Micky The Dog

Brother Dan and I were IM-ing and somehow Micky the Dog came up.

We had been in the house at 10194 Romana Drive for less than a year when, one weekend afternoon, Joan and Bill came in from wherever they had been and announced they had something for us.

It was a dog.

I was completely surprised; I for one had not been lobbying for a dog.  I knew they were trouble.  They got run over by cars and broke your heart.  And then you had to feel guilty too for their having been run over.  And they meant work.

I didn’t like the look of this dog.  The runty little thing was technically, as it turned out, part Rat Terrier and part Chihuahua.  It had short brown hair and a disproportionately large male organ; it yipped and furthermore its long black nails went clickity-click on the hardwood floor.  Clickity-click whenever it moved.

Also it was over a year old and already had a name: “Micky.”  I did not warm to that dog.  Being almost 12, I was rarely called anymore “Nicky.”  Still it happened.  The “Nicky” “Micky” thing, resting on the difference of one mere letter, annoyed me.  Personally, were I a mother and a father getting a dog for a family that had a Nick in it would not get a dog named Mick.  If it came to that a dog named Rick would have been better. 

Frankly had I been a mother and a father getting a dog for a family of human boys I would have made sure to get a dog whose name did not approximate in any way, shape, or form the name of one of the human boys in the family.  I am of the opinion, in fact, that dogs should never be given human names.  They should be given traditional dog names like “Spike” or “Hector.”

I doubt Joan or Bill gave it a thought.  The dog was what they wanted.  First of all it was free, having come from the pound.  Apparently, given all the yipping, it was in good health.  Also they wanted a small dog because Micky the Dog was to be a “house dog” and not an outside dog of the type to which I had become previously accustomed.

Though perhaps at some largely unconscious level Joan liked the idea of Micky the Dog and Nicky the Boy as a way of promoting sibling rivalry.  Certainly at times it did feel like that, with Micky the Dog coming out the winner.  Though to my credit, whatever else his shortcomings, I never held any of this against Micky the Dog.

First Cousins

Please find below the list of the grandchildren of William Berner Tingle and Bertha Mines Tingle as compiled by Jenny Lind Good Bannister:

Grandchildren in birth order:

Gordon Brockman (d.)                         9-5-44             Edith and Bill

William Nicholas Tingle (Nick)               12-14-45         WB and Joan

Neal Mines Tingle, Jr. (Rusty)               12-20-47         Neal and Doris

Susan Gayle Brockman Pittman            4-8-48             Edith and Bill

Stephen James Tingle                         4-11-48          WB and Joan

Jacks Berner Tingle                             2-25-49           Neal and Doris

Wayne Keith Brockman                        7-29-49           Edith and Bill

Elizabeth Nan Good Williamson            4-7-53             Addie and Ed

David Andrew Tingle (Dave?)               5-12-53           WB and Joan

Charlotte Ann Tingle                          11-17-54          Carl and Virginia

Lucy Day Tingle Dean                          4-4-55             Neal and Doris

Tony Kevin Tingle                               4-27-57           Neal and Doris

Theresa Brockman  Hershberger          7-31-58           Edith and Bill

Jenny Lind Good Bannister                  1-8-59             Addie and Ed

Catherine Louise Corbett (Cathy)         12-18-59         Mamie and Wylie

Janet Lowry Good Walston                  5-4-60             Addie and Ed

Daniel Jeffery Tingle (Dan)                 7-15-60           WB and Joan

Helen Elizabeth Corbett (Beth)              2-1-61             Mamie and Wylie

Edward Floyd Corbett                           10-2-63           Mamie and Wylie

Richard Berner Tingle (Ricky)               5-6-64             Douglas and Becky

Sam Fuller Tingle                                10-6-64           Neal and Doris

Amy Rebecca Tingle King                      5-4-66            Douglas and Becky

Cynthia Lee Good Stockman (Cyndi)       10-14-70        Addie and Ed

Emily Viola Tingle                                  6-10-76         Douglas and Becky

 

My blog has a search function.  Should you wish to refer to this list in the future, type in First Cousins and this page should come up.
 

Just yesterday I became a Facebook friend of Samantha Dobbins of Greenville, SC, whom I infer from the list above is the daughter of Sam Fuller Tingle, and the granddaughter of Neal and Doris.  Is this correct? 

 

The Identity Crisis Continued

I don’t know.  Maybe Sunday night I checked my blogs to see what my students had written about the identity crisis thing we have been reading and talking about.  And I just freaked out because what I saw there was pretty awful, like no comprehension of the topic and poorly written too.  I felt really upset: frustrated and rejected.  I mean teaching this stuff is new and I wanted it to work.

But I got up the next day and wrote even more on the assignment pages for the classes about the ID crisis, and hit the ground running in the classes trying to turn the situation around if possible.  Don’t know if I did or not.

I said stuff like, “In your previous blogs on you as students nearly everybody reported stress.  Stress, stress, stress.  Now where is this stress coming from?”  And I went on to talk about how going to college could be part of an ID crisis.  As Erikson says it’s a developmental step that brings with it a sense of increased vulnerability AND a sense of increased potential.  The ID crisis is not a bad thing.  Call it a growing pain.

I brought up the issue of a major and picking one.  Quite a few students in my classes are still undeclared.  So going away to college—and I stressed the away part—as a movement from parents towards autonomy (standing on your own two legs) brings with it, on one leg, increased vulnerability (now you have to decide), and that, on the other leg, goes along with increased potential (multiple roles lying ahead that were not there before); so part of the stress I tried to say might come (not so much from tests and all that) as tripping over your own feet.

I had them get into groups to read to each other what they had written and then I went around and checked in on the groups to see what they were up to.  I stopped especially with one group that had a young woman in it who had been talking before about troubles picking a major.  She says she has no idea what to do and had been taking “random” classes to try to find out like the Biology of Cancer, and Astronomy, and Art History, and I forget the other but something pretty “random.” 

And I suggested to her that maybe taking all these “random” classes was her way of exploring the possibilities and potentials.  But she didn’t seem to be listening and said, out of nowhere, that the real problem was “I don’t want to get old.”  And another student in an adjacent group, piped up, “Yea, that’s so funny.  I was thinking about that on the way to this class.”  And a guy in the group said something of the same thing.  So I figured this young woman was onto something I hadn’t thought about and said, “Old?  What do you mean by that?”  She said, “Old, you know.  All wrinkly and baggy and old.”

And there I stood, exhausted, with hair falling out on the spot, and all wrinkly and baggy and old.

 

 Speaking of old, Brother Dan sent me a link to a video he put up on U-Tube featuring “Good-Bye Blue Monday,” with Dan playing bass and Kim rhythm and Chris on drums in a converted garage clear back in 1985.  Damn, seeing Dan looking so young makes me feel so old.  I almost started crying.  But, really, check out the video at.

Here’s another link to more recent songs Brother Dan put up on My Space.

Truck on! Musical Tingles.

Musical Tingles

We Tingles seem to have some creative juices.  Recently I heard from Jack Tingle.  The Roscoe will be playing as follows:

 

theroscoe

 

For songs click here:
 

 Also musically inclined, Nathan Jey Tingle of Nashville, Tennessee.  Wish I had a bigger pic:

 

 For Songs click here.

 Brother Dan also plays guitar, sings, and writes songs.  Back in the 80’s he and Kim had a group called Good-Bye Blue Monday.  I have an old tape of their songs dated August 9, 1986.  Here’s one that I digitized, called "She Fell."

 And I too keep strumming the guitar and writing songs, though vocally and guitar wise I am not in the same league with Jack, Nathan, and Dan.  Still, I keep trucking and am working currently on a batch of love songs. Here’s one in progress: Fool For Love

I felt sort of odd yesterday, Thursday, the whole day.  Perhaps my unconscious was aware that yesterday was February 7, the second anniversay of the death of William Berner Tingle Junior.

wbo8 

Catching Up with Thanks

Thanks to Cousin Lucy, in a previous comment, for clearing up the mystery of the sickly white egret which turns out to be not an egret at all but a Grey Heron and probably a perfectly healthy one which only looked sickly to me because it wasn’t acting like an egret, which thank goodness, it wasn’t because that’s not what it was.

Lucy said it was a Grey Heron and the picture of one on Wikipedia sure looks like my Grey Heron except that one pictured in Wikipedia lives or lived in Africa. 

greyheron
Grey Heron in Africa 

 Thanks also to Brother Steve for his discussion of herons and the habits of those strange Pelicans that nest in the Mud at Lake Wohlford rather than somewhere down by the ocean which is 20 miles away as the Pelican flies.

Sorry.

Thanks also to Nephew Brian for the pictures taken from rooftop of the building where he resides of the sky and the Oakland sky line where his building is located.

I don’t know that they had any philosophical motive or not but Brother Dave and Sister-in-Law Teresa passed Christmas and a good portion of the Holidays not at home by their festive Christmas tree but in their motor home at Joshua Tree, California.  Joshua Tree is located out in the California Desert near 29 Palms.  I think there was a movie called 29 Palms or maybe it was an Album.

While Joshua Tree is in the desert—it is winter—and from this picture of Brother Dave it appears the desert can get pretty cold.

daveatjoshua

While at Joshua Tree Brother Dave and Sister in Law Teresa visited the Sutton Ranch.From this picture, Brother Dave must have felt momentarily at home because, be damned, if this doesn’t look like it could be one of WB’s backyards. 

davedesert

Oh—I just noticed—410 pm, Tuesday—that a number of folks did the abbreviated Briggs-Myers.  Thanks.  I hope it was some fun and am sure I will have some analytic thoughts there upon later.  

Citrix

Brother Dan works for a software/service firm called Citrix.  I used one of their products a few years back before I knew they were located right here in town.  I subscribed to “Go to My PC.”  Windows comes with a lame-o version; go to Accessories, under that go to Communication; click on remote desktop and if you have all the right numbers you can hook up your home computer to say your computer at work, of if you are off traveling somewhere you can use it to hook up directly with your home computer.  And I do mean directly.  If you subscribe to Go to my PC it works real easily and once you get it to work, you can click on a spot and immediately up will come the screen of the PC you are trying to access, I mean the desktop and through that you can go directly into the distant PC as if it was sitting right there in front of you.  Say you need a document from your distant PC on the PC in front of you, you can go in, find the document, and email it to yourself to the PC in front of you.  They sell other more complicated services for business, and well, it’s a good product and they have been making money hand over fist.  If I were a traveling business man, I couldn’t live without it.

 
Brother Dan came by yesterday and he took me over to the new digs that Citrix is in the process of moving into—their corporate office.  Turns out it’s less than a mile from where I live, in a pack of buildings I hadn’t noticed before.

 

danoffice

Here is Brother Dan in his new office.

 

danoffice2 
Here’s a view of the big office.  Note the snazzy carpet and the open ceiling effect.  Designed Iexpect to make the whole room feel more open.
 
danoffice5 
Here’s Dan in what will be the "game room"–can you believe–of the entire office floor. 
 
danoffice3 
 
Here’s what Brother Dan is looking at.
 
I don’t know why these pics. came up fuzzy.  My little camera is usually pretty trustworthy.

 

The Social Construction of Allergies

Sorry to hear JT of Greenville, SC, has suffered so from allergies.  Brother Dan way back when, like in the ‘70’s, went in to the doctor when they did those patch tests on a person’s back and his whole back lit up like a neon sign.  He was (is) like allergic to everything: dairy, wheat products, dust, dust mites, super dust—whatever, he was (is) allergic to it.  Time was he would doze off while talking to you from the fatigue of those allergies.  We knew a lot about soy products before other people did. 

I don’t know that Brother Steve has any big allergies.

Brother Dave though he has some strange ones that involve the swelling of body parts.  One time he woke up and there were these red stripes across his back that looked like he had been lashed to mast and whipped with a cat-o-nine tails.  These things are dangerous.  Once or twice or more his tongue has swollen up and his throat too, threatening his air supply.  Just recently he got from the doctor something to put adrenaline into himself in case of emergency.

Me, I have the spring hay fever stuff, with runny eyes, and stuff in the head that too frequently turns into stuff in the chest, and O of course that lactose intolerance I wrote about a while back involving incredibly stinky flatulence.

Now I suppose you could say “allergies” are socially constructed since through out most of human history “allergies” did not exist just people with runny noses and funny stripes on their backs that came out of nowhere.  Now we have a name for those things “allergies” and know something about the causes of these things and how also even to treat them, a little bit, so as to get rid of them.

I suppose the biggest social constructor of whatever has been science.  Sometimes of course they have been wrong.  I have wanted to make a list of now defunct diseases; diseases they said existed but in fact didn’t.  In Dostoevsky, the characters are all the time getting “brain” fever.  I think that’s a sort of historical disease.  And at one time, they thought that out there in outer space was something called “the ether.”  Turns out there are no ether, except the stuff that puts you to sleep.

Now, too, when people die and they write about it in the newspaper, if they say anything about why the person died, they say something like “died of cancer,” or “heart failure,” or “stroke.”  I can remember when a person died and they wrote of “natural causes.”  Nobody dies of “natural causes” anymore.  That’s sad really; it would be kind of comforting to die of natural causes.  The opposite of natural causes would be unnatural causes, like having a tree fall on you or somebody killing you.

But death itself is not a social construction.

The Social Construction of Sickness

Germs are real.  Quite true.  The way people react to a person infected by germs or how a person feels about getting germy—well, that’s a social construction of sickness.

I read a book on the social construction of the sickness of cancer and how if you look closely at the language used to describe this sickness, it seems to imply that people who get cancer are getting what they deserve.  Cancer as punishment for something one did, rather than, hell, just getting cancer.

Another book writes about the social construction of insanity, how in the middle ages the insane just roamed the population.  Maybe people threw rocks at them or something but they weren’t considered sick.  Come the 18th century, and suddenly they start locking up the insane and treating them like sick people.  Think Bedlam—one of the first insane asylums.

And then those people, that Jack speaks of, who think being sick is all in a person’s head, as if they are lunatics who are imaging that they are sick, and if they just stopped imagining they were sick, then they wouldn’t be sick, as if not imagining snot running out of your nose would make the snot go away.

And then there’s being sick in the head.  As in nuts, insane, or simply depressed.  As far as I can remember in my particular branch of the Tingle family being sick in the head was simply not possible.  If you were sick in the head, something was wrong with you morally or ethically.

If you were sick in the head, you were just faking it and you should be as ashamed of yourself and just crawl in a hole or something—because you were so utterly vile.  Suck it up!  Suck it up!  What the hell does that mean?

I do think there is something called psychosomatic illness.  But this doesn’t mean you want to be sick; it means that deep down there in the unconscious you have a hell of a lot of conflict about something, some inner pain, that might actually affect the immune system and so you get sick.  After all we are constantly swimming with germs, and if the system goes down they get in.

So sickness sometimes can be a sign, as in, hey, dude, you are really really stressed out.  I made a joke some time back, “The Tingle idea of a vacation is getting sick.”

I have never heard of a salt sea wash.  I will check it out.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense.  I still got that cold and am hung over from Nyquil.

Another First

Another first—that I wish hadn’t happened.  But I called an accountant for the first time in my life.  Actually I didn’t get the accountant; I got her “assistant.”  I had thought accountants just worked for large firms and there was no way to get a hold of one.  But I phoned the “assistant” for the guy at Morgan Stanley (another first—the Morgan Stanley account, I mean) who set up the CDs for the Tingle Family trust and she gave me the number for an accountant.  Apparently any Joe Blow can hire an accountant.

I had to do this because as far as I could figure out from the idiot lawyers who are doing the legal paper for the TFT that if I am ever going to be able to “disburse” the funds in the trust to my brothers, I have to file an income tax form for the deceased Joan for the period of her life in this tax year, 2007, and also a tax form for income generated by the trust, though I can figure out for the life of me how I am supposed to do that since I don’t know when the trust will be dissolved and thus don’t know how long the trust will continue to generate some interest.

So I am going to see an accountant.  I wonder how one dresses to see an accountant.  Not that I care, since I will dress the same as dress wherever I go—which is a t-shirt, plus jeans, and some form of footwear.  I have the feeling that maybe the accountant will be able to show that the trust is not going to generate enough income to be taxable; if this is the case, then I may be able to send the lawyers some official documentation of that fact and his legal mumbo-jumbo with the trust will be over.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, the paralegal at the law office is doing a legal accounting of the monies in the trust based on information I sent him.  But then he sent an email saying that they, the lawyers, had not received paperwork—something called an Acknowledgement and something called a Receipt—from Brothers Dave and Steve.  So I called both of the guys and they said of course that they had sent in the paperwork.  Brother Dave, who knows about such things, had actually made copies of the documents he had signed and returned; and immediately faxed them off to the law office.

I don’t know what to make of a legal firm that loses paperwork like this.  This is not the first time either. I don’t know how Joan and WB found these particular incompetents.  But they have caused me no end of useless and needless anxiety due to their screw ups and in their inability to communicate with any clarity. 

But it’s all my fault I guess.  I could have had all the trust work done by a lawyer I found up here in SB, but the incompetents had set up the trust originally and had all the paper work so I figured it was best to go with them.

The next time my parents die I will make sure to hire the lawyer myself.

Under the Porch

About that tomato concoction WB used to eat with black-eyed peas, a reliable source adds: 

the tomato, sugar and black pepper black eye pea accompaniment of which you speak is actually a rather delectable side dish properly called "stewed tomatoes".  It’s actually a great "gravy" not only for any kind of peas or beans, but is also quite tasty on biscuits (which should first be covered with freshly stewed corn – a whole different story altogether)or rice or mashed potatoes or loaf bread (as opposed to "corn bread), or even boiled okra – yum . Of course, you can always just eat stewed tomatoes with a spoon right out of a bowl – that is, if the bowl isn’t already filled with warm cornbread, black pepper, and sweet milk (as opposed to "butter" milk).

I do not remember having eaten cornbread with sweet milk from a bowl but I do occasionally have a hankering for stewed tomatoes warmed up and straight from the can.

super8 

I didn’t know but Brother Steve reports that he is also lactose intolerant and had to give up on cheese.

My niece Savannah, who just turned 13, had her hair cut last week for the first time in her life.

Brother Dave and Sister-in-Law Teresa went off for four days in their motor home to Dos Picos, a park not far from San Diego.

Carol went to visit some good friends in Dallas, who just moved there a few months back, and to do some networking at Dance Departments in colleges there.  She left last Wednesday, I think it was and was to return last night (Sunday) but freaky thunderstorms delayed planes and she has had to stay over another day.  She got a cheap rate from the airlines for a Super 8 not ten minutes from the airport near a part of Dallas called the Grapevine, an historic district, not bad to hand out.

She is booked to fly back to SB this evening.  But who knows, the reports are for more thunderstorms.  God I hate flying.

I think “sweet milk” is condensed milk that comes in a can.

________________________________________________________________________________

That’s the Super 8 near Grapevine in Dallas.  Though it might be a Super 8 anywhere.