Stan Taylor

Over at Defective Yeti, Matthew Baldwin has invited his readers to offer dating truisms. One commenter advised, probably wisely: If the guy can’t remember how many girls he’s slept with, that is a good sign that maybe he’s not the one for you.
As someone who has had a very limited number of sexual partners in my lifetime (sorry, no details), this got me wondering about people who’ve slept around a lot: at what point do you quit counting? And if you do remember, how to you decide to answer a new date’s query: to lie and say you don’t remember or to be truthful with a large number? Well, if you’re concerned about the size of the number and decide to lie about it, I imagine you might as well lie and say a much lower number rather than claiming not to remember.
Boy, life complications that I’ve never even considered.

Samuel starts kindergarten this week. In preparation, Katie bought him a new lunchbox and water bottle. The water bottle has a liquid-filled insert that you can put in the freezer, let freeze, and then insert into the bottle to keep your drink cold. Samuel thinks it’s really cool.
I kept referring to the insert as an ‘ice dildo’ due to its shape. Katie suggested I stop using this reference lest Samuel pick up the usage and get expelled from kindergarten before he even gets going.

This is so cool. This guy got photos of a praying mantis that had just caught a hummingbird.

I really want a remote controlled lawnmower! I can picture myself sitting on the deck and sipping a cold margarita while I mow. Unfortunately, it’s still a little out of my price range.

I just completed the audio edition of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s an ambitious and lyrical exploration of family, history and empire in Africa. It’s an amazing book, though I barely made it all the way through.

We just spent a week in the mountains of New Mexico with no TV, radio, recorded music or computer. It was blissful. I took along a book, some magazines and some needlework, but the most I managed to accomplish was to read a few National Geographic articles. I have little idea what happened in the world last week, and I don’t really care.
Based on that experience, I’m vowing to do the following now:

• Watch less television
• Surf the Internet less; specifically, I have a list of web sites that I visit pretty much daily. I’m removing a couple of those
• Spend more quiet time (facilitated by the previous two items)
• Read more

We’ll see how it goes…

We just returned from a very relaxing short vacation in the mountains of southern New Mexico. Getting back into the swing of things again…

Katie and the kids are visiting family and friends in San Antonio this week, so I’m living the bachelor life. So, I took myself to see War of the Worlds the other evening. It was the first time in months that I’ve gone to the movie theater, and the first time in years I’ve been to see a movie that wasn’t appropriate for children.
I have to say that having a DVR and DVD player at home completely changed my movie-watching experience. First off, I had to sit captive through 25 freakin’ minutes of deafening commercials before the movie started (I arrived 10 minutes before the posted start time, and commercials continued for 15 minutes after that time). Additionally, I couldn’t stop the movie to go to the bathroom or back it up to hear or see something that I missed.

I just completed the abridged audio edition of That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx. It was just okay, nothing special.
The thing that bothered the about the book was the feeling that Ms. Proulx either had little direct experience with the type of people about whom she was writing (Texas panhandle farmers and ranchers), or that she held those people in subtle contempt. It felt like at some level, she was making fun of them or portraying them as caricatures.

I frequently walk the dogs off their leashes in the fields between the golf fairways near our house. In the late evening and early morning, we frequently encounter rabbits in the open on the edges of the fairways. Xena has become an avid rabbit hunter, but she remains a terrible one. She just doesn’t see the rabbits until she practically trips over them. Tippie, on the other hand, spots them from a distance and gives a try at catching them (NOTE: Tippie has never come close to actually catching a rabbit, and I don’t expect either dog ever to catch one).
This morning, the reason for this difference finally dawned on me: Tippie is sight-oriented; Xena is smell-oriented. While she’s running around, Tippie has her head up looking a ways in front of her. Xena, on the other hand, has her head down and her nose working furiously. She’s an enthusiastic hunter because she smells the rabbits, but she can’t actually locate one that’s in the open because her attention is on the smells in her immediate vicinity. Before she gets close enough to smell a rabbit, it has already run into the weeds.