Pikachu runs the Turkey Trot

For years now our family tradition has been for our sons to run the Turkey Trot in downtown Dallas on Thanksgiving morning.

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This is Nick and Lee after the race ten years ago, in 2003, Dallas City Hall in the background – not a very good photograph, sorry.

Photos of Lee running in 2008:

Lee at the Turkey Trot, Downtown Dallas, 2008

Lee in front of the same tree five years later, at the Turkey Trot, Downtown Dallas, 2008

I always wait for the kids at this tough uphill spot, right before the finish.

I always wait for the kids at this tough uphill spot, right before the finish.

I wrote blog entries, with lots of photos, on the run in 2011 and 2012.

Near the end of the eight mile race, there is a steep hill to torture the runners. I always wait there to see my kids run by. Here is Lee a hundred yards from the finish.

Near the end of the eight mile race, there is a steep hill to torture the runners. I always wait there to see my kids run by. Here is Lee a hundred yards from the finish.

Lee near the finish of the eight mile course. Mardi Gras shirt and Tulane Boxers - worn on the outside.

Lee near the finish of the eight mile course. Mardi Gras shirt and Tulane Boxers – worn on the outside.

This year, Lee flew in from New Orleans (he’s finished up his last semester at Tulane now) for Thanksgiving and ran the Turkey Trot again (Nick was in New York with friends).

He said with finals, work, and graduation job hunting he didn’t have time to train, so he was going to take his time this year and not try and run too fast. For some reason he ran in a Pikachu costume. He said that slowed him down even more, because people (especially kids) wanted him to stop and get their photo with him.

Lee said that he really enjoyed himself, not trying for such a fast time. It wasn’t all that slow, anyway.

Pikachu

Pikachu

Running up that hill at the end.

Running up that hill at the end.

You can see the same sign that was there in 2008.

You can see the same sign that was there in 2008.

Pikachu, goofing around.

Pikachu, goofing around.

A Sprig of Rosemary on Ice

Tell her to find me an acre of land
(On the side of a hill, a sprinkling of leaves)
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
(Washes the ground with so many tears)
Between the salt water and the sea strand
(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)
Then she’ll be a true love of mine
—-Scarborough Fair/Canticle P. Simon/A. Garfunkel, 1966

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes – and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. … [T]he sun became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.
—-Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

Star Flower

James Surls, Star Flower, Irving Arts Center Sculpture Garden, Irving, Texas

James Surls, Star Flower reflection (click to enlarge)

James Surls, Star Flower
reflection
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James Surls, Star Flower (click to enlarge)

James Surls, Star Flower
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James Surls, Star Flower (click to enlarge)

James Surls, Star Flower
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James Surls, Star Flower inverted reflection (click to enlarge)

James Surls, Star Flower
inverted reflection
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Crape Myrtle in Ice

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During the killer summer heat here in Texas one bit of beauty that survives are the bright colors of the Crape (or Crepe) Myrtle trees, blooming on the warmest of days.

Crape Myrtle blooms.

Crape Myrtle blooms.

They also have these amazing limbs, covered in smooth bark.

Crape Myrtle grove at the Dallas Arboretum

Crape Myrtle grove at the Dallas Arboretum

This winter, the ice storm showed another side of their beauty, glowing like crystal in the faint sunlight filtering through the clouds.

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A Rose Embedded in Ice

“No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I’m in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current’s too overpowering; I don’t have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I’ve never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there’s no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I’ll be burned up, gone forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

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My old chainsaw quit working a year ago, so we had to go down to the hardware store and buy a new one. I was afraid they would be out of stock – a lot of people around here must be buying them right now – but they had two left. We bought the smallest, least expensive, least powerful, corded electric one. It’s only for trimming and, like now, clearing fallen limbs – not a lumberyard – plus, the smaller the saw… the safer the saw (in my opinion).

It was cold work, but quick work, to cut up the limbs of the red oak in the front yard and move them to the curb. It took a little more time to chop up the thicker pieces into chiminea sized chunks of firewood, but waste not want not.

chimmy

Actually, our old chiminea has bit the dust too, so we need to get down to Amigos Pottery and buy a new one. This is the season of renewal – new chainsaw, new chiminea to burn the old limbs while we wait for the new ones to grow back. It is a shock to see how much wood the weight of the ice tore off the tree – there are still some detached limbs suspended high up, waiting for a thaw and a good breeze to fall – but there are a lot left and the old tree keeps growing.

Bourbon Barrel Temptress

The ice storm was more than a full day past and I hadn’t left the house except for a short visit to the yard. But it was time to go, time to get out, time to visit the world… at least a little bit. It was time to go to the Lakewood Brewery for a sample of the 2013 Bourbon Barrel Temptress.

Their Temptress, a darker than night Milk Stout beer is one of my favorite things in the whole world. Take that concentrated deliciousness and let it age in an oak barrel that used to hold some fine whiskey and you have made a very good thing better. Today was the day they would open some of those casks.

My Toyota was still incapacitated, covered in a thick carapace of ice. I carefully poured a carafe of warm water along the door edge until I was able to get it open. Almost an hour of running the defroster and chipping away at the thick glazing and it was clear and I hit the road.

The streets were slick, but everyone was suffering from a temporary bought of sanity and were creeping along. I live only a couple of miles from the Brewery, so I made it without any real problem – except for having to walk across the skating rink of a parking lot.

And the Bourbon Barrel Temptress – was it worth the trip? Of course it was.

The Bourbon Barrel Temptress, on a Bourbon Barrel

The Bourbon Barrel Temptress, on a Bourbon Barrel

Lakewood Brewery tour - how they make the stuff.

Lakewood Brewery tour – how they make the stuff.

Music at the Brewery Tour

Music at the Brewery Tour

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Covered in Ice

“Maybe it’s wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

The trees that still had their leaves, mostly oaks, were the ones to suffer the most. (click to enlarge)

The trees that still had their leaves, mostly oaks, were the ones to suffer the most.
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I read on facebook where somebody here in Dallas wrote, under a nice bright picture of downtown, “I remember when it was sunny and eighty degrees… wait, that was yesterday.”

The freezing rain blew in overnight, coating everything in a transparent crystalline shell. I bundled up, breathed the bitter clean air, and carefully walked around the familiar landscape of my yard – transformed into an alien arctic spectacle. When the breeze would blow the world would tinkle with tiny crackling ice. The sun was behind thin clouds but enough light shone through to light up the glassy ice crystals like myriad clear jewels strung everywhere.

We have a huge oak tree in our front yard. Overnight, I could hear wood splitting as the tons of frozen water dripping down the still-attached leaves weighted the wood past its breaking point. In the morning, the yard was littered with limbs, with more broken ones suspended overhead, still stuck in the thick canopy. I’ll have to wait a day or so and then cut the fallen limbs up for firewood and haul the rest to the curb for the city to pick up.

A guy was wandering the neighborhood looking for work – he offered to clear the fall for twenty bucks, which is a more than fair price. I said no… and I’m not sure why, but I think I want to do it myself.

Fiddling in the Arts District

Leftover from the summer

Arts District, Dallas, Texas

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fiddling2

Majestic Parking

“‘He thinks you need a lobotomy. He told me you’re obsessed by car parks.’”
—-J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

parking

“An immense peace seemed to preside over the shabby concrete and untended grass. The glass curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain.”
—-J.G. Ballard, Crash

“At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine were with him — she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned In advance of itself.”
—-J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island

“Wilder pressed on. “I know Charlotte has reservations about life here — the trouble with these places is that they’re not designed for children. The only open space turns out to be someone else’s car-park.”
—-J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”
—-J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company

“The street lamps shone down on the empty car parks, yet there were no cars or people about, no one was playing the countless slot-machines in the stores and arcades.”
—-J.G. Ballard, Hello America

“Two vehicles occupied opposite corners of the car-park, breaking that companionable rule by which drivers arriving at an empty car-park place themselves alongside each other.”
—-J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women

“Acres of car parks stretched around me, areas for airline crews, security personnel, business travellers, an almost planetary expanse of waiting vehicles. They sat patiently in the caged pens as their drivers circled the world. Days lost for ever would expire until they dismounted from the courtesy buses and reclaimed their cars.”
—-J.G. Ballard, Millennium People

“I had left the Jensen in the multi-storey car park that dominated the town, a massive concrete edifice of ten canted floors more mysterious in its way than the Minotaur’s labyrinth at Knossos — where, a little perversely, my wife suggested we should spend our honeymoon.”
—-J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“Thousands of inverted buildings hung from street level — car parks, underground cinemas, sub-basements and sub-sub-basements — which now provided tolerable shelter, sealed off from the ravaging wind by the collapsing structures above.”
—-J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere

“Already, without touching her, he knew intimately the repertory of her body, its anthology of junctions. His eyes turned to the multi-storey car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.”
—-J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

Talons

Sculpture by the side door to the Irving Arts Center, Irving, Texas

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