Text 17252, 84 rader
Skriven 2007-06-27 20:02:57 av Barbara McNay (1:382/48)
  Kommentar till text 17230 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: bird nest 729
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 >> stories of luggage making it on the same plane as its owner are
 >> scarcer than those about luggage that goes someplace else first.
 >  BM> Explains why my brother, on his last trip abroad, took only one
 >  BM> carryon with a careful selection of clothes.

 > Wise choice. I try to carry on only - in the early
 > '90s I went off
 > for a month with two carry-ons, my travels taking me
 > among other
 > places to three rain forests. My boots rotted off my

That trip must have been fascinating, to rot through your boots like that.  [g]

 > feet on the
 > way back, and I dumped them in a dumpster in
 > Dungeness, Washington.

I take it you had no other footwear, else you could have left the boots to
nourish the last rain forest.

 >  BM> Speaking of the didges, way back then I tried Googling to try to find
 >  BM> out what they sound like.  I was unable to discover whether they can
 >  BM> produce anything other than a monotone.  Can one actually play melodies
 >  BM> on one?

 > One can sort of alter the pitch by a not-very-exact
 > tone or two,
 > but primarily the expressive possibilities of the
 > instrument
 > lie in rhythm, attack, and timbre. Unlike most
 > European wind
 > instruments, didges are not a melodic instrument by
 > and large.

No.  Others indicated as much.  The aboriginals use them singly, and the
Europeans put them into an array and call the whole a pipe organ.

 >  BM> Interesting; I've never heard of it.

 > Perhaps Rugged Wearhouse isn't nationwide. There are a
 > lot of local
 > places that one takes for granted but that people
 > outside an area
 > have never heard of.

I would assume that it doesn't exist where there's a Filene's Basement, or
other equivalent.


 > When I lived in Braes Heights in the later '60s,
 > Bellaire was
 > its own city, even though it was surrounded by
 > Houston. West
 > University Place and Southside Place were other
 > similar cities,
 > as I recall.

Yes, they are all separate cities, or were, last I knew. However, Bellaire had
its own Zip Code; it was separate from Houston in the Postal scheme of things,
while West University Place and Southside Place, when I moved away from there,
were considered by the Post Office to be part of Houston.

I'm not familiar with Braes Heights.  I suppose that might be near Braeswood
Blvd., which straddled the drainage ditch from Bellaire to downtown Houston.  I
used to ride along that street on my bicycle with my son when he was small, and
go to the zoo.  I tried once to ride down in the drainage ditch, but it was so
treacherous with algae from the constant runoff that I feared for our safety,
and dragged the bike up the bank to the road.  The zoo at that time habitually
left the back gate open, and so I went in there; it was beyond the back of the
restrooms, and nobody was around.  I left the bike and our lunch there while we
wandered in the zoo for a while, then came back for a quiet lunch.  Very nice.
Eventually, they closed the gate, and I wasn't about to leave my stuff right
out by the front entrance in the bike rack, so I stopped going.

I also went downtown on my bike to my son's medical appointments, riding
through the shaded avenues of Southside Place and West University Place, and
that took me almost directly to the medical center.  I even went to the Jesse
Jones library with him.  I went up into the stacks, and left him sitting by a
window, where he was enthralled by the construction of a new building right
next door.  There were a lot of things that were very convenient, then and
there.

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 * Origin: T E X A S ! (1:382/48)