This past week and a half, I’ve watched several dog videos with the same theme: Dog found abandoned, shy or distrustful of humans; Human interacts with dog, showing it love and patience; Dog responds by being everyone’s best friend ever!

Don’t you just love a happy ending?

Of course you do… and those happy endings are quite frequent, at least according to what I’ve witnessed.

Take the dog Filbrix. The American Oliohound I found abandoned about a block over on a late winter evening. I was out walking our Chihuahua when this short-haired dog came bounding up at us out of a dark corner of someone’s privacy fence. The small dog and I took the invader in, gave her some food (her ribs were showing), tried to find the owner and then took her in for “just one night.”

“Just one night” has become several years. Every week we replicate her first meal with us by feeding her one raw egg on Friday mornings, and every day I find something she does to make me say, “Dogs… Oy!”

This morning for instance, the dog Filbrix was seemingly happy about sleeping at my feet while the better half and I sat on the pair of recliners in our living/family room. I mentioned something about going to the hardware store. The dog Filbrix became alert, putting her nose in my face (while stepping on the family jewels). The other half got out of her chair and like a flash, the dog Filbrix goes and occupies where the other half was sitting.

It was, after all, the dog’s chair. The spouse was the interloper.

Dogs… Oy!

Okay. A little explanation is in order to understand why I call the dog Filbrix, the dog Filbrix. When I was three or four years old, I was gifted with a stuffed dog (with a squeaky nose and floppy ears) which I named Filbrix for no discernable reason. Perhaps it had to do with the construction going on in our corner of the north side of Pittsburgh. A reference to “Fill Bricks” may have caught the attention of an impressionable youngster like me, and the rest, as they say, is history. Later on, I found that there is a resort on the New Hampshire coast named “Philbrick’s of Hampton” (I think it was Hampton. Could be something else.). It’s doubtful that I knew of such a place at such a young age. Besides, looking at their rates, well, they were a little out of my price range.

There is more to the explanation. When my daughter was in the same age range, the first wife and I visited some friends who had a dog named Adrick. My daughter fell in love with the pooch and started to call Adrick “The Dog Add-er-ick.” Not just Add-er-ick. It was always “The dog Add-er-ick.” I refer to the dog Filbrix as homage to my daughter.

Anyhoo, I did my duty and rescued the dog Filbrix. With patience and love, she has become my constant companion. My wife thinks that the dog Filbrix adopted me instead of the other way around. Some love, some attention, and in return, a friend for life.

Be Seeing You!

My social media feed lately has seen an almost daily posting of some anti-vaxxer of note laid out on a hospital bed gasping for breath and pleading with their brethren to go get vaccinated for Covid-19 before it’s too late; like it is for me. There’s also the disclaimer that, “While we hate to see someone suffer and die…” with the admonishment that it’s about time for the anti-vaxxers to line up and bare your arms for the needle; followed by someone commenting, “When will they ever learn?”

The latest reply I put out was, “I’m not holding my breath…”

This ongoing drama reminds me of Theodore Geisel’s tale of the Sneetches. The last line in particular, “You can’t teach a Sneetch” applies here. No matter what proof of efficacy is offered, we are going to continue to see people laid out on hospital beds gasping for breath and pleading with their brethren to go get vaccinated for Covid-19 before it’s too late; like it is for me.

From what I’ve observed in my own little corner of the DFW Metromess are people who are opposed to vaccinations and other measures to curb the pandemic (and the emerging variants) are doing so because “Freedom.” I get it. Wearing a mask is a pain in the patoot. I don’t care for having a needle stuck in my arm, either, but I’ve done both for no other reason than to hope to keep someone else from having to be confined to a hospital bed, gasping for breath… and so on and so forth. It kind of ties in with the admonition of a certain itinerate rabbi from about 2,000 years ago suggesting that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

Perhaps this resistance to protecting ourselves from Covid-19 is, as if I’ve recently heard suggested, a political thing. A thumbing of one’s nose to the current President, or it’s being done in an effort to crash the economy which would bode better for the GOP in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Given what’s been happening in the last year and a half, such a move would not surprise me in the least. One would think that the GOP would offer some constructive assistance with the Covid-19 situation instead of trying to convince us that “The King is a Fink!”

Sorry. Wrong comic artist.

Fortunately, no one close to me has contracted Covid-19 and died. My son-in-law had it, despite having had the vaccine, but other than having to isolate himself for a couple of weeks and having a few mild symptoms, he’s come away from the experience as “Fit as a Fiddle.”

A woman with whom I used to work lost her husband to Covid-19 before the vaccines became available. Her experience was heartbreaking, yet, to this day she gets e-mails and social messages mocking her from people who presumably should know better. He was just another one of over half a million people who made a positive difference in the lives of the people around him.

Then again, “You can’t teach a Sneetch!”

Be Seeing You!

A few days ago I wrote of our adventure in San Antonio where the better half and I spent a couple of nights at a hotel which was, shall we say, a little less than ideal. I won’t go into details on this writing, as those details were covered in my previous post “Dirty is as Dirty Does.”

I left the audience hanging, saying that the corporate office had not been heard from at the time I wrote the piece.

Well, I wrote to corporate a second time on Thursday and got a reply early Friday.

I felt good about what they wrote. They essentially sent me a note saying that the site manager had agreed to refund what I paid for one night’s stay, providing I contact the site manager.

After chewing the message for a while, I decided that I had one of two ways to respond. One was to be a total “Karen” about the experience, the other was to take a kinder, gentler approach. Since the Karens I know are decent people, I opted for the gentler approach.

In the e-mail sent to the site manager, I quickly went over the lowlights of our visit before reminding the manager that it had been agreed that I was to be refunded one night’s stay for our trouble. I then suggested that if the refund had not been forwarded yet, for the manager to make a donation to the San Antonio Food Bank.

My e-mail was sent, with a copy sent to corporate so that they would know what was going on.

This morning, I opened my in box to find a “form letter” from someone in corporate, thanking me for voicing my concerns and for choosing a hotel in their chain – inviting me to come again.

The latest form letter from corporate reminded me of a story from back in the 1890s where someone wrote a letter to one of the railroads complaining about bedbugs in their sleeping car.

The railroad wrote back, thanking them for bringing the bedbug problem to their attention, further telling the customer that they could rest easy that due to their complaint, the company was taking action by fumigating their entire fleet of sleeper cars, and so on and so forth.

They attached a copy of the original complaint to their response, along with a notation on the complaint:

“SEND THEM THE BEDBUG LETTER”

Somehow it seems that the practice of sending form letters in response to complaints is still with us. Maybe the idea that impersonal responses to serious (or semi-serious) inquiries has been around longer than we thought.

The name of the chain has been withheld as a courtesy to the people who work there.

Be Seeing You!

I don’t care to complain, but it seems as if I am finding things to complain about without actively seeking things to complain about.

Take a recent stay at a hotel in San Antonio.

Please.

The better half and I made preparations to go see her mother a couple of weeks ago. We bypassed our usual overnight hotel for another motel closer to the in-law’s place, in part because her brother would be staying there. It seemed like a safe bet. The hotel where we would be staying is in the same family as the hotel we usually frequented. I’ve stayed at other properties in the same chain and found them to be amicable places to stay.

I should have turned around at the first hint of trouble… booted the reservation (which had been pre-paid) and headed over to our usual digs.

The problems started at the front door which refused to open until the better half worked a trick she had picked up from her days as being a hotel maid. Never mind the seats on the “porch” which had outlived their usefulness about three years ago, and never mind the collection of cigarette butts and beer bottle caps found on the ground surrounding the porch.

We did a quick inspection of the room fearing the presence of bedbugs. No bedbugs apparent on either queen bed. We had reserved a room with a single king bed. No biggie, as it turned out.

Then we started noting little things: There was a towel stuffed into the cabinet above the toilet. The towel had apparently been used to wipe away the mold we noted around the bathtub. There were light bulbs apparently missing from their sockets – an electrical outlet without an outlet cover in the bedroom between the beds – it appeared that someone had “liberated” the battery from the smoke detector – blades on the ceiling fan in the front room had not been cleaned in recent memory.

Now, I’m not the world’s best housekeeper by a long shot. At the same time, though, I am not in the business of providing rooms for paying guests. The room where we were staying was not acceptable even by my own lax standards. There was no excuse. None. Especially considering what we paid for the room.

A complaint was forwarded to the “Home Office”. To date, all I’ve gotten is a message saying “We’ll look into it.”

Earlier Sunday evening, I got a reminder of a post by a good friend of mine where he talked about his two weeks of being “Morning Mayor” of the small radio station we worked for in southern Ohio. His tenure started the day after I was pulled into the station manager’s office and told that I was going to be replaced in two weeks by someone from a larger market who he had hired the day before.

To be honest, I was rightly pissed at the decision, especially since I had worked through one of the worst winters the town had experienced to that point. I went off to lick my wounds while my friend, Alex, got the chance to play personality radio for a fortnight.

His post described his experience as being one of the best in his life (you’re welcome, Alex) – one which he never really forgot. Reading his post, I recalled the period and my mourning the loss of a job I really wanted for three years prior to getting it.

I then read some of the comments made in addition to the post, including an entry made by me where I recall accepting the “demotion”, as it allowed me to do what I really wanted to do which was to create creative commercials for the station’s clients.

I had taken a lemon and made it into lemonade. Something I have done repeatedly in the span of my lifetime. It’s being able to roll with the punches, to adapt, which makes someone genuinely… let’s just say, interesting.

There is an entire litany of little setbacks I had suffered on the way from there to here; too many setbacks and comebacks to enumerate in a short period of time.

Two which came to mind were the events leading up to owning a house in an obscure little corner of the DFW Metromess and the more recent setback I had earlier this year.

The better half and I were living in a rental home in an older part of Allen Texas a few years back. I had just come off an injury which took me out of work for nearly two months when I got a call from a real-estate agent who blithely told me that she was coming over to look at the house so she could list it for sale. She prefaced her announcement by asking me if I had gotten the note from the landlord telling me that I needed to be out of the house by the end of the month. Never mind the detail of sending us a registered letter or even bothering to call me… I needed to be out by the end of the month with about sixteen day’s notice.

We made it out, landing on a property owned by my wife’s boss, arriving by the skin of our teeth. For the next few months, we hustled to find a permanent place to live, finally settling on a really nice place in a somewhat decent neighborhood. Truth be known, I knew enough about Real Estate law to be able to have the agent who called me on that beautiful October day to sweat out keeping her license – and I could have stuck it to the landlord for not fixing various shortcomings which desperately needed to be repaired.

But I didn’t.

I was the nice guy who put it behind me and went ahead to better things.

The rectal cancer had the possibility of being an even bigger setback. Before the good news that it was operable and that it had not spread, I determined to make the best out of the situation by rolling out my sense of humor, grinning and bearing what could have been a onerous load.

The gist of this little essay is that today’s encounter with a six-year-old post from my friend gave me some insight about what really matters in this life. Life can sometimes hand out some pretty tough lumps. It’s how one handles those lumps which defines what type of person one is.

Be Seeing You!

First to Find, Last to Find

I mentioned in a previous installment putting together lists of geocaches to attempt to find while taking a trip on the road. The better half and I planned a trip to see her mother in San Antonio in the middle of August, so, I made a short list of caches I wanted to go after while out on the road.

My itinerary was not as ambitious as had been previous efforts. My first really big cache hunt came about on a trip to go see Mount Rushmore with the kids and the first wife in tow. By the time we finished that trip, we had found caches in at least half a dozen states, including “Mingo” (one of the oldest caches still active in the United States), a letterbox cache at the foot of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, and my first “First to Find” cache, the “Nebraska Sand Hills Rest and Rattle.”

“First to Find” caches can be (and for that matter still are) special. Here locally, in the area around my little corner of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metromess, there seem to be several cachers who appear to try and locate new caches almost as soon as they pop up on the pages of Geocaching.com. For the record, no complaints from me, although I have caught little rumbles from others who resent the enterprising cachers.

“Nebraska Sand Hills…” was found by the family at least five days after being published – and no one else bothered to find the cache until several weeks after I finally logged the find a week and a half after the actual discovery. It was my proudest “FTF”, but certainly not my last. There were many caches I’ve encountered with an empty log book.

Back to the trip to San Antonio.

I decided that I would attempt only three caches. Two on the way, and one on Tuesday morning close to where the mother-in-law lives.

The first attempt was made in Abbott Texas, birthplace of Willie Nelson. I looked at the description of the cache and saw a clue as to where it might be. I didn’t load the cache into the GPSr, deciding to try to find the cache “naked” (without using the GPSr). The turn-off from the Interstate was easy enough, and the town itself was just as easily found. However, the “spoiler” (a hint given away to help cachers find what they were looking for) had me looking for a structure which wasn’t there. We drove through town, waved at the people going to church on that Sunday morning, and then got back on the road to try and make time.

No biggie. We get down to San Antonio from time to time, so, no love lost.

The second cache I attempted was at the Buccee’s just north of Temple. For my readers not living in Texas, Buccee’s has been described as the largest convenience store in the world. There’s a chain of them spread along the Interstate, offering fuel, food, and the cleanest restrooms you will ever find anywhere. To give you an idea on just how big a Buccee’s is, well, imagine something the size of a typical medium-sized grocery store. The lot is so big that cachers have been able to place 3 caches on the property in Temple and not violate Geocaching.com’s rule that caches must be placed at least 500 feet apart.

The better half and I planned on this being nothing more than a pit stop, so, I pre-selected just one of the three caches on the property and parked Willy the Jeep near where I thought the cache would be. While the other half went to use the facility, I quickly fed the coordinates for the cache into the GPSr and found that I was about 200 feet away from the target. The hint told me that the cache I was looking for was a “Lift A Skirt” (under the cover at the bottom of a light pole hiding the bolts holding the lamp in place).

A bit too easy, I thought. I might have gone ahead and tried to find the cache in the third pole in my line of sight, had it not been for the rain and wind which had just started. Well, that and the fact that I still had to use the facility myself. And the fact that I had to buy the obligatory bag of “Beaver Nuggets” (sugar coated hull-less popcorn. “Only sugar has more sugar”). Took about five minutes to do what needed to be done before heading on down the Interstate.

We arrived at the Alamo City none the worse for the wear. We headed directly to see my in-laws (mother, father and brother) before having dinner and heading back to our hotel.

There was a restless night in an underwhelming hotel, followed by breakfast with the brother-in-law and his girlfriend outdoors in a picnic area next to the swimming pool. I told Steve (my brother-in-law) a little bit about geocaching and he agreed to go with me on a hunt to find the one geocache I had loaded into the GPSr.

“Thirty-Two, Forty-Three” was listed as a micro-cache located about half a mile from the Tobin Trail head adjacent to Interstate 410 north of downtown San Antonio. Steve and I needed the walk, and we combined that walk with some pleasant conversation. When we got close to “Ground Zero”, we found numerous places where a cache might be hidden. We noted more than a few little frogs in the immediate vicinity. Steve told me a story about an incident he had with a frog when he was quite young… I eased his mind by recalling a line from Monty Python (“… if we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy, now would it?) and we kept searching.

Finally, I found the cache, or what were the remains of the cache, out in the open about 20 feet from where the GPSr said it would be. I went ahead and added a portion of the card I had used to write the cache coordinates as my attempt to log it and then moved on with the remainder of the hike and the day.

My spouse and I went home on Tuesday. I went ahead and logged my fine on Wednesday morning. Shortly after logging “Thirty-Two, Forty-Three,” I got a notification that the cache had been archived, or withdrawn by the cache owner, making me the “Last to Find” the cache.

No rewards from Geocaching.com. No satisfaction of making a new discovery, although there could be some satisfaction derived from being the last person to find a cache before it was withdrawn.

For me, it was find #989. Eleven caches to go before #1,000.

Be Seeing You!

It took no time at all for me to sketch out what my final finds would be. But the best laid plans of mice and men…

I drew up my list before my premium membership in Geocaching expired. I didn’t really get around to finding any caches until after my premium membership expired. I did find one premium cache, though, before that membership expired – the cache being “Little Blue Truck,” found on the way to The Hideaway Ranch and Refuge about ten miles from Glen Rose Texas.

It was here that I started to keep track of what I was finding and in what order I was finding them. Little Blue Truck was, according to records kept by Geocaching.com was find #987.

Thirteen to go.

There was no truck here, just a picnic area. I had passed the picnic area on more than one occasion. This was one of what I call an “on the road” cache.

Back when I was active collecting geocaches, I would plot my caching ahead of time, spotting likely targets on the Geocaching.com maps and loading the ones I’d like to go for ahead of time. Aside from having passed the picnic area where the geocache was located, I targeted this cache because I met the people who had previously logged this cache while going after number 984 while on a walk with the dog Filbrix in Farmersville.

A few weeks earlier, while I was plotting out the final caches, I noted that someone had placed a few caches on or nearby the Chaparral Trail going northeast out of Farmersville. When I arrived at what would be number 984, another couple was busily looking for the cache I was after. It became a “community” effort. The cache was found, the log was signed and I was off with Carol and the dog Filbrix on a walk up the trail to find two other caches. There was very little conversation between me and the other cachers. They were content to log and be on their way to find the other two caches on my list. They were driving. I was on foot. Needless to say, I found caches #985 and #986 after they were long gone.

I chalked up the lack of interaction with that couple to what I believe is a 30+ year gap in our ages. On one hand, it’s nice to see that there is a younger generation involved in the sport. On the other hand, I’ve found that that their participation in the sport is changing some of the parameters within the sport. Geocaching had been changing when I was more active. For instance, there was/is a geocacher who loved to climb trees. His caches were always in trees. Puzzle caches have become popular with some geocachers. Fine, if you are into puzzles, but I was not quite into puzzles. The current trend is the “Nano” cache. The geocachers I met in Farmersville were all about “Nano” caches. Sometimes they are easily spotted, sometimes not. Nano caches are about the size of a pencil eraser and can be a bear to find, especially with eyesight which is sometimes spotty.

Anyhoo, the “Little Blue Truck” was a “Nano”. Fortune was with me when I found the cache. There was a broad hint which led me almost directly to the target. Found, logged and on my way within five minutes.

My next find was not really a find at all. I went to revisit “The Hideaway”, a cache placed by “9-Key” at the entrance to The Hideaway Ranch and Refuge. “9-Key” was a fellow named Will Neinke, a prolific cache finder and cache placer. His finds and hides number in the thousands. He had also helped develop a system of symbols found on most cache pages as a way to help geocachers know what to expect when finding a cache.

Will was a personal friend. He and I crossed paths quite often, sharing a love of caching as well as an appreciation of the ’60’s television series “The Prisoner.” My adoption of Patrick McGoohan’s phrase “Be Seeing You” became my geocaching “handle” (BCingU). Unfortunately, Will had an early demise which was part of the reason I decided to check up on the cache in front of The Hideaway.

The last time I went to The Hideaway, I noted that I could not find the cache in its published location. That was roughly two years ago. In the meantime, other geocachers noted that the cache was, indeed, still present. One respondent indicated that the cache had been relocated to the other side of a driveway.

My hunt for the cache took place on a Monday morning. While the dog Filbrix waited on the other side of the cattle guard, I looked for the cache using the GPSr (GPS receiver) set for the coordinates published on Geocaching.com. Still absent. I then moved to the other side of the driveway and found the cache in what was a much better place, none the worse for the wear.

When we returned home Tuesday evening, I noted the new coordinates in a note to whoever was interested in looking for the cache. The next weekend, a geocacher noted finding the cache, but not at the coordinates listed on the web site. To change coordinates, apparently I have to be the cache owner. As the owner of the cache is no longer able to answer any inquiries, there may be one or two other geocachers who will be frustrated when they were not able to find the thing.

Of note between caches #987 and The Hideaway (I’m calling it #987a) are the bonds of friendship. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s something else. I feel a strong bond with some of the geocachers I met when the first few years of playing the sport. Some of the newer people, well, let’s just put it on me.

I have occasional contact with the geocacher known as “Bobcachette” – she introduced me to Geocaching (as told in part 1 of this series) and is currently rumored to be living somewhere in the area of Glen Rose.

Mr. “9-Key” has passed on, as have “Mustang Joni”, “Geo-Dee”, and “The Padre”.

Others will take their place as the sport moves on. There are new ways to play the game, and I will likely continue once I have reached the 1,000 finds mark. It’s just that I will do so at my leisure.

Be Seeing You!

My mail today included a full-color postcard from our local Congressman. He seems a nice fellow, but the postcard was more or less a message telling me that the fellow is sticking to the “Party Line” regarding the election we had last November.

Just to be clear, I have nothing against Republicans as individuals. Here is where the line “Some of my best friends are…” sounds a bit trite. Quite a few people I know of are honorable members of the GOP and I share many of their concerns when it comes to some of the issues which face us as citizens of the U.S.A.

What irks me are the “My way or the highway” folk who insist on political orthodoxy regarding certain topics not necessarily vital to moving our country forward. Essentially, that’s what my congressman (more probably the minions working for that congressman) sent me this morning.

I would rather engage with someone like Dave Hobson, the fellow who represented the northern part of Ross County Ohio back 30 years or so ago.

I met Dave while working for WBEX at the Veteran’s Hospital in Chillicothe. He was slated to give a speech, there. The boss man asked me and another fellow to go out and meet the guy.

I expected to be met with a parade of aides and press people surrounding the man, but was shocked when he came to the radio station van, asking us if we knew where he was supposed to be. After talking with him a bit, we took him to the VA auditorium where he had a talk to tell us that his father was a small-town postmaster and that he was like his father – dedicated to the idea that he was a public servant, not some high and mighty leader with aspirations for higher office.

It was later that I came to the realization that what he was espousing was something we now call “Servant Leadership.”

Would that everyone’s Congressman be the same. We could accomplish quite a bit for the good of everyone, not just for one’s particular political party.

(Did I mention that Mr. Hobson was a Republican? Pardon the error.)

It was here that I was going to insert the letter I wrote to the Congressman “representing” me. I decided not to do so, as it would likely be tossed in the trash by him and some of my readers. It’s alright. I’ve already put the full-color postcard from my Congressman into the circular file.

Be Seeing You!