How I spent my birthday

Of course, it isn't over, so something magical might yet happen.  
Yesterday Cliff and I were heading to the local Mexican place to split a meal when a nearby elderly neighbor flagged us down.  Cliff turned the car around and we went to see what he wanted.  Turns out our next-door neighbors (not the newest ones) had a runaway dog and their teenagers had been along looking for it.  After they were gone, the dog showed up in the old guy's yard, but it was too shy to come to him.  I called it out of the middle of the highway and it came cautiously to me.  I patted its head and decided the easiest way to return it to its yard would be to pick it up and carry it, since it wasn't a very big dog.  When I first started to pick it up, it nipped at me a little, but I didn't figure it would actually bite me enough to hurt and continued picking it up.  Bad choice, because that dog bit and made a puncture wound that must have gone to the bone.  I dropped it like a hot potato and let the old guy worry about what to do with it.  
It was surprisingly painful, but as long as I didn't use the hand (the left one), it was bearable.  So we went to Olathe, Kansas to buy a truck.  Yes, Cliff finally bought a truck so he can haul tractors to tractor shows.

No, no, that isn't it.  That's a Remley photoshop picture.  Boy, he chose an old picture to play with; look how little the trees were!  

I wasn't terribly impressed with the truck when we went to look at it.  It was filthy inside and out and had a funny smell.  It's a dually, so there are six tires to worry about buying when the time comes.  It will get about ten miles to the gallon, although since we won't be using it as our main vehicle, that isn't such a big deal.  

Cliff and grandson Arick are trying to figure out how to get to the spark plugs to change them.  

Back to my birthday:  I decided last night before bedtime that I should probably see somebody about my aching hand, if only to get antibiotics to prevent infection.  Rather than go to the emergency room, though, I opted to wait until this morning and go to an urgent care clinic, planning to be there as soon as they opened so Cliff would have the rest of the day to mess around with his truck.  
I got up around 5 A.M. as usual, and just as I was headed toward the kitchen to make coffee, the electricity went out.  Great, happy birthday to me.  I can't bear to start a day without coffee, so I dug a percolator pot we used to keep in our camper.  Then it struck me that I didn't have any ground coffee.  I never grind my coffee beans ahead of time, because I want all that wonderful, fresh-ground flavor.  

mine is similar to this one

The morning was saved when I remembered my hand-cranked coffee mill sitting on top of the refrigerator, and also by the fact that I have a gas cook stove.  I had the best coffee ever.  Before I had finished my second cup, the electricity came back on.  

Before we headed to see the doctor, I had to knock on the neighbor's door and ask if their dog was current on shots, because I knew they would ask me about that at the clinic.  At first she seemed angry, but after a little explanation and my showing her the red, swollen hand, she became apologetic.  I assured her the whole thing was my fault, and we were on our way.  
At the urgent-care center, the doctor felt around on my wounded hand (ouch) and asked if I could feel anything in there moving around when he pressed on it (ouch), anything that felt like a foreign object or splinter.  I didn't.  He explained that sometimes if an older dog bites someone, a piece of a tooth will break off in there and cause a problem.  He called in a prescription for an antibiotic, told me if my hand started looking worse or had red streaks running from it to go to the emergency room, and that was that.  
So we haven't done anything special for my birthday.  OK, yesterday we ate Mexican at my request.  And tomorrow we are going to downtown Kansas City where I can get close to the old bridge across the Missouri River that I used to play under and on, when I was a kid.  David Remley plans to meet us there.  Here's a picture he took of the walk that leads under the bridge.  This is on the opposite side of the river from where I lived, but it's the same bridge.  

     

Below are pictures I took when some of my cousins visited and I showed them my playground, the ASB bridge.

My dad was with us for this walk down the levee to the river.

I wanted this picture to appear as though the girls were very high on the bridge.

And in this shot, they are near the top.  My mom and Aunt Ruby and I walked across the bridge a few times and shopped at Woolworth's and Kresge's.  We would get a hoagie sandwich at Kresge's for lunch, billed as "a meal on a bun".  

And here are my cousins on the sidewalk on the bridge.  Can you tell I fancied myself quite the photographer?   

posing on the levee

We lived in Harlem for three or four years, and I spent a lot of time sitting on those rocks watching the river flow past.  I find it interesting that all these years later I still live very near the Missouri River, and I still love it as much as ever.