Eighteen wheels and a dozen roses
Ten more miles on his four day run
A few more songs from the all night radio
Then he'll spend the rest of his life
With the one that he loves
      -- Kathy Mattea

Okay, it's not eighteen wheels, and Ethel doesn't like roses. And it's not the rest of my life.

But when I finish up my day's work today, I'll head home, and spend a whole week with whatsername. And that's a wonderful thing.

And it's my understanding that she's happy about it, too. That's an even more wonderful thing - to have somebody that you admire and want to be with, who wants to be with you. Pretty cool stuff.

I have notions about us sailing and going climbing, and running towards each other though fields of mountain daisies, but I suspect that it's gonna be jackhammering and landscaping :)

        

Two weekends of running a jackhammer have left me with no zest for life - no joie de vivre, no gumption, no enthusiasm, no skip in my step, no bounce in my stride, no bomp in my bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp and no ram in my ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong.

So I'm sitting here working from home, and my banjo sits over by my office closet door, staring at me guiltily...

               

You can't play a banjo when you're tired. Not only that, but if you're tired, you can't even LISTEN to a banjo. A banjo demands movement (if played well, it forces you to dance; if played poorly, you have to get up and leave). And playing a banjo is a vigorous action, if only in a spiritual sense. To play a banjo, you have to smile and be happy.

All of that takes energy, or at least caffiene.

Maybe I should get some coffee.

But I can't - it's too late. I've sat here too long. Now I've reached that point in my orbit where I would have to have some coffee in order to get up enough energy to go get some coffee. Before long, I won't even be able to type about how much I need coffee.

Maybe I could send Ethel an email, asking her to bring me some coffee?....okay, I did that. No response yet....she's in her office, talking. Imagine that.

I'm now reaching that point where I stop believing in anything, where I don't even have enough get-up-and-go to do anything but give up.

and now look. i'm too tired to press the shift key. it's all lower case from here on out.

uh-oh. one eye is closing. productivity will soon grind to a complete halt. ethel still hasn't stopped talking long enough to read her email. i could call out her name...nope. vocal cords have ceased to function. all i can generate is a sort of hum.

i sure do hope that i don't get an itch - there's no way that i'd be able to scratch.

ethel's still talking....laughing....unaware that, just down the hall, i'm slipping into abysmal oblivion - the long dark night of the soul...i feel like the Hal 9000 in 2001 A Space Odyssey when Dave is pulling out his cortex components....daisy, daisy... give.. .me..... your...... .answer.... .do........

....i may have just gotten rescued - silas walked into my office, and i was able to whisper the words 'coffee....now' and he heard and seemed to understand. he left rather quickly - of course, he may have headed off somewhere to do some sort of teenage thing - no, i just heard the tinkle of silver, like a spoon hitting the counter...oh, there it is, in front of me now...must....raise.....arm.......

cold....did they refrigerate this coffee?...but coffee... nonetheless....okay, now wait.....

Okay. I'm better now. Time to pick up the banjo :)

        

I arrived home last night very tired from my recent efforts. After dinner, I had no desire for anything that would tax my nearly-drained reserves.

So we decided to watch The Great Muppet Caper :) It had been a long time since we'd seen the scene at 17 Highbrow Street, with Neville and Dorcas.


                 

Everyone has their favorites, I suppose, but this scene is, to me, one of the most enduringly funny, and infinitely quotable, scenes in cinema. (inserting randomly-retrieved highbrow street quote here - "That's more of a supper club").

However, I found my world picture rocked by reality last night, as we were watching this scene with subtitles. For some reason, we'd never done that before (and I'd never realized that the wife's name was Dorcas, a name that I instantly associate with Jubal Harshaw).

Mostly, it was just reinforcing the dialogue that we already knew by heart. But at one point, when Neville states what he might buy were he to suffer from boredom, the subtitles said, quite plainly:

                   "...some calve's foot jelly, perhaps?"\

For twenty-some-odd years, I have heard those words as "Carlsford jelly". Now, I'd never actually heard of Carlsford jelly. In fact, I'd never heard of Carlsford anything, but that's what my ears heard the first time, and so every time I've heard it since then, it has reinforced my preconception.

Ethel and Silas, as well, have thought that it was Carlsford Jelly, but what chance did they ever have of hearing it any other way? Before Ethel ever saw the film, I had recited the line the way that I'd heard it many times. Before Silas ever saw it, he'd heard "Carlsford" many times from his mother and father.

I considered the possibility that perhaps the captions had been done after-the-fact, by people listening to the dialogue rather than reading the script (there are many instances of subtitles where the written words are simply, and obviously, mistaken) so this morning I went a-Googling.

No Carlsford jelly anywhere in the known universe.

References to calve's foot (or calf's foot) jelly all over the place - too many to count (although Google did so anyway).

It's going to take me a long time, but I'll adjust to "calve's foot jelly". I've had bigger shocks.

And, fortunately for my psyche, this rewrite of my consciousness was followed by the scene at the Dubonnet Restaurant ("it's more of a supper club") , so the shock and intrusion of the strangeness was followed by the comfort and hominess of Fozzie doctoring the champagne ("You know, if you put enough sugar in this stuff, it tastes just like Ginger Ale").

        

Here's what our front yard looked like when we bought the Chocolate House (we brought that lone saguaro cactus with us and planted it during the first week):


                       


Then Ethel did a lot of research on desert landscaping, spent a lot of time with a landscaper to talk about how the job is done,  spent a lot of money at the nursery, and got a Jackhammer to keep Silas out of trouble:


                                                      

...and now, after two weekends of exhaustive and exhausting work, here's what the front yard looks like now:


                       


What you're seeing is three trees (a Mesquite, a Palo Verde and a Desert Willow), various Birds of Paradise, some desert bear grasses, some aloes and yuccas, golden barrel cacti, an ivy against the wall that's supposed to grow up and cover a good bit of that, some desert brooms, milkweeds, and the added-earlier Dead Saguaro, the Fountain, and the Boulders. 

There's actually a lot in the front yard that you can't see from this angle, so Ethel sent more for me to choose from. Here's one from the porch area, looking south:



                       

which may help to give a better idea of just how crowded the front yard has gotten.

This isn't all of the landscaping that we've done, by any means - we've got two more trees on the east side, along with a lot of cacti and shrubbery (feather dusters, Mexican honeysuckles, and the whole eastern side will be covered with Queens Wreath ivy; we've got sage and rosemary (no parsley or thyme, though - and the sage was already there :) and, on the west side, three citrus trees - lemon, orange and grapefruit.

That, by the way, is just a partial list. I really don't know all of the names of all of the plants that Ethel has had us put into the ground. I do know that I'm tired. Saturday, after my run, I helped Silas with two trees on the east side (although he did most of that work). That left me tired.

Sunday was sort of a marathon, starting at 8 AM and finishing at 5 (with a sort of siesta in the middle, although we didn't sleep) with both of us going full time; we'd swap out with the jackhammer and shovels. We would have two holes going, and  one of us would be hammering in his hole while the other would be shoveling what he'd just broken up, then pass the jackhammer back across and dosey-do. That left both of us incapacitated; Ethel was exhausted too, and all she did was watch us work and eat bon-bons.

Now what's left is the plants to be planted on the hill (which will be really crazy, as the hill doesn't actually have any "dirt" or dirtlike substance - it's pure calichi, with boulders and stones and rocks and gravel) and then trenching to install the irrigation and lighting. Ha - did you read that? "....and then trenching to install the irrigation and lighting". That takes a few seconds to type, but it's an eternity of work and suffering - sort of like typing "...and then the Roman Empire fell...".

I'm taking next week off from work - this is called a "vacation" - but I have this funny feeling that I won't be getting any rest at all.

        

OK - here's Jax in his going-home clothes, being held by (we openly show her face now) hims momma Angela:

                         

Folks who've nursed babies will recognize Jax's expression here - it means "hey - I smell Momma. Where's the groceries?"

Jax is not the least bit concerned about the fact that, at the time this picture was taken, the Crimson Tide of the University of Alabama was at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, LA, and either the score was tied, or Bama was behind (up until this game, Bama had only trailed for 1:15 all year). No, Jax still lives in the world where he's fed, or he's not - and his diaper needs changing, or it doesn't. That's pretty much it. Currently he has the mental capacity of a Cocker Spaniel (although he's considerably cuter). We have hopes that that will change; however, so far I've had three Puckett boys, and they are all stick stuck in the "Cocker Spaniel cranium" phase.

This was Jax's first Alabama game, and he handled the noise and excitement rather well - slept through most of it, in fact. (N.B. - I have some friends in Utah who had their first child some years back. When the boy was about two years old, the mother brought him to a meeting that I attended; upon hearing my voice, the toddler started crying. I asked her what was wrong - she said that he'd never heard anyone shouting before. Being raised in a house full of Alabama fans, Jax will probably not suffer from that sort of sensitivity to loud noises :)

Strangely enough, the parents wouldn't let Papaw hold the bady during the game - seems that they were concerned that I might toss Jax up in the air if we scored, or slam him into the ground if LSU scored, so I had to wait until halftime to get in any babysitting time:

                         


So we watched the LSU game and ate shrimp etufe and didn't toss the baby at all, even though the game went into overtime (my poor mother; she couldn't stand it when Bama got behind. Sometime in the third quarter, she had to get up and get out of the den and she just paced back and forth in her hallway, unable to watch the game until it was over, and even then she misread the score and thought Bama had lost. I had to call her and tell her that, no, Bama won in overtime :)

We won't get to see Jax this weekend, as Floyd's mother is coming out from Alabama to visit; since we're the local grandparents, we have the privilege of seeing him anytime, so we'll keep away and let her have her baby time. And the Mississippi State game, while an SEC game and thus not a gimme by any means, should not require the full juju of a Puckett Party (besides, I'm just NOT gonna eat bulldog. I don't even know where we could get any bulldog).

        

I was hoping, today, to show you pictures of my new grandson Jax, wearing his gbeautiful Bama go-home-from-the-hospital outfit.

But, unfortunately, I'm afraid that I've been derailed from that pleasant diversion by a sudden reminder of - and a social obligation to spread the message about - a disease that still persists in the Heart of Dixie.

Here, for your observation, is my great-niece Sophia, wearing her Alabama outfit:

                     

As you can tell, Sophia is very unhappy.

No, she doesn't need to be changed, and no, she's not hungry.

Sophia....is being indoctrinated.

Even though Sophia is a native of the great state of Alabama, and even though she comes from a fine family of good character and standing, it turns out that Sophie is being raised by a couple of Auburn fans; custody was awarded to the couple on the rather shaky theory that they should have her, just because they are her parents.

Well, I hope that the DCSIFF (Department of Child Services and Infant Football Fandom) sees this picture - actual photographic evidence of the most blatant and horrifying sort of child abuse.

Obviously, Sophia's parents have dressed her up in Alabama gear - and the wearing of the Crimson and White can only make a child feel warm and happy - but then proceeded to pinch, bite and swat the child until she cried. This happens over and over - showing the baby her reflection in a mirror, and then bringing about intense discomfort until the child cries in pain and despair.

They do this in order to force the child away from her natural, wholesome inclination to feel fulfilled and happy whenever she sees the big Script A, and - instead - through the misuse of Pavlovian techniques, condition the child to associate Alabama's colors with pain, abuse and suffering.

It's a terrible thing to see. But Sophia's parents aren't to blame. They, like many others before them, have had their natural desire for their Bama Birthright to be somehow twisted and torn, like toilet paper on Toomer's Corner three days after a win. The insane idea takes up residence in their minds, and forces itself to crowd out all reason and accountability. They don't know any way of life that doesn't include perpetrating the Auburn Illusion.

Sometimes it goes from parent to child; other times, it strikes from without, due to geography or being misguided by a high school counselor to take the low road to a higher education.

Like alcoholism, drug addiction, or a preoccupation with NASCAR, Auburn fandom is a sad perversion of a child's normal instincts and enthusiasms. In this case, an Alabama baby - brought into the world to love, live for, and watch Alabama football - is left with the desire to see football, but has all of the normal attributes stripped away by a process of indoctrination and mind-control techniques, to the point where a perception of Red is yellowed into an unhealthy Orange, and the White of purity is displaced by the Blue of depression.

This is much like the process by which Winston Smith, in Orwell's "1984", was forced to look at three fingers and see four, or two - or however many fingers he was told to see. These children are told over and over again that "Bear was a bad man" and "Bama fans are all ignorant and toothless trailer trash" and "Beating Alabama once is a bigger deal than having a bunch of national championships or SEC rings" - with food and affection withheld until they parrot back the phrases that have held so many Aubies in thrall to their delusions for so very, very long.

It's shameful, and it gets repeated, generation after generation. And it brings a sense of futility and despair to any concerned, caring adult.

But there is something you can do.

Stop The Insanity! Contact Alabama's Department of Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention today to speak your mind about creating yet another generation of Auburn fans - before it's too late for all of those other children.

Because it might already be too late for Sophia.

        

Now, with a Bachelor of Science Computer Science (BSCS) with a minor in Mathematics, you'd think I'd know simple arithmetic.

But I have to admit that - although I wasn't aware of it - I had not understood the rules for mulitiplication until this morning, around 3 AM.

                                         


Yes, it's true, I've always known my multiplication tables - up through 12, and, like anybody else, I could use those to do larger sums in my head.

And I'd always known the simple rules about "a positive times a negative results in a negative; a negative times a negative results in a positive" - but I'd never UNDERSTOOD it until (as I said) this morning, sometime around 3 AM.

It came to me in a dream - I was actually teaching somebody else how to multiply, and we had started off with the simple matter of the use of the word "times"; come to think of it, I'd never actually really realized why we say TIMES until I had to figure it out while I was explaining it to the person in the dream (whoever it was).

Wow. Just like Jethro and his Gazintas - I had learned it by rote, and thus never had to learn what it meant.

Now, I am pretty sure that my teachers did, indeed, explain it to me, but since I had already learned the rules, I probably paid no attention to the explanation ("yeah, yeah, I know that already, see how smart I am? Let's get on with it") and thus missed the reason why things worked the way that they worked.

Lord, what a metaphor for my life! So busy thinking that I understood, and wanting to hurry through whatever was next, that I missed they "why" of everything!

And it's an extended metaphor, as well, because it wasn't until I had to explain it all to somebody else (at least, in my dream) that I understood why we say "times" and why a negative times a positive equals a negative.

They say you wind up teaching what you have to learn.

Now I just need to find somebody who wants me to teach them how to quit work and become a ski bum without starving....I'd love to learn that.

        

....and weighed six pounds, nine ounces, then he'd look a lot like Jackson David Puckett :)

                  


Jacks did NOT want to be born, as it turns out, so he swelled his head up to the size of a volleyball to keep from being pushed out. And Angela has the pelvic girdle of an Ethiopian, so there were many hours of "irresistible force meeting an immovable object", so eventually the doc decided to go in and get him.

(I'd like to state, here and now, that - although it has always been the lot of the male to go outside the cave and fight the saber-toothed tiger, or go to war and fight the Nazis, or go down with the ship so that the women and children can get into the lifeboats - I am very, very grateful to be a man, and not a woman. That other stuff is INFINITELY preferable to being the center of attention in a Labor & Delivery room. The fact that I've never had to actually FIGHT saber-toothed Nazis or get out of the lifeboat only adds to my extreme gratitude for my Y chromosome).

Anyway, all of this push me - pull you stuff resulted in Jacks' head being pushed into an orofice much too small to accodomate it, such that - if his head DOESN'T reshape itself - I expect him to wind up as an Art History major in a Liberal Arts college, wearing a turtleneck and smelling like the Arcosanti. But the doc assures us that there are no such concerns - that his head will go back to its designed proportions.

I got to go into the nursery with Dave, briefly, in order to touch and smell little Jacks. It's pretty amazing, to do this as a grandfather - one has much more awareness of just how big an event a birth is, when one has been through it before, and when one is not suddenly assuming the mantle of responsibility that goes along with it. I see that my eldest son, at the age of 29, will suddenly have to go ahead and finish growing up in all of those ways that simply cannot happen until one is responsible for somebody else's life.

I'm also able to think long-range - at some point, Ethel and I will be taking Jacks skiing, and climbing, and sailing; he'll be calling us Mawmaw and Pawpaw, and running into our house yelling. At about the same time that Silas moves out and makes our house quiet, he'll be showing up to raise the decibel level.

I reckon that'll be all right :)

        

It's Monday morning, and Angela is in Labor and Delivery, going through all of the things that women go through preparatory to giving birth.

Meantime, little Jackson David Puckett (that's the last name that I've heard) is sitting inside under rather crowded conditions, awaiting his release.

               j

Ethel is already at the hospital - she can't get back to the L&D rooms, because she can't reach Floyd on his cellphone to come let her in.

I...am at the office, getting some work done :)

I'm actually the only one of the bunch that's ever really been through this whole thing, since Ethel slept through Silas' delivery (emergency C-section). Thus, I'm the calmest, and I'm also the one that is most aware of just how long and drawn out these sorts of things can be.

And I'd rather do my waiting at the office than in the waiting room at the hospital :) Here I can get work done, I've got all of my normal this-and-thats around me, and for all I know I could finish out a full workday, and they'll still be sitting down at the hospital waiting on the Big Event.

That's one thing that is still rather barbaric about the whole birth thing - you just can't get these girls to commit to a schedule.

I have to admit that I hope that little Jackson does make an appearance at a reasonable hour, but babies tend to arrive with their own timing, and it often seems to be extremely nocturnal - and, doggone it, I'm too old for nocturnal :)

By tomorrow there should be a posting with a photograph of Jackson, as opposed to an ultrasound (unless he's too ugly for cameras). Watch this space!

(N.B. - yes, for those who are wondering, I am indeed aware that Alabama is now #1 in all of the polls and the BCS standings. It's unimportant. To paraphase St. Nick, "....if you could tell me who was #1 in the polls at week 10 LAST year, then maybe it would mean something." There's a lot of football left to play).

        

On the way to Prescott to not go to Sedona and not hike, we stopped at Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti.

                           
You may have heard of Arcosanti - some folks have. Most folks, when they think that they've heard of it, are actually thinking about the Biosphere, which is north of Tucson; and most folks who think that they've heard of the Biosphere north of Tucson are actually thinking about Biodome, which is a movie with Pauly Shore. I don't know what most folks are thinking when they think about Pauly Shore - I'm not sure that they are thinking at all. I would assume that spending much time with Pauly Shore in one's forebrain might shut down all neurological activity, except for a random twitch.

An "arcology" is a combination of architecture and ecology; I understand that the idea is that cities could be built into single large building, or group of buildings, as an alternative to "urban sprawl". Those of us who like urban sprawl seem to be in the majority (although there's definitely a minority who will admit to liking urban sprawl. It's sort of like those folks who watch Desperate Housewives, or folks in Alabama who voted for Clinton; you know that they are out there, and the results of their choices tell you that they must be in the majority, but not too many of them will admit to it).

Of course, just because I like urban sprawl (you know - huge areas filled with large numbers of people who have bought their own homes; neighborhoods for miles on end) doesn't mean that I wouldn't like arcologies, too. I can imagine a benefit to a lifestyle that doesn't involve commuting - or even getting into a vehicle at all. I like people, so I don't mind spending a lot of time pressed in close with a bunch of 'em.

But I suspect that the folks that I met at the Arcosanti wouldn't want to spend a lotf time pressed in close with me; as I said the other day, most of them seemed to be wearing Tevas and patchouli. Now, I wear Tevas (or I did, until my Tevas finally died, and I replaced them with a pair of Keenes) but for me, water sandals are a footwear choice that indicates that my feet are hot, or that I am going to get them wet.

The folks that I saw hanging around the Arcosanti weren't going kayaking any time soon; there's no way that they could do that, as then they would have to re-apply all of that patchouli. I saw a lot of these plants around, and wondered if maybe they were patchouli plants -

                                            

- but I see in Wikipedia that, no, that's not what they look like at all.  (I have to admit - the little yellow berries looked sorta suspect).

Here was an interesting bit that they did with the cypress trees out back, running them straight through the roof:

              
                      

and this common area:

                            

...but the whole place left me feeling vaguely unsatisfied; as though there should be a great deal more that they had built, being out here in the desert for thirty years.

And that feeling hasn't left me; but I'm aware that it's certainly borne of ignorance. Let's face it - if somebody were to look at (say) ten pages of code that it took me a month to write, they woudl say "Gee, that's not so much - I could type a lot more than that in a month", not understanding that I'm actually building a structure of thought and process that's never been done before, and that many of the lines of code had been written, tested, rewritten, retested - and then completly thrown away and something else put into it's place.

I'm using the same character set - letters, numbers, punctuation - ust like these builders are using concrete, wood and steel;  there's no telling how many times they've torn a section back down and said "Nah, that's not what we want. It didn't work the way that we thought it would".

So I'm sort of an oaf, wandering around and seeing not too much in the way of walls, windows and doors, while somebody who knew what they were looking at might be saying "Gee, how did they think of that? - whatever made them make that choice?" and be completely amazed.

Well, I'm 49 & 3/4 years old, and I've already used up most of my brain, so I'm probably not going to go study architecture just so that I can understand what Arcosaniti is.

Instead, I just said "Gee, that's interesting", and went home, and scrubbed off the residual patchouli :)