This year Susie and I celebrated Thanksgiving with Mike and family at their place on Lake Houston. Thanksgiving dinner included besides both our granddaughter; nephew Mikel and his daughter Aurora along with a couple of Mike and Adrin’s retired widower neighbors. Good company, good food and engaging conversation, a lovely Thanksgiving.  The reason I write this now is I had a chance to once more indulge in an old tradition and it stirred up so old memories from years ago. Since the late 1990’s a men’s group that I’m a member of has gone down to a local men’s half way house Thanksgiving morning to donate clothing and to meet with the residents and still be back home early afternoon for family activities. The half way house was in the Montrose area more or less in the shadow of downtown Houston. After the area gentrified the ramshackle place was sold for a princely sum and they moved out to the Spring Branch area where they still operate today. In those earlier days it wa...

  The Texas Water Safari is a unique event spectator wise. It starts with the haze of adrenalin in the pre race prep and the start, then the chaos of Rio Vista followed by the drama at Cottonseed Rapid after which things start to settle down to the following by the committed to a long hard multiday event. I’ll tell you a little secret, there’s a special spot for yours truly early in the race at Staples Dam, the first checkpoint. I stand on the bridge looking upstream for the first unlimited boats to appear. Often more than one boat this early in the race, no one has yet pulled ahead. There is the first boat, six paddlers, blades flashing in perfect unison. Each boat a half ton or so rushing thru the water driven by muscle and will, the boat in perfect harmony with its purpose in the universe. When the conditions are right, with a little breeze to ruffle the water you can’t make out the faint wake of their passing. It then crosses my mind “I had a hand in that” and the feeling i...

Don Cash was a videographer for the Texas Department of Wildlife and wanted to do a segment on wood strip canoe building. I was introduced to him at a Houston Canoe Rendezvous and so began an interesting journey. I was about to design/build a new boat to participate in Junior Water Safari. After talking to Don we struck a deal wherein I'd build a boat slightly more photogenic than I'd originally intended and he would film the process and produce a video for a segment of Texas Parks and Wildlife show that ran on NPR. From my viewpoint it was a large undertaking for Don. It was a three hour round trip from his home base in Austin to our house in Cypress. There were a lot of trips, first for the design, then several segments during different stages of the build. Followed by some of the original launching and then the actual race. I suspect his interest started to flag when I started the inlaid chevron deck. It was a little tedious and looked pretty rough unfinished but I sanded do...

  It’s been four and a half years since that event changed our lives. All the basic rebuilding is well behind us and some landscaping and rockwork has brought our weed problems brought about by lack of canopy cover under some semblance of control. So life goes on. But I miss the trees, and the fireflies. In general where the tornado came through every tree over 24” caliper was gone. Those 24-30”+/- were snapped off near the ground. Trees larger than that were uprooted. Out of every three trees, one was in the smaller category and two were larger. In the immediate vicinity of the house there are seven stumps indicating twenty one primarily mature oaks were gone. Gone also are fireflies who were sheltered under their canopy. Prior to the tornado the fireflies would put on quite a show in season right up to our back deck and around us. Many hundreds looking for love under the shelter of those oaks. There were some positives. The new shop was a far better than the original which was ...

  From my earliest days I measured length, weight and volume with feet, inches, yards, miles, pounds, ounces, tons, pints, quarts, gallons and so on. I learned early on that most of the world used a different system with meters, grams and liters, a somewhat shorter list.   But I was educated and operated in the feet, pounds and gallons universe. Didn’t think much about it for many years until I started using a little shareware program called Michlet that was strictly metric. The program was not particularly user friendly but was powerful in providing solutions to problems that I was quite interested in. Translating from one system to another and then back again was tedious but necessary. An answer in meters per second meant nothing to me I need to know what it was in miles per hour or feet per second. Intellectually I knew that the metric system was better in many respects but learning a new language late in life was both difficult and I’d never be quite as proficient in the l...

  Sometime after Susie and I moved here to the hills I was talking to someone about what a current boat project was going to weigh. It was probably our son Mike here on a visit, to the best of my knowledge the only maritime discussions about weight with locals revolve around fish and fishing gear. Anyway I was discussing the various ramifications of material selection and building technique as related to what the thing was going to weigh. Susie was on the couch crocheting and said “I know exactly what it’s going to weigh”. Oh really, says I. Yes she replied, It’s going to weigh “a little more than you’d like” all your boats weigh a little more than you’d like. I was stunned. Susie is always right; we’ve been married for a long time. But I hadn’t realized her knowledge extended so far into to my passion for boatbuilding. But she was totally right. All my boats and related things through the years have weighed “a little more than I’d like” without exception. There’s no good way...