Century Oak

You knew that I was going to figure out a way to get more A&M icons on this site. Just so you all know, the picture in my header now is a shot from under the Century Oak that I'm borrowing from the Texas A&M website. I don't know the person sitting on the bench, but it looks to me like they are pondering some profound bit of wisdom posted on the Michael Musings blog.

Seriously, that is the same bench where Leah sat when I proposed to her. According to tradition, marriages that are started under this tree will last as long as a the tree has. Over ten years later I'd say...so far, so good.

From the Texas A&M website:
"The Century Oak, located in the heart of campus near the Academic Building, is a place many Aggies choose to propose marriage. Well more than 100 years of age, the tree, a live oak, was one of the first trees planted on Texas A&M’s massive 5,200-acre campus. In addition to the historic oak, there are between 25,000 to 30,000 trees on Texas A&M land, which occupies much of Brazos County. They include such types as the Kentucky Coffee, the Jerusalem Thorn, the Western Soapberry, the Kawakami Pear, the Chinese Pistache, the Carolina Laurel and the Afghan Pine. Complementing the trees, some 150,000 plants are grown each year to beautify the campus. "

Stand Here and Don't Move...

If you didn't already know, today is Jeffrey's birthday. I thought it would be cool to do a post in his honor to remember the occasion, so as he would say: Do you remember when....

When we were kids and Papa was still working, we had access to all kinds of cool things that were removed from emergency room guests. We got keychains, patches, rings, knives, and the occasional Chinese throwing star. As a matter of fact, I happened on this picture of one that is a copy of the exact one I got from Papa's stash.

Now, as I posted earlier, pretty much all of the male children born between '74 and '80 wanted to grow up to be ninja. Which ties in nicely with Jeffrey's profile question and explains why we wanted to get to China in the first place. Anyway, after watching tons of Chuck Norris movies, all of the episodes of "The Master", the movie American Ninja, and anything else we could get our hands on, we were pretty good at choreographed fighting. We needed to be ready for the real world, though, and that meant weapons training.

With my trusty apprentice at my side, I staged a scene for practicing my accuracy with throwing stars. I had already been throwing the thing into the sheetrock in my closet (behind the clothes so Mom wouldn't see) for months. I was ready.

My apprentice took his place. Idiot. And I took my throwing star. Moron. I said, "Jeff, don't move," and I threw the star into the sheetrock beside him. Two wrongs didn't make a right, but at least they didn't make an emergency room visit either.

After all the stupid things that we did together (and that I did to Jeffrey), I'm certainly glad that we can still celebrate his birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, bro!!

NewsGator

I don't know about you, but with so many people online with blogs I've got a lot of pages that I check daily for updates. Of those, a few are sometimes disappointing, but I hate to not check on the chance that Jeffrey or John has posted some new pearl of wisdom. To help with this issue, I started digging around in the Blogger help files and came across NewsGator.

I signed up today for this free service, and it's pretty cool. I've got everyone's blog listed, so now I can just login here and each blog will indicate whether there are new posts or not. Of course, everything was "new" when I first set it up, so I marked everything as read and now any new posts that someone puts out will show here so that I don't have to keep going to Jeff's blog and seeing the same thing over and over again. If you want to get to the actual blog site to post a comment or check comments, the site provides a direct link that opens a new browser window, too. It's very versatile.

If you want to be sure that your site is publishing information about when new posts are made, check under settings/site feed and make sure that "publish site feed" is set to "yes." You'll also see on that page the URL for your publication. Mine is http://michael-musings.blogspot.com/atom.xml, and everyone else's follows the same naming convention. It's this address that you would need to put into NewsGator for it to get publication info.

I hope that you find this helpful. Shoot me an email or post a comment if you have any questions.