Evil things I found in my childhood toy chest.

Just got through looking through an old toy chest I had when I was a young boy.  We are in the middle, as most know, a presidential election.  The bad news is no I did not find a Mickey Mantle baseball card.  I just knew I had one.  But maybe I found reasons why the facebook post I've been seeing lately thinks I'm a Standard Redneck and a racist.  First there's got to be a couple of good influences here.  The Robot doesn't have to be evil does it?  Then the orange box which is a Telegraph machine for learning the Morse Code.  The black book was my bible.  And the cow horn was made for me by my Great Grandfather who was a sharecropper for the Paterson family.  But then you have an army truck which from FB post means I want to kill people.  Then there's the plastic toy soldiers that I'm sure I played kill the Japanese with.  Then there's the most evil of all, a toy gun.  I'm sure I used to strap it on and played, "make the Indians slaves".  Well I guess the cow horn is evil also because the cow might not of cared much for it being made.  Besides my family must be evil because shortly after they arrived here in Texas from Tennessee they went to war with Mexico.  Probably because they had darker skin.

Here's a picture of my Great Grandfather that made me that cow horn.  He carved BB in it for my name Buddy Bell.  He didn't have much just a saddle which I think my cousin Joe still has.  He was Joe's grandfather.  He worked cattle for a land owner and for pay you got a place to live and an acre or so for farming.  Maybe a small salary I don't know but I do know things where different in his day.  But it's 2016 so why bitch FB friends?

One last thing that proves white boys are evil.  I got this for Christmas one year.  Once again I went straight to the encyclopedia, lucky there was no Google back then, and looked up something.  I went back to this set and sure enough there was a bottle of Sulfur and a bottle of Salt Peter.  John Lesser came over and the experiment was on.  I went out on the back porch and got a piece of charcoal out of my dad's barbecue charcoal bag and smashed it on the the sidewalk.  I mixed them together placed a grasshopper on top of it and said, "watch this Lamar" lit it and blew up the grasshopper.  I'm sure glad my mom didn't hear it.  That type of stuff was short lived though because a few days later I shot a hole in our roof with my dad's 300 Savage.  Boy did I get a whopping.  I learned what not to play with.

Don't leave your beer cans laying around for your kids!

I'm alone today so I thought I open up an old toy chest I had when I was a young boy.  Why would a 9yr old boy have a beer can in with his toys you ask?  See picture of the back side below.

It was 1963 and I just saw a band from England on the Ed Sullivan Show that had electric guitars. I was so blown away that I went straight to my parent's Encyclopedia Britannica and looked up electric guitar.  We didn't have google back then.  All I had was a wood acoustic guitar my parents got me from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.  Which was kind of like Amazon back in my days.  It said the pickups were made of metal with copper wire wrapped around them.  So I cut a piece out of a beer can my dad had drank the night before and wrapped wire around it.  I tried to copy a diagram from the encyclopedia using a battery from another toy and plugged it into a radio I had.  It didn't work!  The name of the band by the way was "The Beatles"

Grandkids in the South Texas Spring. 2016

Here' a picture of my youngest grandchild, Kailyn, from April of this year.  She just got a new puppy called "Ruger".

 Here's my grandsons Mason and Maddox.  If you notice I used the same sky.  I use an open source program called "Gimp".  The sky on the top picture is zoomed in more but if you look at the tiny cloud in the middle you can see the size is different and in the top picture nearer to the horizon.  Getting the clouds to show through the brush was a trick.  I didn't do as good of job on the bottom picture because it was my first try at layering mask. I lost detail in the fence and some clouds show through the fence post.  Sure it's easy to go back and paint in the post from it's layer but I learned that trick after I posted it to Facebook.

 Here's a screenshot of the App "Gimp" with a picture before I edited the sky.  I Googled sky pictures until my OCD thought I found a sky that matched better with the Bluebonnets.

I saw a post from a cousin of mine of a bird picture a friend of her had posted.  She was holding the bird in her hand because it had hit an window.   I've seen one like it before but it is very rare in our area.  It reminded me of an encounter with a bird I had just had in our area.
 I didn't put the Christmas Tree up in the garage this year, instead I hind it on the back porch.  A mockingbird made a nest in it and hatched eggs.  The other day I saw one of them on the ground with it's mother.  I picked it up and put it back in the tree twice.  The third time I got it on my finger and took it to show the family.  While inside I put it on my shoulders and played guitar.  I put it back on the nest after that and the next morning they had all flown away.  I can't believe how fast mockingbirds mature!  Here the first picture I took when it started to leave the nest.

   Guess the reason I'm posting this to my blog is the blog started with an experience I had with an owl.  Maybe it's a marker of a period shift in my life.  Maybe it's just a stupid encounter with another bird.

Here's a better picture of my grand daughter's blue eyes.

Kaylyn our third grand baby

Here she is our latest grand baby Kaylyn.  She's the daughter of my number 3 child.  She has just started to crawl. 

Here she is pictured with the pink frog we got her for Valentine.  I got to see her crawling, the first time for me the other day.  We also had a really good meal with Justin and Lindsay my daughter and son-in-law.  He's a chef and fixed a really good soup dinner.  Gracie the dog was also excited to see us.

As Time Goes By

I'm totally out of the Trucking Business now.  I had to sell the Truck really cheap to pay off my back taxes.  Especially the back years on my home.  My wife's car had already been repo so after the truck sold we had to move our things out of our house and sell it.  I've moved in with my parents and guess I'm now a bum.

Some of the good news is now we have another grand son called Maddox so Mason has a little brother.

Also Lindsay is with child a little girl who will be named later.

I'm having an hard time dealing with all the time and work that I put into the trucking business.  The 14 hour work days is the norm in trucking.  I just can't go back to that when I've lost everything doing it.
  I've always wanted to try and return to the days when I was a musician.  My family is not behind me on this and think I'm crazy.  But I've always believed I had a special gift for it.   www.youtube.com/user/bigfootyancey  is my You Tube channel where my efforts toward getting my ability to play guitar back after 30 years of driving truck is recorded in different videos over the last year.