This post originally appeared last year, 52 weeks ago. But , TODAY IS PICTURE DAY!
Forty years ago the picture below was taken, a lot has happened since then. I’ve grown up and I continue to learn and grow everyday.
I’ll be ready for the photographer and hopefully I’ll get a good photo this year. I wasn’t pleased with last year’s photo and have used a #1 Uno card to cover up my ID photo since last spring. Yesterday, the weather turned and it was cool enough to sleep with the windows last night. I could feel the cool air all night. It was a good sleeping night. It’s going to be a great day, even with a repeat on MtDC.
Tomorrow is picture day. School picture day. I get my picture taken every year. I’ll be in line early and looking my best for this year’s school picture. Last year, I wore a pink shirt with a blue tie and the year before, a blue shirt and a pink tie; beyond the last two years I cannot remember which year is which. It will be my school ID photo for the next year; and it will be in the yearbook. So, when my students look back on middle school, there I’ll be along with the rest of my colleagues. Continue reading Picture Day, again→
I love Saturday mornings. I usually get up early and it’s quiet. I brew coffee, bond with Ivy, read the newspaper, or scan e-mails, and say a quick prayer for the day.
my messy desk – needs a makeover and I need to do it.
Instead, this morning I slept late, I needed to sleep late. It was a late night and the outcome of this week’s football game was not good. We were on the road. We had a couple of injuries and the Tigers didn’t play well, coming up on the short side of the score, 13-17. It’s a long season and we have seven more games, at least. W and the players who didn’t get in last night, will play this morning at home.
The 2015 high school football season started this weekend. It’s W’s last season of high school football and perhaps ever as a player. Friday night the Wheaton Warrenville South Tigers began the season against their cross-town rival, Wheaton North. I watched from the North sidelines as part of the chain gang. I kept my mouth shut and my enthusiasm to myself. I kept my eye on the field and moved with the ball.
my shadow cast upon the sidelines
It was a good game and the Tigers came out on top, barely.
The game was scoreless at the half. 0-0.
The third quarter began and The Falcons quickly scored a touchdown to lead by seven. The Tigers answered with a touchdown of their own and the game was tied at seven all. It stayed tied until the end. Then, the game moved to overtime.
Overtime rules are different. Each team gets the ball on the ten yard line and gets four downs (plays\tries) to score. The team that scores the most points wins. Simple.
Both teams failed to score in the first overtime and the teams switched ends and started over. In the second overtime, the Tigers failed to score on three downs, then, kicked a field goal to lead for the first time in the game. Then it was the Falcons turn. They ran three plays and failed to score, then lined up for a field goal, too. Continue reading Failure is expected….→
I’d like to introduce my first ever – guest blogger – Chris White. I’ve known Chris for a over forty years, he was my backdoor neighbor growing up and the leader of all things fun in the neighborhood. There were a lot of boys our age in the neighborhood growing up and only a couple of girls in our age bracket. Chris was a few years older than me, but I never felt that way – we played tackle football in the side yard, baseball in the vacant lot, and when I got older, he became my boss at Tempo Records and Tapes. I moved away from Texas in ’87 and he moved, too. We lost touch, but I never forgot growing up in the neighborhood. We got back in touch a few years ago on Facebook and we’ve messaged back and forth a several times catching up. His whimsical sense of humor was inspiration and I vividly remember many of the laughs we shared, many of which are not fit to print. Despite our moves, both of us still root for Houston sports teams. Which, if you know the history of most of Houston’s sports teams, is funny. Very funny.
I let Chris tell you the rest of the story……
I first discovered musical idols the day my older sister brought home “Meet the Beatles.” Not yet ready myself to idolize anyone not wearing a cape and tights, I watched fascinated as my sister melted into a puddle while the moptops went about changing popular music forever.
Flash forward a few years, leaping over a Herman’s Hermits infatuation that’s better left unexamined, to my freshman year in high school, when I first discovered that athletic skill wasn’t necessarily a prerequisite for attracting the opposite sex. I began to gravitate toward those girls who’d never heard of Johnny Bench but who could have described Led Zep’s Robert Plant in sufficient detail to satisfy a police sketch artist. It was around that time I discovered the first musical idol I could latch onto and call my own: Keith Emerson, the genius behind Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Keith was a giant of progressive rock, a colossus among multi-keyboardists — it was decades later that I learned he was (and still is, presumably) all of 5’4”. Regardless, Keith seemed larger than life at the time.
Since my family owned a Hammond organ, I began to teach myself how to play, taking baby steps at first. Wrangling a couple of friends who shared a remarkably similar complete lack of musical talent, I formed a band. Or more accurately, a “band.” Clay, the proprietor of this blog (thanks for the guest spot, Clay!), whose boyhood home was right behind my own house at the time, can attest to the fact that no amount of volume can make up for a dearth of musical skill. The amazing thing about lack of ability, though, is that it’s often accompanied by a simultaneous lack of awareness. Not realizing how bad we were, my bandmates and I continued hacking away on our respective instruments until a miracle occurred. Lo and behold, we gradually became mediocre. Eventually we progressed through “adequate” and “not terrible” and by the time we were seniors in high school, ended up somewhere around “pretty damned good,” complete with a record (recorded in an actual honest-to-God music studio) that got a few spins on KLOL, the dominant FM rock station in Houston at the time.
Chris White on flaming guitar with Rex meredith on vocals and Curtis Peet on guitar
It was on a road trip in 1976 to play a spring break gig in Corpus Christi that I was introduced to the musical idols who would keep all others at bay for the next forty years. One of my bandmates brought along a supposedly high-fidelity 8-track tape of Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam” album, which we listened to over and over and over in my dad’s Olds Delta 88. By the time I was back in Houston a few days later, the trajectory of my life had been irreversibly altered. No longer would I be quite as satisfied with the bombast glam of Queen or the overwrought noodlings of Kansas. I had discovered complex chord changes, jazz harmonies, guitar solos wicked enough to send the swiftest-fingered rockers back to the practice room, all set to rock songs with lyrics that were literate without being pretentious. A shimmering, gorgeous surface hid the musical complexity underneath, and the lyrics only gave the faintest of brush strokes to the sordid tales they painted, forcing the listener to fill in the details using his own imagination. That some people didn’t “get” Steely Dan, taking them as a light-rock band with glossy songs, only made it that much better. I was in that select group who understood how deep their music actually was. Genesis? Yes? Rush? Don’t get me started with those prog-rock posers, Steely Dan were real musicians playing music that was challenging in a way nothing else I’d ever heard on rock radio was. Continue reading Tuesday’s Tune: Reelin’ in the Years→
Yesterday morning O bounded down the stairs and asked,
“Daddy, do you want to go fishing?”
How could I refuse? “Yes, you get the boat ready.” I replied.
the boats, waiting
I finished my work and met her on the dock. I remembered the things she had forgotten – life jackets and a camera. We catch and release, but photo first – when we can.
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”― George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One
This fall, I’ll be teaching history full time for the first time in my teaching career. I am excited and I am worried. History gets a bad rap, especially with 13-14 years olds. Many folks believe history is remembering all sorts of dates and facts, and while that’s part of it, it’s not the reason we study history. We study history to learn from our mistakes and move forward as a people, as a society.
This past year, I taught one section of history and it opened my eyes, again. American society seems to repeat itself every other generation – the issues my great grandparents faced, my generation faces today. In the 1840s immigrants – the Irish – were blamed for the country’s ills. Three generations later in 1900 – 1920s a different group of immigrants – eastern and southern Europeans were blamed, today it’s yet another group of immigrants longing for freedom.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” From the “New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
In the last quarter of the school year, I suggested a daily dose of history and volunteered to manage it. Administration ALWAYS appreciates initiative and follow through. Each school day I’d select an event and create a slide for the morning announcements. My colleagues knew I was behind it and let me know they appreciated the reminder of the importance of each day. Sometimes, I’d tweet it with my school twitter account – @ScullenWatkins.
I am number that third guy who walks into a music store searching for a tune he’s heard, sometimes I’ll have the tune, or maybe a bit of the chorus. Sometimes I have it correct, most times though, I am all messed up. Eventually I get it right and find the song.
Monday morning – nothing but blue skies do I see
Blues skies made an appearance yesterday. It was great to see them after Sunday’s storms. Storms rolled across the lake in waves Sunday afternoon. The first wave came around noon and brought wind, thunder, lightning, and rain. The second wave came a couple of hours later. The third wave came around 5 PM.
B and I had decided that gardening would have to wait for another day and she took off with O and friends to let the kids see a movie and to shop – she needed paint for the downstairs powder room among a few other items. I finished my chores and decided to watch a baseball game upstairs when the last wave rolled through.
We’ve been Up North over a week and each day we’ve been chipping away at our chore list: getting a chore here and a chore there knocked off the list. We have a summer’s worth of ‘to dos’ to accomplish while we are here, there’s always something to do, even when I’d rather read a book or gaze out over the lake. But, we’ve also had time for a boat ride to watch the sunset. Inspiring.
sunset Lake Margrethe – Monday, July 26
We were having dinner with friends the other night – they came here for ribs and beans and we were at their place for ham and potatoes last night – we were talking and they shared they had been looking at other cottages around the lake and decided that where we are, they are four houses down the shore, can’t be equaled. I agree. I get up in the morning and look out over the lake, enjoy a cup of coffee and think, dream, or I can sit on the deck and read a book, and the lake lies before me. Continue reading Inspiration→
We live in a small world. 70 percent of Earth is water, the rest is land.
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
— Neil Armstrong Apollo 11 astronaut and first man to walk on the moon.
‘Earthrise’ first photo of Earth from space – December 1968 courtesy of NASA
I grew up in Houston in the late 60s and early 70s. I remember the night Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, but I was more interested in football, and other sports, than I was in space.
My parents moved to Sugar Land, a small growing suburb of Houston, in 1967. We moved in in early August and my mom still lives there. The same year, the Regners moved in next door. Tom Regner and his wife, Shirley, moved in next door. He was 21 and less than a year out of college with a baby on the way. I was six years old and my world was small, very small, little did I know how truly small the world was.
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Mr. Regner played football for the Houston Oilers. He was drafted in the first round, the 23rd overall pick in the 1967 NFL draft. His NFL career lasted until 1972 when he was traded to the Baltimore Colts and he retired. He came out of retirement in 1974 to play for the Houston Texans of the World Football League. After the season, he retired for good and opened Venetian Village, an Italian restaurant.
Like most people, music has always been an important part of my life. I tried out for chorus in third grade and didn’t make it, I couldn’t carry a tune, I still can’t but it doesn’t stop me from singing. I played trombone in middle school and gave it up, like scouting and sports and so many other activities I quit in that awkward middle adolescent period between 13 to 16. Music was an important part of growing up – listening to the radio and learning the popular rock and roll songs of the 70’s. I worked in a music store in high school. In 1979, a music store sold records and tapes, the kind of music that was on vinyl.
Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was released in November 1979 – my senior year in high school
This post originally appeared last year, 52 weeks ago. But , TODAY IS PICTURE DAY! 
