A TOUGH TWO WHEEL DECISION

2002 HONDA SHADOW AERO 1100

I came across a ladies blog to-day & her June 9th entry caught my interest right away. She talks about something we animal lovers don't like to think about yet we know the day comes for all of us in dealing with the loss of a pet. Her site is called Nodin's Nest & it looks informative.......http://nodinsnest.blogspot.com/

In about 10 days summer will be officially upon us. Wished I could say we have had a lovely spring here in southwestern Ontario but it has been cool, cold, cloudy & damp. Fingers are crossed for a pleasantly warm summer.

Gas prices are on the rise again just like last year at this time so I imagine a lot of fellow RV snowbirds are beginning to get a little nervous about this upcoming winter's plans again. In this day & age making any kind of medium or long range plans about anything is like trying to figure out when mosquitoes will someday harass the first astronaught to play golf on the far side of Saturn's rings.

I have been wrestling with a decision for quite awhile now that keeps me flip flopping back & forth but lately I've been doing more flipping than flopping. My logical mind tells me that it doesn't make a lot of practical sense to keep something that is costing me about $45 a month for 12 months of the year when I am only able to use it comfortably for about 3 of those months and for at least 4 months of the year it cannot be used at all whatsoever. It is not an essential thing & I have actually been using it less & less every year. Of course I am talking about my motorcycle. Aside from the first couple of rides in the spring of every year the excitement & thrill of the ride has kind of gone out of it for me. There are so many other practical areas where insurance costs, license fees, & maintenance monies could be used. This is my third motorcycle & when it's gone I'm not under any illusion that there will be a fourth motorcycle in my life. What makes the decision harder is the fact that this motorcycle is a Honda which just about puts it at the top of the motorcycle quality list. A beautiful bike in tip top shape & a real joy to ride. But...............:((

My new eating habits are going very well & I'll be posting a weight on Monday morning. I have already noticed my legs are beginning to feel better & maybe, just maybe, I'll begin fitting into some of my other pants again in a few weeks. It would be great to get out of the same old fat guys clothes I've been wearing these past bunch of months. Looking for my Discman in a drawer the other day I came across some brand new underwear I had bought a year ago. Before re-checking the size I had opened the package only to discover they were too small. Stores don't like taking free-wheeling underwear back so I was stuck with them, or would they would have been stuck on me if I had tried to wear them. Figured at the time I might someday shrink into them. Hmmmmm, dya suppose there could come a time when a new underware celebration day will be in my future................................:))

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TAVISTOCK-SMALL TOWN SATURDAY NIGHT.....50 YEARS AGO!!

DAISY

In last night's blog I forgot to add a couple of links for, "The Sons Of The Pioneers."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_the_Pioneers
http://www.cmt.com/artists/az/sons_of_the_pioneers/bio.jhtml
To-morrow I'll continue my country CD theme with another favorite western singer of mine........Marty Robbins.

I was also reminded last night of another time in another place where western music was popular but I didn't like it because it was a time in my life when I considered it hick music & it reminded me of farm kids!! I was around 14 years old & figured Buddy Holly was a whole lot cooler than Hank Williams any day. Afterall, I lived in a small town which to me was almost a big city anyway & that country music stuff was for the local hayseed farmers & their tumble down barns out there in the country.

It was back in the late 50's & very early 60's that I was living in the little farming community village of Tavistock, Ontario Canada & times were a whole lot different from the way they are now. Especially on Saturday nights because that's when the farm guys rolled into town. Kind of like the old west when the cattlemen would ride into town on a Saturday night, hit the saloons & shoot up the bars.

Tavistock at the time had a population of around 1200 people with 3 grocery stores, a drug store that the grayhound bus even stopped at, 4 gas stations, couple hardware stores, a bank, 2 butcher shops, 2 bakeshops, a clothing store, a local newspaper, plus an assortment of other little shops & stores. The local restaurant & hang out was called Joe's Place & the 2 big booming hotels were called the Arlington & the Oxford. It was the Arlington & the Oxford that mainly contributed to the exciting & wild side of the Saturday nights.

It was a different world then with different ideals, ideas, morals, & ways of doing things. By late Saturday afternoon the local farmers, having finished up in the fields & barns, climbed into the tub for the Saturday night special, shined up their best boots, & slipped into their best jeans. With a clean shirt & some extra bucks in their pockets they loaded up the wife & kids in the car & headed into town for groceries, a stop at the hardware store, ice cream at Joes & a few beers at the Oxford. CLOVER

Saturday nights were alive with people on the streets. Cars lined the curbs on both sides. Groups of people standing on sidewalks talking & laughing. Like I said, it was a different world. Joe's Place was the hub for everyone from kids to grandparents. A large squared off horsehoe lunch counter with about 20 stools made for standing room only. Two bowling alleys in the back were action packed with thundering bowling balls & flying pins. Four pool tables in an adjoining room were never vacant with all available chairs on the sideline filled. Hank Williams, Hank Snow, & Eddie Arnold boomed out of the old jukebox at Pappa Joes. Tavistock on a Saturday night was alive....................and then came the entertainment.

It was the young farm guys with their Dad's car or their own jazzed up set of wheels that really livened things up. These were hard working kids who had spent the week out on the land in the hot sun, planting, ploughing, digging, tending cattle, up at the crack of dawn doing chores & just getting themselves wound up tighter than hot snare drum at a Gene Kruppa concert. By the time Saturday night rolled around these guys were headed for town......... & boy were they ever!!

It was usually the shrill sound of squealing car tires that first brought heads around to the fact that another night of action was underway. Late 40's & early 50's flat head Fords were popular as were the Chevy's & Dodges. Fender skirts, moons, wheel spinners, dice on the mirrors, whatever these farm kids could fancy up their cars with they did. Patsy Cline, Johnny Horton & Marty Robbins boomed out of their big single bass dash speaker car radios. The beer was in the trunk, the girls were in the passenger seats, & the cars were layin rubber up & down the main street. Like so many other small towns on a Saturday night in those days, Tavistock was alive!!

I was too young for a driver's license then & alcohol was hardly even a thought in my mind yet as I watched all the shenanigans from the sidelines. Four main roads & a street all converged in the center of town so all the cars racing around had to pass through that intersection over & over. On the south side of the street on one corner was an old store called Pepplars that had long since gone out of business. This was a favorite spot for my young friends & myself to sit & watch the goings on. From here we could keep an eye on both hotels & instantly spot the fights as they broke out later in the evening. Occassionally one of us would walk up the street to Joes Place to bring some pop back for everybody but I hated doing that because of the farm guys hanging around the doorway at Pappa Joes.

I was afraid of these guys because some of them were always spoiling for a fight. They were bigger, stronger, & older. With a few beers or a quick coke under their belts they were looking to make a name for themselves by pounding out some of the sissy town kids. I got pushed around a few times & knocked to the sidewalk once so I had a real dis-like for these farm guys & their dorky hayseed country music but I sure envied them roaring around town in their souped up cars. With big rumbling duel exhausts, windshield visors, wide whitewall tires, sexy looking girls, cigarettes in their mouths, sunglasses & long red scarves on the mirrors, these guys were cool. And seemingly no fear of authority whatsoever. They were the Blums, the Zehrs, Ramsyers, Rubys, the Benders, Baechlers, the Schmidts, & many more. They were our farming community. They were our young Saturday night buckaroos.

??

And the only authority in town at the time was an aging retired police officer with a single car & flashing red light. His name was Peter Grant but we all called him Peter Gunn. He was a good man & did his best to rein in the young bucks but there were just too many for him. By the time he got to where the squealing tires were, another fight had broken out in one of the hotels & by the time he got that under control in one hotel parking lot there were squealing tires & dust flying at the other hotel.

Yep, it was Saturday night in a small Ontario town about 50 years ago & I was there as Jim Reeves, Frankie Laine, & Johnny Cash laid down the treasury of memories that I would learn to love so much......................... many, many, years later:))

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MUSIC......MY ALL TIME FAVORITE THING:))

AZALEA FLOWER

Well, I'm sitting in the same place as I was last night at this time staring out the same window. My fingers are resting on the keyboard revved up & ready to go but the thought patterns just haven't come down from command central telling them just what to rev about or where to go. Last night's dripping rain has been replaced with rays of evening sunlight filtering down through the pine trees & my desk's timepiece has moved a full 24 hours ahead. Oh dear.....could another blog jam be upon me:(( PHLOX IN THE PINES

I may have blogged about this before but let me say a few words again about one of my favorite all time favorite loves....Music:)) There is not one single solitary thing in my entire life that has brought me more continuous pleasure than listening to music. I was reminded of that again this morning when I decided to put to-gether some new music CD's from my extensive Winamp media library. It's a library I began about 10 years ago when I downloaded my first tune from the internet. THIS & THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS WERE TAKEN IN THE AREA THAT "GHOST RIDERS" WAS WRITTEN ABOUT

The library has grown over the years to encompass the Big Band Era & all the popular music from the 50's right into the 90's. I have broken the music down into categories such as Rock & Roll, Blues, Old Country, Relaxation, Folk, & my current favorite over the past 8 years or so.....ambient. I even have a folder of favorite TV themes from long ago & add to that some old radio programs as well. It's quite a mixed bag of music but you won't find any opera, hip hop, religious, or rap, on my computer. HEADING WEST TO-WARDS DOUGLAS, ARIZONA

This morning I decided to re-do some old country CD's that I like to take along to the southwest in the winter. When we think of Roy Rogers we think of his Palomino horse trigger & his rootin tootin television show back in the 50's but Roy sang with a group called, "The Sons Of The Pioneers." I came across their music years ago when I first caught the southwest bug. To date I have 51 of their songs here on file. It's not only the cowboy stories of the old west but it's the harmonies in the voices that I find so hauntingly beautiful. Best version of, "Oh Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie" I've ever heard & it's one of my favs. In recent years I have also become a Hank Williams Sr fan so I was busy putting a CD to-gether with a bunch of Hank's tunes this morning as well. What makes these CD's especially meaningful for me is our winter trips through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, & California. To drive through & camp in the very areas & settings these songs were written about is something I always look forward too. In this world of harsh realities it is one of the few fanciful escapes I can relate to. Last winter we drove down a road through an area in southeastern Arizona where years later on June 5th, 1948 Stan Jones wrote the country classic, "Ghost Riders In The Sky." Words & pictures plus how Stan Jones was inspired to write that song can be found here............ http://deenotes.homestead.com/ghost.html Looking forward to returning to this area in October & November. Well, look at that..............for not having anything to say an hour ago it looks like command central finally managed to rev up the fingers enough to put a few paragraphs to-gether again & send another blog winging it's way to wherever these blogs wing their way to.................................:))

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