My neighbor-across-the-street has launched two kites, and his son and daughter are flyin' them like a pair of pros. Considering that they are about knee-high, they ain't doin' bad!

I cannot fly a kite. I can fly off the handle, fly into a rage, fly down the highway if the cops ain't watchin', and that's about all.

My neighbor is an inventive kite-flier. And he's usually as high as the kite he flies. You can gain some altitude with a liberal application of Budweiser.
We don't hang with Gerald and his wife (you might remember them from my Wedded Bliss post awhile back). He kinda looks like Charles Manson (I always hear Helter-Skelter by the Beatles when I see him), and he cannot look me in the eye when he speaks to me. And he and T-Bird have "had words" before.

But last year he did something that caused my husband and I to stare..............in awe.
I had seen him struggling with a kite that morning. It's hard to get one airborn with a beer in one hand, especially when your drunk, and you don't want to put down the suds. He disappeared after a bit, and my husband and I went to town.
When we came back home, Gerald was standin' in his front yard, one hand in his jacket pocket, holding a longneck Bud in a death grip with the other hand. Staring skyward.
Searching the sky, we finally located what he was staring at. It was his kite, and it was so high up in the sky that we could barely make it out. It was just a dot waaaaaaaaaaay up there. Where planes fly! He had tied the end of the kite string to the end of the monofilament line on his fishing rod. Then, he stuck the fishing rod thru the side-mirror bracket of his truck!

Hands-free kite flying! Pretty handy when your Hell-bent on getting a buzz.

Well now, that calls for a comment, so we went over to check out this set-up. He said he could have gotten it up even higher if he hadn't run out of fishin' line!

Next time someone tells you to go fly a kite, do it the redneck way! That'll shut 'em up!

And don't forget the beer.

I have finally found the answer to the age old question!!

No, not THAT question-----I have no earthly idea why we are here, or what it's all about, Alfie. It's not my area.

And I still don't know who put the bop in the bop-she-bop-she-bop. Or who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.

I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

But the answer to "why did the chicken cross the road" is clear to me now! It came to me out of nowhere.

Actually, it came to me from the left side of the alley behind the glass shop. Close up and personal, at about 30 miles per hour.

I was creeping down the alley, vigilant because of the pot-holes that the city refuses to fill, after leaving the post office on my mail run for Bosslady. I was really studyin' the asphalt, or lack thereof.
So I didn't see Henny Penny until she was in mid-flight. No warning cluck or cackle. No lights, sirens, or nothin'. Just a blur of brown and black feathers flying over the hood of my car, about two inches from the windshield.

WHOOSH!

I saw a rooster fly over the front of an SUV last week, and was laughin' at the driver who no doubt soiled his upholstery along with his Fruit Of The Looms ( the sudden flash of brakelights was a dead give-away ). I'm not laughing anymore, because I almost soiled MY upholstery, and that is unacceptable.

I didn't hit the poor thing, but she won't lay an egg for a while, and she scared the "cluck" out of me, too!

I've rambled so long I've forgotten the question.

Oh yeah!

Chickens cross the road for laughs, and cheap thrills, at OUR expense. They probably get kick-backs from detail shops. I almost had to pay some poor shmuck to clean my front seat.
It's pay-back for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Popeyes.

T-Bird came home from work early yesterday because the power went out at the plant.
We were having a nice sunny day, so what was up with that? Not that he was complaining! He got go play at the airport.

They have been tearing down several old, dilapidated buildings here and one was an old tobacco warehouse next to the plant.
He was at his welder when he heard three loud explosions. He said it sounded like they were being bombed.

Everybody ran outside just in time to see the warehouse collapse.
The crew of day-laborers had been tearing the metal siding off of the building and I guess that was all that was holding the building up.
The three explosions were three transformers blowing when the power lines were being pulled loose by the collapse.
The downed power lines started a grass fire.
The plant superviser had been talking to a man in the parking lot about renting another warehouse that is owned by the plant that T. works at. It scared them half to death! He grabbed his cell phone and called 911 to tell them that a building had collapsed and they needed a firetruck and the power company.

Dispatch asked if it was in the county or the city. He yelled at her that "it don't make a damn! Send somebody out here!" Everybody knows where the place is, since it sits on the same road as the Emergency/Lock-You-Up-Complex. And if there are heavy duty power lines on the ground and a fire, we can nit-pick location when the smoke clears.
We have noticed that no matter what the problem is, the very first question asked around here is: "Is it in the city, or in the county?" I've heard it discussed in great detail for everything from fires to car wrecks to shots fired. It wastes valuable time to argue about it. JUST SEND HELP!
Before the fire could spread further, one of the men started beating it out with a jacket, jumping around the power lines that were, of course, "hot".
Here comes the power company. When the fire truck pulled up, they sat in the truck and watched the man beat the fire out with his jacket.

Don't stir yourself boys.

And the men that were tearing down the building?
Were they crushed by debris?
Were they electrocuted?

Naw! They came up out of a creek bed by the warehouses. Holding a bottle of tequila!

AAAAAHHHHHHH, Saturday!

Snuggle up under the covers 'cause the temperature dropped to 29 degrees, and the wind was howling. Any outside work was on hold.
Sip on a cup of coffee and watch some t.v.; get ready for the day. We had things to do around here, but we didn't have to break our necks to get it done. No boss's involved!

At least we got to the coffee part.

We heard my son's truck pull up in the yard, and I let him in. My Saturday went down the toilet. He and his girlfriend live in a trailer that is owned by my mother. There are several old pine trees on the property.
He went to pick his girl up from work, and when they made it back to the trailer, they found a pine tree had blown over, missing the trailer by just a couple of yards. It didn't snap off, it pulled out of the ground. But no damage done. No problem. If he had not been gone to pick her up from work it might have flattened his truck, since it fell across the driveway. The city guys came out and moved the top of the pine out of road.
However, upon further inspection, he found a much larger pine was starting to lean. Toward the trailer. And the ground was cracking. With the wind blowing so hard, the tree itself was cracking, and it was cracking UP the trunk.
Now he starts to panic, so he got Girlfriend and the parakeet out and sent them to her mother's house. Then he runs to my house.
I called my mother so that they could get someone out there, and I called the city's emergency number. I was told by the Emergency Guy that they cannot come onto private property. Never mind the fact that they, the city, had cut one tree down on that place that was gonna fall two years ago, but it was an election year, and the man said that for payment he wanted Momma to vote for the current mayor, and that would be payment enough. So she did. But now we would have to call someone else. I told him we would have welcomed Osama Bin Laden if he could divert the tree. He is sympathetic, but useless. They used to come out and take care of stuff like this, but the policy has changed. Meaning, I suppose, that this was not an election year. But he gave me two numbers to call.
I called Mom back, and they had a man on the way. We hauled tater to Son's place.

It is a bad feeling to stand there and see a crack grow in a tree that is going to render my son homeless, and destroy Momma's property. The man that lives next door to my son was worried that when it came down his utility shed was gonna be gone, and his stuff with it. The ground around the tree moves every time the wind blows. And we could do NOTHING. But watch. My parents showed up, and we just stood there and watched the tree lean farther and farther. Waiting on the Tree Dude. And praying.
When Tree Dude showed up, he didn't have so much as a pocket knife on him. He was worried about payment, and we discussed it in length. Plus, it's Saturday, and he says he "don't like to work on Saturday." Duh. AND he doesn't really think it will fall. Finally, he agrees to do the job, but says it's gonna take an hour or so to get back with the bucket truck.

An hour.

About an hour later we found out that he is having to REPAIR said bucket truck, but then he'll be back. Crap.
The tree is cracking with every gust. And leaning more and more.

There are times when even a bucket truck is a beautiful sight, and that thing was drop-dead gorgeous when it rounded the curve!

Up he goes in the bucket, and yells back to us that "this thing's gonna fall!" NAH, we called him just for shits and giggles!

He dropped that pine just right. It missed the fence across the road and a row of mailboxes that I just KNEW it would crush, it was so tall.

Momma had said before Tree Dude got there with the truck that she just knew it wouldn't fall on her trailer, because she had asked God for help. I had asked her if God had gotten back to her on it yet, and was reminded that He had told her in the Bible that if she asked for anything she would get it. Point taken, and as a Southern Baptist I knew better. My son had said that he had faith in God, but he also had faith in gravity. He said that he wouldn't have noticed that pine if the first one hadn't come down. He would have been asleep on the couch, catchin' up on some sack time, while his girlfriend was asleep in the bedroom. It would have fallen across the living room section, and I cannot take the thought that he might have been killed today.

Actually, he might not survive the day after all. Girlfriend found out that he had run back inside to the living room, to save his computer. When we left she was yelling at him, and throwing pieces of pine tree at him, and he was runnin'.

He's on his own. I've had all of the excitement I can stand.

I am just stunned.

Completely stunned.

I tuned into the local news yesterday at lunch to get a weather update, since the forecast had been calling for severe weather, and I had to be out in it.
Well, I got blown away, all right, but the weather had nothing to do with it.
In a small community not too far from here four volunteer firefighters had been arrested. For arson, of all things!!!!
They set an empty house on fire, torched a couple of cars, and started brush fires. It has been so dry here that for several months, you could start a fire with two amorous crickets.
And burn the state to the ground.
We figured that maybe they were setting fires to help friends get insurance money. It's dishonest as heck, sure, and illegal to boot. People do bad things to "help" others, and don't think about the consequences.

So we were watching the news again this morning while getting ready for work, and in the words of Paul Harvey, we got "the rest of the story".
There had been MORE arrests. Five firefighters, their chief, his girlfriend, and a buddy. By the way, that is the entire volunteer fire department for that community.

The girlfriend was arrested because she was there for some of the planning, and didn't turn them in (she got to ride along in the truck when one call came in).

The buddy was arrested because he was there when one firefighter torched a car, and kept his yap shut. Wanna bet he's talking today?

Now, why in the world would these people, trusted by the community, do something like this????

This will make you sick.

Investigators say they did it so that they could------get this!!-----USE THE NEW FIRE TRUCK!!!!!!!!!!

After checking out the 911 tapes the investigators discovered that it was firemen making the calls to 911, and then they would race to the station so that they could go for a ride on the new truck.

You may throw up now, if you wish.

Two years ago, right here in my town, several law officers were in deep doo-doo for "borrowing" new cars and trucks off of car lots. Why? To go joy-riding around town.
They would cruise the car lots, find a new vehicle that had the keys in it, and take off!! When they were finished, they would park the vehicle, get back into their cruiser, and go back to work. Protecting and serving our community.

They were supposed to be suspended, minus pay, but we saw 'em every day, on the job. So they got away with it.

If the firefighters had just gone cruising in the new toy, and had not been setting the fires, they could have gotten away with that, most likely.

What do we do now that The Good Guys are The Bad Guys?