Bill & Sheila Become Grandpa Bill and Grandma Sheila

Our first grandchild, Benjamin Robert Schatz, was born at 5:38 this afternoon at St. John's Hospital in Tulsa.  We were up at 5:00, had breakfast at the Diner at 6:00 and were walking into St. John by 7:00 AM.  It was a long but good day with lots of time to talk, think and simply be around each other.  My good friend Bruce DeLay came by and spent much of the afternoon with Sheila and I.  Funny how guys with "Rev." before their name somehow know how to show up at exactly the right time.  Around 4:30 things started picking up and a little after 5:30 Little Benjamin was here.

Back to the Farm

Not my picture but almost identical to what we saw.

Sheila and I spent a nice long day at the farm Saturday not doing much of anything.  The fall color seemed to be about at its peak and the last couple of miles of tree lined dirt road were a real treat.

We spent a couple of hours puttering around the house, doing light cleaning, etc. In the afternoon, I put in a nice hour in the backyard with my new Remington 597 HB, shooting at pieces of 1/2 inch lath stuck in the ground in the dirt embankment lining the storm cellar wall. 

By dark, we were ready to go and had our hearts set on dinner at Charlie's Chicken in Sallisaw.  Unfortunately, Charlie's was closed  and the only thing open worth consideration was THE Chinese place.  For the past couple of years, the Chinese place on Highway 59 South north of the I-40 junction (the only Chinese place in town) had gone down hill and we had been avoiding it.  However, we were pleasantly surprised to find new owners and a great selection on the buffet.  It was really a very good meal and quite inexpensive.  We were home by bedtime and a good time was had by all.  

Bill and Sheila and the BBC

It would seem that Sheila and I don't care much for American TV anymore.  We just don't watch it for the most part.  It is mindless at best and at worst insulting to our values.  I can't remember the last time we watched anything from the major networks.  Now that technology has given us multiple choices, we watch a lot and I do mean a lot of UK produced programming.  Here are some clips from a few of our favorites:

Dowton Abbey.  Previous seasons available on Netflix Streaming.  Season 3 will air early 2013 on PBS Masterpiece Theater.  Another period drama which began before the First World War and is now continuing into the post war years.  Too many plot twists to explain in a paragraph.  Just very entertaining.

Foyle's War.  Available on Netflix Streaming.  The adventures of an aging British Police Inspector in WWII Britian.  Probably the best of the host of very good Brit mysteries.

Doc Martin.  Available on NetFlix Streaming.  Only a Brit could think this one up.  What happens if a snooty big city surgeon suddenly begins fainting at the sight of blood and gets a last chance to continue practicing as a GP in a small fishing village?  We have already watched the whole series but for those who haven't it is now showing on OETA.

Lost Empires.  Available on Net Flix Streaming.  A Granada Televsion mini series based on J.B. Priestly's novel of the same name:


A very young Colin Firth is the orphaned nephew of a mysterious and highly cynical (but usually correct) star performer on the U.K.'s music hall circuit.  In this clip, he and his love Nancy are having what appears the perfect afternoon together which is interrupted by the sound of distant gunfire from an army rifle range, symbolizing the onset of the World War One in a few months.  Firth's character does not notice but his uncle has already set the premise up in an earlier scene when he predicts the horror of the coming war and observes that Great Britian is sliding into a morass it will never completely recover from and nobody was doing anything to stop it.

Midsomer Murders.  Again, NetFlix Streaming.  This is one of Sheila and I's favorites but for entirely different reasons.  She likes the light, breezy "Murder She Wrote" tone which I have to admit is pleasant enough.  I like the fact that the program is better than sleeping pills and can usually render me unconscious in less than half an hour.

Three World Class Musicians You Can Hear in Tulsa for the Price of a Drink or a Meal

Tommy Crook, the guitar player the late, great Chet Aktins called the best guitar player he had ever heard.  Mr. Crook plays at Lana Thai on South Memorial on Friday and Saturday nights.

 
Rocky Frisco of the legendary JJ Cale Tulsa circle of friends.  Rocky plays several nights per week at various local drinking establishments. His personal "About Me" page at TulsaWorld.com says he hangs around at: Utopia, Cimarron, Roadside, Scotty's and Blind Lemon's.




Little Joe McClerran is a very young man who has already won several awards in blues competitions.  He has also toured the Middle East and South America through a program sponsored by the U.S. State Department in cooperation with the Jazz At The Lincoln Center program.  Little Joe and company often play at Bodean's on the weekends.

Bill and Sheila's 43rd Anniversary Party

Catching Up .....

I got an e-mail from a blog subscriber this morning asking if Sheila and I were OK.  It was the lady who sometimes rents us her cabin down by Octavia.  I hadn't posted to this blog in about a month and she was concerned for us.  That was very thoughtful of her but I should have expected as much.  Hill country Okies are good people.

Well gee, what's going on in our life?  The contractor has been here for two weekends replacing a rotted out bathroom floor and then re-tiling it.  As usual, he did a great job.  But, he was always a good kid even when I was his Sunday school teacher way back when.  Sure, he's kind of a charming rascal, but he's good at what he does and keeps his word.

My beloved Sonata is back in the body shop.  We reluctantly decided to change insurance companies.  Traveler's has been wonderful to us and I can't say enough kind things about their support staff.  But, their rates for Oklahoma took a big jump after last years storms and the recent brush fires.  I had some hail damage that I didn't even notice when it occurred.  But, several months later, when I let the car get dirty one day, I noticed I had numerous tiny hail dimples.  So, I thought it would be wise to get the claim in while I was still insured by the company that was insuring me when the damage occurred.

This week, I am driving a vanilla, 2012 Impala.  I used to like Impalas.  In the late fifties and early sixties they were fast and sexy.  Later, they turned into boats.  This one is a barge.  Don't get me wrong, everything works and works pretty well I guess. But, the car feels like it was designed by a committee and built by one. Everything about it from control locations to styling just screams "government motors."  It has all of the  style and personality of a bureaucrat.

How in the world U.S. automakers let the Koreans of all people steal so much of the market I will never know but they darn well did.  My two year old Sonata is still sexier, faster, more stylish and ever so much more comfortable than this Government Motors monstrosity that is supposed to compete with it.  Dang, if Hyundai doesn't try to make a fortune on me, I may keep my current lease car and if they do I may lease another.  I have to say, the Sonata is without a doubt the best car I have ever owned.

My pickup is still in the body shop and while that normally would not be much of a problem, without it I have not been able to go the farm and set up my turkey blind and feeder.  The season starts Nov. 3 and I should been throwing corn for the past month or so.

Well, that is a little part of what is going on in our world.  More when something happens.

She Has No Idea ....

I had an interesting exchange with my forty-ish daughter on the way back from a very good lunch at the Cheesecake Factory yesterday.  Sheila mentioned that her fiance' Robert might like to go squirrel hunting with me sometime.  Robert is a Wyoming boy and has probably seen his share of how meat is actually produced but then again, things like squirrel hunting are very much an individual preference.

Noticing Robert's discomfort at the idea, I tried to get him off the hook by saying as much, basically that dressing up in camo, sitting dead still in the woods for hours, and then shooting, skinning, gutting  and cooking a small, furry, woodland creature might not be everybody's idea of fun.  My daughter shot back, "Well, you've never done anything like that in your life either."  She then mentioned a couple of our woodsier relatives as folks who would but laughed at the notion that her suit wearing, technology addicted father even could.

In a flash, it occurred to me that she had no earthly idea what life was like growing up on a farm in the 1950's.  Fried chicken for dinner was not a matter of pulling something out of the freezer.  When the decision was made, dinner was walking around someplace in the yard, pecking at rocks, worms and insects.  The decision was followed by an order, "Billy, go kill a chicken."  Soon after, the carcass would be plucked, cleaned and finally seared to remove pin feathers before it was cut up and put in the pan.

Fish for dinner did not mean pulling out the frozen fish sticks either.  You caught the fish, cleaned the fish and cooked the fish.  Same for squirrel.  You shot the squirrel, cleaned the squirrel, cooked the squirrel.  Same for rabbit.  These were not deep, dark pieces of woodsman's lore.  They were household tasks if you wanted meat for dinner.  I was probably ten or twelve the first time I ate store bought chicken at home.  The only fish we ever had was caught by someone in the family.

When I was growing up, little boys fished in the summer.  Period.  It was what you did.  Some did a lot more than others and some took a lot more joy from it than others but everybody did.  In the fall and winter you hunted squirrels and rabbits.  You ate what you killed.  It was a major sin and a sign of a lack of character to take life needlessly.   So, if you killed it or caught it, unless is was pest or nuisance species, SOMEBODY was going to eat it. 

Obviously not me, pic from the net.

Some of the best days of my childhood were spent roaming the fields and woods with my trusty .22 single shot.  That gun is sitting in the corner of my office right now, wearing a vintage Weaver scope probably worth twice as much as the gun.  It is still a tack driver and has the smoothest trigger of any weapon I have ever fired.  It is probably the most accurate weapon I own and it is certainly the simplest.  That gun cost my father nearly a week's wages.  He bought on lay away at Buster Brown's Jot Em Down Store on Factory Row in Ft. Smith, Arkansas.  It has provided hundreds of hours of fun, a degree of protection and even occasional meat for the table now for over sixty years.

I love the outdoors but have never been much of a hunter or fisherman.  Simple reason, it is much easier to buy food than kill it.  Twice in my life, I worked for companies that manufactured fishing equipment and so I had to be technically competent with the equipment.  But now, in my latter years, these things I did as a kid when there was nothing else to do are becoming more and more attractive to me.  I will go squirrel hunting again soon and in the process scout the place for my turkey blind.  I am going to try to take one of the big birds this year.  For five years, I worked on a commercial turkey farm where hurting one the senseless creatures was a firing offense even though that evil, terminally stupid but very tasty beast was beating you to death with its powerful wings and crapping all over  you in process.  I have cherished the thought of killing one for my entire life.  This may be the year.  Watch out TOM, I'm coming for you!