Caesar and Cleopatra are my two "German Wolfhounds." I call them that because their Momma was a German Sheperd, while Daddy was a Borzoi, or as they are sometimes called, a Russian Wolfhound.

Evidently Daddy could scale an eight foot fence given sufficient motivation, and Momma in heat was such.

More on them later...

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It's in great condition, and runs like a top, after I changed out the distributor. (Cost me a hundred bucks, found a used one.) The doors still sound and feel like a bank vault when you close them, and there's not a rattle or squeak to be found.

Since I've had it, I've put a pair of tires on it, and replaced the rear brake pads and rotors. I've put thousands of miles on him, without a hiccup.

The guy that I got it from, a chronically unemployed DJ whom I will call Dunce, got it from the mechanic that had worked on the car it's entire life, and bought it from the doc's wife's estate when she passed on. Arno, the mechanic, has all the service records from Day One, kept with all the anal level of detail you would expect from an Austrian-born, factory-trained master mechanic that started to apprentice while still in high school.

The Dunce got hard up for money, and tried to sell it. As he was so broke that he couldn't even afford to put a new distributor in it, he decided that he would rig it. The distributor was worn and loose, but he could get the car to halfway run but stuffing, get this, wooden shims, between the distributor housing and the intake manifold to hold it in place.

With this lovely marvel on engineering in place, the car would run for about five miles, or the first big bump, whichever came first. He wondered why he couldn't get anybody to buy it. I watched this comedy from the sidelines for a few days, just shaking my head. He had asked me repeatedly if I wanted to buy it, but I told him I already had two vehicles, and didn't need a third.

After about a week, he begged me to buy it from him. I asked him how much he'd sell it to me for. Book on the car is about four grand, and he'd been asking $2500. I ended up buying it for a grand.

So I had to give the car a name.

Well, despite my distaste for most things of a "spiritual" nature, I'm fairly anthromorphic about some things, particularly cars and computers. I always give them a name, and truly think of them as partaking in that quality that we call "life" to a greater or lesser degree.

In fact, I believe everything around us, from dirt to dahlias to Dells to dolphins to Dubya, is alive, in varying degrees, (with the possible exception of dogmatic yellow-dog Democrats :-) and that between the quick and the dead there lies not a dichotomy, but a spectrum. But this is fodder for a different discussion. Again I digress, as I am wont to do.

So anyway, after much scratching of the haid and intense ponderment, (Fritz? Hans? Aaahnold? Adolph?) I decide to call him Otto.

I think of him as a him, though many of my cars have been female. He's all stolid, square shouldered and business-like, no swoopy aerodynamic curves for him. Were he a person, he'd be a hard-working, stout, middle-aged German burgher, with an ample gut from a lifetime of lager, potato pancakes and bratwurst, along with a good helping of strudel for dessert.

Otto Bonn. From Stuttgart. Otto Bonn von Stuttgart. :-)

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Antoine de Saint-Exupery 'Twas a loooong day today.

CG and I hopped into Otto late this morning, and headed north, in yet another episode of the never-ending quest for a house. We scoured the lands around the towns of Magnolia and Montgomery.

We saw several interesting homes, but nothing that'll actually work for us. We saw nice homes on little lots, (little meaning under two acres) and a few nice pieces of land with truly cruddy houses on them. This is much more of an issue for CG than me, as I'd happily live in a tent, just so long as it had AC and a DSL connection. :-)

The more interesting of the homes we saw was built in 1863. It had fourteen foot ceilings, a loft and some other cool stuff, but there was a pending contract on it, the property was too small for a horse, and it was in the city of Montgomery itself. We'd like something a bit farther out. In the event any of y'all would like to see it, it's here:

www.txland.com

As we left that house and were driving through the town square there in Montgomery, we happened to see the office of the realtor that had that listing, so we stopped in to see what else they may have had in the area.

The agent there was a likable young man (young to me being early 30's), and we chatted for a good bit about the market for land thereabouts.

He seemed truly disappointed that we weren't bucks-up enough to buy something in the $3-$500K range, as his firm seems to specialize in selling ranches in the 100 to 1000 acre range. He did mention one ranch they had that was a really good deal - 509 acres at only $3300 an acre.

www.txland.com

I said sounds great, why don't you see if they'll just parcel off those last nine acres, I figger anybody that's in the market for a 509 acre ranch is prolly in the market for a 500 acre ranch, doncha think? He allowed as how he thought so too, but other people had asked and the seller didn't wanna fool with that.

(sigh)

(Anybody got a few hundred thou to spare? The guy tells me you could probably buy this place, subdivide it, and make a boodle. We'll split the profit. 7 bedroom 4.5 baths in the main house alone, with plenty of room to build on)

As he was showing us some properties on their website, the conversation turned to computers, as they tend to do when I'm in the room with somebody, I can't for the life of me figure out why. :-)

Small world. Turns out the guy is a self-trained amateur geek, and before long we were discussing his latest installation experience with Mandrake 8.1, MySQL vs. Access as the backend for the database of properties he maintains to feed into their website, running Samba on his LAN and how he has a set of keys to the little ISP there in town where he gets to go and play on the machnes whenever he wants.

Now CG is a polite and gracious woman, but after about fifteen minutes of this she's shifting impatiently from foot to foot and her eyes are glazing over. To make matters worse, there were no less than five antique stores within a few blocks - in fact, there was one right next door. They were calling to her like crack calls hookers.

"If y'all are gonna talk about computers all afternoon, just come get me next door when you're done.'

"Sure, honey, I'll just be a minute."

"Yeahright," she called over her shoulder as the door closed.

"Shit, this's gonna cost me some money."

The guy just grinned. Turns out his mom owns the antique store...

Anyway, I managed to restrain myself to only about another, umm, thirty minutes or so, primarily because they ran out of stuff to sell CG, (thank dog we weren't in the truck, but Otto, or I'da really been sunk) so she came a dragged me away just as we were really getting into the topic of the future of AIX now that IBM is pushing Linux so hard...

So, we spent the rest of the afternoon lazily driving back home, stopping at every junk store, err, antique shop, on the way.

She ended up buying $37.50 worth on antique door knobs, (don't ask, I have no idea why) and a $65 old table that was so worm eaten and nefarious I thought maybe they were selling it for firewood, but which CG assures me will be just the ticket after she refinishes it up in the Shabby Chic/French Country look that Martha Stewart has evidently brainwashed every woman on the planet that has ever been in the same zip code as a cable TV to think is the True Cat's Pajamas.

That's just the stuff that she got that would fit in Otto. She put some other crap on layaway, but mercifully, (perhaps there is a loving god, my rants to the contrary) I managed to tune it out as she was running down the list by concentrating really, really hard on the chord changes to George Strait's new cover of "Stars on the Water," which happened, thankfully, to be playing on the radio at the moment she decided to regale me with the triumphs of her bargain hunting.

I figure my pleasant conversation with that realtor cost me to the tune of at least $200 an hour.

The only reason I can survive these ShopaPaloozas with my sanity intact is that most of these stores have old books and/or newer used books for sale. I also like to look at the old tools, and electronic stuff.

I managed to avoid the temptation of paying $135 for a 286 with one meg of RAM and a 14" VGA monitor. The lady at the shop looked at me askance when I told her it wasn't worth near that.

"But it comes with a printer, too." she said. pointing to an old nine pin dot matrix. "Make me an offer."

"I wouldn't want to insult you."

"I need to get it out of here."

"Ma'am, I'm not trying to be impolite, but I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me for free. Your best bet is to go take the thing to the poorest part of town around here, and give it to the first kid you see. Charities don't even take these things anymore. Failing that, you can maybe get about five bucks for it from somebody that wants to salvage the floppy drives in it, and I think there may be a drive cable in there you could use. That's about it."

It was kinda neat to actually lay eyes in Lotus 123 for DOS again, though.

I did end up buying from her "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris, on the history and future of astronomy, and "Art Through the Ages" 1928 Edition, by Helen Gardner, the latter once having belonged to one Lester A. Mattson of St. Paul, Minnesota, if the writing on the inside front cover is to be trusted. Total combined cost: $4

One of the places we later shopped had a whole box of vinyl. I riffled through it, and found some neat stuff from the 70's and 80's. Unfortunately, a lot of the records were in poor shape. I broke my poor little heart to see the first Janice Joplin album in the box, but with both the jacket and the record itself is such a disreputable shape the I didn't want it.

I did make off with, all in great shape, scratch free, so far as I could tell:

BeeGees - "Main Course" Rickie Lee Jones - Self-Titled, I think, the one with "Chuck E's in Love." Commodores- "Midnight Magic" Vanity- "Wild Animal" Teena Marie - "Wild And Peaceful" Chaka Khan - "Chaka" The one with "I'm Every Woman" Prince - 12" "Purple Rain - Long Version, "God" Instrumental and Vocal versions on the B side Donna Summers - "A Love Trilogy"

and last but not least...

Moby Grape - Self-Titled

Aggregate Cost: $6

We stopped at that little country diner in Magnolia where CG and I habitually ate breakfast every Monday morning after a TRF weekend, though this time we were eating a late lunch. This is the joint that makes sausage gravy and biscuits worth getting on a plane and flying down here for.

Well, the menu was a bit different this time. CG has wanted to lose a few pounds, so we're on a diet. I'm being a supportive podnuh, and eating all the same stuff that she does, not wanting to make it any harder on her than it already is by slathering down gobs of rare ribeyes in front of her.

So we each had a grilled chicken salad, hold the cheese and the croutons, balsamic vinagarette on the side, ice tea, and can we have some Sweet'N Low also, please?

Our last stop of the evening was at a roadside vegetable stand, where we picked up some home-grown tomatoes (orders of magnitude better than those from the grocery store) fresh strawberries, okra, squash and cucumbers. (have I mentioned we're eating lots of salad and steamed veggies lately?)

We finally rolled into the apartment a little after eight, only a bit more than ten hours after we left. Shelby the Spotted WonderDog was most happy to see us, primarily because we had to open the door to get in, affording her the chance to bowl us over streaking outside to go pee. She had evidently been waiting with her legs braided, so to speak, for our arrival.

Well, that was today. Tomorrow, up bright and ugly in the morning to be At Excalibur for the opening gate show at ten.

Over & Out...

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