Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Carry-On Rules

My briefcase is not big at all; it is rather small as a matter of fact. It is actually a small, soft-sided, laptop case, so that tells you how big it is – or how small it is in this instance. Well, on a flight last week, I put my briefcase, which was the only carry-on bag I had, in the overhead bin above my seat. Some minutes later, an attendant ordered over the loudspeaker for everyone with big bags to put them in the overhead bins, and for everyone with small bags to put them under the seat in front of them. I ignored him, and after a minute or two, he came over to me and told me I would have to move my briefcase from the overhead bin and put it under the seat in front of me. I replied that since I had a valid ticket, I should be entitled to use as much overhead space as anyone else. I asked him why I, who was carrying a small bag, should have to be more uncomfortable than I otherwise would be, just so some other person could haul in a blimp of a bag and yet receive preference for the overhead bins.

He didn’t answer that. He just said, “You do know that you have to obey what the attendants say to do, or get thrown off the airplane, don’t you?” So, I gave up and said, okay, hand it down. But he let it go, and my briefcase stayed where it was. Elaine stated later that I would never win the “it’s not fair” argument (even though I apparently had won it on this one particular time), because the airlines decreed the policies, and they didn’t care about fair, and the attendants just did what they were told to do in order to keep their jobs. She said that I would be far more likely get my way by informing the attendants that I was an old man suffering from severe neuropathy and very poor blood circulation in my legs and that I needed to stretch them out, which a briefcase under the seat in front of me would prevent me from doing – all of which would be true.

Well, of course Elaine was right, generally speaking, but, my legs aside, I’ll tell you that this thing of the airlines giving people with big bags preference over people with small bags really bugs me. It got me to thinking, what if, for example, someone packed his small briefcase inside one of the largest allowable carry-on bags? He could put his briefcase in the bin above him without receiving any hassle from an attendant. Moreover, if a lot of other people started doing the same thing, the airlines might eventually adopt a fairer policy. One policy that would be fairer than the current one would be for the airlines just to reduce the maximum size of a carry-on bag that anyone is allowed to have and to diligently enforce that decision.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Yams and Sweet Potatoes

Yams and sweet potatoes taste more-or-less like each other, but they have little else in common. Sweet potatoes are botanically very distinct from yams. Sweet potatoes are members of the morning glory family, whereas yams are tubers of tropical vines that are closely related to lilies and grasses. Sweet potatoes are native to Central and South America, whereas yams are native to Africa and Asia. Sweet potatoes are dicotyledons; yams are monocotyledons.

If you live in North America, unless you specifically search for yams, you are probably eating sweet potatoes. It is not unlikely that you have never even tasted an actual yam. Yams are popular in Latin American and Caribbean markets; they are slowly becoming more common in U. S. markets.

Sweet potatoes are of two dominant types. One type has a thin, light yellow skin with pale yellow flesh that is not sweet, and it has a dry, crumbly texture. The second type is the one that is most often incorrectly called a yam. It has a thicker, dark orange-to-reddish skin with a vivid orange, sweet flesh and a moist texture.

Yams contain more natural sugar than sweet potatoes and thus are generally sweeter. However, yams are much starchier than sweet potatoes and not nearly as nutritious. Sweet potatoes are packed with vitamin A, which is considered critical in maintaining proper eye health. One sweet potato contains nearly eight times an adult's daily need of Vitamin A, and, because the vitamin is fat-soluble, the body can store it for later use.

Sweet potatoes contain several other vitamins and minerals in amounts not found in yams. Sweet potatoes contain significantly higher amounts of calcium, iron, and vitamin E, and twice as much protein per serving. Sweet potatoes are also strong sources of beta-carotene, manganese, and copper. Sweet potato varieties are classified as either “firm” or “soft”. When cooked, those in the firm category remain firm, whereas soft varieties, although actually firm when raw, become soft when cooked.

It is the soft varieties that are often (incorrectly) labeled as yams in the U. S. Firm varieties of sweet potatoes were produced in the U. S. before soft varieties. When soft varieties were first grown commercially, there was a need to differentiate between the two. African slaves called the soft sweet potatoes yams, because they resembled the yams in Africa. Thus, soft sweet potatoes were referred to as yams to distinguish them from the firm varieties of sweet potatoes. The U. S. Department of Agriculture requires sweet potatoes that are labeled as yams to also be labeled as sweet potatoes.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

HAZWOPER Heat


HAZWOPER is a government-invented acronym for HAZardous Waste OPerations & Emergency Response). To become federally “HAZWOPER-certified”, you must first take a 40-hour course. Thereafter, you must take annual 8-hour refresher courses to remain certified. By the time I retired, I had taken the original 40-hour course and 18 of the annual refresher courses.

The class instructor always handed out HAZWOPER Student Workbooks at the beginning of the course. The workbooks always contained a section on “Fires and Explosions”, which I considered to be one of my areas of expertise. That section of the workbook contained a fill-in-the-blank statement that said, “The degree of heat required to initiate combustion is called the: ____________.” The official workbook answer was “Ignition Temperature.”

I have always been somewhat demanding when it comes to accuracy in educational texts, and I’ll tell you that seeing that statement, “The degree of heat required to initiate combustion is called the “Ignition Temperature”, never failed to offend my scientific sensibilities. This is because heat is not temperature. Heat and temperature are two different things. Heat is a form of energy. Temperature is not. Temperature is merely a measure of the degree of “hotness”.

I give you this, from page 18 of Introduction to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, Third Edition, by J.M. Smith and H.C. Van Ness, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975: “One notable advance in the theory of heat was made by Joseph Black (1728-1799), a Spanish chemist and collaborator of James Watt. Prior to Black’s time, no distinction was made between heat and temperature.”

The first time I read this, I was astonished to learn that people had not always made this distinction. To me at the time, the distinction seemed obvious, although I knew that was probably because the knowledge of it had been around for more than two centuries. Things always seem easier after someone else has figured them out for you. The arrogance of humans is often manifested in feelings of superiority to those who came before us. For example, we might think we are smarter than the cave man was, but it may well be that if the cave man had not already figured out how to make fire, how to make tools and arms, etc., we would be living no better off than he did. To us accrue the benefits of all the advancements in knowledge that humankind has made throughout history. But I digress.

To clearly understand the difference between heat and temperature, it is useful to imagine that you have a one-pound hunk of iron at a temperature of 1,000 degrees F, and you drop it into a tub containing a million pounds of water at 60 degrees F. What does your intuition tell you the final equilibrium temperature of the water will be? Not much more than 60 degrees F, right? This is because your one-pound hunk of iron, hot though it is at 1,000 degrees F, is much too small of a mass to significantly increase the temperature of a million pounds of water. But now imagine, instead, that you have a million-pound hunk of iron at a temperature of 100 degrees F, and you drop it into a million pounds of water at 60 degrees F. Now what do you think the final equilibrium temperature of the water will be? Common sense tells you that the final temperature of the water will be considerably higher than 60 degrees F, right? So, what this also tells you is that although a one-pound hunk of iron at 1,000 degrees F is a lot hotter than a million-pound hunk of iron at 100 degrees F, the latter contains much more heat.

I rest my case.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Fruit Tree Orchard

In 1972, Elaine and I bought our very first house, in Rodeo, California. That’s across the bay from San Francisco. It was a small house, but it was a pretty house, and it was well built by the architect from whom we bought it. At the time, it was less than six months old, and the architect who built in it was living in it when he sold it to us. Elaine and I planned to live there for the next several years, so we bought gardening and landscaping books and spent hours and hours planning and reading. We planted decorative trees in front; for example, a flowering crabapple tree. We dedicated the large back yard to fruit trees. We planted trees for apples, peaches, plums, pears, nectarines, apricots, lemons and oranges, figs, cumquats, and I don’t know what all; I think even avocados. We also planted a vegetable garden, squash and tomatoes mainly.

I also designed and built, with the help of a friend of mine named Delbert, an elaborate multi-circuit sprinkler system that worked on timers. Next, Elaine and I planted the whole yard with Dichondra seeds and then pulled weeds by the thousands for months after they germinated. The end result was very satisfying, though. After we had lived there for about two years, things were beginning to look pretty nice, and we were feeling good about the result of our thousands of hours of hard work. But then late in 1974, I took a new job in El Paso, and we had to sell the house and move.

Eventually, after moving from El Paso to Washington, D. C. and then back to El Paso again, we wound up in Houston in 1985, and we have remained here ever since. For the last twenty years of my career, I was a private consultant, and on occasion I had to testify in court. In 1999, I had to go to San Francisco to testify in a trial. After the trial was over, I had the whole afternoon left before I had to return to Houston. I thought about driving out to see our first home, which I had not seen for twenty-five years, a quarter of a century. Then I thought again, and I said to myself that, given some of my past experiences in this sort of thing, no doubt the person who owned the house now, or maybe some owner before him, had long since uprooted or chopped down all the fruit trees that Elaine and I had planted with tender loving care so long ago. By going out there, all I would be doing is setting myself up for a major disappointment.

But I really did want to see the first house we had ever owned, and I eventually succumbed to my curiosity and drove out to Rodeo, while at the same time I was preparing myself for a bitter disappointment. When I got to the neighborhood, however, I immediately perked up when I saw that the flowering crabapple tree was still out there in front of the house. That was a good sign, the way I saw it. I drove up and down the street and around the neighborhood, before I finally got up the nerve to park the car at the street curb and go up and knock on the door.

A middle-aged man came to the door. I judged him to be probably my age plus or minus a few years. I said hello and told him my name and said that I was the original owner of his house, or well, almost the original owner. I said, for example, that I knew that the kitchen and dining rooms were on my left, the living room was right behind him, and the master bedroom was on the far right end at the back of the house. I told him he had a fireplace that opened out to the dining room on one side and the living-room on the other, which was unusual. I also told him that I knew he had a sundeck outside the master bedroom and a concrete patio running along the rest of the back of the house, and that the master bedroom, the living room, and the dining room all three opened out onto the sundeck or the patio through sliding glass doors. And, finally, I told him, unless some previous owner had cut them all down, he had an orchard of fruit trees in his back yard that my wife and I had planted a quarter of a century ago.

He grinned and stated that I had convinced him, and he asked me if I would like to see the back yard. Well, sure, of course! I said. I thought you’d never ask! I said. He invited me into the house, and nothing much that I could see had been changed in the kitchen, dining, and living room areas. Then he took me through one of the glass doors onto his patio and into the back yard. I was astonished. Indeed, I was surprised and delighted. No grass grew anywhere. That’s because all the fruit trees provided such dense shade. Most of them were bearing fruit, and the owner got a grocery bag and started picking plums and lemons and oranges and so on, and putting them in the bag, which he gave to me. I thanked the man for his kindness and took the bag home, where Elaine and I, at long last, got a taste of the fruits of our labors long-past.

The Tree House and the Sky-Ride

We lived in El Paso during two different time periods. During the first period, from roughly 1975 to 1979, we lived in an area that was called the Upper Valley, located outside the city limits. We lived on an acre of land that had previously been planted in cotton and alfalfa, and therefore was devoid of any trees or grass until we planted some. Our house was about six months old when we moved in. We bought it from another company employee who was quitting or being transferred to another location, I forget which.

Anyway, I should have said when I moved in, not when we moved in. You see, I moved to El Paso about two months before Elaine and Neal and Glen did, because although we had a buyer for our home in Rodeo, California, the sale had not yet gone through closing. I thought I got a pretty good deal on the Upper Valley house, but Elaine never particularly liked it. Let this be a lesson to all husbands: Do not ever, ever buy a house to live in, without first letting your wife inspect it.

Being young and active at that time, I was always involved in one project or another. In addition to my work for pay, that is. There was a huge cottonwood tree on the edge of our property adjacent to a county road that passed by. I decided that that tree desperately needed a well-built tree-house in it. The trunk of the tree divided into three main limbs about 15 feet off the ground. I designed a tree house with a cantilevered support for the fourth corner of the tree house floor, using two 4” X 6” X 15’ beams that I hauled up into the tree using ropes and pulleys, since I had nobody to help me, and that I secured to the tree with 60-penny nails.

Sixty-penny nails are six inches long and almost a quarter of an inch in diameter; technically, they are spikes. I got really good at driving nails. I learned how to hold the hammer near the end of the handle, and haul back like a major league baseball pitcher and let ‘r go, and I got to where I could drive a 60-penny nail in with two strokes, three maximum, the first to set the nail and the second, or third, sometimes, to drive it home. Before I got that good however, I smashed the you-know-what out of the end joint of my left little finger. Ever since then, it has been a little bit flattened-out and about half again as large as the end of my right little finger. Moreover, in the last few years I have developed a big ugly knot on the end joint of the left one.

I built the tree house floor out of Douglas fir, tongue-in-groove, 2” X 6” X 10’ planks. I got the wood from a retired and dismantled railroad caboose at a wrecking yard in Canutillo, New Mexico, located approximately 20 miles from where we lived. The tree house had one hundred square feet of floor space, ten feet by ten feet. I built side guardrails and benches around the inside, put up a roof, and also I built a window facing a telephone pole that stood out at the back end of my property, about 75 to 100 yards away, in slightly diagonal direction.

Then I built a sky-ride, as I called it then, but known as a zip-line nowadays, so I have been informed by my now-grownup children. I got enough ¼” steel cable to reach from the tree to the telephone pole. I attached one end of the cable to the tree, at a point about ten feet higher than the floor of the tree house. I attached the other end of the cable to the telephone pole, about six or eight feet off the ground.

Elaine’s sister, Jane, and my brother-in-law, Ricky, happened to be visiting on a weekend that I had planned to be working on the sky-ride, so I took Ricky with me to a local wrecking yard to look for some kind of wheel contraption suitable to install on the cable that would allow you to ride it down to the ground. After a couple of hours of searching, we found a slaughterhouse hook with a ball-bearing-swivel-pulley-wheel assembly, which henceforth I’ll just call the pulley. It was perfect. I immediately bought it and took it home and installed it on the cable.

Next, I attached a horizontal piece of pipe to the pulley to serve as a trapeze bar, and I made a string pull-back system, so that after you rode the cable down to the end, the next person in the tree house could pull the trapeze back up. Finally, I roto-tilled the ground near the telephone pole, from the pole back to about 20 feet up the line, so that when you rode the line down, you would have a soft landing. The more that you weighed, the farther out from the pole you touched down.

Neal and Glen really liked playing in the tree house and riding on the sky-ride. Neal would sometimes turn upside down and swivel round and round on the way down. Here he is in this picture.



Glen was not heavy enough or tall enough at that time to touch down on the dirt with his feet at the end of the line before he slammed into the telephone pole, so some of us in the neighborhood would stand a few feet in front of the pole and catch him, more-or-less softly, before he hit it.

I must have worked at least five hundred hours to build that tree house and sky-ride, and I was really glad they were such a success. I was so happy that my children liked it. I had put my heart and soul (and little bit of my left little finger) into building them, and I was very proud of the result. To tell the honest truth, I myself thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the tree house of an evening and riding the sky-ride down from time to time.

Neighborhood kids liked the sky-ride so much that I had to lock it up when I wasn’t around. In about 1977, I met a French engineer named Herve (pronounced kind of like Airvay), with whom I worked for a couple of years. Herve had three daughters, all under the age of ten or twelve I think. One weekend afternoon, Herve and his family came out to visit and have a cookout or something like that. Herve’s daughters immediately started lobbying him to let them ride the sky-ride. After awhile he agreed to it, and his girls and my boys proceeded to have a blast! I can’t recall if Herve himself rode the sky-ride, but I know I did.

In August of 1977, one of my nephews, Howe, and his mom, Vicki, one of my sisters-in-law, came out from Georgia to visit us. Naturally, we did some fun and touristy things. For example, we went to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, New Mexico, and we went to a bull fight in Juarez, Mexico. However, whenever we were at home – da dum – we rode the sky-ride!

Here is a picture of Howe about to jump out of the tree house window.



And, here he is going down:



Sometimes, Neal and Howe would both ride the sky-ride down together, as they are about to do in this photograph.



I think about that summer visit from time to time, and I wonder if Neal and Howe and Glen remember it the way I do. In early 1979, we had to move to Washington, D. C., and we had to sell the house (and the tree house!). By that time, Elaine and I had done a substantial amount of landscaping, and we had a slatted roof built over the patio that ran the whole length of the back of the house. This was the second time we had busted our butts for two or three years to landscape a home, only to have to move out right after we got it done. It kind of bummed us out, but at the time I believed that my career potential would improve significantly if I accepted the D. C. assignment. Having to leave the tree house behind especially stuck in my craw, though.

We lived in D. C. (actually, McLean, Virginia) for about three years, but after about two years there, I had to go back to El Paso on a business trip. When I got there, I couldn’t resist driving out to the Upper Valley for another look at the marvelous tree house and sky-ride that I had built and that the kids had universally loved. But when I drove by, I was stunned. I was so grossed out I almost ran off the road, because I saw that the people living there now had torn it all down! I was depressed and disappointed all the way home.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Parking Lot Ethics

When I arrived on campus to begin my freshman year at college, I desperately needed money. I was almost penniless. I had a scholarship that would pay for my tuition and dorm fees, but it wouldn’t provide anything for food and books and other stuff. I decided to go see the campus athletic director, to see if he might have a job for me. I don’t recall what inspired me to do this, but it turned out to be a brilliant idea. It just so happened – so the athletic director said – that he did have a little job for me if I wanted it. It was not a full-time job (which I didn’t want anyway), and it was not a permanent job, but I could have it until he said otherwise. The job was selling parking tickets for the home football games.

He gave me a roll of 100 tickets for the first game, and he took me out to see a parking lot. It was a good lot, close to the stadium entrance. It was fenced off by itself, separate and apart from the main stadium parking lot, which was a whole heap bigger than this lot. I was supposed to arrive one hour prior to kickoff time and open the lot. Each ticket was to cost $1.00. He told me if I brought him back $100.00 and 100 ticket stubs on the Monday afternoon following the Saturday night game, he would pay me $5.00. I thought Wow! I can buy four or five meals with that! I thanked him sincerely and took the roll of tickets back to the dorm.

Well, I got to the football stadium on Saturday night of the opening home game, an hour ahead of the scheduled kickoff time. I opened the parking lot and started selling the tickets. Now, you know, when you go somewhere like a movie, you typically buy a ticket at a ticket booth, and then you continue on into the theater and give your ticket to some gate-keeper, who tears the ticket up and gives you the stub. If you think that you might have to leave the movie in the middle and go out past the gate-keeper, then you had better keep the stub, or you won’t be able to get back in. At some places, they won’t let you back in period; for example, most live theaters, but that’s beside the point. In this particular operation, there was only me, and not a one of these hometown fans was likely to leave during the game. Consequently, most of the people driving through just dropped their ticket stubs on the ground within a couple of feet of me.

Now, it might sound easy selling parking lot tickets, but there was more to it than I had previously given much thought to. I kept the roll of tickets in the left hip pocket of my sports coat. I kept the cash in my right pants pocket and my ticket stubs from people I had sold tickets to in the right hip pocket of my sports coat. After I had sold a number of tickets, I started picking up the ticket stubs that people had tossed, and I stuffed them in my left pants pocket. I don’t recall exactly what possessed me to do this, but it turned out to be an unwitting inspiration.

After I had sold all the tickets on the roll, I was still looking at a long line of people who wanted to park, and there was still a lot of vacant space left in the lot. So, I started selling the prior patrons’ ticket stubs from my left pants pocket, and putting the cash into the left breast pocket of my sports coat. (Well, what the hell would you have done?) I kept selling the stubs over and over again like that, until a cop who was covering the lot walked over and told me it was all full now, which it was, and that the kickoff had already occurred (as if I cared!). I had sold something close to 500 tickets, and I was holding the first $100 in my right pants pocket and the remaining $400 or thereabouts in the left breast pocket of my sports coat. I was euphoric. $400 in little more than an hour’s work! (Little did I know at the time that that was the highest hourly rate I would ever make during my entire lifetime!) When I got to my seat in the stadium that my roommate was holding for me, along with our dates, he immediately sensed that something was up, but I gave him the mum’s-the-word sign, and I told him about it later on back at the dorm.

On the following Monday afternoon, I reported to the athletic director as instructed, and I gave him his $100 and the 100 ticket stubs that I had kept in the right pocket of my sports coat. He said good job young fella, and gave me $5.00. He also gave me another roll of 100 tickets for the next game, with the same instructions as before. Well, I continued that gig for three or four home games, until one black Monday afternoon he told me he was sorry, but that one of his football players needed a job and he had to give preference to him. By that time I had made more than $1000 from that job, and my only regret was that it wouldn’t be more.

Back at the dorm, my parking-lot caper became the subject of seemingly endless philosophical debates about the ethics of what I had done. Several of my dorm mates argued that it was highly unethical. I told them they were just envious. I said that if I had not resold the ticket stubs, all those people who had bought them would have had to find other parking places that would have been much farther from the stadium entrance and would have cost more besides.

I also pointed out that most, if not all, of the people I sold tickets to, were avid hometown fans who had probably been parking there for years, so they no doubt knew how big the lot was. If I had closed the gate after selling only 100 tickets, they might have gotten angry; they might have even threatened me physically.

Moreover, I had kept my bargain with the athletic director to a tee. His instructions had been quite specific. Each ticket was to cost $1.00. I was to bring him back $100.00 and 100 ticket stubs, and he would pay me $5.00. That’s exactly what happened.

The athletic director had been there for a long time, and he must surely have known how many cars the lot would hold. Therefore, I figured that the way I “played the game”, so to speak, was the way it was apparently intended to be played. Nobody was cheated out of any money. Nobody paid for anything he didn’t get. I made some money on the deal, and if I could do it again, I would do it again.

Monday, September 19, 2011

How's Your Tallywacker?

When I was a little boy, there were only two or three other homes anywhere in sight. One of them was where Ben lived. His house was diagonally located from us, about two stone-throws away, on the other side of an alley that ran between his avenue and ours. Ben was about the age of my older brothers Lewis and Howe, I think somewhere in between them. My brothers and I spent a lot time at Ben’s, one reason being that he had a TV set. We watched stuff like “I Married Joan”, “The Life of Riley”, and “Dragnet”. Ben’s parents were very friendly. Sometimes I took care of their dog when they were away. Ben’s mom helped me get through the first grade on time, and Ben’s dad often kidded me one way or another in a friendly way. Ben, however, sometimes took shameful advantage of our age difference.

For example, one afternoon when I went over to Ben’s, he greeted me by asking me how my tallywacker was. I had no idea what that meant. I was just an ignorant little kid, and I had never heard the word tallywacker before. Ben told me that asking someone about his tallywacker was just a friendly way of greeting him, kind of like asking how things were going for him. Well, that seemed like a good explanation, so with Ben’s encouragement, I practiced asking him how his tallywacker was for the next hour or so, until I had to go on home for supper.

Now, Sunday midday dinner was always a big thing to the Whitmans. If it was summertime, we often would go to Radium Springs for a picnic and swimming. Otherwise, we would likely have a fried chicken dinner or roast beef dinner at home. Just outside and off to one side of our dining room window, there was a big Mimosa tree that we climbed on a lot. It was perfect for climbing, but that’s another story. Sometimes, Ben would come over to see us while we were still eating dinner, and when that happened, he would just sit outside in the tree until we were done and could come out and play. To get to the tree from Ben’s house, you had to walk right by the dining room window. On this particular day that I’m telling you about, maybe a couple of weeks after my visit at Ben’s that I just described, Ben came walking by the dining room window while we were at Sunday dinner. He waved at us and continued on toward the Mimosa tree, and I hollered out the open window to him, “Hey Ben, How’s your tallywacker?” My mom and dad instantly swiveled to focus di-rect!ly on Ben, and he looked like a deer caught in the headlights. You reap what you sow.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

A Splendid Weekend

On Thursday night, June 2nd, 2011, my little sister Marilyn and her man, a fellow named Ted, arrived at Hobby airport for a visit with us. I had not seen Marilyn for almost ten years, and I had never met Ted. I had already checked out all kinds of stuff the previous several days for places to take them while they were here. Unfortunately, there were not going to be any home baseball games or other sporting events or entertainment events of any particular interest, and I was kind of anxious about what we would do or talk about. Marilyn said don’t worry about that kind of stuff, that all they wanted to do was hang around with us for a few days.

Well, we talked kind of late the night they arrived, and they were tired from their trip, so we got started a little bit late on Friday. We ate a Mexican lunch at a nearby Lupe' Tortilla’s restaurant and lazed around the house that afternoon. On Saturday morning, we decided to go see the Water Wall in the Galleria area. It is a romantic location where many couples get engaged and like to get their pictures taken. I realized that although I have lived in Houston for more than a quarter of a century, I had never been to the Water Wall before. It is pretty impressive.



Afterward, Ted was admiring the nice landscaping with all the young live oak trees.



I suggested that since he liked live oak trees, we ought to go to Beck's Prime restaurant on Westheimer and have hamburgers for lunch under The Tree (as I know it). I hold it in awe, because it is over 400 years old. We did just that. The weather was perfect for it, and our burgers were great.



After lunch we drove through Memorial Park, which Ted really admired, especially noting that among all the other stuff -- golf course, baseball fields, volley ball courts, swimming pool, hiking trails, jogging trails, bike trails, soccer fields, tennis courts, picnic areas, arboretum, etc. -- they even had a croquet court. That seemed to really impress him. There were lots of joggers out.



Then we went to the Beer Can House, a very weird place indeed. Some crazy old fart spent a good part of his life creating something so enormously tacky that it has become a favorite tourist attraction.



Upon leaving the Beer Can House, we proceeded to a little park northwest of downtown, where Ted got some really good pictures of the downtown Houston skyline.



Next, we rode the Main Street train from one middle to the other and back. It was way too crowded at the north end of the line near Minute Maid Park and Discovery Green to get on the train there. There was some kind of festival going on. Instead, we got on at the middle of the line and rode south to the end of the line, where we got off and got a good view of the Astrodome, an engineering marvel -- forlorn, ignored, and forgotten though it is these days.





We got back on the train and rode it all the way north to Minute Maid Park and south again to where we had parked. Throughout the whole time we kept wondering why nobody was collecting tickets. When we had first got on, Ted bought four tickets for $1.00 apiece. We observed that we could just as well not have bought them, since nobody ever asked for them, and, besides, how in the world did the City expect to make money on the rail line if nobody ever checked for tickets? Well, Elaine and I had lunch with some old friends of ours a few days after Marilyn and Ted left, and I brought up the question. My friend Barbara explained it this way: "The way they do it is, they randomly check people getting off, and if your ticket time has expired, they fine you $200." I said, "Oh… I see …" I hadn’t even noticed that our tickets were good for a limited period of time.

On Sunday morning, Ted and I went back to Memorial Park to play croquet. There was one little problem. Although there was a gate at the croquet court right near a parking area, it was locked. Now, from east to west, there is an office or clubhouse, several tennis courts, and on the far west end is the croquet court. We had to walk through the clubhouse and out back and then down past all the tennis courts before we could get into the croquet court through a back gate. To me, it seemed like about 9,756 feet, and by the time we got to the court, I was already done in. Oh, by the way, did I mention that the temperature was 100 oF, and I was using a cane? Ted and I played one-half of one game before I collapsed from the heat. I sat down for awhile, but eventually I made it back to the car, with Ted’s help all the way, of course.

We rescued the day by all four of us playing Budweiser Croquet after lunch inside the house. Marilyn won. Budweiser Croquet is where you use two cans of Budweiser beer for a wicket and one can for a stake, and you lay a course through your house or some part of it. I invented the game many years ago. Of course, you don’t have to use Budweiser, but that’s what I used the first time I ever played the game, so I call it Budweiser Croquet. You need large rooms and a carpeted floor to play it. I am fortunate in that I have a huge carpeted living room.

Marilyn and Ted left on Monday, June 6th, and we were sad to see them go. I couldn’t recall many weekends in my life that were nearly as much fun as the one we had just spent with them. Ted is a good person, fun to be around, and I was pleased to see my little sister happy with him. I sure hope it’s not another ten years before I see her again.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Nice Guy

There was this guy who got his overalls real greasy working on his car, so he put them into a bucket and soaked them with gasoline to loosen the grease. Later on, his wife retrieved the overalls from the bucket and threw them into the washing machine, as she was going to wash a load of darks. The warm water came on and made the gasoline vaporize, and when the timer switch switched to rinse, a spark ignited the vapor. The explosion killed the man’s wife, and it destroyed the utility room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. The widower sued his dead wife’s mom and dad, because they were the ones who gave the washing machine to them as an anniversary present.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Dr. Dan and the Baghouse

Dan was my best friend and favorite coworker for several years in the 1990’s. We ate lunch together three or four times a week. I sometimes called him Dr. Dan, and for some reason he often called me Main Man.

Dan has a Ph. D. in Geography. He was once a Professor at Columbia University. He is from Long Island, and he is from a family of commercial fishermen. His brothers are commercial fishermen. Dan is the first person in his family ever to get a college degree. He was also the first person in our company to become a Certified Industrial Hygienist, no small feat. Dan is a really smart guy, and he is kind of professorial in his demeanor, if you know what I mean.

Dan got a job assignment that pertained to a lead foundry in Mexico. The foundry baghouse had burned down, and Dan was involved because of the resulting lead contamination. Environmental work was what Dan mostly did. He came to me wanting to know all about baghouses.

I explained that a baghouse was a contraption that cleaned the air by capturing airborne particulates such as coal dust, lead dust, or sawdust. It is essentially a container of giant tube socks, or bags, which are hanging upside down; that is to say, hanging with the open ends at the bottom. Some baghouses are shaped like vertical cylinders; others are box-like. Airborne emissions that contain particulates are blown upward through the socks. The socks catch the particulates but let the air escape through to the atmosphere. In fact, the only way the air can escape to the atmosphere is through the socks.

Every so often a motor turns on and shakes the socks to knock the particulates loose, by rotating a cam geared to the sock assembly. Alternatively, a sudden puff of air is blown through the socks in the downward direction. The loosened particulates fall to the bottom of the baghouse. They are physically removed from there and disposed of. Baghouses are used in places like foundries, lumber mills, water treatment plants, and etcetera. We found pictures, diagrams, and illustrations of baghouses, but Dan wanted to see one up close in person.

Well, I knew of a place with a baghouse. My father-in-law, a very smart man called L. W., owned a lumber yard. Indeed, he had founded it and nurtured it and grown it into a very successful operation over the years. I asked him, could we please come out and see his baghouse? Of course, we could. When we got out there, we saw that it was of the cylinder variety. We discovered that the door to get inside of it was on the cylinder wall about thirty feet up. It was accessible from a little platform that you could get to by a ladder welded onto the outer wall of the cylinder. The bottom rung of the ladder, however, was about fifteen feet up. That was no problem for L.W.. He got one of his employees to bring over a fork lift, and I stood on a pallet lifted by the tongs. When I was up high enough to get on the ladder, I started climbing. Eventually I got to the door. I tried to turn the knob one way and then the other, to no avail, and I shook it and rattled it and did all the things you do with a door knob before you conclude that it is really locked. Well, it was really locked, and while L.W. was trying to remember where the key to it was, a swarm of angry wasps came after me from their nest under the guardrail.

I never descended a ladder so fast in my life, but I got stung nonetheless, a couple of times at least. Dan and L.W. were laughing too hard to be of any help. Finally, I managed to find a smoker on the premises, and I bummed a couple of cigarettes from him. I got the tobacco out of the cigarette papers and spit on it and applied the moistened tobacco to the places where I had been stung. After a little while the hurting began to subside, because, you know, the tobacco leaches the poison out. The wasp incident pretty much ended our day. Dan did not get to see inside the baghouse, and that was a big disappointment.

A few months passed. One Saturday morning I got a telephone call at home. It was Dan. He was in Sulphur, Louisiana, at a water treatment plant there. The plant used quicklime in the treatment process. The quicklime was stored in dry form, as a very fine, white powder, or dust. It turns out that while the plant’s quicklime storage tank was being refilled, there was an explosion. The roof of the tank was blown out and peeled back just like the lid on a can of peas when you open it. Quicklime was blown all over the neighborhood, up to a mile away. Dan said it looked like there had been a snow storm. Dan had been called in to assess the environmental damage and devise a remediation plan. After he got there, though, the plant manager asked him if he would also be able to determine the cause of the explosion. Dan said, oh no, sir, that he didn’t do anything at all like that. Dan told him that he would need to get me over there to figure that out.

I drove over to Sulphur, and when I got there, I had never seen anything like it. Everything was white! The quicklime tank was elevated maybe twenty feet off the ground and had a funnel-shaped bottom draw-off. The quicklime supply man stated that he had hooked the loose end of his truck hose into the tank bottom draw-off and turned on his blower. That’s how they refilled their quicklime tanks; they blew the quicklime in from the supply trucks. They had been doing it this way for years.

I always do a lot of walking around and looking when I investigate explosions. And I do a lot of thinking about how the process works. Now, it goes without saying that if you fill a tank with dry quicklime by blowing it into the tank, you have to let the air escape or you’ll blow the roof off. Which is what happened here. Therefore, the tank venting system had to have been blocked, and the air couldn’t escape. It also goes without saying that you can’t just let the air blow through the tank without capturing the quicklime, or you’ll just wind up blowing all the quicklime from the supply truck into the atmosphere. And what do you need to capture the quicklime? Yes, a baghouse. I reasoned that there had to have been a baghouse, which would have likely been on the roof of the tank. It must have been plugged up, and it must have been blown off the roof.

So, I knew what I was looking for, but I did not know exactly what this one looked like. In my walking around, I spotted what looked like an outhouse or one of those portable potties you see around construction sites, but it was a good bit larger. It was about fifty yards from the tank, and it looked suspiciously out of place for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on. I began to get that tingle I sometimes get when I know I have figured something out and am about to prove it.

Sure enough, when I walked over to the “outhouse” and opened the door, I saw that it was a baghouse. As I expected, all the socks were so jammed packed with quicklime that no air could possibly get through them. They looked like giant, white sausages about to burst out of their skins. I concluded that the motor that shakes the socks out every so often must have failed. After that happened, the socks gradually filled up completely. And then when the supply man hooked up his hose and started his blower, he blew the tank roof off, along with the baghouse that was installed on it. It looked to me like quicklime had gotten inside the motor and clogged it up, causing it to fail. I could check that later.

I was excited, and I couldn’t wait to show Dan, but I closed the baghouse door and maintained a calm demeanor. “Dr. Dan” I called across the plant yard. “Can you come here just a minute? I want to ask you something.” Dan walked over. I was barely able to stifle my excitement as I opened the baghouse door and asked him, “Do you know what this is?” Dan stood there for a minute looking without seeing. Then the scales fell from his eyes; he was suddenly stunned, and he couldn’t even speak for a few seconds. Then all he could do was gasp, “A BAGHOUSE! A BAGHOUSE!” You found a BAGHOUSE!” Dr. Dan had finally gotten to see a baghouse. He was thrilled, and so was I.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

A Crazy Job

It was a crazy job from the get-go, and the only one I’ve ever done that had to be coordinated with the phases of the moon. Barbara had gotten this assignment to reconstruct a highway accident and videotape it on the accident site. She had data on the vehicles involved, speeds and distances, and so on, from the police report and depositions and whatnot. Here’s how it all happened to the best of my recollection.

A man was attempting to change a left tire, on the narrow shoulder of a two-lane blacktop at night, and he had his butt hanging out into the road. He was at the bottom of a hill. It was a clear night, but there was no moon at the time. An eighteen-wheeler came over the hill on the same side of the road and clipped him.

The man who was hit was from a road-service outfit. He had driven a two-ton flatbed truck to the site and parked off the road in front of the guy with the flat tire. That guy was driving a gray, 1974 International Harvester Scout and was hauling a two-wheel dolly behind him, with a red, 1966 Mustang on top of it. The left tire on the dolly developed a flat, and the man called the road-service outfit for help.

I first got involved in this job by calculating some stuff for Barbara. Then she asked me to go find a ’66 Mustang somewhere, and do it in a hurry. She also asked for help with the logistics of getting everything on the accident site at the right time. In less than two weeks, she had to have everything – a flatbed truck and driver, a ‘74 Scout, a two-wheeled dolly, a ’66 Mustang, an eighteen-wheeler and driver, plus a video crew – on some road up somewhere up in the tri-state area. This whole re-creation of the accident had to be timed so there was no moon when we did it. Scott had earlier spotted a ’74 Scout in the same parking garage we used, and he promised to locate the owner and try to make some kind of deal with him. I went to Bob, our CEO, and asked him for $5,000 from petty cash. I told him that if I was lucky enough to find a ’66 Mustang, I would likely have to offer cash on the spot to get it, and I figured I’d have to pay $4,000 to $5,000 for it. He grumbled at me, but he saw my point, and I got the $5,000.

Then I enlisted Dan to help me. He got a lot of car ads and a city map, and I drove. We were in my almost brand new bright red, 1992, five-on-the-floor Camaro, with a five-liter engine. I really liked that car. We nearly covered the city looking for a ’66 Mustang, and it was getting late on the second or third day when we finally came up on this old boy’s house somewhere in the far east part of Houston . He had almost finished restoring a ’66 Mustang. The interior panels for the doors still needed to be installed, but other than that, it was pretty cool. It ran really well, and he had painted it a nice looking metallic gold.

I asked him what he would sell it for, and he said $4,500. With no hesitation at all, I whipped out a stack of $100 bills and peeled off 45 of them, one by one, counting them off out loud as I placed each one into his open hand. He looked kind of dumbfounded but handed over the car title and registration, and we had our ’66 Mustang. We drove it directly to an Earl Scheib paint shop and instructed them to give the car a new red paint job as soon as possible. It was still tacky the next morning, but we deemed it good enough to go. We were in a hurry.

Meanwhile, throughout all this we had to keep calling around talking to truck rental outfits for a two-wheeled dolly, a flatbed truck and driver, and an eighteen-wheeler and driver. We didn’t have cell phones back then, or the Internet. Scott had managed to reach the Scout owner and had bought it from him. It had to be repainted too, so back to Earl Scheib. Then, Scott, who was the video man for Barbara, said the new coats of paint were too shiny, and made the painters do another coat and dust them up while they were still tacky. Boy, those guys hated to have to do that, especially to the Mustang.

Anyway, we finally got everything flanged up just in time. I had arranged for a flatbed truck and driver to come to the Earl Scheib paint shop. The Mustang and the Scout would be loaded onto the flatbed (it had a ramp). The flatbed driver was hauling a two-wheeled dolly. He would drive up to the site, a two-day drive, and we would fly up there and drive out to meet him. Barbara had arranged to have all the video equipment transported to the site. Meanwhile, I had arranged for an eighteen-wheeler and driver to meet us there too. We had just got the Scout and the Mustang onto the flatbed, and I was filling out papers with the driver, when an Earl Scheib employee stepped outside and yelled, was one of us Philip? It seems I had a phone call. Or maybe it was Scott who got the call, whatever. It was from Barbara. She told us the case had just settled, and the client wanted us to stop work. The timing was perfect, because we were all ready to head home for supper.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Ethanol in Gasoline Sucks.

Right now, members of our United States Congress are debating ways to reduce spending. Well, one way is to stop spending our tax money on stupid things. For example, a huge amount of our tax money is spent on corporate welfare to large agribusiness corporations to raise corn, for the purpose of making ethanol to put into our gasoline. By law, ethanol must be blended with gasoline in many areas of the country (e.g., Houston, where I live). As a result, the use of ethanol in gasoline has increased substantially over the past decade, while the cost of food has also increased as a direct result of ethanol consuming ever more of the corn crop.

Making ethanol from corn to put in your gasoline is truly one of the dumbest ideas to come down the pike in generations, and the purpose of this posting is to urge you to write your United States Senators and Representative(s) and tell them to stop wasting our money on such an insane policy.

Currently, the federal government imposes a 54-cents-per-gallon tariff on ethanol imports and provides a 45-cents-per-gallon subsidy for blending it into gasoline. Naturally, the tariff discourages (essentially eliminates) importing ethanol from Brazil, where they make ethanol from sugar cane, which is cheaper than making it from corn. And the subsidy encourages the otherwise uneconomical production of ethanol from domestically grown corn.

The tariff and the subsidy were both extended through 2011 by means of H.R. 4853. President Obama signed the bill into law on December 17, 2010. The items in it that are related to spurring ethanol production from corn to put into our gasoline need to be repealed, and now is the time to do it.

Former Vice president Al Gore, that Nobel-Prize winning, “green energy” activist, has admitted that his support for corn-based ethanol subsidies, while serving as Vice President, had more to do with getting votes in the 2000 Presidential Election than with saving the environment. He also admitted that corn-based ethanol subsidies are not good policy.

At a green energy conference in Athens, Greece, Gore said, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President."

He also stated "It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol. He also said that the energy conversion ratios -- how much energy is produced in the process -- "are at best very small." (As stated below, I believe they are negative.)

Consider the following:

• A gallon of ethanol has only about 2/3 the energy as a gallon of gasoline; hence, your miles per gallon will decrease if you use gasoline containing ethanol.

• Corn is food, after all, so making corn into ethanol for our cars is tantamount to burning up our food, and it is driving up the cost of the remaining food that we have available to eat. Corn is a staple food for cattle, hogs, sheep, and chickens, so the cost of meat and poultry are going up, along with the cost of corn itself. Just a couple of years ago, I could get an ear of corn for ten cents an ear in season, and now the price is about 33 cents. There has also been about a substantial increase in the in the price of Jack Daniels.

• Ethanol loves water and soaks it up from its environment, so it can’t be shipped in long-distance pipelines with gasoline, because the water will corrode the piping and pumping machinery. The ethanol will also dry out the seals at the compressor stations. Consequently, it has to be transported in tank trucks or railroad tank cars, at a higher cost than transporting it by pipeline, and it must be mixed with the gasoline near the market place.

• Corn requires immense amounts of fertilizer, more than any other crop, and the runoff goes into the Mississippi River and runs down to the Gulf of Mexico, where it creates a dead zone the size of New Jersey or larger.

• It takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol. This assertion has been disputed by certain studies that have been made, but when you think about all the energy that goes into plowing the land and planting the corn, weeding and watering and spraying the crop while its growing, harvesting the corn, shucking it, stripping the kernels from the cobs, crushing them, distilling the mash, transporting the ethanol, etc., it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine the possibility that you’re putting more into it than you’re getting out of it. I have carefully reviewed several of the studies that have been done out there over the past several years, and in my view, the most thorough and logical studies support my claim that it takes more energy to make ethanol from corn than you get from the ethanol.

• The only good reason for making corn into ethanol is for whiskey.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

My Visit to Sierra Blanca

It was the summer of 1982, and we were going on a road trip to a family reunion in Wimberley, Texas, some 560 miles east of our home in El Paso. Our family car at the time was a 1966 Chevelle Malibu Sports Coupe. Elaine’s dad had given it to us as a wedding present. It was a great car, with a standard shift and a V-8 engine, and it ran like a scalded cat, but after 16 years we really did need a new car.

We decided to buy a Mercury Grand Marquis. At the time, we figured it might be the only new car we would see for many years to come, so we splurged and ordered it with some extras – for example, wing vents (remember those?), a towing package, and a premium sound system that even played audio cassette tapes.

For some reason I never understood, the car was to be delivered in Fort Stockton, and I would have to drive over there to get it. Since Fort Stockton was some 250 miles east of El Paso, I thought that arrangement sucked big time (although at the time I probably had not heard that expression). Worse yet, it wouldn’t be delivered in time for us to drive it on the trip to Wimberley. I worried over that some but soon quit thinking about it as the day approached for us to leave.

Neal and Glen were thirteen and ten at the time and Ellen was only one. The Chevelle was crowded with all of us in it, but worse yet; the AC crapped out about half way to Wimberley. Ellen overheated easily; besides being that it was a typical Texas summer, hot as hell, so you didn’t need to be a baby to suffer from the heat. We were all miserably hot, and then things got downright scary when Ellen got sick from it and started throwing up, and her body got all hot to the touch. We got really worried, and when we got to Wimberley we gave a huge sigh of relief.

When the reunion was over, we drove another 180 miles eastward to Houston to visit Elaine’s parents, with the AC still not working. We worried all the way about Ellen and kept wiping her forehead with a wet rag. We decided that after a day or two in Houston, Elaine would fly back to El Paso with Neal and Glen and Ellen, whereas I would drive back myself in the Chevelle. And so it came to pass.

Somewhere on the western edge of San Antonio, I spotted a hitch-hiker down the road. Now, I was a hitch-hiker from way back, and despite having read In Cold Blood, I still had a hard time passing a hitch-hiker by without experiencing a tinge of guilt, given the thousands of miles that other folks had hauled me back in the day. So, I slowed down and looked at him closely. He looked to be about halfway between a hippie and an oil-patch roughneck. I decided I might give him a ride. I rolled to a stop next to him and let down my window some. Asked him who he was and where he was going and so on. Asked him was he carrying any weapons. He said not unless you counted his pocket knife.

He told me his name was Clive (or maybe it was Carl), and that he was headed to Oregon to get a logging job. Said he knew somebody who knew somebody who could get him on with a logging crew. This was a good thing, since he had just lost his job in Louisiana. After a few minutes I decided, what the hell, and told him to get in. Off we went, and after awhile we got to talking, and after a couple hours of that we had become pretty good friends. Then I had one of those great ideas on which fate turns. I told him I had a new car waiting for me in Fort Stockton (it had been delivered to the dealer while we were in Wimberley). I asked him if I picked up the Grand Marquis when we got to Fort Stockton, would he be willing to follow me in the Chevelle from there to El Paso. He said, oh yeah, sure, so the deal was struck, and we continued on down the road.

Now at that period in time, the entire nation suffered under a speed limit of 55 miles per hour, which was imposed during the Nixon administration, ostensibly to save gasoline. I always said that every Congressman who voted for the 55-mph limit should be required to drive at 55 mph from Houston to El Paso. Anybody who’s ever driven over that stretch knows how nearly impossible that is. Me, I think I’m congenitally incapable of driving only 55 mph on stretches like that. What I am trying to say is, that Clive and I were haulin’ ass across the desert at about 85 miles an hour, me in front in the Grand Marquis and Clive behind me in the Chevelle. Oh, by the way, did I say I was really enjoying my new car?

Eventually, we approached Sierra Blanca, a little bitty place in the Guadalupe Mountains about 88 miles east of El Paso. By that time we were fairly flying across the desert; we were on the home stretch. That’s when the Sierra Blanca Sheriff caught me in a speed trap. (Later on, my friends would say things like, “Wow! You didn’t know Sierra Blanca was a notorious speed trap?!” And “Oh yeah, that’s the speed trap from hell!” But had any one of them ever mentioned a word to me about this before I got caught? Not on your life! Forget about it! No way, Jose’!) Anyway, Clive stopped too, about 100 feet behind me.

The Sheriff checked my license and proof of insurance and wrote me a speeding ticket, and then he wanted to know why “that guy in the Chevelle” was sitting back there. I told him how Clive was doing me a favor by following me in my old car so I could drive my new one home, and he promptly walked back there and asked Clive for his driver’s license and proof of insurance. That’s when we learned that Clive’s Louisiana license had expired two weeks before.

Well, the Sheriff arrested Clive and hauled him off to jail, and he (the Sheriff, not Clive) confiscated my Chevelle. After awhile, I followed them over to the jailhouse in the Grand Marquis. It was getting dark now. I started knocking on the door to the jailhouse and hollering questions like, when could I get my car back, and when could I get Clive out, and eventually a big, mean looking sheriff’s deputy came outside with a big gun. He told me I would have to pay my fine and Clive’s fine and a car impoundment fee, which in total naturally amounted to some outrageous amount of money. Then he said if I didn’t have the money on me, I’d better get my butt off the property, or he would lock me up alongside my friend.

Nowadays, ATM machines are commonplace. You can get your hands on some cash in a hurry if you need to. But back in 1982 I had never even seen an ATM machine, and if I had seen one, it certainly wouldn’t have been in Sierra Blanca. Consequently, having no other alternative, I drove the Grand Marquis on home to El Paso. I told the whole story to Elaine, and I said that we would have to go to the bank the next day and get enough cash to get Clive out of jail and get the Chevelle back, and then we would have to drive back to Sierra Blanca and do that.

I knew that if I had not asked Clive to drive the Chevelle, or if I had not been driving 90 miles an hour, he wouldn’t be in jail, so I felt like the right thing to do was to get him out. Besides, I wanted my car back. However, the mean looking deputy with the big gun had scared me a little. So, we left Neal and Glen and Ellen home, and when we got to Sierra Blanca, Elaine parked about 300 yards away, and I walked on up there alone. We had agreed that if I didn’t reappear within an hour, she would drive back home without me and call our lawyer.

The precaution turned out to be unnecessary. I paid the money and got Clive out of jail and got my car back. Clive and I took the Chevelle back to El Paso, with me driving it, and Elaine following us in the Grand Marquis. Clive spent the night with us, and the next day I took him to a big truck stop on IH-10 West, not too far from where we lived. We got a call from him a few weeks later. Said he had gotten to Oregon okay and that he had gotten the logging job and found a place to live. We have not heard from Clive since that day, but I hope he has stayed well and prospered. And I have never returned to Sierra Blanca.