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Saturday, June 16, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #95

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself.

1. Recently, Joel walked into my office with a .270-caliber rifle cartridge he had found near his apartment. (Some hunter unloading his truck had dropped it, probably.) I took it to the police station and gave it to the desk clerk. She said people do that every week with ammo they found laying somewhere and the police agree that the best solution is to bring it to them. I have no idea what they do with it. (Destroying it would be safest as some ammo is old and unstable and one might assume an evil person could sabotage ammo.) Live ammunition doesn't need to lay around in a desk drawer with other junk. Do NOT try to take the bullet out of the case with a pocket knife! Just take the whole thing to the police. It's almost certainly not evidence of a crime, but is just something somebody carelessly dropped. I learned this as a young boy. A relative died, and older relatives cleaned out his house. While they found no firearms, they found dozens of rounds of ammunition of many different calibers. No one had any idea where it came from or why he had it, but my father (who had been a soldier from the age of 18) said that in the Army there was always an "alibi box" where one turned in any such things found laying about without having to give any explanation of why you had them. [I saw such things during my own service starting in 1971.] Since we were not on a military base (my father had been in the reserves for many years by that point) he reasoned that taking this trove to the police would be the best thing, and I happened to be with him when he did. They didn't ask him (or me when I took in Joel's bullet) who I was or where it came from. The clerk just dropped it into a box on a back counter and went back to work.

2. During 26 and 27 April 2012, Amarillo played host to George W. Bush, who was here for a bicycle rally with some wounded warriors. Amarillo has had a number of presidential visits over the years (including serving presidents, men who later won the office, and ex-presidents), including: Teddy Roosevelt in 1905, FDR in 1938, Eisenhower in 1953, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1984, George HW Bush in 1970 and again in 2006, Johnson in 1950 and 1959, Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968, and Reagan an astonishing six times (twice in 1968, then in 1974, 1976, 1978, and 1980). We were also visited once by Vice President Spiro Agnew, who shook my hand.

3. When I was in the State Guard, one job I had for a time was to obtain and pass out "packaged snacks" to soldiers being put on guard posts. The theory was that a soldier with a snack in his pocket had something to look forward to, something totally under his own control, and that improved morale. What I found was that candy bars melt, snack crackers and cookies get broken and crumble, and that the best snack was a brownie in a plastic bag. No matter how hot it got, and even if the soldier ended up rolling around on the ground with the brownie in his pocket, the brownie was still going to be a brownie no matter what happened to it.

4. Any time you're somewhere and have a chance to pick up one of those pens printed with advertising (a pen placed there by someone who wanted you to pick it up) then take it and give it to a waitress in a restaurant. They're always having customers walk out with their pens and need a constant supply. The business that paid to have their advertising printed on the pen wants the pen to circulate and be seen by a lot of people.

5. Leanna and I don't cook at home much (just Sunday, although we microwave stuff and make sandwiches during the week). We usually do a grocery list on Friday night and over lunch on Saturday we discuss what we'd like to cook for Sunday dinner and have in the fridge for the rest of the week. Then she does the shopping on the way home, sometimes with me tagging along. (For the grocery list, I created an inventory form organized by which drawer or shelf the cans are in, plus the fridge. We keep a standard stock of so many cans of this or boxes of that and all I have to do is count what's there and enter how many more she needs to buy.) We're not "foodies" by any means and cook one of a dozen meal plans (e.g., turkey, roast beef, pork chops, navy beans and ham, chicken breasts, beef stew, non-toxic chili, burgers, tenderized steaks, non-toxic meatloaf, etc.) that we have cooked many times before. We probably try something entirely new once a year, with mixed results.