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This story is about my Great Grandmother, and is transcribed from the oral narration always told by my father. It was edited slightly to make it easier to read in written format.

One day dad was in town, and he saw a street vendor selling hot sauce. The vendor had his case of merchandise on one fold out stool, and was sitting on the other.

Dad bought a bottle thinking it would be good sense he liked hot sauce. The next morning Mom made two over easy eggs. Dad put a drop of the hot sauce on each egg, and stirred them up. When he started eating the eggs they were so hot that he couldn’t eat them. After that he stated he bet he’d found something that his Mom couldn’t eat.

Next week Grandma was on a visit for the weekend. There were two things to always remember about Grandma: She loved to eat, and she loved to cook. Grandma fixed breakfast for everyone including over easy eggs for herself. Dad picked the hot sauce up and handed it to her saying “Mom here is some hot sauce with a good flavor but its not quite hot enough.” He wanted to see her reaction to this extremely hot, hot sauce.

She took the bottle, looked at it, then poured some of it on each egg. Then she started eating. She stopped for a moment. With a kind of funny look on her face. Now imagine my fathers shock when she picked up a teaspoon, put some of the hot sauce in straight, and tasted it. Then she looked at my father and said. “You’re right Neal. It has got a good flavor but it’s not quite hot enough.

Can you imagine the look on his face when what he though was going to be a joke on her backfired?

With a flutter of wings, my cockatiel landed down on the floor yesterday. SurgarBaby, walked around exploring every bit of fuzz, and bird seed hull that he found. He spent a good 15 or 20 minutes in the floor before I picked him up. SugarBaby was chattering happily the whole time.

My brother’s often told me that the bird liked to follow him around the house, and they’d have to watch for him. Why SugarBaby preferred to follow him around on foot, rather than fly, has me puzzled a bit. Then again, it doesn’t really. There’s not a whole lot of places at their house which he could have perched on.

He has walked around on the floor here on occasion, but not as long, nor as far, as he did yesterday. He walked a good 15 to 20 feet or so, wandering as he did. This morning he’s walked all most that far as well. Wandering around, exploring everything within beak reach. It means I have to keep an eye on him as he’s like a little kid getting into everything.

He taps things with his beak, then sometimes tastes of a particularly interesting item. If it turns out to be paper he’s going to chew on it for a few minutes before passing by. If I try to pick him up, he runs away as fast as his little legs will take him. It’s amazingly cute. I think I’m going to have to bird proof the house again, this time on floor level.

Now I have to go see where he’s wandering off too…

And over to you…

Do you have pets? What cute, or funny, things have they done lately?

Recently I’ve become interested in Locomotives again. I was really interested in them for awhile when Shining Time Station was on PBS. The stories of Thomas, Gordan, and my favorite Henry, made me want to learn more. At the time it ended there due to a lack of books about trains at our local library. We didn’t get the internet until about 1997, and by that time PBS had drifted out of my line of favorite programming. (Except for watching Bob Ross, of course.)

Steam is where it started

I started out with a fascination about steam engines. I have only seen one steam engine in person. Yet I could, and still can, go down to our local tracks and see a diesel engine 5 days a week. They stop in town to get something to eat wile the tanker cars are being loaded with clay. So I didn’t see what could be so interesting about them. Liking Thomas the Tank Engine also made me biased back then. That was before Diesel the characters were introduced at all.

Diesels by Design

After my early fascination with trains; my interest died off for awhile due to a lack of information. I got more interested in engineering type things in general. I’d pick up bits here and there, how wiring worked, how to design a desk, an so forth. I didn’t get back interested in how they actually worked until a discussion of trucking actually came up. There was a blip on a show about how trains where being fazed out because of trucks… It saddened me immensely. It hit me that the diesel engines might go the way of the steamers and die out completely. Then all the rails would be ripped up, not just the ones that hadn’t been used in so long that it was unsafe to leave the bridges up.

So I watched every TV show about trains that came on the history channel that I could, even the ones about crashes. My library still had a serious lack of books about trains, so I dug up what I could on the internet. My searching skills were limited at the time, and it was before I knew about Google so I only had Yahoo Search as an option. I turned up a lot, but not a lot at the same time.

Tracks that that continue today.

I recently began to research about trains again. It started with my looking up Thomas the Tank Engine on Wikipedia after being reminded of it by some fan art. After I finished reading everything I could on that, I’ve started researching the various trains and vehicle that were, and are, in the show. I even ended up stumbling on a type of engine that I knew nothing about. Namely Fireless Locomotives.

And over to you…

Is there something from your child hood that you’ve had a renewed fascination with recently?