Dream analysis

 One of these days, we'll be able to track our dreams like we track our heartbeat or sleep now.  In the meantime, I'll have to rely on the old-fashioned 'get up in the middle of the night and try to write it down' method.  Which rarely works well.  But last night I did get some information down:

I was in Amarillo, Texas ( a place I've never been).  I was playing golf at a country club, very similar to a place you might expect.  I was paired with a husband and wife and we had a pleasant time.  It was in modern Covid time.  The date was March 9 - I even wrote that down at 3 a.m.  

Afterwards before I was to leave, the husband and wife showed me a 25 basin hand-washing station, where I washed my hands before leaving.

After surgery last year when I was on a lot of medication, I did not sleep well and did not have dreams.  Glad to be back to normal, even if the dreams are anything but normal.

Last 4 states

 I am planning to finish up my 50 state quest in 2021.  Now's the time to get them all done.

I had a new idea, after stumbling on a video of Amtrak.  Now our national rail system is kind of a joke, but there are some areas where there is some market penetration.  Turns out the route that I will need to take, Fargo ND to Cleveland OH to Albany NY and then Rutland VT will hit the states that I need to get.  So maybe I will do a leg, Riding the Rails.

It might be just the time.  It looks like if time is a factor then the train is the longest way, but it might not be bad for a solo traveller who doesn't want to do all that driving.

Something to factor in!

Summers in Industry, TX

In the late 70s, 1977-79, one of my vacation highlights was spending a week in Industry, TX (then pop. 1,001) with my good friend Reed at his grandmother Lillian's home.  A real throwback of a time in retrospect.  Lillian lived in a small frame 2 (maybe 3?) bedroom house in town, just off a main road.  The house was not air conditioned, althought I think she had a window unit in her bedroom.   So when we were inside, it was quite warm.  We would therefore be outside most all day long.  I used to joke that we would go outside to cool off.

What did we do?  She had a large backyard, with a canning shed, so there was some room to run.  We could walk everywhere in town, so sometimes we'd go to the library, or to a local general store.  The town must have had some pull because it had a bank, a library, a car dealership.  Some quick research says it was the first permanent German settlement in Texas.

On Saturday nights, there was a dance at the Industry Fireman's Hall, and that was a big social event.  We got to go but just hung out in the corners.

Reed's mother and father both were from the area, so we would go visit family here and there.  His parents would usually take us one weekend and pick us up the next so they were around a lot.

One fun memory is we would ride our bikes down the large hill near her house - fly down.  Then we had to pedal back uphill.  I guess we walked or biked around town our fair share as well.

Lillian cooked all the meals for us and I recall some big breakfasts as well as eating at a small kitchen table.  She must have been a very calm person, because nothing we ever did seemed to rattle her.

I think she had a TV but she watched what she wanted and we rarely watched any TV.

Part of me has always dreamed of buying that house and fixing it up.  But I'm afraid that the best times for me were back then in the 1970s.  You can't go back to 13 years old again.  And spending the whole week with your best buddy. 

Mary Ann

I was talking to my friend Dave and telling him what a good car my 2015 Lexus ES 350.  Reliable, good looking colors in and out (silver and black), and should last a long time.

So he asked me "Have you named her?"

I thought for a minute, having just watched Gone in 60 Seconds and thinking of "Eleanor" so it was an easy choice...

Mary Ann

Spelled the common way, like the good girl on Gilligan's Island, it's really named after my godmother Marianne who was a long time friend of my late mother.  Marianne was married to  Sterling McCall, one of the first Toyota dealers in the US in the 1960s and who went on to become very successful.

I thought it was an inspired choice!

May 2019 * the Hospital Story

Talking to my old friend Erich, I let him know that I had open heart bypass surgery in May 2019.  "What, how did I miss that?" he said.  So here's the story for him.

On Monday May 13, I was in my office around 1:30 and getting ready for a 3:00 appointment at my wellness doctor Dr. Desai.  Now I had been going to that clinic had been watching my blood pressure.  On that day I was getting some chest pain, not crushing, no other naseua, pain in left arm, none of that.  I was not looking forward to telling the doctor about this.

At 3:00 when I went to the doctor, she immediately said "You might be having a heart attack.  Take this aspirin.  You need to go the emergency room."  I was taken aback.  She offered to call an ambulance but I said "I'll drive myself."  Shaking my head now at my denial!

A short time later, I was walking into the ER where I got hooked up to a number of tests and had a number of questions.  Since I wasn't having any dramatic things happening, I was there a while.  Eventually I had a test called a CTA - where a contrast solution was viewed to see any blockage.  Even the specialist doctor thought but was not entirely sure I had blockage.  So I was admitted and scheduled for a heart catheterization/angiogram the next morning.  "Maybe you'll need a stent" they said.

About 10 p.m. in the hospital, a new cardiologist Dr. Alam came in.  He seemed concerned.  Perhaps he was seeing something.  But not enough for any accelerated action.

I went in the next morning to the "cath lab" and everything was still calm.  When I woke up, a whole bunch of people were standing over me.  Dr. Ramirez who had done the catheterization said I had two blocked arteries, 80 and 90% and they were so close together that it could not be stented.  "You need surgery today!"  Fortunately Susan was there and was able to quickly make decisions as to the surgeon, the time, etc.  I was still reeling from the anesthesia.

I recall being wheeling into the operating room.  It looked like a futuristic movie set.  But I was not able to stay awake long.   Then I was out.

When I woke up, I had a tube in my throat but the first person I saw was my friend Dr. Shuaib.  I didn't even know he knew about this.  But he had heard and came to watch me recover.  He said it was important that I get extubated as soon as possible, and so he coached me through that.
s,
 That night I felt like I was strapped to a block of stone like a medieval torture.  It was otherworldly.  Perhaps like a purgatory, a place between life and death.   Certainly an out of this world experience. 

When I woke up Wednesday morning, the ICU nurse was there.  She assured me I was doing well.  "Were you here last night?" I asked.  "Was I in this same room?"  Yes, of course.  It was all very different.  It was a normal looking hospital room.  No block of stone to be seen at all.

When I was awake on Wednesday, my family was there - Susan, Sarah, Travis.  It was a surprise to me to see Sarah and Travis since they live in the Fort Worth area and I did not know of any travel plans before.  That was the best part that we were all there together.

That Wed. night was even worse.  I was so scared, couldn't sleep, could barely move, terrible discomfort.    The new nurse was in and out.  At some point about 3 am after I had already been up for an hour or two, she said "Just let me know if you need anything".  I asked "Could you please just stay in here for 5 minutes and talk to me."  I was like a little boy asking for my mother.    She stayed and the fear went away.  That was perhaps the worst moment.

Thursday people started to come visit more.  My spiritual advisor Father Bob.  My doctor friends, including Dr. Nguyen who used his expired doctor credentials to come in.  Dr. Z who has become a good friend.  You don't forget those who showed up when you least expected them.

The usual procedure was to go to "Step Down" from ICU but my blood count was low and that was worrisome, like perhaps I had some internal bleeding.  They got me out of bed to walk around accompanied, but day 1 was not a good result.  I did better the following days.

I got into the rhythm of the times.  At 0515, Dr. Ramirez the cardiologist would visit.  Breakfast at 0700.  Dr. No my friend would come about 0800.  Susan about 0815, then noon, then 0600.  She kept that schedule up and it was comforting.  Plus it helped her to know that I was in good hands.

There were some procedures that were unusual to me, like a Foley catheter ( and getting it out), an IV in the neck, arm, help to go to the bathroom later, a sponge bath, and so forth.  In hindsight I was pretty beaten up.  I did enjoy that I could use the phone to be in touch although it was nice when people just showed up instead of asking permission.  I was in no shape to be making many decisions.

On Sunday, I was transferred by ambulance to the Rehabilitation Hospital just down the street.  It was a terrible emotional experience to leave the safety of the ICU for something unknown.  I cried and cried.  Little did I know that the next phase would be even more rewarding.

Wilson Tour Special

I recently picked up a Tour Special II putter on eBay for the bargain price of $8.75.  For those not familiar, the Wilson Tour Special is a forged, flange blade style putter with a slight offset shaft.  It has a matte silver finish.

Wilson Tour Special II - circa 1980s

This version Tour Special II is marked by its straight hosel instead of a slight offset.  A real scalpel. It also has a leather wrapped grip (original) with the Wilson red and white shield button logo on top.  The shaft appears original (no tags) and is a straight, no steps, steel shaft.

This flange blade style is very traditional, going back to the 50s and likely early to post WW2 design.  Putters were originally very simple paddle styles. The prototypical version is the Acushnet Bullseye which is center shafted and  could be used left or right handed.

Bullseye putter - circa 1960s

The flange style rose in popularity in the 50s, with the MacGregor Tommy Armour Ironmaster.  This added weight behind the face added some feel but the rear shaft likely caused more difficulty in hitting a consistent “sweet spot”.  To add to the confusion, the center line marked was usually not the actual sweet spot.

MacGregor Tommy Armour Ironmaster  - circa 1950s

Not to be outdone by its competitor, Wilson produced its version with the rise of the next star of the 60s Arnold Palmer.  The Wilson “Designed by Arnold Palmer” was a beefier version of the Ironmaster.

In 1964, Wilson and Arnold Palmer split up.  Arnold got the name, but Wilson kept the putter.  Renamed simply after its model number, the Wilson 8802 would rise in fame with the next generation of the 70s, Ben Crenshaw.  

Back in those days, when a player would use the same club for 20 years, Crenshaw’s 8802 would acquire Excalibur-like status and its own name Little Ben.  Like Willie Nelson’s guitar called Trigger, both Crenshaw and Nelson would claim that they tried multiple copies and versions of the same instrument, but it was just “not the same.”

Willle and Trigger - a Martin N-20 that he bought sight unseen

For whatever reason, the model 8802 was briefly discontinued in the 70s leading to a first collectible boom for that style.  It reemerged in the late 70s renamed as the Wilson Tour Special I. It combined the 8802 style with the 8813 top line ball marking.  It had a matte finish rather than a chromed finish and had its own particular 1970s style.

The model would run through most of the 80s.  A straight hosel version, the Tour Special II came next, followed by the Bullseye flange-evoked Tour Special III.  But change was in the air and the flange’s days were numbered.

An aircraft engineer, Karsten Solheim took the flange blade and worked to improve it by heel/toe weighting, therefore removing the biggest weakness of the style (the undefined sweet spot).  Additionally, he added a much larger and pronounced offset to keep the hands in front of the ball at impact, the second biggest weakness. His version of the flange blade, aptly dubbed, the Anser, caught on in the 1970s and went from a fringe invention to the new standard and the old style was on the way out.

At some point the patent on the Ping Anser must have run out and now every company has a version of that plumber’s neck, heel/toe weighted/ face insert, top line right on sweet spot club.  This new standard is even referred to as a “blade putter”. 

Scotty Cameron Newport 2.5 - circa 2000s - clearly a version of Ping Anser

Those players who came of age with the old technology, most notably Phil Mickelson, stuck with the style as long as they could.  New companies like Odyssey emulated the look, but added weight and more mass behind the ball. It appeared that the blade was going the way of the “woods”.

But the style like all styles never really goes away, it just circles back around.  

You can now buy a Ping version of the forged flange blade.  The artisan Scotty Cameron copied the look and called it a Napa and those are collectors items already.  Like a classic car, the lines of design from the 1950s and 60s are still beautiful, but modern technology adds a dose of reliability.  But you pull an old classic blade out of the bag, your playing partners will gasp in awe and amazement. I’d say that’s worth a whole lot more than $8.75.  

From Maria Portillo

My friend Maria Portillo wrote this. I met her after her heart surgery and she told me part of this story. It is so good, it was worth saving and repeating:

 By Maria Portillo (from a Facebook post)

I know it is almost midnight and this day is almost over; but today February 7th was National Wear Red Day for awareness of heart disease, and I did not want this day to pass without posting something about it. 

So I wore red all day today, because in March of 2008 I had quadruple open heart bypass surgery in McAllen, at Doctors Hospital Renaissance; all four of my arteries were 99 percent blocked. I was 58 years old. I only survived because of the Grace of God and the skill of my cardiac surgeon, Dr. Jorge De La Garza, and I know that God guides the hands of all doctors. 

So the story I am about to tell you is about heart disease, but it is also a story of how God never leaves us if we trust Him. And I want to tell all my women friends and family members, please take care of yourself; be careful what you eat. Before my open heart surgery I had let myself gain over 200 pounds, and I am barely 5 feet tall. It was too much stress on my heart, and I ate nothing but fried foods and carbs, I am posting some pictures of myself so you can see how I looked in 2008 when I weighed 205 pounds. 

I was very unhealthy, could barely walk. I had a heart attack at work, at the time I was teaching paralegal courses at South Texas Vo-Tech and it happened in class; an ambulance was called; I barely made it alive to the ER, and I was sent to a cardiac surgeon. I will not go into the details of that night before my surgery; all I will tell you is that I was sure I was going to die; I convinced myself that I was not going to survive. My beloved cousin Carmina never left my side. And my nephew Alex whom I love with all my heart, never left my side either. My brother Raul came from Dallas to be with me and arrived in the middle of the night. I was so happy to see him. 

That night, I did not sleep at all because of the fear. Now I will relate something that happened and I hope you believe me, because it happened. Around 3 o'clock in the morning, I started feeling a tingling sensation coming from my toes all up my body. I felt extreme fear and I knew that if that tingling came all the way to my chest it would consume me. Suddenly at the foot of my bed I saw 2 figures of people, they were gray and they did not have any features, no eyes, no nose, no mouth, nothing, only gray faces. I knew they were evil. I started screaming for my brother Raul who had fallen asleep on a chair. He woke up and said what is wrong? And I said "Those people, those gray people at the foot of my bed!" And he said, "There is nothing there!" But only I could see them. 

So my brother started praying for me, and he said "By the grace of God, by the stripes of Jesus, all evil disappear!" And when he said that, those figures slowly started fading away till they were gone. My brother, who is a much better Christian than I will ever be, told me that because of my fear the enemy was attacking me, that Satan was trying to get me because I had lost all my faith and had decided in my mind that I going to die. Then he said, "Don't you remember what Jesus said?" And I said "What?" and he said "In John 10:10 Jesus said "I came that you may have life, and have it abundantly!" "You will have life, Elena, and you will have an abundant life, but you have to trust in Jesus." So all of a sudden I felt peace, but I still felt a little fear, I still had a little unfaith. 

Then right at 5:30a.m. the nurses came to take me to the operating room. My fear came back; I did not want to go. As an excuse I said, "Wait, please let me read my bible before you take me." The nurse said hurry up because the doctor is already waiting for you in the operating room with his mask on. My brother brought me my bible, which was an old bible that used to belong to someone else and it was all marked with notes written all over it; I just opened it without looking for any particular page, and it opened to a page that had a verse circled in red ink. Of course I looked at it because it was circled in red. Do you know what the verse said? It said "Create in my a clean heart, oh Lord, and renew my spirit." It was Psalm 51, Verse 10. 

I suddenly knew that God was speaking directly to me. He was telling me right before surgery, that he was going to give me a clean heart and renew my spirit, the two things I needed most because my heart had disease and my spirit was way down. So I said, "Okay Lord, you have given me a message, and I am going to trust you." T hen I told the nurses, "Okay, I am ready to go." As the nurses wheeled me down the hall to the operating room, and as I stared up at the lights as I was being rolled down the halls, I kept repeating out loud, "Lord, I am going to trust you, I humble myself before you, but first clean my heart of my sins and then of my disease." And I kept repeating "First clean my heart of my sins, and then of my disease." 

I remember going into the operating room, I saw the doctor with his mask, and another doctor with a mask, it was bitterly cold, and there were huge tall columns of some type of metal; they transferred me to the operating table, and I barely remember the anesthesiologist telling me to start counting, then I was out. The surgery lasted 8 hours. I woke up at 1:30pm, alive! My brother was there, cousin Carmina was there, my brother said "You made it Elena, you're alive!" I was intubated and asked them to take the tube out so I could talk. I felt no pain whatsoever! No pain at all. Of course, I was thanking God over and I made a promise that I would tell everyone I met the story of how he saved me and gave me a verse to read at the very last minute before my surgery. And so to everyone that walked into my room, I would tell them this story, to the janitor, to the nurses aide, to the laboratory tech who came to take my blood, to every person that walked in my room, I would not let them leave until they heard my story. 

I was in ICU for 10 days. I was walking by the next day after the surgery, and I never felt any pain in my scar and they did not have to give me any pain medicine. Nobody understood it. But I knew. However, this is not the end of the story. After being in ICU for 10 days, I kept on telling everyone who walked in my room or visited me, the story of how God gave me that verse just before my surgery, how I just found it marked in red. I must have told the story 100 times in those 10 days. 

Well, on the last night I was there it happened again. I was awake and I suddenly started feeling that tingling sensation on my toes, it started to come up my body again, I looked at the foot of my bed, and those gray figures were there again! No faces, just all gray, this time I could tell it was a man and a woman and she was carrying a baby. But they were all gray and I could sense extreme evil. My brother had left, no one was in the room with me. I started screaming "Help, help me, help!" A nurse came running in. I remember it was a Filipino nurse. She said "What is wrong, Ms. Portillo, all of a sudden your blood pressure shot up really high on the screen!" And I told her "It's those gray people at the foot of my bed!" and she said she did not see anything, But I kept telling her I could see them. 

So she said, "Okay, I am going to do something, but you must not tell anyone or I will get fired." She closed the door to the room and got on her knees by my bed, And she started to pray, and she said "By the stripes of Jesus, all evil go away!" The same words my brother had said. And once again, once those words were spoken, the figures started slowly fading till they disappeared and the tingling stopped. So she asked me if I wanted to talk to the hospital minister, and I said yes. So she promised to send him to me in the morning before I was checked out. 

At 6:00am the hospital chaplain came in and I told him everything that had happened and I asked him why it happened again after God had saved me and I believed, and he said that he thought it happened because I had been praising God too much, telling everyone my story over and over, and that it made the enemy of our Lord very angry because he knew I had regained my faith and believed in the Lord again, and so he wanted to try to get me one more time. But the Lord was merciful and he made sure that the nurse who was outside my room was a Christian who believed in Jesus, the kind of nurse that would risk her job by kneeling by the side of a hospital bed and praying for a patient. 

So I went home. And the first Sunday I told my story at church. And ever since then I try to tell it to every new person I meet. I thought I would tell it on Facebook to all my new Facebook friends whom I have not met in person because we live so far away from each other. So in honor of Heart Disease Awareness Day, and in honor of our great Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, this is my story. So as you look at my pictures and you see my scar, and you see me smiling with my big old scar, it is because I am so grateful God let me live! 

P.S. - Some other day I will tell you of my cancer and stroke which came later, and how the Lord continues to be merciful to this sinner. In the meantime, take care of your bodies and what you eat and drink, because on this earth we are only flesh and blood, and God gave us our bodies for a gift, not to abuse them. God bless everyone!

New Decade - New Me

Welcome to the 2020s!  Not sure what we will be calling the Twenties for the next 10 years but this is a good start.  It is New Year's Day now and the year is off to a good start.  Texas won the Alamo Bowl last night 38-10 against Utah.

I have decided to return to my work in private law practice but on a reduced schedule and reduced client list.  I've done a good job at it over the years and can't think of anything I'd rather do that will give me as much satisfaction.

A jury trial is set for Jan 6 - my first of the decade.  I'm getting ready for whatever comes next.

Still awaiting the response from the Fifth Circuit on my appeal.

Just got a new civil matter so I am good to go.

Scheduled my ski vacation for January 29 - that's turned into a great tradition that keeps a good group of friends together, through all sorts of things occuring to us.

I'm excited for the future!  Bring it on!