My Dear Sweet Sainted Wife is due to return to Blytheville later today after spending a week going to, coming from, and staying in Austin, Texas, where youngest son Zach currently resides. As anybody who knows much of anything about Texas knows, it's a big state, and it's about a 12-hour drive to Austin. So if you're going there just to visit, you ought to stay for a little while, anyway. So she stayed for a week.
That 12-hour drive and having to work kept Zach in Texas both for Thanksgiving and Christmas so My Dear Sweet Sainted Wife figured he had a least one good home-cooked meal coming, so off she went to Texas. Prime rib was the choice, and as it turns out prime rib costs as much or more in Texas as is does in Arkansas or Missouri, especially when you buy enough to feed a large fellow like Zach and a house full of his friends who were equally deprived when it comes to home-cooked dinners. Twenty-five pounds of prime rib and only a few leftovers later, My Dear Sweet Sainted wife headed home.
The dogs will be glad to have her back, and I guess I will too, even if we're just home 'til the next trip in about a month down to Florida. At least that one will include the granddaughters, who keep everything going strong all the time.
Maybe Zach's old buddy Daniel will move in while we're gone and keep the dogs fed and exercised, all for the low, low price of a depleted stock of food in the house and a small gas stipend.
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I promised Blytheville athletic director David Hixson I wouldn't write anything in this column about our golf match Sunday afternoon.
I lied.
With only a spot of four mulligans against the reigning Blytheville Country Club Champion (one of which actually helped me tie a hole), I beat him 2-1 on a cool but windless day on the links. His three double-bogeys didn't help him any, because as lousy as I am, I can still make a bogey almost no matter what. Sometimes very little except bogeys, but that's another issue.
Since my former rival Dr. Matt Jones seems to have disappeared into the woodwork this winter, I've got to beat somebody now and then.
Rob Carey joined us on No. 6, but Hixson and I were both too smart to get in a game with that guy.
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Only a couple more days 'til the Super Bowl and I'm still holding out for a good game with a close final score. I don't see it any other way, but naturally I'm wrong about two-thirds of the time.
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Speaking of the Super Bowl, I never really considered using deer antler spray as a medicinal product (maybe because I've never heard of such a thing), but I guess there's a market for it since pro golfer Vijay Singh volunteered that he had been using it for years and had no idea there was anything in it that might be considered "banned." Linebacker Ray Lewis was first connected to use of the stuff but he's retiring after this year and nothing can possibly come of that situation anyway.
All this uproar about steroids and deer antler spray and human growth hormone and blood doping in cycling and all that, somewhere along the line people are going to have to realize that professional athletes are going to do whatever it takes to give them an edge.
There's no stopping it, and having a different code of prohibitions from sport to sport just makes the effort that much more doomed to failure.
I don't have any answers to the problem, I just know that the whole issue of performance-enhancing drugs is a dead end, no-win situation for everybody, and it ain't going away.
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I want to congratulate Emmanuel and Ollie Lofton for the special section that's in today's paper. I think it's the third year in a row we've had a similar section in the paper to commemorate Black History Month. There's some really interesting stuff in there, and I want to point out ... any typos are mine, not Emmanuel's or Ollie's. It's always interesting to work with the Loftons on a project; they've been there, and done that more than once.
dtennyson@blythevillecourier.com