Unburned Pieces of the Mind

According to Gene Norman, the weather guy on Channel 11 here in Houston, these past few days have been unusually warm and humid. As he says, “The muggies are back!” Compared to Maine where I lived before moving here two years ago, “muggies” are not too hard to take, especially with temperatures near ninety during the day and low seventies during the night.   Most of my neighbors in the apartment complex where I live have had their AC's cranking at full force, but I leave mine off and instead go old fashion by opening my patio screen door. With a tower fan in ... Read Full Story

With more summer like weather upon us, I find I’m getting out and about more often. Even though it is a late April day here in Houston, it feels more like a hot July day in Maine.   For today’s get-out-and-about adventure, I decided to attend the San Jacinto Day Festival and Battle Reenactment. I’m not much of a history buff per say, but once you learn about what transpired here on April 21, 1836, you leave with a greater appreciation of how significant this event was and how vastly different our country might be today if Santa Ana and his army had been ... Read Full Story

"War - I know it well, and the butchery of men Well I know. . .” Homer, The Iliad Houston, Texas--This first day of June 2008 is turning out be a real scorcher. It’s just past noon, and the temperature’s at 94 degrees with a heat index of 101. In spite of the hot day we’re having, I head out to Memorial Park for my Sunday afternoon walk on the mountain bike trails that meander through a lush green and densely vegetated forest featuring giant loblolly pines and massive water oaks. In a city the size of Houston, it is good to have a ... Read Full Story

Two natural disasters within two weeks in the southeast region of the world have been keeping the nightly news buzzing with the latest death counts. The May 3 rd cyclone that slammed into Myanmar is now said to have a death count of 137,000 or more, and the latest death count from the recent earthquake in China is not at 57,000 or more.   Considering that it’s only been two and half years since the Asian Tsunami that claimed over 200,000 people, that region of the world has experienced an unprecedented loss of life and destruction of property. In some places, entire families and ... Read Full Story

Since I signed up with Netflix a few years back, I have been renting TV shows that were popular during the time I was growing up, which would've been the late fifties and early sixties. So far I’ve managed to view the entire series of “The Rifleman,” “Combat,” and “Route 66.” For my next series, I rented “The Best of Bonanza, Vol. 1.” Of the episodes watched so far, “The Saga of Annie O’Toole” had a scene with Adam and Annie opening a restaurant, and the scent of her cooking wafting through the air brought in all the miners looking for a good home ... Read Full Story