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To set this up – last Sunday was my 71st birthday. Last Thursday was Grandson Ver 2.2’s 18th birthday. Today we needed brisket to celebrate. Granpa did one. And it was good. I used Zach’s Grilling Spices and Durkee’s Steak Dust for seasoning. Smoked with half oak and half hickory. This was my first hot and fast at about 350 for 7 hours. As opposed to my usual low and slow at about 225 for 10 hours of so. Anyway, food pron pics below. Raw on the smoker, smokin’, ready to wrap, unwrapped, some sliced, Grandson Ver 2.2 dishin’ up granpa’s brisket and potato salad and granma’s beans, and last Grandson Ver 2.2, my old self and Grandson Ver 2.1.
These are The Cactus Cuties last Jan 20 before the Texas Tech vs Texas basketball game in front of 11,000 folks. They sound a lot better than most of the people that sing the anthem.
When I was this young ladies age all I did on roller skates was fall down.
I’m kinda stove up right now. Pulled a hitch in my git-a-long and about the least painful chair is this one in front of my computer. This happens occasionally. Old football thing I’ll tell you about someday.
Anyway I was listening to my Buddy Rich station on Pandora.com and decided to visit youtube and listen to some of the old time drummers. Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Lionel Hampton, Don Lamond, etc. And then I ventured off to younger drummers. This young lady was 13 at the time this was recorded. She just may be Buddy Rich re-incarnated. You can hear more at her web site. And she plays guitar as well.
but mens has more funz. These guys remind me of Rodney Crowell’s “Telephone Road” which he wrote about growing up in Houston. The video has music too but I like Rodney’s better.
Please welcome our new granddaiughter Kristen Brianne who arrived on the scene this morning at 9:02. Can’t wait to get my grubby old paws on her. Our travels are somewhat limited now but we’ll probably get there this weekend. And Christmas. Granny’s got some spoilin’ to do. And Gramps too.
Brother Kellen and sister Katherine are happy to have her in the family.
And that’s my baby boy Kelly holding his baby boy Kaden. And baby daughter in law Amy. She’s the only one in that family whose name doesn’t start with a K. Well, Kelly’s first name is actually Myron but Mrs Myron never liked it so he grew up as Kelly.
Don’t worry kids. Granny and gramps will be there soon.
It’s been a few days since I posted anything, hasn’t it? Well, just to catch up real quick, Mrs Myron decorated the place for Christmas Saturday before Thanksgiving. Both local sons and families came over for turkey and Grandma wanted the little kids to see her house all ready for Santa. That’s because they probably won’t be back until after Christmas. Granddaughter #2 is due in about 3 weeks. Our 6 grandsons and nearly 2 granddaughters range in age from almost born up to 23. Hell of a spread, huh? And Granny’s really looking forward to having another little girl to spoil. After 4 sons and 6 grandsons she figures she’s due.
And Thanksgiving was great. Smoked turkey, ham, cornbread dressing, 4 different kinds of pie, candied yams, mashed taters, 4 different kinds of pie, and a couple of vegetables. Did I mention we had 4 different kinds of pie?
All of that is well and good. But to the title of this post. You know Mrs Myron has Parkinson’s. Well, the last few months her short term memory is giving her more and more problems. During the remodel, she hid some of her jewelry. And didn’t tell me where. And we almost never found it when the work was done and she wanted it back in the bedroom. And we are watching 2 month old reruns that she doesn’t remember seeing. But she remembers some old Eastenders that she saw several years ago. And almost daily now, I have to show her how to do some things with the Dish remote that she did with no effort a couple of years ago. The latest problem involves her cell phone. We got it last week because she gets in the go carts at Walmart and frequently when I tell her to wait right here I’ll be back in a minute when I return, she’s roaming around. But at least she will go to the service desk and ask them to page me. Anyway we thought if she had a phone I could just call her and ask which aisle she was on, you know?
Well, it’s a flip phone so I set it up so that she just has to open it up to answer. I called her on it yesterday while I was out just to see what happened. She never answered. When I got home, she told me she couldn’t figure out how to answer it. I put several of our family and neighbor numbers in it. I’ve had to show her every day how to turn it on, find a name, dial and then hang up. And how to answer it and then hang up. And then how to turn it off.
Mrs Myron is scheduled for a visit to her neuro in January. But given what’s going on I think I’ll probably get her an appointment with the Baylor College of Medicine Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorder Clinic here in Houston instead. It seems to me that her PD is well controlled but the memory thing is really beginning to bother me.
There are numerous causes of memory problems such as some meds, PD itself, and thyroid (she’s on meds for a thyroid deficiency) to just to name a few other than the big one we all worry about. Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest. I’ve talked to my sons about the problem also.
I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m doing. Just screwing around while Mrs Myron takes a much needed nap. We had a pool full of kids and grandkids over today.
And Ginger was here
From the date on the latest Rick Casey column on this topic, it appears I have been remiss in following this case. Guess I really need to start reading the paper every day again. Anyway, according to the article, there are at least a few politicians who seem to feel as I do. And the one currently sponsoring the bill to allow kids to be kids is a Democrat. What can I say?
From the column:
SOME good may yet come out of the case of Casey “The Kid” Harmeier, the 12-year-old desperado from Tomball who faces criminal charges for accepting a dare to remove the cover from a school fire alarm.
Rep. Harold Dutton (D-Houston) says he may call The Kid to testify regarding legislation intended to turn “zero tolerance” into “common sense” at the state’s schools.
Dutton chairs the House Committee on Juvenile Justice & Family Issues, and was appalled to learn that The Kid was still facing criminal charges even after school officials learned they were mistaken in thinking he had actually pulled the fire alarm.
Further down:
The crime of chewing gum
A common technique these days is to have school district police issue Class C misdemeanor tickets not for crimes but for violations of school rules. These tickets require trips before a municipal court judge or a justice of the peace.“They’ve issued tickets for chewing gum,” Dutton said.
As Billy Jacobs, a former Texas Education Agency school safety official, has said: “We hold children to higher standards than we hold adults. We don’t leave any room for children to make mistakes.”
And speaking of zero tolerance:
Dutton isn’t alone among Houston-area legislators working on the problem. Rep. Rob Eissler (R-The Woodlands), who chairs the House Education Committee, tried to pass legislation two years ago that would have required school officials to take into consideration such factors as the child’s intention in the matter and his or her disciplinary history.
The bill was watered down after school officials promised they would cut back on “zero tolerance” idiocy. I’m sure many have, and many others didn’t need to.
But enough administrators are still engaging in “zero tolerance” foolishness to make further legislation necessary, and Eissler had indicated he intends to work for some.
Rep. Dora Olivo (D-Missouri City) is pushing a bill that would allow a student who discovers he inadvertently left a Boy Scout knife in his pocket, or a hunting gun in his truck, to tell a school official and turn the knife or gun over without reprisal.
And Casey closes his column thusly:
Teachers and well-behaved students need safe and controlled classrooms for learning to take place.
But allowing school officials to hide behind “zero tolerance” and to criminalize childish mistakes is intolerable.
Can we have an amen, brothers and sisters?
I’ve been saying for years that many of my friends and I would have been locked up if we had gone to schools with the kind of insane policies now so prevalent.
And you know what? My baby boy who is a high school coach, biology teacher and just got his masters agrees with me.
A column by Rick Casey in the Houston Chronicle on 2/13/07 is a perfect illustration of how the administrators in todays schools no longer think for themselves. And prosecutors as well. When did our society go completely off the rails when dealing with kids? I have long stated that “zero tolerance” policies are just an excuse for school administrators who don’t want to think and reason their way through a problem. I fully understand there are kids who are real problems. But not every kid who makes a mistake is a problem child. But will anyone try to determine who is and who isn’t?
According to the column:
There is a dramatic new development in the case of Casey “The Kid” Harmeier, the 10-year-old desperado from Tomball who faces a criminal charge for removing the clear plastic cover from a school fire alarm.
District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal says he is “checking the case out.”
It is possible, he admits, that his juvenile section prosecutors are mistaken in their determination to bring The Kid to trial May 15.
As reported here 10 days ago, The Kid was first charged with a felony for pulling the fire alarm. Then district officials discovered that an adult had actually activated the fire alarm.
She was trying to shut off a local horn that had sounded when “The Kid,” responding to a dare while in line with classmates, pulled the cover off.
Instead of dropping the charge, prosecutors reduced it to a misdemeanor.
Wow, they dropped it to a misdemeanor. But here’s legal speak from the Harris County DA:
“People do make mistakes,” Rosenthal wrote in an e-mail response to some questions. “However, I am told that there is evidence that substantiates the charge of an attempt to (file a false alarm) and evidence that would prove scienter (otherwise it is not a criminal offense).”
Scienter is Latin legal jargon. The U.S. Supreme Court has defined it as “a mental state embracing intent to deceive, manipulate, or defraud.”
Well, Rick Casey knows the DA’s office is understaffed and overworked and they may need some help with this major case. To wit (I can speak lawyer, too):
I have already cited an eyewitness, a classmate of The Kid who was standing nearby when he took the dare. She says the dare was only to take off the cover, not to pull the fire alarm lever.
But while 10-year-old boys appear to be eligible for felony treatment, 10-year-old girls don’t seem to qualify as witnesses.
If you read the coulmn, you will see that now the school administrators agree the child should not be charged with anything. However, the wheels of justice are turning:
Why, readers ask, would prosecutors stubbornly continue with a case like this? I can only speculate, since the notion that The Kid really committed a crime is patently ludicrous.
Speculation #1: Prosecutors tend to be overworked, and don’t really look at the evidence in a case until a trial date is near. In the meantime, they bluff in the hopes of getting a plea bargain.
Speculation #2: When prosecutors offer a plea bargain, as they did in this case, they think they are doing the defendant a favor and the defendant is either stupid or ungrateful or both if he or she turns it down.
The offer here was “deferred adjudication” in which The Kid would have served a six-month probation. If he didn’t get into trouble, the offense would have been wiped off his record.
The notion that someone would reject such a “good deal” for the simple reason that he didn’t commit the crime seems unlikely to many prosecutors.
Meanwhile, more than three months after district officials discovered he didn’t pull the fire alarm and apparently didn’t intend to, The Kid has nightmares partly because criminal charges are still hanging.
Shouldn’t some adults also lose sleep?
I long for the days when incidents like this were thought through and dealt with appropriately. Such as the time way back in the dark ages of 1960. I was stationed on a submarine going through overhaul in Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. We lived in Naval housing on base. One afternoon, I turned the corner and there was a base fire truck in front of my apartment. As I pulled up behind it, I saw a gaggle of kids surrounding a couple of firemen at the end of the building. As I got out of my car and started that way, my 3 year old son came screaming “I didn’t do it, daddy, I didn’t do it.”
As I approached the firemen, I could see my son’s tricycle against the wall of the building. Under the fire alarm. One of the fireman told me it seemed the older kids dared my son to pull the alarm. So he put his trike under it, stood up on the trike and pulled the alarm.
And the whole time I was talking to the fireman, my son was hanging onto my leg trembling with fear. And the fireman was smiling, fighting back a hearty laugh. I assured him I would explain to my son what the alarm was for and that it should never be pulled unless there was a fire. The fireman said he knew I would take care of it and that was that. Can you even imagine that happening today?
