Completely dismayed by the Minority Report

I guess I owe a number of people, upwards of 3, an apology for my comments about crop pants. I am a discerning fashion nut and simply thought that everyone thinks as I do. How could they not? And, yes, I can sniff out a clothing store a mile away. While Kathy and Rosemary were in the small Osage town in Oklahoma, I saw a sign a couple of blocks away that said, "Fine Apparel" and felt the pull. I bought a pair of FDJ jeans. I asked the shop owner if she had them in white. She said "no" but would you consider a capris pant? I opened the dressing room door and stared down the barrel of white crop pants! I remained polite and was not moved from my goal - to buy a pair of jeans.

Today's drive was a long one, but we are ensconced in an extended stay 2-room and a kitchen suite in Austin. We'll be here for 4 nights or so. It's comfortable, my travelling companions are on the net and printing all kinds of stuff, while I watch the reports on Paris Hilton's release from jail. Civil rights attorneys are up in arms about this coddle-the-rich release.

We stood at a stop somewhere outside of Tyler, Texas, this afternoon and I heard the most beautiful birdsong. The birds were in bamboo-like vegetation. The local guy I stopped said it wasn't bamboo but was probably in the family. The stalks are cut by kids for fishing poles. Kathy thought I was hearing whippoorwill and mockingbird. It was a beautiful sound.

Mt. Vernon, Texas, is one of our best stops. We stayed overnight at the Super 8, which I believe I mentioned last night. We got the last room so that put us under the stairway. This morning we stopped in at the museum, which was a delightful experience. The town writer dropped in. The volunteers who work at the museum and the writer love what they're doing and love the area. They compile birth and death rates and collect stories of local lore. I played Don Meredith's jukebox (DM is from Mt. Vernon), a little Johnny Matthis and a little Doris Day, while Rosemary and Kathy toured the museum's upstairs, where they saw the country's only bird shell exhibition.

Here's a story from the Mt. Vernon Museum. On display is the wedding dress, fragile and beautiful, of a 20 year old, circa 1850 or so. Her husband to be was the town's undertaker. On the morning of their wedding, a famous gunslinger in another town was killed. The groom/undertaker and his assistant picked up the body, bringing it back to the Mt. Vernon funeral parlor. The assistant was so excited to see the body of a real gunslinger that he pulled the gun out of the holster, it fired, and killed the groom/undertaker on what was to be his wedding day. The bride went on with her life (I can't remember what happened next with her).

The volunteers at the museum also told me that there was a sharp increase in rig wrecks in the late 1800s. Lots of speeding, I suppose. I told them that I hadn't been able to order a beer with dinner the night before at the Mt. Vernon Cafe. The guys got a big kick out of that and told me that theirs is a dry county, where you can bring your own bottle into a restaurant and drink, but you can't buy the beer on site. If the restaurant was a club, you could.