I'M JUST A LITTLE EMBARRASSED

By my appearance. Oh maybe I should be more so.

But the recent valley rains have left me doing a reverse kind of molting. I'm turning into Algae Man or Mold Man. And, yes, that's me under all that growth.

I actually learned something by our more than a week long rains. I grow other colors than gray (hair and beard). And flesh (for body fat literally everywhere). I grow several shades of green when I'm not exposed to the sun.

I once had a dermatologist ask what I wanted to get so tanned. I simply answered that everything I like to do is outside. In the Summer sun in SoIL, I didn't even mind, well all that much, mowing the yard (we didn't have a lawn, because I never ever fertilized. I preferred our neighbors didn't either because some of the stuff that makes grasses grow might just blow over my way. I preferred dead or yellow grass) when the sun was blazing. To illustrate my point, I would mow at noon for three hours or more with a push rather than riding mower, partly, ok, largely because I could never keep a rider from breaking down. Shirtless, almost shortless; that is, I wore the skimpiest jogging shorts I owned. We lived at the end of a cul-de-sac or more accurately a dead end street, so there weren't many who viewed or would want to view me anatomically.

But these days of whines and doses of rain, I'm an inside guy. Turning green. Not with envy.

RAIN? FOR 6 STRAIGHT DAYS? IN ARIZONA?

That's what the prognosticators are telling us. Where's Al Gore when you need him? I'm sure he could give a reason. Global wetting? Or maybe he invented rain in January in the desert.

Since we only received 3 inches of rain all last year--a number I still refute. I know we got more than that at our house, thank heavens. But we're supposed to get 5 inches this week. Another number I'll have to see to believe. For some reason when rain clouds approach the valley and the dryness, they dissipate or disappear or dry up or totally ignore.

I don't complain abut the rain. We desperately crave it. What I dislike is a gray cloudy steel curtain day with no precip. I remember months of those in SoIL. But I'm told we have sunshine 330 days, so I know I'm where I'm supposed to be. Though when I visit places like Virgin Gorda or St. Barth's, I think I'm a bit of an island boy, too.

Oh, well. I'll just batten down the hatches, although I'll have to examine our house closely to try and find even one hatch. Then I'll have to figure out what and how to batten. But I'll get through this rainy spell. At least I won't have to shovel rain.

EXCUSES, EXCUSES

A neighbor of several years goes to his next door neighbor and asks, "May I borrow your axe?"

He's denied and told, "No, I'm just getting ready to make some soup for the day."

"But what does that have to do with whether you'll loan me the axe or not."

"If I don't want you to borrow the axe, I figure one excuse is as good as another."

FROM WATER FOUNTAINS TO FOUNTAIN HILLS

I like water moving. No brackish stuff for me. I like waterfalls and whirlpools, too. Bubbly brooks and aerated swimming pools. Waves from oceans or made by boats. A veritable water contrail.

At least once every cruise I've taken, I stand at the back of the ship and watch the blue water split and turn green in the turmoil of a huge ocean vessel cutting through the water. I'll stand there and watch, sometimes see fish or birds or both; usually just me and the ship and the water being sliced.

When I play golf at Fountain Hills, I never tire of seeing the huge fountain shoot tons of water into the air before making a cascading arch of return. If I lived there, I guess I'd have to take a gander ever 15 minutes at the start of each hour for that's when the water works begins.

About the only moving water that I never got into was the toilet flush. But I was in the presence of a family friend who stuck his head into the toilet and flushed to give him a swirly. He was only five years old, so I could understand.

I wonder if he has the same fascination as I?

YET MORE NOSTALGIA

Even in such places as Istanbul, I like to see laundry hanging on the clothesline. Even, as I said, in makeshift clotheslines on tenement balconies. On small porches in the inner city where you know almost no sunlight and certainly no fresh breezes do the blow drying jobs.


Why that scene appeals to me, I don't know. Something about the outside. Something about families working together. Something about clean clothes.

Well, at least non-dirty by-wear clothes. When it's a necessity to have fresh clothes to put on, because the closet is pretty bare. Again, why I wax poetically about this probably has more to do with a yearning for a time past.

Because we currently have a lousy dishwasher that sometimes leaks, sometimes doesn't open the soap dispenser, most times leaves spots on glassware, and doesn't do a great job of drying plastic popcorn bowls, for instance, I get to hand dry, well actually dishcloth dry the plastics. There's something nice about that. Of helping out in the kitchen. To return, at least in my imagination, to a time when we had no dishwasher and we all had to pitch in.

Like hand washing the car. I still do that a lot. I know, it's a lot easier to go through a car wash and it's not all that expensive. But I like to chamois down and clean the wheels and get that grease under my fingernails that takes a good scrubbing to get off. It even leaves black residue on my fingers themselves highlighting my, at the least, partial fingerprint. Again, it's an ode to a bygone time. A memory of what I used to do.

So while I'm being in-the-remember-when mode today, I'm getting hungry for a hamburger from a mom-and-pop diner. A family run drive-in before, yep, before the chains. But doggone, I don't know where to find one in Scottsdale. Not even a neighborhood store or pharmacy or sporting goods store or bookstore.

I bet when I take my walk today, I won't even see any laundry on the line. Where did 1957 go anyways?

MY NAME IS EARL, BUT IT JUST MIGHT BE THE HAG

I'm normally pretty respectful to my teachers. In fact most all teachers, who I think do a heckuva lot better than they're given credit for. This picture, as superimposed, as surreal as it is, reminds me a lot of my old social studies (pre-civics) teacher Miss Hagey.

She put those big eyes on The Hoob and me one Friday about a week before Christmas. It was 7th hour, the last hour of the day. Our school day ran until 4:05 after having held us captive since 8:25. And it was more than halfway into the period.

As a frosh in high school, I didn't know all the ins and outs of high school life including when we got our edition of the school newspaper that I enjoyed.

I turned to my bud and whispered, "Do we get a Vernois-News today?"

Boom. Busted. Nabbed. Kicked out. The Hag sent us to the Principal's Office. Why Hoobie never objected and why I didn't stand up for the guy and take the fall on my own, I don't know. Probably because we both felt we deserved it because of prior atrocities we had committed.

Mr. Kuhn, our Principal, yelled at us a little and gave us a week's detention. We were kept out of class for three additional days until Christmas break. Miss Hagey stopped by to wish us a Merry Christmas and see that we had learned our lesson.

I felt like an absolute low life and got in trouble at home, too. Which is still the only way to raise a kid But I don't recall much behavior modification as they called it back then from me. I was too much of a little punk.

But I'd say that act had the single most effect on my freshman year. Even more devastating than Freshman initiation.

HOOK 'EM HORNS

I didn't stick around long enough to see the post-game interviews after 'Bama knocked off the Texas Longhorns in the BSCS college bowl championship. (For close readers, I know; I added an extra S in the title game abbreviation. You can probably figure out what I meant, and if you can't just look to the first letter, put them together and now you know what I think of the whole system.)

After Texas qb McCoy got knocked out of the game in the first quarter, I didn't think it'd be much of a game. For the most part I was right, until the orange-clads made a post-haste run but fell short.

I've always liked the Texas colors for some reason, but 'Bama red is pretty awesome, too. So I was quandried as to whom to pull for. I told my wife I was going to root for the team with the prettier cheerleaders and since they were both Southern schools, the choice might be difficult. She's used to my kind of silliness and paid me no mind as they might say at either school.

But what I missed besides a good comeback was Colt McCoy's responses to how he felt after having missed, in effect, the whole championship game. According to a good friend, it went something like this: Sure, I'm disappointed. But God controls my life. The same God who allowed me play football at this level. And if it was for His purpose that I had to sit out, then I'm standing on The Rock."

Of course, my admiration for him went sky high. As my admiration for Florida's qb Tim Tebow who wore lamp black under his eyes with Eph. 2:9 on them. Those guys are stand up guys, who like Kurt Warner are the kinds of leaders you want to build a team around. Those kinds of guys who have their priorities straight.

Even in a championship game.