My Dad, My Hero

I know, corny title, but I mean it. My dad is the best guy in the whole wide world (next to my hubby, of course). He's one of a kind. Someone who's stuck by me my whole life and cheered me on through thick and thin. I wish him the happiest of days as he chugs along. After all, there aren't a whole lot of 60 year old Americans who can say they ran 18 miles on a whim, walked from Kittery to Portland, biked 90 miles to 'The Nest Among The Hills' and can eat a bag of potato chips in 2 minutes flat. I hope to accomplish half of those things in my lifetime. Especially the snacking. I love you very much Dad. Thanks for being such a great guy, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Thanks, Everyone.

I'm sure everyone has seen enough of me for a while. But thank you all for your kind birthday wishes, pictures and poetry. Love, The Birthday Guy

Happy Birthday Chuck!

Chuckie, six-oh, it does not compute.
You used to wear madras-shorts, then a suit.
You banged on your drums & were known as The Fox.
Sentenced to Mercersburg, you escaped in a box.
Once you drove me to Nanny's when Thatch was first born,
Jim was in Vietnam, I was forlorn
A good brother-in-law then, and forever thereafter
Lots of good times, and plenty of laughter.
Feliz Cumpleanos, Happy Birthday, shalom
Good health, good teeth, end of this poem.

Big Six Zero

His birth certificate says charles
His bros we call him chuck
He's named after his grandpappy
One tough ornery old duck
Chuck, he's a softie
Almost buddha-like in his demeanor
He used to be a carnivore
But these days won't even eat a weiner.
As a young man
My brother joined the Peace Corps
Went to Brazil, got drunk
Found it mostly a bore
Back home
An increasingly unpopular war
Chuck got drafted
But demanded to know, "What for,
What the fuck for?"
He refused to do the bidding
Of the rotten old whore
He refused to do the bidding
Of the rotten old whore.

He ain't heavy
He's my brother


Happy Birthday, Bro

Grounds for Sculpture Part II

AmyLynn's Mom came out from Nebraska this week. We decided to take our
mothers to G for S. I rented a wheelchair so Hot Dot (as we used to call her) would not
have to walk so far. Although some of the paths were easy to navigate, there were quite
a few spots that were impossible or grid-like and bumpy. By the time we reached the
spot seen above Mom was complaining that her fillings were shaking loose and my arms
were getting Popeye-like. We were cracking up tho. Right after this photo was taken it
began to pour rain. However a great time was had by all.

Wilbur Makes NHS

William B. Simpson II was inducted into the National Honor Society tonight, and we’re very proud of him. Not only for being a good student, but for his community service, athletics, and for holding a steady job, which is more than we can say for his father. We figure W.B. Simpson the 1st would be proud of him too, if he could be aware of his achievement. Here’s a picture of Will (left) with his buddies Andrew McDonough-Lee and Luke Lee-Goldstein, both of whom also made the NHS.

Hey Dickhead

A thousand an acre? Give me more info. I am hungry for money.

URGENT - INSIDER INFO ;-)

Rich's friend has just brought to his notice that there is a good piece of land for sale.
It's near Lake George. (250 acres for thousand $ an acre) Since many of you will be spending the weekend there, he was wondering if you could please take a look at this piece of land and give your assessment.
Things to look for - Access to public roads, topography of land(hilly, wet) electric cables, paved roads etc.
Rich's cell phone 908 872 6521.
Since this land is right off route 87, Rich was thinking of Charlie, Jim, Bill, Thatch, Chris who might be driving by it.

The property address is 170 Dixon Hills Rd.
The directions are: 87 No to Exit 24 (Warrenburg/Lake George) Take right off exit go 1 block then make a left onto Schroon river Rd, take it to Wall St., make a left on Wall St 1 block to Dixon Hill. Take that to the end of pavement.

Nanda on behalf of Rich.

Welfare

Fat lazy toad
sits on the edge of my pool
Jumps in
Splash!
Sucked into the skimmer
along with the rest of the
swimming pool
trash:
Leaves and beetles
and windblown clippings
of freshly mown
Grass.
I fish him out
toss him next
to the old pile
of fireplace ash
But toad's quick
He's back in the pool
faster than Bobby Hayes
could run the 100 hundred dash.
I fish him out again
put him by the side of the road
stuff his slippery pockets
with cash;
Toad says
Hey padre
any chance
you got any hash?
I give him a sliver of Lebanese blond
no thicker than a blind man's
Eyelash;
No way fat toad's
getting a bigger chunk
of my private stash;
Toad sticks
out his thumb
seconds later has himself a ride
in a 53 Nash.
I go to bed
Eat popcorn
Drink pap
Watch back to back to back episodes
of Mash
And in the morning
Fat toad's sittin
on my window sill sash
Says man what a bender
I sure could use a place
to crash;
I wave him back
to the spare bedroom
where Fat Toad starts passin
the most fascist and noxious gas.
Months later Fat Toad's still
back there
and now he's got this horny She-Toad
Who's given him a ripe vile rash;
She-Toad's a bitch
Ornery, brassy
and brash.
I finally give up the ghost
Pack my gear
Light out
Take a long slow paddle
Down the Allagash.

Land of the Free

1 OUT OF EVERY 136 U.S. RESIDENTS NOW BEHIND BARS


WASHINGTON, Associated Press - U.S. prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week last year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars.

Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.

The jail population is increasingly unconvicted. Judges are more reluctant to release people pretrial. 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate than men. An estimated 11.9 percent of all black men were incarcerated, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.

14 Down, ??? To Go

In early 1992, upon release of my first published novel, This Way Madness Lies, Fay Weldon, the British novelist and sexual provocateur, wrote: Madness tries to do something very extraordinary: that is to say, make sense of the human condition, define the human experience.

I did not think even way back when that this was extraordinary at all; I thought, and continue to think, that trying to make sense of the human condition is what life, and art, is all about.

But the damn difficulty, the slipperiness of it all, exacerbates.

So I keep watching. And waiting. And once in a while some small clue pops up. Here's one I found just a short time ago. It's a paragraph from a long article about Stevie Wonder and his pregame musical show at this year's Super Bowl.

"The music that changed Stevie's style in the seventies was nothing that you might expect, even though it offers a fair account of how the free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempts to make us like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality."

And I thought it was just me and my prose having a tough time getting a grip.

(the article is called The Blind Man and the Elephant: Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, and thousands of overweight teenagers party in the ruins of Detroit for Super Bowl XL. Harper's 6/06. It's some very funny and insightful shit. By the way, the music that changed Stevie's style was produced on the orginal Moog snytheizer.)

Future Foreign Currency Trader

Hunter's area of expertise and obsession has now switched from the gathering and cataloging of Yuh-Gee-Oh cards, to the gathering and endless speculation about money, both paper and coin. He is extremely knowledgeable about the denominations of bills both past and present. This is the kind of thing we research when he comes over. Did you know that there was a $10,000 bill until Tricky Dick Nixon got some sort of law pushed through stopping circulation of higher bills, with the purpose of thwarting the mafiosa. Hunter can wax poetic about the beauty of a hundred dollar bill for 10 minutes at a time. He is not so much interested in the purchasing power as the design. To this end he also collects foreign currency, a Turkish bill from Grandpa Rob, Cuban pesos and Beautiful Jamaican money from Jim, Norwegian kroners, Italian lire(before the Euro), even a Guatemalan bill from cousin Dave. Hes always sure to ask you if you have any interesting money. Hes like an old hippie from the 60s, "any spare change man?" This prompted a little lecture from Grandpa, "Hunt, don't be too much of a scrounge." Still he can't help himself, hes somewhat obsessed. I told him I was going to think of a new nickname for him and he suggested "money boy". The strange creature above was Hunter's idea of a true super hero, 50 cent pieces for legs, Susan B Anthony's and Sacajawea's for arms, and lots of paper all around. He carries 2 dollars with him at all times in case he runs in to someone with a $2 bill willing to trade. You'd be surprised that he now has 6 two dollar bills. He yearns for an untouched freshly minted sheet of four, two dollar bills, available at the local collectible shop. I think Grandma might have to buy this for him.

.

Fingernails

Fingernails oh fingernails
I know you are my friends
You keep my back from itchin
Tho I’m bitin off yer ends
I nibble and I gnaw you
Til my fingertips are sore
Though I bite the hand that feeds me
It keeps comin back for more

mother's day

"Here's to you, mom," I say as I lift a glass of wine in remembrance of her. But I wasn't drinking wine, or endulging in any other substance, when I heard her voice around this time last year. [Nor have I ever before heard voices from anything other than a physical source]. Yes, her spirit had gone on to another realm but I heard her voice. Apparantly, her spirit had just been through an intensive life review whereby one experiences the perceptions of another person. She said to me:"Now I understand why you felt the way you did."This wasn't the first time I heard her voice since she left this world. Shortly after her spirit left us, I overheard a conversation she was, I intuited, having with her spirit guide. "Well, I'm sorry," she said. [I don't know if she had gotten the lowdown on the life she had with me before the one she had just passed from. According to my dreams about that past life, I'm the one who owed her an apology, big time].Anyway, I, then, heard her voice several days later. I, again, intuited that she was speaking to her spirit guide when she asked: "What went wrong?" I knew she was refering to the life she had just lived in relation to me. A week or so passed when I heard an audible voice at my bedroom door exclaim in heart felt recognition of me: "Bob." A few days later I heard her empathetic statement after what I intuited had been a life review episode where one percieves life through another's eyes.I hope you'll all take this as a mother's day gift and not the ramblings of someone who hears voices that aren't there. Who says you can't send a mother's day gift to people who aren't your mother? Bob

sight and sound

porch sitting
in the high hot desert
at 10,000 waves
i saw shimmering
in the distance
what looked like open graves

but nope,
it was just some slick-lipped
know-it-all
giving birth
to an endless cascade
of verbal
holes
in the earth

The Flood of ’06

The deluge has taken a bathroom break, so here are a few shots of Water World. In 20 years here we have not seen so much rain at once, but after seven days of it we are still high and dry. You really can’t see it in these pictures. Anyway, it’s supposed to start up again tomorrow, so we are sleeping in our rubbers. I am anyway.

La Plaza de Santa Fe

Rich Lefty Whiteys Haggle and Discourse with Impoverished Navahos



whilst recently away from home i was lucky enough to observe culture in motion. in a rather spiffy shop on avenida de saint francis just off the plaza in downtown santa fe i watched a sixty-something white woman of slim design dressed casually in travel pink plunk down her platinum card for a quite lovely leather and silver belt. cost: a mere $1540. yes, $1540 to hold up her fashionable guachos.

but this was just the beginning of the fun.

not half an hour later i again encountered this same matron trying to be a lass. this time she was trolling for Indian goodies outside the Palace of 1000 Governors, as shown in the above photo. she had her eye on a splendid little hand-made Navaho doll. cost: $25.00. white woman offered ignorant savage $15.00. red woman who had made doll herself said $25.00. white woman said okay, $20.00. greedy, crafty, no-good red woman said $25.00. white woman got huffy, swelled out her nonexistent bosom, shifted the bag containing her fifteen hundred dollar belt from the spiffy shop across la plaza from one scrawny shoulder to the other, and snipped, oh, forget it. i was only buying it to do you a favor anyway.

and i wondered, where the fuk is geronimo when you need him?

NIce Cajones!

Hey all!

I'm back from a quick trip down to Jersey to visit with Marg and Jim and discuss business. We had a great dinner Friday night at the Glen Gardner Inn then hunkered down to watch the tivo'd Survivor from Thursday night. Saturday was spent picking out plumbing fixtures, vanities and shower heads. It wasn't until we arrived at Melick's that the weekend turned naughty. As you will notice, Jim's smile and twinkle in his eyes describe how he is feeling. Tickle....Tickle.....

Visit to India

All of you have expressed some level of interest in visiting India.

The best season to visit is Nov to mid-Feb. This way one can avoid cold winter in the US and enjoy the mild/cool (US Spring-like) weather in India.
Keeping in mind the heavy traveling season around Christmas Holidays and the overbooked flights, best period to visit is early-Jan to mid-Feb.

I have found these websites somewhat informative.
www.touristplacesinindia.com/tourist-cities-of-india.html www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/destinations/asia/india

The Lonely Planet – India book is quite informative too.

Nanda

Antietam

I have not posted in some time and I probably forgot how to do the pictures, but if this came out that is a picture of the statue of JR's brother George, the color bearer of the 125th Pennsylvania. Tad and I just returned from a trip with two busloads of his Princeton classmates. We toured the battlefield with Professor James McPherson, who knows just about everything and he can make you see and taste and smell (ugh) all the different areas of the battle of Antietam. He said there were a bunch of green regiments that didn't do much but get in the way of the more seasoned guys, and many of them were slaughtered, but when Tad asked him about the 125th PA, the professor stood a bit straighter and said "Oh the 125th. They were green. But they were farm boys. They knew how to fight. They made a good showing that day."

I think maybe Tad paid him beforehand?

Anyway, here's to George and especially JR (and many thanks to Aunt Annie) - cause where would we be if that minnie ball had killed him?

A Visit to Chris and Amy's

Chris and Amy are always busy doing something at their house. They've done an amazing job fixing it up. They're both quite talented.
A recent visit on a Sunday afternoon found Chris and his buddy Answorth removing tree stumps. The refuse was fed into a large chipping machine.
In the 2nd photo you'll notice a large stump has become jammed in the feeder mechanism. The machine complained mightily, belching black smoke in protest. The jamming may have been due to the feeders exceeding the recommended stump diameter. Be that that as it may, our two heros were not to be thwarted. Photo #1 shows Chris attempting to push the stump forward with his foot. Remember the scene in the movie Fargo?
Failing in that attempt, Chris enters the shute.
Now it must be said here that Chris is an excellent mechanic and is not one to be foolhardy. As far as I could tell, he took the proper safety precautions.
The last photo is a sticker plastered on the side of the chipper for all to see. The warning is clear.

News of Jean Simpson

I just came back from a quick visit to Huntingdon and Alexandria Pa. Jean has returned home from the hospital and seems in fine shape after her heart episode. I spent a couple hours reminiscing with her and Susie Simpson who is visiting from San Diego. A visiting nurse arrived while I was there and after an examination, pronounced Jean fit, at least as fit as an 88 year old can be. Of course she refuses to have 24 hr in-home help but she has many friends and someone stops by every day.
Visits to Huntingdon are always very nostalgiac for me. I feel the area is the center of the Simpson clan. With the original Raystown Dam now underwater it's definitely changed but the vibe is still there.
I had lunch with Cary Simpson, his son Ted, and Ted's girlfriend Rene. They are doing fine. Cary, at 77, still enjoys running his Central Pa radio empire with Ted's assistance. Like his father, Cary's a very unique individual.
Both he and Susie are interested in participating in the blog. Chuck, perhaps you you could set them up. I think you have Cary's address. Susie's is donanderson3@cox.net
Jim

Crystal Clear Waters

Rahway River, Cranford, NJ

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than half of U.S. streams are polluted, with the worst conditions found in the eastern third of the country, according to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In its first-ever study of shallow or "wadeable" streams, the agency found 42 percent were in poor condition, and another 25 percent were considered fair. Only 28 percent were in good condition, EPA said. Another 5 percent were not analyzed because of sampling problems in New England.
The survey found activities such as farming and logging helped raise the levels of nitrogen and phosphorous in the water Those chemicals promote the growth of plants and algae that gobble up oxygen. That, in turn, kills aquatic life.
Streams running in the East, from the Atlantic coast through the Appalachian Mountains, fared the worst, with 52 percent listed as poor.

out my window

scarlet tanager
on the fence
begins to sing
startled
takes to wing
and is gone

i think

the supposition
the opposition
ain't right
feels wrong

Pinkie in the Garden

Heres my gardening assistant, Ms Prickley Pants. She will not wear jeans or shorts, although she ain't too careful about keeping her finery out of the mud. We had a good time on Wed messing around in the dirt, watering some plants, and sweeping the garage.

Back by Popular Demand

OK, it's back. But with a clarification: any blogger has the right to remove his or her own post at any time.

Springtime in PA

I had to remove that gut shot. Too hard to look at.

I am sorry for posting a picture that shouldn’t have been posted. I got overboard in taking and posting photos. I have removed the link from my earlier entry. Sorry for offending people earlier.

Nanda

My New Bracelet

A surprise from Jim on our anniversary !

Please click on the following link for the photos.

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/nanda_jcnj/slideshow?.dir=/fc33re2&.src=ph

Ricky's Reunion

For those of you who missed Ricky and Nanda's Reunion, where large amounts of delicious Indian food were served in an upscale New Jersey manor house, here are some pictures. Yes, it's taken me a while to get to this, but here you go. The URL follows this text. You'll have to cut and paste it because I can't get the link to work. A good time was had by all. I didn't get a picture of Bill. Laura or Elizabeth, so have included one of Elizabeth from an earlier photo shoot. By the way, Ron Peterson also attended, but he didn't show up until the next day. Thanks Nanda and Rick for a great time and for the excellent private room. Oh, Maia was there too, but I didn't get a shot of her either.
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/charliesimpsondotcom/slideshow?.dir=/9568&.src=ph