What the Kumpes are watching on Netflix Streaming this week .....

This guy makes most private detectives look like pantywaists.  Set in war torn, modern day Galway, Ireland, Jack Taylor is dark, moody, violent, complicated, intelligent and literate as only an Irishman can be.  The video promo won't embed so here a link to it:

Jack Taylor Promo

This guy is several bricks short of a full load due to a head injury but he is an idiot savant of sorts when it comes to finding things.  The characters are well developed, the dialogue is good and the whole package is entertaining:

This movie is so profound on multiple levels that I won't even attempt to explain it:

CHICO! CHICO!

The weekend got off to a strange start last night.  Friday night, Sheila and I had a nice dinner at our favorite Thai place, did our grocery shopping for the week and were just settling in to bed to watch an hour or so's TV when the phone rang.  It was our daughter, Michelle.  It seems that their Dachsund, Chico, goes a little nuts when Robert is out of the house.  Last night, he apparently decided to try to find Robert which would have been difficult since Robert is in Austin, Texas.  Michelle asked if we would come and watch little BB while she searched the hood for Chico. We were there in moments.

I didn't want Michelle wandering the neighborhood alone at that time of night so I asked her to get in the car with me and we began scouring the neighborhood.  Soon, Michelle rolled the car windows down and began yelling Chico! Chico! out the window as we drove around.  It only took me a couple minutes of watching lights come on to realize just how odd we must have looked, two distinctly white people driving around an East Tulsa neighborhood yelling Hey Chico! Chico! at darkened houses and yards.  I gently tried to suggest that maybe yelling Hey Chico! Chico! in this hood might not be a great idea.  Michelle is totally oblivious to those types of considerations and continued until we had covered several blocks.  We eventually found the dog two houses down from her house.

This morning, we went to the farm.  I always enjoy the moment just before we round the curve and pass over the twin bridges over Onion Creek on

the road leading to the place.  That spot of road was always cooler in the hot summer and in my youth, I would slow down there as I passed to get a moment's rest from the heat.  This time, I actually stopped and took a picture of it with phone.

We did a few chores and I watched some Saturday westerns on the old TV.  They were the same westerns  I used to watch when I was growing up there.  I spent a while shooting my high power air rifle at soda cans.  Growing bored with that, I took aim at an old pot covering one of the water well heads.  I expected the pellet to just dent the pot and bounce off.  That did not happen.  It went straight

Not my kill.  But a good pic of the gun.

through the pot with a clean hole and did damage to the well casing inside.   I began looking at that air gun with a new found respect.  The specs said it shot its' .177 pellet with about the same muzzle velocity as a good .22 but I really didn't believe it, until now that is.

Soon, Sheila busied herself on the front porch removing years of accumulated paint from one of the chrome chairs from the dinette.  I joined her for a while and enjoyed the view from the porch.  The place is marvelously quiet and aside from my cousin delivering a load of cattle into the pasture we had the afternoon to ourselves.

There is something incredibly calming about the sun on your face, the wind in your hair and no sounds but a a few birds and cattle when you live in a city surrounded by people, cars, sirens, airliners

overhead, police helicopters and often just voices from the neighborhood.  Before we built the privacy screened deck you could see, and sometimes hear, eleven different houses from our back porch.  I have learned to tolerate it but I don't like it.

Sheila is still too shy to let us have friends from Tulsa come down.  Granted, the place is a dump but it is a cleaner dump every time we leave.  To me, it is charming and homey in a poor boy country cute kind of way and I think our friends would enjoy it too.  And,  nothing will change the fact that it is the house I grew up in and whatever it's condition I refuse to be ashamed of it or the people who put it there.  It is what it is and I am who I am.  I've both been a lot of places and done a lot of things since I was kid down there but that place will always be a part of me and to some extent ...... home.

Tomorrow, I am doing NOTHING.

A Very Fast Little Weekend

This weekend went by in a blur.  Since I am gone four nights per week learning how to be a PI (or at least how to get a PI license), I am dead tired by Friday night and really look forward to my weekend.  This one ended far to soon.

Friday night, we had dinner with the Rat Pack at the usual Chinese place on South Memorial.  After dinner, we drifted over to Mike and Jodi's.  The guys drank coffee, swapped stories and kinda followed the Thunder game.  The gals were in craft heaven in the kitchen, gluing generations worth of costume jewelry together to form Michelle's wedding bouquet.

Saturday was a hard day.  Sheila was gone at 5:30 AM to proctor the professional engineering exam at TU.  The professional engineering exam is a big deal for those engineering students.  It is literally their license to practice as a registered engineer.  Since Bill Manning passed, Sheila is the chief exam proctor, so she had to be there early to get her crew lined up and the facilities prepared.

I spent the day closing out my practice's 2012 books and doing taxes.  ALL day doing taxes. Sheila didn't get home until 8:00.  When she did, we ate some carry out chicken she brought home and went to bed exhausted.  Sunday morning, we got up and went to work on the taxes again.  I had expected us to work all day and into the night but by 2:00 PM we were more or less finished.

Sheila's reward for her hard work was to go spend an hour or two with little Ben Bob while Robert and Michelle did chores outside.  BB and Sheila both wore themselves out playing with each other.

We left their house around 5:00, bought a few grocery items and some carry out Mexican to bring home.  As we settled in, I found an APR program playing one song after the other written by Kris Kristoferson.  He is a classic example of a genius musician who should learn to keep his mouth shut about everything but his music, especially politics.

Remembering last week's successful uke lesson, I asked Sheila if she would like to learn to sing her favorite song, "Me and Bobby McGee" to  my guitar accompaniment.  She was too tired and declined.  And that is how we more or less ended the day, eating carry-out Mexican on the deck, pondering old Kris Kristoferson tunes, and watching the sun float westward over el barrio.

Little Ben Bob's First Easter

A Little Slice Life From the Adventures of Bill and Sheila

This was a strange Saturday.  My honorary uncle Sam Barnes had emergency heart surgery yesterday, so the first stop of the day after breakfast was St. John's coronary care unit. But, breakfast starts the story.

Since we were headed toward that neighborhood anyway, Sheila and I decided to have breakfast at El Rio Verde which is purported to be the best authentic Mexican place in town.  It isn't really, there are a couple of better places, but it is good and it does serve breakfast .... sort of at least.  I ordered decaf coffee.  So sorry, no decaf.  I ordered horchata.  I had to ask the waitress twice to get that and when she delivered the glass it was INSTANT made from powder stirred up in the glass.  I ordered a chicken fajita omelet made with egg whites and no cheese.  We waited while some Mexican customers who came in after us got their food.  When the omelet finally arrived, the waitress explained that the chef would not make an egg white omelet.  By then, we were running out of time and I didn't want to fool with sending it back.  So, I just pulled the eggs off and ate the filling along with some so-so at best tex mex hashbrowns.  No apologies.  So, as we were getting ready to leave I looked over at Sheila and slowly mouthed to her so the waitress could see, "UNO DOLARES PROPINO.  NO MAS."  THEN there was an apology.

We then proceeded to St. Johns.  I took my uke and my tablet with some old family pictures on it.  I also took Sam a small uke for him to play while he is convalescing.  I played for him a while and then we looked at some old family pictures.  Then we settled in for a nice long visit with Sam regaling me with tales about my ancestors.  It was a good visit despite the circumstances.  I enjoy old Sam.  He is a talker.  I just got a text from Sam's daughter telling me that he is doing well enough to go home.  So, Sam will sleep in his own bed tonight with two new stints to keep him going strong a while longer.

A friend of Sheila's died last week.  The funeral was in Nowata this afternoon.  We arrived in Nowata about an hour before the funeral and decided to have a light lunch at the Bliss Restaurant, which appeared to be the only sit down eating establishment in town except for Pizza Hut.  Sheila ordered the meatloaf.  I ordered the fried chicken.  Sheila and I then asked where the bathrooms were.  The proprietress explained to us that there were no inside toilets and gave us the keys to the gas station style outdoor bathrooms around back.  That was an experience in and of itself.

When we returned, our food had arrived.  My fried chicken meal was about two notches below a bad KFC but it was edible .... sort of.  But, Sheila's meatloaf was without a doubt the most disgusting thing I have ever seen a restaurant put on a customer's plate.  To start with, it appeared about two days old, dried out and burned on top.  The hamburger had apparently been heavily cut with some other substance. And, the taste was awful.  I used to feed my Dobermans far better dog food than that piece of meatloaf.  It was so disgusting we actually took a picture of it.

The funeral was held at a very nice little funeral chapel on main street that appeared to be a converted store front.  It was just right for a small service. Everything was handled very well.  It was all quite touching.

Bill Manning was a PHD engineer. Bill's brother Frank Manning is something of a legend at TU and has been like a member of the family to Sheila and I for decades.  Bill and Frank were twin brothers.  They were born in Barbados and educated in Canada before immigrating to the US.  Bill Manning was a mathematical genius with a true photographic memory.  He was also a formidable college athlete in his day.  There were only a few people at the funeral but it was probably the highest concentration of advanced degrees and college professors the town of Nowata had ever seen.  For many years, Sheila worked for Bill as an assistant proctor of the Registered Professional Engineering Examination in the Eastern Oklahoma testing region. Now that Bill is gone, Sheila will be the proctor.

It's a long way from the sunny beaches of Barbados where Bill was born to the little prairie cemetery in Nowata, Oklahoma where he now rests.  The path between the two places must have been quite a story.  My theology tells me otherwise but I would like to think that somehow old Bill's spirit is back on Barbados now, young, happy, swimming like a fish and basking in the tropical sun he was born under.  We did not get to stay for the graveside service.  I had a marriage counseling appointment with a young man back in Tulsa that required us to head straight back.

By sixish, Sheila and I were eating carryout hot wings and sushi on our deck.  Sheila had wanted me to play uke some more this morning when Sam wanted to talk.  So, I played for her a while this evening and then gave her a uke lesson so she could start learning to play for herself.  She did well.

It was a busy day, with a little bit of everything, bad food and bad service, lots of windshield time, a good visit with an honorary uncle I have come to love, the funeral of a truly remarkable man, an intense hour trying to save a marriage and at the end of the day a quiet hour on the deck with Sheila.  I guess you could call that a little slice of  life in the Adventures of Bill and Sheila.