I traveled that location. The two bridges across Tandy Creek have been rebuilt. Those crossings had become a bit annoying, due to unfixed erosion damage.

I was feeling quite light on my feet today, zooming up the hills. I think new hiking footwear may have been the cause of the lightness....