Over the past week or so, I've been having some rather intense dreams about getting married. Sometimes they're jumbled-up dreams, sometimes they're crystal clear. Sometimes they're someone else's wedding, sometimes they're my own. A couple nights ago I dreamt I got hitched to one of the neighbor chicks who used to have a big ol' crush on me (she's married with two kids now). LAST night I dreamed I was getting married to -- drum roll, please -- Janet. She had her hair cut really short for some reason, though.

Maybe someone's trying to tell me something?

Who needs air-conditioning when you have a motorcycle? Yep, I dug my motorbike out of the basement for the first time since 2006 (when I injured my leg). The dang thing runs just as good now as it did when I parked it. I don't know what the quality of Honda's bikes is like these days, but their engineers were really on to something back in the late '70s (my bike is a '79). As far as I know, my bike is even still on the factory rubber (tires)! It just keeps going and going and going and going...

In addition, I think I finally found this bike's "sweet spot" in terms of what it was designed to do: back country roads (including gravel roads) at 40 m.p.h. This is where it seems to be at its happiest, and where it runs at its very best. It was designed as a "Street and Trail" bike, and in the past I was trying to push it a little too hard in an off-road environment -- hence my injured leg.

The only thing it didn't like over the past three days that I've run it is the one time I tried a freshly "tar and chipped" road (Adair road, to be specific... and don't ask what I possibly could have been looking for on that road). It was a royal pain trying to keep the thing upright in those conditions. Other than that it has been a dream to ride.

It's a perfect little motorcycle to just tool around the countryside on :)

I guess I'm going to have to ask Kathy what's going on with Janet the next time I see her. This whole mess has gotten to the point of ridiculousness. Actually, it passed the point of ridiculousness about a decade ago. Something like this could only happen to me...

I can only hope that Mr. Fulton has a long, miserable, tortured life ahead of him for what he's done. He's certainly earned it.

It all started about 17 years ago. There I was, early in my rose-growing career, perusing the 1993-'94 Weeks wholesale rose catalog. There, towards the back of the hybrid tea listing, was an old rose called Talisman. Its breeder was listed as "Montgomery - 1929". Just like all the other roses in the catalog, this one had a full description, as well as a photo. Unfortunately, the photo was of a full blown-open bloom, so I really couldn't tell much about its appearance, other than it was a red/goldish-copper blend. But I was, of course, intrigued by the date of introduction: 1929. Here was a plant that was a living remnant of the Jazz Age.

A couple months passed and I was fortunate enough to be given Stirling Macoby's Ultimate Rose Book as a gift. Here again was mention made of this rose named Talisman. According to Macoby, the Montgomery Rose Co. asked and got six times the price of other roses for their Talisman plants. It was that unique in its day and time. Unfortunately, the photo in Macoby's book was no better than the one in the Weeks catalog.

The years passed and I continued to run across references to Talisman from time to time, but I never did see any decent photos of this rose, nor did I ever see one for sale anywhere.

Enter the internet.


Finally, while researching roses over at Helpmefind.com one night I found some decent photos of Talisman's blooms at the peak of perfection. It is no wonder that Montgomery charged so much for this rose; even by today's standards it is an utterly unique and beautiful rose. It was, in fact, one of the leading florist roses in its day, as well as being one of the most popular garden roses.

The next thing to do was find a source for a Talisman plant. Once again, enter the internet.

I managed to track down three or four vendors that were still propagating this old variety. All of the places I looked at grow their roses from cuttings on their own roots, not grafted as is the usual method. This didn't really worry me as I have propagated and grown my own hybrid teas from cuttings before. I finally settled on Rogue Valley Roses as my vendor of choice. So I placed my order early last week with the date of shipment to be on this past Monday, May 10th. It arrived on Wednesday, the 12th, and... it is a cutting alright, and a small one at that. But it's rooted and it's growing (even has buds), so it should be okay.

I'm going to run this little guy through a full bloom cycle in its current pot and then it will be potted up to a one or two gallon container. The eventual plan will be to pot it up into a 5 gallon (or larger) pot; that is where its permanent home will be. You see, these old hybrid teas aren't always as winter-hardy as the newer ones, so it only makes sense to keep it in a pot in the heated greenhouse over the winter months. This little rose plant is the single most expensive one that I have ever purchased ($31.00, including shipping and handling), and it's becoming an increasingly rare variety -- not something that I want to take a chance on losing over the winter. No, it is best that I preserve it. It is a remnant of an impossible-to-recapture time in American history.


I will try to post updates on its progress on this blog.

For the first time since the spring of 1982 -- twenty-eight years ago -- my body is completely free of nicotine. W00T! :)

Click on this photo to see it full size. It's incredible. Every time I see a photo like this, something deep inside me tells me that I was born way too late; that the era depicted in the photo is where I belong. And I don't say that lightly. Ever since I was a wee lad I've always been drawn like a magnet to the pre-WWII years of this country. Everything from the machinery of the era, to the music, the movies (Mary Pickford!), to the social mores has fascinated me. Needless to say, it has led to more than my fair share of depression over the years. It's also one of the reasons that I've always been so obsessed with Merle Haggard's music; Merle has always felt the same way. Brian Wilson (of Beach Boys fame) once said, "I just wasn't made for these times." I'm not a big Wilson fan, but that single sentence pretty much sums up my entire existence.

To me.

I am completely lost as to how to proceed with THAT situation. It is the most drawn-out, bewildering, heartbreaking thing that I have ever been through in my life. Would you believe that it's been nearly 18 YEARS since I first met her?! Combine all of that with all of the bizarre, unexplainable things that have happened, and... what is a person to do?

*sigh*

Did you ever notice that I just post about the same things over, and over, and over again? I don't even know why I re-started this blog.

Okay, so I'm going to give this another try. I figure if that guy in the photo below can break a 17-year cocaine/speed/marijuana/alcohol/whore addiction by quitting cold-turkey, I can quit a simple little 27-year nicotine addiction (has it been that long?) the same way. Trying to cut back gradually sure hasn't worked. {:-(


Ol' Waylon really was a ballsy S.O.B... and now you know where he got the nickname "Waymore." Heroes sometimes come in unexpected forms. {:-)

I'm not going to say who that woman in the photo up there is. I don't want the search engines to pick it up, because if she finds this, it might would definitely hurt her feelings.

At one time (high school) I was about as much in love with her as a guy could be. I mean, it was one of those "burn with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns"-type deals. But it wasn't so much a physical attraction as it was an emotional one. Well, actually it was physical, but not in a down-in-the-gutter sort of way. I just thought she was pretty. Believe it or not, at that time, she looked a heck of a lot like Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life. There were some other photos of her on the site where I found this, and... it's hard to believe that this is the same cow girl. Judging from the info she provided on that site, she's already been through one marriage, has a kid or two, and is now with another guy. Needless to say, I'm glad that things didn't work out between her and I. As much as I liked (loved?) her, somehow I just knew she wasn't the one I was looking for, and I was right -- in a big, BIG way.

I finally got around to overhauling my train site, and it is friggin' GORGEOUS, if I do say so myself. The stock template I used is beautiful in and of itself, but I just spent the past week making a ton of improvements on it that I am quite happy with. These range from adding a formatted date header (which the stock template lacked), to tweaking the behavior of the links, adjusting the top menu so that it is aligned properly in IE, adding a subtle 275 x 1 pixel separator between each post, adding a 1 pixel border around the photos, and on and on... If you look, you'll see that I also made that last adjustment to this site, as well -- it's just a simple little piece of code that you add to the CSS portion of the site's source code, but it makes all the difference in the world in the appearance of the photos. Fun stuff!

You know, now that I look at this site again, I can see that I'm going to have to do something with it, as well. I can't stand the fact that there is virtually no padding between the post titles and the post text... it's just little things like that that drive me NUTS!

P.S. Click on that pic of crazy old Merle down below, and you'll see that it opens in a pop-up window. That's another little trick that I just learned. This computer stuff is great! {:-)

Yep, today is my fortieth birthday. So it's double the festivities for me (Thanksgiving & birthday). Yip-de-freakin'-do.

Yeah, I'm back. Don't really know why, but... here it is. It's been over a year since I posted anything to a "personal" blog. I removed myself from Matt's blog last year; since he has obviously abandoned it, there wasn't any sense in ME keeping it updated -- it's his blog, not mine.

So there's the first post of my newly-resurrected blog. So there.