An ode to the soaker hose.

It’s 4 a.m. and I’m sitting here with warm lemonade because I didn’t want to wake Sam with a lot of noisy ice dispenser hoo-hah. Other than that, however, everything is just peachy unless you want to talk about DROUGHT. I just found out that most of north Texas is implementing immediate stage 3 water restrictions. This means you can only water your lawn or landscape once every two weeks from November 1 to March 31 and never between the hours of 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. New plantings (shrubs, trees) and foundations can be watered for up to two hours daily with a slow soaker hose or by hand.

In case you have no idea why anybody would water their foundation, we do this because: 1) houses here are all built on concrete slabs with no basements; 2) the soil under the slab is typically Texas clay; and 3) clay shrinks in a drought and your house could tip, crack or warp. So we all learn to run a couple of $10 soaker hoses around the perimeter of the house to keep the foundation level. This definitely beats the alternative, such as spending $25,000 to replace a bunch of warped floors, cockeyed doors and bulging window frames. I’m just saying.

Here’s some late-breaking news from our Holy Crap department. As if the drought couldn’t get any worse, please take a look at this DUST STORM two days ago in Lubbock.




And now for your possible interest I want to share the following recent photos of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Paul is typical and moderately wrinkly for an extremely rich dude at 69, but Ringo at 71 looks AMAZING, ageless and not much different than he did 25 years ago. He even has NICE TEETH and an EARRING!

I’m going back to bed now. Thank you for reading this.