Toby Brazee of Spur has been named the new police chief for the City of Spur. He’s not so new, though, since he has lived in Spur for a number of years and even worked a brief stint as a patrolman in 2006. And, since former police chief David Barkley left town a couple of months ago, Toby has patroled Spur for the Dickens County Sheriff’s Department, and I believe he has done a good job. The city council made a good choice.

Now let’s hope Brazee is left to do his job without intervention from the powers that be. During his short shift as a patrolman he resigned after an unfortunate misunderstanding between he and former police chief Ramiro Rodriquez that was goaded by Spur Mayor Ken Gilcrease when Gilcrease told Brazee he could take a weekend off , but Gilcrease neglected to mention it to Rodriquez. Making matters worse the weekend off was Spur Homecoming weekend when Rodriquez needed the help. Since Rodriquez didn’t know that the mayor gave Brazee the weekend off, he reprimanded Brazee for not showing up for work. Hopefully this experience will serve Brazee in establishing his supervisory position over the police department, and the mayor will allow him to perform his duties, so the mayor can stick to his own responsibilities.

It’s been a slow news week out here on the frontier. I always count on the swimming pool to at least provide a good photo opportunity when all else fails, but this week that failed, too, when I drove over to Swenson Park and discovered the pool was closed Tuesday afternoon. A cooler temperature and cloudy sky scared off the swimmers I guess. In case you are wondering we’ve had no rain despite what the sky looks like or what the forcasts say.

The most exciting news to report this week came from Aunt Sue who told us she saw a mountain lion on her place. Now that is something not every newspaper can report. Unfortunately for me Aunt Sue didn’t have her camera with her, so you’ll just have to take Aunt Sue’s word for it (and mine.)

I wrote a story for this week’s newspaper about Sgt. Steve Bunker, U.S. Army. He has undoubtedly had a run of hard knocks beginning last October when a vehicle in which he was traveling in Iraq was hit by a mortar blast. The impact from the blast broke his pelvis, hip, and back, and now that he is injured and reassigned to the Wounded Warriors Batallion, he no longer receives combat pay which amounted to $2,100 a month. Because of the pay cut, Bunker contacted his bank, USAA Federal Savings Bank in San Antonio, to try and negotiate terms on his car loan. Bank officials have been unwilling to negotiate and have now threatened to take Bunker’s van. Bunker has four children ranging in ages one to 15, and the van is the family’s primary mode of transportation.

So not only have thieves pilfered the houses he was working on in Spur for his family to live in (see “Home renovation set back by pilferers”, The Texas Spur, 6/26/08) but he is also fighting a military bank to keep his transportation.

According to Wikipedia, the United Services Automobile Association (USAA) is a Fortune 200 financial services company focused on providing banking, investing, and insurance to people and families that serve, or served, in the U.S. military and other selected federal agencies. USAA was founded in 1922 by a group of U.S. Army officers to self-insure each other when they were unable to secure auto insurance due to the perception that they were a high-risk group. I wonder what those guys would think about USAA not having a “policy in place” to address a problem like Sgt. Bunker’s.

It’s one thing for a business to purportedly say they support our troops, but is a business in actuality willing to put their money where their mouth is?

We had our quarterly women’s meeting at church Wednesday night which is basically a social where we eat, have a program, and discuss any business items that need to be addressed. I arrived early hoping everyone knew that the city had placed all residences and businesses under a “Boil Water” notice after our water services were interrupted the night before while a city crew made repairs to a broken pipe.

On Tuesday night water distribution to Spur residents ceased while city employees worked to repair a section of pipeline. All Spur residences were affected, and the City of Spur crew worked all night to restore water service to homes. By Wednesday at noon the City of Spur issued a “Boil Water” notice via Cap Rock TV’s announcement channel, an action the city took in accordance with Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) guidelines. Any time water is cut off to an entire community TCEQ requires the city to notify residents to boil their water until it is determined to be safe for consumption. The agency which makes that determination is the Texas State Department of Health Services (TSDHS). Once the line break was fixed on Wednesday morning the city superintendent took a sample of the water to TSDHS for testing. TSDHS made their own tests and determined that the water sample was safe and notified the city on Thursday, June 19, that the “Boil Water” notice could be lifted.

Any concerns I had about the iced tea being made with dysentery-infested tap water were soon squelched shortly after my arrival at church when I was told that the tea was made with bottled water. However, there was much discussion about why the water had to be boiled and how one could tell if it needed to be. As in most groups where the topic of conversation falls outside the expertise of those in the group, there is always at least one individual who adamantly tells the others their own extensive knowledge on the subject at hand.

“Well I called so and so, and she told me…And, you must boil it for 2 to 3 days at least! If it’s yellow, you have to boil it before you drink it!…And the city should put it in The Texas Spur that anytime the water is turned off that it should be boiled for 2 to 3 days afterward.”

Hmm…I thought. Yellow water?! That’s scary. I’m not sure I would trust any yellow liquid, even after boiling it, unless it was lemonade, apple juice, or an alcoholic beverage. I had not observed any yellow water at my house, in the toilet bowl or otherwise, that day and thought the water that came out of the pipes at my house earlier that day looked cleaner than it had at other times after being turned off to fix a pipe. But since I hadn’t talked to “so and so” and had little knowledge on the subject of water sanitation I decided to just use bottled water at my house until the coast was clear.

That coast was made clear late Thursday afternoon when TSDHS contacted the city to tell them the water sample was good. So no need to fear. We were never in danger. For future reference, though, it is never a good idea to drink yellow water or, in winter, yellow snow.

My favorite computer wizard visited my office yesterday to exorcize one of our computers from its latest evil spirit. Fortunately it isn’t that often we succumb to such measures, but there are times we have to call in an exorcist. We call our cherished wizard “The Great Tabbouleh” which is so much more interesting than simply calling him “The Exorcist”.

You are probably asking where that name came from, and for those of you who already know what tabbouleh is(pronounced “ta • boo • lee” and also spelled “tabouli”), you must be asking what parsley, onions and tomatoes have to do with wizards and demon-possessed computers, but let me explain. The Great Tabbouleh and I go to the same church, and once a month our church has “dinner on the grounds”, that good, old-fashioned lunch following church where everyone brings a dish and we all sit down and eat together. I have had a bumper parsley crop in my herb garden this Spring, so I decided to make tabbouleh for “dinner on the grounds”. Tabbouleh is basically a salad of chopped parsley, green onion, and tomatoes combined with bulgur wheat and a simple dressing of olive oil and lemon juice. Until that day’s lunch we referred to The Great Tabbouleh as simply, Cliff. While Cliff seemed to savor eating the dish, he liked saying the word “tabbouleh” much more. In fact he now uses the word “tabouli” every chance he gets to express emotion or to describe something. Thus we have named Cliff “The Great Tabbouleh”–”tabbouleh” because he likes the dish and “great” because he rescues us every time we have a computer disaster. (We prefer the fancier spelling “tabbouleh” rather than “tobouli” because it is much more distinguished and fitting for our wizard.)

Tabouli, the dish, is one of those that people either like or don’t like. People always ask me what is in tabouli, and I glady let them know, but what I don’t often tell them is that the origin of the dish is Arab. Something I also neglected to tell my brother-in-law recently when I took it to my sister’s house for Mother’s Day. He isn’t one of those people who falls in the “like tabouli” category, and the word, for him, did not evoke the same sentiment as it does with The Great Tabbouleh, especially if I had told him its origin. In fact, my brother-in-law found the word hard to say and kept referring to it as “kabuki” which is an entirely different foreign-inspired artform.

Kabuki is really a theatrical peformance of Japanese origin that includes a highly stylized song, mime, and dance, not to be confused with another artform of the same name, but Redneck in origin, and performed on a chair made of porcelain. So what does “kabuki” have to do with “tabouli”? I’m not sure unless, Redneck in origin, “kabuki” is a direct result of eating “tabouli”.

My name is Cindi Taylor, and I am a book junkie! “Hello, Cindi!” echo the voices through the voluminous room, but they’re only in my head, for I am playing the scene in my mind’s eye.

I met a friend, another book junkie, in Lubbock yesterday for our quarterly meeting of Junques de Books (or JB). We began our day with coffee at a coffee bar, in a bookstore, of course. It’s kind of like having an AA meeting at a liquor store.

So you are probably asking why we would meet in such a seductive place, but we’re confirmed junkies, and brazen book lovers we will forever be as long as there are books to buy, bookstores which sell them, and libraries to loiter in. So yesterday, we explored this bookstore and followed up our excursion to the next port of call, another bookstore. Now with so many books to read, limited time to read them, and limited money with which to purchase them, you might ask how we decide which ones to purchase. Once we have perused the stacks we narrow our selections to two, maybe three, then, to make the final cut, we read the first page of each to see which captivates us and holds our attention.

Book Candidate #1:

” Would you consider yourself stressed? No. I’m not stressed.
I’m . . . busy. Plenty of people are busy. I have a high-powered job, my career is important to me, and I enjoy it. OK. So sometimes I do feel a bit tense. But I’m a lawyer in the City, for God’s sake. What do you expect?
My handwriting is pressing so hard into the page, I’ve torn the paper. Dammit. Never mind. Let’s move on to the next question…”

Book Candidate #2:

“Sex in a box. That’s what it was. Spine-tingling, heart-stopping, decadent sex in a box…..”

Sold!! With some books, it really only takes one sentence, maybe two or three.

I try to keep up with national news especially if it has a local connection, but reading the front page article, “Dickens residents back accused Blackwater shooter”, in the Sunday, May 18 issue of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal was the first I had heard of former Dickens resident Paul Slough’s predicament. If you didn’t see the article, A-J reporter Henri Brickey interviewed some respected and reputable Dickens residents who expressed pride in a hometown boy who had gone to Iraq to serve his country. The article exhibited a willingness on their part to believe in a young man with strong character who overcame obstacles to obtain his high school diploma and join the military. A 1999 graduate of Patton Springs High School, Slough joined the Army and served several deployments before he was honorably discharged.

According to the article, Slough, now an employee with civilian private security contractor Blackwater, was on a security convoy for some U.S. State Department officials on September 15, 2007 in Baghdad when a white car, traveling the wrong way, failed to yield to the convoy. What exactly happened depends on who is giving the report, but a shootout ensued and, in the end, 17 Iraqi civilians died. Slough is the only Blackwater team member who has been named, yet there were others involved.

Curious, I “Googled” his name to find the origin of the news tip that led the A-J to run such a story, and the only other news outlet which came up was an article from a January 19, 2008 article in the New York Times. That is the news outlet that named Slough. Read it at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/us/19slough.html

The NY Times has a tendency to dramatize things, expecially when it comes to guns and cowboys (for which they derive their image from Clint Eastwood westerns) as seen in the following paragraph in the aforementioned article: “This flat, arid corner of the country, settled by cattle ranchers, is not different from many small towns that propel young men and women into the military. It is a place where working-class people hold traditional ideas about what it means to be an American, where churches outnumber restaurants and children learn to handle weapons not long after learning to read and write.” Not all Texas children handle weapons, but if one is going to handle a gun, I appreciate when one is taught to use one responsibly as a child.

You be the judge. As for me, when I read about how “children here learn to handle weapons not long after learning to read or write”, I couldn’t help but remember the news media’s description of John Hinckley, Jr. in 1981 after he shot President Reagan. I was going to school at Texas Tech at the time (also a stop-over for Hinckley in his education) and will never forget how we students were portrayed by the media as “gun-toting” even going so far to say that we carried guns to class in our backpacks. Even if we had, what did that have to do with Hinckley and his actions in 1981?

It’s 7 a.m. I’m walking my basset hounds who, having the second best noses in dogdom, have to stop every six feet to smell what last night’s rain brought to the surface. Me? I’m still trying to wake up having had only one cup of java before the pair of dogs finally convinced me it was time to go. Nothing new there.

I can see someone walking toward me one block ahead in front of the Methodist Church. There is frequently one, maybe two others, taking a morning walk on the town’s main street when the kids and I embark on our morning routine, but this morning as I round the corner at Campbell Funeral Home, the other pedestrian crosses the street to address me. Oh great! I have on no makeup and didn’t even run a comb through my hair, let alone brush my teeth.

It’s only Lewis (name changed here to protect me from a lawsuit). I refer to him as “Looney Lewie” since he came in my office, liquor on his breath, a few years ago to place an ad and proceeded to tell me the guys in the car outside with him were FBI and so was he. Yeah, right! This morning he stops me to show me some legal document he purports he received in the mail, and indeed it does name him as a party in what looks to be a civil suit. He then tells me he wants me to know that he is contacting the television networks about the injustice he has been served. That’s great Lewie! You go for it! He tells me that the parties involved–that being the city police chief, the city, and the plaintiff in the case–don’t know who they are messing with, an ex-FBI and ex-CIA official such as himself. He stops his tirade once to say, “You are the newspaper lady, right?”, as if he is making sure he hasn’t just made a fool of himself in front of a normal human being. Maybe my no makeup and disheveled hair made him think it wasn’t me?! But who else in town walks two basset hounds down main street at 7 o’clock in the morning?

I interrupt my male basset from his now long-term exploration of the Foster’s front yard to continue on to the safety of the Methodist Church’s covered walk. As we retreat, Lewie is still hollering something about how he just wanted to let me know so I wouldn’t be surprised when I saw it on CNN. I give him the thumbs up and walk on.

Heading north now making our way back home, a guy with a long, gray pony tail in an older white pickup pulls over in the parking space in front of Duckwall’s next to me and the dogs. Now what?! Fortunately he’s only looking for a gas station. Obviously he’s not from here. No problem. I can handle his question, and I give him directions to Allsups.

Back in front of the Methodist Church again, I see none other than the plaintiff in “Crazy Lewie’s” case walking across Burlington over to the grocery store. She sees me and I try to look away in case she saw Lewie talking to me earlier. But she just gives me a shy wave and keeps walking. Thank goodness. I already know way more than I wanted to know about that situation. What is going on?! Most of the time I think the characters I just saw and/or conversed with would normally be sleeping off what they did on Saturday night.

The dogs and I are safe inside now. And, as I pour myself a much-needed second cup of coffee, I wonder does anyone else bring out these predicaments, or is it only local newspaper editors who are a magnet for such early-morning encounters?

I attended the all-sports banquet at Spur High this week where I sat next to the father of one of the senior students. He described to me a recent incident at home where his son apparently got into big trouble for eating more than his share of chocolate-covered strawberries prepared by his mother for a social event. The son had been told he could have x-amount of the strawberries, but he apparently didn’t stop there. Initially I didn’t see this as a big deal since kids have, for generations, been eating cakes, pies, cookies, and other tempting sweets intended for church and social functions before arriving at said affair. But the father’s desciption of the incident led into more concerned reports about the boy’s behavior in recent weeks. I recognized the symptons immediately, and, though the father seemed baffled by them, I didn’t see the episodes the father described as anything terminal.

In my limited experience–from mainly my own affliction 29 years ago and, more recently, in my observations of my friends’ children–I recognized the ailment as nothing more than “senioritis”, a term used to describe the direct physiological effects of a feeling of entitlement or privilege and a tendency toward rebellion and/or irresponsibility.

Senioritis describes the condition of many senior class high school students when they find themselves, with their plans made and a new chapter in their life about to begin, ready to move on. Finishing the current chapter is now only a formality, and they put themselves in a “holding pattern”.

My husband claims that he contracted senioritis on the first day of Kindergarten, but senioritis is not to be confused with a general apathy that many students, from all grade levels, experience due to a lack of motivation or interest. An accurate diagnosis of senioritis assumes that the cause of decreased motivation is the acceptance to college and the notion that optimal performance is no longer necessary to maintain that acceptance. Because of this, senioritis can only be contracted by seniors in high school.

Victims of senioritis typically exhibit a reduced concern for social acceptance, instead focusing on graduation and increased desire for leaving home. In visiting with the aforementioned father, he described how his son looked upon arrival home from the senior class trip to Florida. Cowboy boots, shorts, a souvenir t-shirt, and beard stubble, in the father’s opinion, was not acceptable attire for the plane trip home.

The condition can also manifest itself in increased social and extra-curricular activity, which comes at the expense of academic duties, with the student preferring to “have fun” rather than working academically. Go figure!

Fortunately for most students and especially their parents, senioritis is usually only a short-term illness. Only in extreme cases will it lead to other consequential disorders such as moving back home.

Three incumbents rallied in the May 10 election in a highly contested race for the Spur City Council. Incumbent (Ward 3) Deborah Harris defeated Jerry Dunaway 94 votes-62 votes. Incumbent Manuel Herrera (Ward 2) defeated Olivia Penaflor 46 votes-19 votes, and incumbent (Ward 1) Bucky Phelps defeated Randy Adams 47 votes-42 votes.

In the race for two at-large positions on the Spur ISD Board of Trustees, Lance Harris (201 votes) and Shane Shobert (209 votes) were both elected to their first terms. Other candidates and their votes included Bedford Jones, 67 votes; (incumbent) Kevin Swaringen, 142 votes; Roy Sanchez, 104 votes; and Ralph Frausto, 44 votes.

Voters passed two propositions for Spur ISD to equalize its wealth as a Chapter 41 school district. Proposition #3 passed (260 votes-79 votes), and Proposition#4 passed (246 votes-89 votes).

In the City of Dickens two incumbents were defeated and one incumbent reelected. Steven Taylor (69 votes) and Jack Martin (59 votes) defeated incumbents Alma Paschall (17 votes) and Bobby Laster (24 votes) to win two of the seats on the Dickens City Council, and Wayne Goodwin ( 76 votes) was reelected. Lena Penick also ran for one of the three positions and received 21 votes.

Jayton-Girard ISD Trustees Kathy Owen (70 votes) and Layne Coulter (72 votes) won their bids for reelection. Paul Morales received 38 votes.