Still Working on Getting this Retirement Thing Right. . .

I'm roughly 3.5 years into retirement now and I clearly haven't got it quite figured out yet. Oh I think I'm doing pretty well in action, but evidence suggests that I still suffer the psychological scares of a 'productive' life.

I recently received a flurry of phone calls from family and former work-mates. In fact, in the last two weeks I've made or received 8 phone calls!! (I counted.) Now you have to understand that for me this is notable since the Recent Activity list on my phone usually shows, if anything at all, one or maybe two calls a week, and that's incoming and outgoing combined.

This unprecedented ring-tone event was a confluence of my Chilean brother (An exchange student that lived with us when I was a kid.) visiting the family up in Michigan and some major developments at the company I used to work for. (It looks like the French masters that bought the company 8 years ago have well and truly screwed the pooch, which, after all, is what the French are best at. The stock price is less than a quarter of what it used to be when I left and Friday there was a major round of layoffs including the 71 year old 40+ year employee that hired me back in '81.)

At some point these calls inevitably get to the 'What are you up to?' or 'What have you been doing?' or even the innocuous 'What's up?' stage. Now that might seem like a fairly normal and inoffensive question to ask someone you haven't seen in - well - forever, but since retirement questions like that send me into a panic.

I'm like that little boy sitting at the dinner table when he suddenly realizes the frog isn't tucked safely in his pocket any longer. There's a moment of stunned inaction, then his face flushes and he chokes on his Spaghettios while trying to surreptitiously peek under the edge of the table-cloth hoping for salvation in the form of a docile and cooperative amphibian, or in my case, a comprehensive list of productive activities I've 'been up to'.


You see, I'm a product of the 50's and 60's. A product of parents from humble beginnings working hard and steadily realizing the American Dream. (Of course back then the American Dream was a lot more realistic and didn't include obscenely grotesque McMansions with a driveway full of the latest in transportation, both land and sea, and being first in line at the fast-food drive-through! But that's another post altogether. . .) A product of immigrant grandparents that truly knew the meaning of sacrifice and labor and the value of the precious blessings they did have.

 And I certainly don't mind being a product of all that! That morality and work-ethic served me well and I was able to retire debt-free at 58 in large part because of it, but when my answer to the 'What'ch doin'' question used to be:

Designing and building another 3 million dollar, cutting edge data center.
Managing 40 or so international high-tech computer geeks.
Conceiving, designing and testing a more efficient and effective cooling plant control system all the 'experts' claimed would never work. (But has since become something of an industry standard. Don't you just love 'experts'!!)
Making sure 60 million dollars worth of computers stay healthy and running 24/7/365
Flying over to Europe for a series of meetings.
Presenting a paper on Supply Side Control of High Density Data Center Cooling Plants at a conference in Seattle.

Somehow:

I finished a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle last week.
I planted the winter vegetables a few days ago.
I went to town for groceries yesterday.
I filled the bird feeder this morning.

Just doesn't cut it!!!

Don't get me wrong. I'm good with my life as it is now. In fact I like my life now even if it does sound - well - mundane.

I get up in the morning with the sun rather than at the prodding of an alarm-clock. I can actually take a deep breath and savor it. I feel lighter inside than I have since right around when puberty hit and responsibilities and expectations became serious stuff. And the thought of going back to a regular job gives me the cold sweats.


Intellectually I know that all is right with my life, (OK, most of it is right.) but somehow, deep down in my psyche, when challenged by others to justify myself, my 'worth' is still inexorably tied directly to my measurable and bragable productivity.

(OK, while writing this a Pileated Woodpecker, big birds about twice the size of the more common Ladderbacked Woodpeckers, started working on an old dead oak just over my right shoulder and I stopped and watched for a while. When he flew off I was in no rush and just stood and looked at the pond for a while longer. Not that there was anything of note going on down there at the pond. I was just watching it while listening to the tireless double-'coo' of a nearby Inca Dove.  Now just how am I supposed to convey the importance and the value and the worth of those moments to someone who's indentured themselves to the mortgage company, the banks, the credit card companies and private schools, and must focus desperately on the next almighty dollar or loose everything?)



I'd like to get rid of that lingering remnant of my old life, that need to have my self-worth measured by the length and 'societal-relevance' of my list-of-deeds. But since I'm retired I'm pretty sure $180 an-hour therapy sessions are out of the question. . . Maybe I should just get rid of the phone!??

Behind the Wheel but Goin' Nowhere

Yep, just spent about 4 hours behind the wheel and went - well - absolutely nowhere.

We are blessed with a really nice bit of land here and prefer to let it do it's thing as naturally as possible. No lawn, (Just the thought makes me shudder. . .) and the only deliberate plantings we have are in pots. But of course just the fact that we're here upsets the natural balance of things.

The view down towards the pond after a couple years of being left alone.

We have a driveway and a couple barns which disrupt the natural water-flow, concentrating runoff in some places and leaving others without. Out of self defense we're forced to do some ant control in the immediate vicinity of the buildings. (By the way, I've found that using about a quarter of the recommended dosage of ant killer works just fine, but what do you expect when the people profiting from the sale of it are the ones telling you how much of the product to use.) And we certainly don't let the occasional wildfire run - well - wild.

That tangled mass in the foreground is Holly Yaupon, currently about three feet high but can grow into small trees if left alone.

Because there's no cleansing fires the Yaupon, in our case mostly the Holly variety,  grows rampant. Also, sometime in the past someone brought a Chinaberry into the area. (And if they did that on purpose I hope they're ashamed.) When we bought the place there was actually a 50' tall Chinaberry tree here, which, given the weak nature of Chinaberry, was pretty remarkable. That tree is long gone (Didn't want the dang thing falling on our heads.) but that doesn't stop others from trying to get a start,and since the things grow fast, if left alone for a couple years shoots can get 15' tall and up to three inches around.

That taller, spindly tree in the upper-middle is a two year old, 15' tall Chinaberry growing about 10' from the side of the barn. In the foreground are dozens of 5 & 6' Chinaberry's trying to sneak in under the shelter of some Cedars.

Our solution?

Cue the beast.

 aka, our tractor with the 5' brush hog attached. We drag this out every one or two years depending on the rains.

This is not a fancy tractor with airconditioned cabin, dolby sound system and hydrostatic drive. Our tractor is a 1950's design built in a 1970's era factory, shipped over from China in a crate and assembled in a garage. It has straight-cut gears, no syncro's, a two-stage clutch with springs that will lift you right up off the seat, push-rod brakes that won't quite hold on anything more than a 5 degree slope and if you don't keep the hundred or so bolts and nuts tightened regularly she will shake them loose and shed parts at the most inopportune time.

But she is affordable and a loyal workhorse that can use the 3 cylinder 20 HP engine and 4-wheel drive in low-1st to push over trees and pull herself out of 2 feet of mud. (She's also supposed to be able to hit 15MPH in high-3rd but I'm pretty sure trying that on anything other than a freshly paved road would be suicide!)

 Normally we keep the chipper hooked to the tractor. We use that quite a bit more than the brush-hog and the chipper has a pretty dang big flywheel in it making the whole thing weigh about 500 lbs. so it acts as a nice counter-balance when using the bucket on the other end of the tractor.

I know from painful experience that setting the chipper down on anything other than dead level ground makes it very difficult to hook back up to again without undoing and readjusting just about every linkage there is on a 3-point hitch, so I built this rolling platform for it to sit on when not attached to the tractor.

That way, once I get it loose I can roll it out of the way somewhere and hooking it back up is not too much of an ordeal. 

These quick-connects on the ends of the three-point arms sure do make changing implements simpler!

OK, chipper is off, now where did I leave that brush-hog???

Oh yeah, there it is.

 A brush-hog is an overgrown mower deck fitted with a stump-jumper, a big heavy disk, to which a couple of really big, heavy blades are attached with pivots. You might think that getting under there with a grinder and putting an edge on the blades would be part of this whole process, but the truth is, as long as I keep the tractor in low-2nd at about 1800RPM, the dull blades are just as effective at taking down grasses and stuff as sharp blades. (If I try to save time and run in low-3rd at the same RPM I'm going so fast dull blades don't have enough time over any one spot to cut everything completely.) Sharp blades also cut off the tree and shrub stems cleanly which then readily sprout more stems, where dull blades shatter the stems making it unlikely that they will sprout again.

One of the down-sides to shredding fields that are hood-high in plants is that they all try their dangest to go through the radiator. There's this removable shield that helps collect some of the crap before it clogs the radiator, but that only goes just so far and to keep from overheating I have to remove this shield and take the air-hose to the radiator and clear it of a thick coating of dust at least once during the process.

Another downside to pushing the woods back where they belong is that a guy, especially a retired guy that's supposed to be kicking back and enjoying life, can get pretty wore out dodging branches and stuff. One trick I learned early on was to always keep the left side of the tractor shoved into the woods and never the right. The exhaust stack is on the right side and, especially when it's hot, branches will bend it over until it's practically in your lap,which is never a good thing!

And the job was not without it's casualties, like when one of those branches swept the hat right off my head and under the brush-hog. Fortunately I usually have one or two spares laying around for just this sort of  event.

As you might expect, a job like this requires proper protection, including good sturdy snake-boots.

This pair is over ten years old, but I think maybe this job was their last.

Before

After

But at least that job is done for another year or two. Right now it looks a little rough and brownish, but the woods are back in the woods, the Chinaberry stems are shattered off at ground level, and  in a couple weeks things will be greening up nicely.

Now, (rubbing hands together.) the kids are back in school and the highs are supposed to stay below 90 all next week. Sounds like camping weather is almost here!

Mid-morning Snack?

This morning I was taking a 'before' photo out across the field towards the pond for another project I have coming up.

Just after I snapped the first photo this little guy comes prancing into frame. (Look right in the center.)

You can see in this crop of the previous photo the way he/she's almost pointing, like a hunting dog.
Well, over there next to the well-house, the blue, barn shaped building partially visible on the right edge of the un-cropped photo above, is another deer.

And apparently they are related. I've seen them around for several months (After a while you get to recognizing individuals by the scares and blemishes they carry.) and I'm kind of thinking this is actually not mom, who is significantly larger, but rather sister, but hey, hungry is hungry! 

Here's another shot of the two of them from a few weeks ago. Mom is out of frame hanging out in the treeline above the top of the photo. Here you can see the scares on sister's right side, just behind her shoulder.

Sis is pretty dang bold. This shot give a better idea of where I'm standing, which is at my computer desk just inside the barn door. Here she's about 15 feet away and yes, though the main attraction is the seed the birds have thrown out of the feeder, on occasion she has threatened to kick my ass unless I throw a fresh handful of corn out there as well.

Supermoon Eclipse, One Crappy Photo

OK, it's been a couple days now but I've been busy with other things, and to be honest I figured someone else would post something spectacular by now. After all, I follow a number of blogs of outdoorsy type people and this was kind of a big deal, or at least I thought so, but so far, nothing. . .

I mean personally I was out there the night before setting up my tripod and taking some test photos, (Seriously, does the world need any more full moon shots?? I think not. . . unless that's also something that comes in a glass. . . and I'm talking about the drinking kind of glass not the glass in the bus window.) figuring out the best settings on my Cannon SX50 point-n-shoot as well as determining where to best put the tripod and approximately what azimuth and altitude to point it.

I tried to do all that Friday night but it was a day of high overcast that didn't clear in time.

Saturday wasn't looking too good all day either, but just after sunset the sky cleared and the nearly full moon was hanging up there bright and sharp. At a little after 8PM local time I was out there sighting the camera in and putting tape down next to the tripod feet in case I, or a racoon or something, bumped the tripod in the 24 hours or so before the next shoot.

Sunday, daytime: I kept a close eye on the sky, the Weatherbug radar, and the wundergroun water-vapor maps all day. Things were looking bad and I actually checked to make sure we had the NASA channel on our satellite lineup, but let's face it, watching something like this on TV is just not the same as seeing it live! It's my conspiracy theory that that's why there are so many conspiracy theorists that don't believe we actually put men on the moon. If we had just shot a few of them, screaming and kicking, into space and booted them out onto the moon's surface, let them put their own boots on the ground as it were, that whole conspiracy debate would have been a non-starter.

Sunday: moonrise: Absolutely nothing. (Does anybody else find it disturbing and shortsighted that my spellchecker recognizes sunrise as a word but not moonrise??? I think it's some sort of conspiracy. Maybe I should start a web site to get the word out. Oops, no pun intended, honest!)

Sunday: T - 30:  Still nothing, not even a lightening of the thick clouds. Things are not looking good. . .

Sunday: E S time (Eclipse Start time): Is it posible that the sky is lightening a bit??? Aw shucks (Here I turn and kick at the ground.) prob'ly my 'magination.

Sunday: E S +10: I can actually see a fuzzy moon! It's either that or a landing light of some lost airliner headed right for me. I'm hoping for the former because I'm telling you, the latter would just ruin an already sketchy evening.

Sunday E S + 20: Oh wow!! Clear!  OK, so maybe not exactly clear, but pretty close and I'm running out of time!  Snap off a dozen or so shots. All of which look pretty much the same when played back on the camera's LED screen, (I didn't want to demount the camera to plug it into my laptop.) but never mind, you can't have too many shots!

Sunday E S + 30: The haze has thickened, the eclipse is pretty much full, and I can barely make out the moon with my naked eye, which means I had zero luck capturing that nearly invisible object some quarter million miles away in my viewfinder no matter what zoom level I tried. I don't know what happened to the blood, part of blood moon, but all I have up there is a faintest hint of a shape, black on black, and for all I know I could just be looking at one of the motes in my eye!

Sunday E S +70: I should soon be able to see the other side, the left side, of the moon as the eclipse starts to release it's hold. I said I should be able to, but I can't. The l*^%$ ffrassing clouds have completely shot-blocked me, and at my age I can't afford to be anything-blocked because desire, function and opportunity just don't coincide very often anymore, and I don't see that improving any time soon!

Of course come 0330 the sky is crystal clear and the moon is sending taunting moonbeams through the window, across the floor and right into my eyes, but by then all the excitement was long over. (I won't comment on the fact that now, awakened by the moon, I have to lay there, hoping against hope that I will fall asleep again, as I listen to the wife snoring beside me, because, well, that would be indelicate of me. . .)

Let's see, the next supermoon eclipse isn't until when?  2033! Oh crap! On my 40th birthday, slightly over two decades ago, my brother blurted out that I was halfway to dead. Looks like I'm going to be cutting things close!

So after all that, all I have to show for this rare event is one crappy photo, shot through light haze with my 12.1 MP Cannon SX50 at full optical zoom in high-dynamic-range mode.

Playing Favorites

Yesterday I was about a half mile from the front gate and a Whitetail buck floated over the fence and trotted across the road, right to left, in front of me, rack held high and proud. I slow for deer, to the point of almost stopping, because where there's one there's often more and - well - they're a little insane, especially around roads.

Good thing I did because off to the right in a small hidden meadow was a fair sized harem that the poor schmuck had obviously been building. (Poor schmuck because it's early in the season so all the work he's doing gathering up the ladies will be for naught when a bigger, more savvy dude comes along and takes them away from him a few weeks from now.) True to their nature, one of this harem was panicked at being separated from the boss and decided that playing suicidal chicken with a 7000 pound van was preferable to being on the wrong side of the road!

This morning I spotted several of those more experienced and savvy rivals biding their time on the other side of the pond.

Mixed in among the big guys was one just barely beyond the spike stage

and he seemed to be currying favor from one of the elders,

but he better watch out because I don't think everyone in the group is down for that sort of behavior.

Tales from the Road: Cattle Call

Did you ever notice how much a livestock trailer looks like a school bus from certain angles?

Today I was driving over to a friend's place and as I came around a curve I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a school bus pulling into a ranch gate.

I thought 'cool, they must have a summer kids program back in there somewhere'.

But as I pulled even with the drive I looked over and saw that what I had taken for the tail end of a school bus was actually the rear half of a goose-neck livestock trailer with a white sun-shade roof. The only thing missing were the big flashing lights.

The thought of us stuffing our kids and livestock into such similar transportation was briefly amusing, but then I was reminded of something I hadn't thought about in over 40 years.

In 1972, when I was in basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood in central Missouri, that's exactly what they used to do to us. Load us into livestock trailers, only these were the full size, tractor-trailer kind.

You might find this amusing in a quaint, 'embellished memory' sort of  way, but the photo below accompanied an Army  news article  titled:

 NEW 80-PASSENGER SYSTEMS REPLACE OLD "CATTLE CARS" FOR MOVING TROOPS

 

The article goes on to explain that before these were deployed elsewhere, Fort Leonard Wood received a prototype of this new transport for testing in 2001!!!, 29 years after I was livestocked into the bowels of those old, dusty, rattly, noisy, and just generally uncomfortable cattle-cars. 


To be fair, those old livestock trailers had been thoroughly cleaned out so it's not like we were slopping around in bovine waste products. In fact they had even been painted olive-drab, inside and out, perhaps so we didn't feel quite so much like we were on the way to the abattoir, though I'm not sure the prospect of running a obstacle course in the hot sun or sitting around on hard wood planks learning to fire a LAW after a full day of PT and a night of fire-watch was all that much better.

Driving Texas

OK, admittedly, this is a bit of a rant, but every time I leave the state for a while and come back, I'm reminded all over again of Texas' particular brand of driving. Which is, in a word, fast!

OK, I'm confused. Am I supposed to drive friendly or the Texas way?? I wish they'd make up their minds. And I'm not at all sure we should be so proud of having spawned the Bush's within our borders. At the very least I know we shouldn't be spending my tax dollars on frivolous signs saying so.

Not that Texas is unique in having it's own 'style' of driving, You'll find different styles all over this country. But fortunately for those of us taking regular road trips, traffic laws in the USA are comfortably similar across all the states.

And that's good because things could be worse!!

Those of you doing cross-country trips before the 70's might remember the right-turn-on-red confusion. Some states had it, some didn't. If you weren't sure you had two choices; make the turn and pucker-up while you waited to get pulled over, or sit there and have the guy behind get all pissy about you wasting a few seconds of his precious time while he made a spectacle of you by laying on the horn. It wasn't until the fuel shortages of the 70's that the feds stepped in and pushed the have-nots to normalize things.

And just imagine if the US were like Austria from the Napoleonic invasion in the early 1800's up to 1938 when things were finally rectified! During that 100+ year period, as you crossed from one part of the country to another, roughly equivalent to crossing our county lines, you had to change which side of the road you drove on! OK, initially it was horse to horse conflict which was slow motion by current standards, but by the early 1900's speeds started to pick up and finding yourself on the wrong side of the road had more serious consequences!

Oh, and along those lines, just be glad you weren't in Sweden September 3rd 1967!! At midnight, in one fell swoop, the entire country switched from driving on the left to driving on the right! Not, I'm sure, without a few hiccups and some extreme pucker factors.

But, even though things are largely uniform in this country, visa-vi driving legally, there are some noticeable differences between states.

Some of these differences are mandated by law.

For instance, New Hampshire thinks (Correctly in my humble, but always right, opinion.) that as an adult I have the right to make my own decision about wearing or not wearing a seat-belt. I would never dream of not wearing a seat-belt but I certainly object to my government forcing me to do so!

On the other end of the spectrum, New Jersey and Oregon think I'm just too stupid to pump my own gas and instead force me to let disposable minimum wage flunkies do it for me.

Exposure to toxic fumes is often cited as one of the arguments for this law so, extending that logic, if it's too dangerous for us normal citizens to pump gas and breathe fumes once or twice a week they must consider the people hired do it a hundred or so times a day as disposable. From that we can assume that anyone with even a few working brain cells would be reluctant to take such a job; and what does that say about the person cavalierly pumping that explosive concoction into the tank under my butt???

Another argument used by those too lazy to get their butts out of the seat is that it's safer because you can stay in your car where thugs can't get to you, but I think there's a slight flaw in that logic too. Sure, I stay in my car, in fact the law says I must, but because of that I have to let some stranger, perhaps not the kind of person I would be comfortable being around otherwise, (See the previous bit about toxic fumes!) walk right up to where I'm sitting helplessly behind my open window. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how carjackings start??

And by the way, while we're on (OK not 'we' but just 'me'.) differences in laws between states, are all you mega 102" wide RV owners aware that in 12 states plus DC you are legal only on federal highways and once you stray a certain distance from them, 10 miles in Louisiana but only 1 mile in Maryland, you are illegal unless you have a permit??

No, I didn't think so. Not something the RV salesperson was likely to point out was it?

But some of the differences in driving style from state to state can be traced back to geographic or cultural/social issues.

For instance, generally speaking, speed limits are higher in the less populated western states than they are in the highly populated eastern ones. (Yeah, I know, that was an easy one.)

And in my own experience, though I don't really know why, the drivers of Minnesota and New Mexico are much more courteous than those of Massachusetts and Louisiana. (According to Cars.com, Idaho is officially ranked least courteous and North Dakota most courteous.)

On an even smaller scale:

In San Francisco you can get a ticket for not turning your wheels into the curb after parallel parking. This is so when your parking brake fails the car rolls up on the sidewalk and flattens a pedestrian or two rather than damaging the car parked downhill. Not something most of us would think about.

And is it just me or have you noticed that as you drive from rural to urban areas, the closer to the city you get the more frantic the driving becomes. As the official speed limit drops in anticipation of congestion, the actual speed driven increases, as does the sharpness and frequency of lane changes, along with a corresponding reduction in following distance and suspension of common sense.

I can only assume this is because we all know that that one extra car length we gain through aggressive driving is extremely important when in the city. Never mind that the only thing we really gain is arriving at the stop-and-go traffic jam a half second sooner than the next guy. (As we bury Duddly McLeadfoot this fine day, try not to think too badly of him. Sure, he killed himself and three innocents, but he did it while trying to get there ahead of the other guy, so that makes it alright. . .)

In Wichita drivers use their horn; a lot! Most are not angry, flip-off, slam-fist-on-horn honks, but rather just little toots; hello, or hey-I'm-here toots if you will; but they still make the uninitiated visitor all paranoid and jumpy. At least that's what they do me.

If you're a Dallas-ite apparently you're taught that taking an exit by starting from the left lane and just shooting on across all traffic lanes is a common and acceptable driving strategy. (So many do it I figure it must be on the written test somewhere.) But it's a strategy that can scare the daylights out of the unwary! (I make sure I have extra underwear along when going through Dallas.)

And that is my segue into Driving Texas! Not a very good one I admit, but it got me here. . .

Texas, the land of the ridiculous, perhaps even asinine, speed limit, where the least of the issue is the 80 and even 85 MPH speed limits we have on some of our expressways. Because this is also the land where 75 MPH is common on highways (As in 4 lane, and once in a while even 2 lane.) and 55 is - well - the only place you're likely to see the old familiar double-nickle is when actually driving through a town! For several years we had a two-lane state road 20 miles south of us; a road lined with frequent driveways, farm gates and gravel pits; yet it had a posted speed limit of 75!

But that doesn't really matter anyway since here in Texas speed limits are barely considered a suggestion. After all, we're talking about the state that ranks dead last in the nation in severity of speeding fines as well as frequency of any actual speed enforcement. It shows too. In 2014, here in Texas we killed 3534 people on our roads.  Adjusted for miles driven, that's about twice the rate of Illinois which ranks 1st in fines and enforcement. (I know, I know, I too hate to admit that Illinois ranks first in anything except corruption and former public officials residing in prison, but facts are facts.)

But never mind the stats, because as a card-carrying Texan it's pretty much your patriotic duty to drive as fast as you want as often as you want, even if that means passing against the double yellow line uphill on a blind curve, or even on the shoulder if necessary. (Believe me, it happens!)

If, for some reason, you can't get around someone driving slower than you want to go, like perhaps you have some remaining vestige of self preservation, duty demands that you then push that slower vehicle as hard as possible until such time as you can get by them. You are to do this in the hopes that they might go just a little bit faster while you, very impatiently, wait for your chance to make a death-defying, gas-sucking, piston-scoring lunge around them; because we all know that 30 seconds you're loosing is so friggin' important!! Never mind that in the next town 90% of the time that same car will be waiting right behind you at the stop light.

Oh, and by the way, here in Texas it's not considered tailgating until you've hooked bumpers, so don't freak out if you look in the rearview and see nothing but hood ornament.

Now, to put things into perspective, not all Texans buy into this driving style, just enough that it's noticeable. Despite the speed limits out there, a surprising number of casual drivers, and I dare say a whole lot of professional drivers, ease their way across even the empty miles of West Texas at a safe, sedate 65 MPH. (I know because they don't pass me and I don't pass them.) And Texans also drove a quarter billion, that's with a b, miles in 2014 so that's - let's see - 25 goes into 35, carry the 10, add a zero - oh hell! No matter which way you do the math that's lots and lots, and lots, of trouble free miles.

But I do wish I couldn't see the gleam in the eye of that chrome bulldog in my mirror!!