Black Bean Salad

One of Louise's and my favorite places to eat in the Rio Grande Valley is The Blue Onion in Weslaco, Texas.  They serve a black bean salad which I dearly love.

I didn't ask them but decided to try to replicate their recipe.  Most black bean salad recipes also call for corn but I didn't want to, for some reason.  Here is my recipe which serves 4-6:

2                 16oz. cans black beans, well drained
1/2 cup        onions, finely chopped
1/2 cup        pimentos, finely chopped
2                  medium jalapenos, deseeded and finely chopped
2 tbl.            olive oil

4 tbl. white vinegar

2 tbl. lime juice

2 tbl. sugar

1/4 tsp. pepper

1 tsp. salt

Mix all the ingredients together and, if you can, let them set in the fridge overnight
to meld the flavors. It does taste pretty good without that rest, however.


Addendum: When you drain the beans, go ahead and rinse them too to get the
"gunk" off them. Also, instead of pimentos, use 1/2 cup of finely chopped red bell
peppers.

Edd Alexander March 27, 2018

Harry Nash Revealed

Well, it's been a long time since I've put anything on this blog - almost a year in fact.  Why?  Because I have had writer's block.  That's code for being lazy.

Yesterday, after seventeen years of frustration, I finally found out where my great grandfather Harry Nash came from.  I first wrote about Harry in April, 2013, listing him as one of my failures in genealogy.  He has certainly been an enigma - I've been able to trace back every one of my ancestors for several generations except for him.

My grandfather was Edward Everett Nash.  He was born just before the turn of the twentieth century (1894) and saw a lot of hard times.  His parents abandoned him when he was a small child and he lived in orphanages until he was 12 or 13.  At that time he struck out on his own.

Ed's mother was Susan Pearl Miller, my great grandmother.  She had 18 children by two different husbands and, as far as we can tell, didn't raise any of them!  For several years, I've been able to research her family and have met a bunch of cousins.  I have a pretty clear picture of her life although I never met her.

Susie Pearl's mother was Martha Jane Duncan and her father was Daniel D. Miller.  The other day I was browsing the LDS website, FamilySearch, and found that we can trace the Duncans back to about 950 A.D.  In fact, my 30th great grandfather was Duncan I, King of Scotland.  He was murdered by Macbeth in order that Macbeth might assume the crown.  Macbeth, of course, was the subject of the play by William Shakespeare.

But I digress.  The subject of this blog is my Grandfather Ed's father, Harry Nash.  Because Granddad was abandoned, he never knew much about his parents.  In fact, family lore tells us that Ed only met his father once when he was about 13 or 14 and working on a ranch in Arizona.  A man rode up to him and asked Ed if he knew who he was.  When he replied that he didn't, the man told him that he was Ed's father.

As I stated earlier, I've been searching for some information on Harry Nash for seventeen years.  Every lead I've ever followed was either wrong or inconclusive.  It's ironic that only yesterday morning, I told my wife, Louise, that I certainly hoped to solve that riddle before I died.  Then, by yesterday evening, much of it was solved!

I was going through some DNA matches for my aunt Edith when I found a new match named Jeffrey Pepper.  He was a good match to her but not to any of Aunt Edith's other family lines.  I thought that he must surely be descended from the Nash's.  I sent him an email and, within an hour, he responded telling me that his great grandfather was indeed a Nash.

With the information he gave me I went to work on Ancestry.com and quickly found his great grandfather, Frederick W. Nash.  A little more digging and I found that he had a brother, Harry W. Nash.  This Harry was born about the same time as my great grandfather had reportedly been born but in Massachusetts, not Michigan as the family had believed for years.

I was beginning to feel certain that this was the right trail and when I learned Harry and Fred's father's name, I was sure.  It was Edward Everett Nash, exactly the same name as my grandfather!  In a matter of a couple of hours, I had gone from knowing nothing about Harry Nash to having a pretty good understanding of them.

It's almost kind of a letdown to know that the mystery is solved.  I've chased it for so long and now it's over, sort of.  There is still a lot we don't know about Harry, specifically what happened to him after he and my great grandmother separated.

Jeff Pepper has promised to send me more information about the family and I'm anxious to get started on researching more of Harry's background.

Winter in South Texas

Louise and I are finishing up our winter in South Texas and it has been a wonderful time here.  We continue our weight loss program - I've lost 102 pounds to date and she is at about 75 pounds down.  The closer we get to our goals, the harder it is to lose weight.

This is about our 10th (or 11th) winter in the Valley and every year gets better as we make more friends and meet up with old ones.  Our neighbors are wonderful!  Cecil and Brenda just left to go back to Kansas and we will surely miss them.  Ray and Jane are our next door neighbors and they will leave on Monday.  They are entertainers and spend their summers doing a show on the Celebration Belle, a riverboat which sails out of Moline, Illinois.  In fact, we plan to time our summer trip this year to go on one of their day cruises and see their show.

Bill and Rita live in Wichita, Kansas and they will be leaving in a couple of weeks as will Jim and Judy from Wisconsin.  Judy is Louise's shopping partner and I think they've made shopping into a contact sport!  We did miss Norm and Charlene this year; they live in Vermont and are building a new home so they had to skip the winter trip.  Larry and his wife, Joann, are from Missouri and we've sure enjoyed our time with them too.

I've played more golf this year than I ever have.  South Texas is about the only place I play - when I get back home, I'll hang up the clubs and not touch them again until next winter.  I must tell you that my game never improves - it seems to get worse as the winter goes along.  In spite of that, I look forward to playing golf in the winter.

Staying in an RV Park is just like living in a small town.  Everyone knows everyone else and knows what they are doing!  We stay at La Feria RV Park in La Feria, Texas and I wouldn't consider staying anywhere else.  We had a park "happy hour" yesterday and had a large turnout.

When we leave the valley this year, we are going to go to Houston for a few days to see Aunt Pat, an old school mate, Frances, and some other friends.  After that, we are going to Frederickburg, Texas (in the heart of the Texas Hill Country).  We'll spend a few days there with Don and Lynn from Sanger, Texas, then we will head home.

The Mathematics of Weight Loss

Yesterday Louise and I celebrated our first year of our weight loss program.  We celebrated, of course, by going out to eat.  By the way, we went to the Polo Grille in Tulsa at Utica Square and the service and food were impeccable!  Louise had a lobster tail and I had a small filet.

During the past year, I've lost 94 pounds and she has lost 60.  Together, we've lost the equivalent of a medium size person!  The term "lost" is really a misnomer; most people don't lose weight, they get rid of it!  During the last year, we've had several splurges including dinner last night.  The key is to "get back on the horse" the next day and continue your program.

I have spent a considerable amount of time during the last year thinking about weight loss and have come to the realization that it is simply a matter of mathematics.  I thought that since we both are deeply involved in this program, I would put down some of the numbers.

One of the must important numbers is know is what the experts call the basal metabolic rate, or BMR.  This is simply the amount of calories a typical person will burn in a day without doing any serious exercise (a couch potato, in other words).  The formula for BMR is as follows:

     For Men:  BMR = 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)

     For Women: BMR = 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)

In my case, my weight is currently 183 pounds, my height is 67 inches and my age is 70.  If you plug these numbers into the formula, it reveals that under "normal" conditions, I will burn 1581 calories per day.  If I were a woman, my BMR would indicate a total burn of 1437 calories per day.  Don't ask me how these formulas were derived, the "experts" did it.  By the way, you can find several BMR calculators on the internet.

The formulas above show several interesting facts:

     a) People who weigh more have a higher BMR.  This makes sense since larger people require more calories to move around, to keep their bodies at 98.6°, etc.

     b) Taller people also require more calories to sustain their bodies, I suppose for the same reasons listed above.

     c) As we get older, we require less calories, probably because we become more sedentary.  Notice in the formula that age related calories get subtracted, not added.

I should stop for a minute and answer the question, "What is a calorie?".  It is simply a measure of energy, just like BTU's.  In fact, one BTU equals 252 calories.  Thus, a calorie isn't some physical thing we find in food and drink but a measure of energy.

OK, now I know my BMR if I'm a couch potato - 1581 calories per day.  If I do nothing but get up in the morning, eat, watch television, and go to bed at night I'm going to need to consume 1581 calories every day to maintain my current weight.  But what to do if I want to get rid of some of my weight?

Again, the "experts" tell us that a pound of body mass has a calorie content of 3500 calories.  If you want to get rid of one pound of body weight, you need to consume 3500 fewer calories than you burn. In my case, I burn (or use) 1581 calories per day or 11,067 calories during a one week period.  If I want to lose (oops, I used the "lose" word) one pound in a week, I have to either exercise to burn calories or consume 3500 calories less than my body needs.

The math tells me that 11,067 calories minus 3500 calories equals 7567 or 1081 calories per day.  In other words, if I consume 1081 calories per day, I should get rid of one pound of body weight in a week.  I've got to tell you, 1081 calories per day is a pretty harsh diet.  What to do?  Exercise!  Exercise has two important benefits here.  First and most important is that it keeps you moving!  By now everyone knows that you need to get up off the couch and do something.

The other benefit of activity is that you get to eat more!  That's what I'm talking about!  In my case, walking for one hour per day burns an additional 350 calories of weight loss.  There are numerous charts on the internet telling you how many calories you burn doing various activities.  In Louise's and my case, we both wear Fitbit bracelets which calculate how much exercise we get and how many calories we burn.

So, the math is clear!  Weight loss (or gain) is equal to calories eaten minus calories burned (or not eaten).  The other day I did a little math to confirm this.  In the past nine months my Fitbit says that I have burned about 1,000,000 calories (yes, that's one million).  My eating diary says that, for that same period, I have eaten about 750,000 calories, or 250,000 less than I have burned.  Using our 3500 calories per pound of body mass, that says I should have lost 71.4 pounds.  My actual weight loss during that period?  67 pounds!

The math is correct - if you eat less than you use, you are going to lose weight!  So get out there and do something!

The Evolution of Our Camping

Having just spent three months in South Texas in our motor home, I began to think back on our camping and RV experiences.

As a child, I don't remember our family ever "going camping".  We went on quite a few vacations but we always stayed in a motel or rented a cabin.  After I grew up and left home, Dad and Mom did get a travel trailer and spent a great deal of time traveling.

When I married Louise, our first vacation together was a camping trip.  We had moved to the Detroit area because of my job and decided to go camping in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  We rented a tent, bought a lantern and portable cook stove, and took off.  It was one of the most memorable trips of our life!

Later, after we had returned to the Tulsa area and started having children, we did quite a bit of camping, starting with tents and camping with our friends, Richie and Leann and Grover and Barbara.  We soon graduated to an old Ford van which we used for a while, then an overhead camper in the pickup truck.

Eventually, we acquired an old 22' bumper pull travel trailer and pulled it all over the United States, including a trip to Virginia to see our old friends, Jerry and Marlene.  In 1986, we were part of the group which purchased Tulsa Winch and sold the travel trailer for two reasons: first, we needed the money, and second, we weren't going to have any time to go camping.

At this point, I was reasonably sure that our camping or RVing days were over.  In fact, my standard comment on camping and RV's was that I would do all my future camping at a Holiday Inn.  After my retirement in 1998, however, that changed.

Some friends who were RV'ers said something about us going on some trips with them.  I thought it might be wise to rent an RV to see what it was all about.  After I checked some prices for rentals, however, I decided I didn't want to do that.  We wound up buying a used Sprinter fifth wheel trailer from a couple who were giving it up.

The Sprinter was a good trailer but you couldn't stand up in the bedroom.  To exit the bed, the person closest to the front of the trailer had to crawl over the other person.  We also decided that we needed more room.  This was about the time we started going to South Texas in the winter and, when you spend three months in an RV, you appreciated all the space you can get.  We traded the Sprinter for a brand new Everest fifth wheel.

We pulled the Everest all over the U.S. for several years and had a great time in it.  I was towing it with a 1999 International and it was a good looking combination.  Eventually, the International grew tired and I was faced with the prospect of replacing it.

In about 2010, Louise and I decided to try a motorhome instead of a trailer.  We traded the fifth wheel off on a used Holiday Rambler bus and used it for about five years.  Last year, we traded the Holiday Rambler off on a Tiffin Open Road with four slides.  It has more room than any RV we've ever had and we are really enjoying it.  In fact, we just returned from Roaring River in Missouri where we spend a week.

I don't know how long we'll be able to continue to RV but, for now, we are gonna go every chance we get!

Our Bermuda Vacation

Louise and I just returned from a week-long vacation to Bermuda.  I had thought about a trip there for several years and I guess you could say that I had it on my bucket list.

We flew from Tulsa to Hamilton, Bermuda via Chicago and New York.  We had to spend a night in New York because all the flights to Hamilton leave in the morning and arrive about noon.  Naturally, all the flights were delayed and otherwise messed up but we got to Hamilton about when we thought we would.

The island of Bermuda was discovered by the either the Portuguese or the Spanish (I think they are still arguing about this) in the 16th century but no people were left on the island to stake a claim.  In 1609, an English ship headed for Jamestown got off course and was forced to land in Bermuda.  The island became a British colony and remains part of the British Commonwealth today.

We really enjoyed our vacation.  The island is full of neat beachs and quaint, small cottages.  We used the bus system all week to get around and it worked well.  Plus, we didn't have to drive on their narrow, winding streets.  Most people who live in Bermuda get around by riding scooters.  It's not unusual to see a well dressed businesswoman in a skirt and high heels tooling down the street on a scooter.

Bermuda shorts really were created in Bermuda.  The typical businessman there wears a jacket and tie, Bermuda shorts and knee high socks.  Most of the shorts are of pastel colors, coral, yellow, pink, and green as are the houses.

One thing we were warned about but still surprised at anyway was the cost of goods in Bermuda.  Louise and I typically spent $60-$70 together for breakfast and about the same for lunch.  Dinner was upwards of $110 for a couple.  There are no fast food chains in Bermuda; the government has banned them.

Although Louise and I flew to the island, there are several cruise lines which have Bermuda as their destination.  There are three cruise line ports in Bermuda and we saw cruise ships at all of them.  We decided that, if we were to return, we would take a cruise there where we could go back to the ship for our meals.

The trip home was similar to the trip out except that we went from Bermuda to Washington Reagan to Charlotte to Tulsa.  And, like the trip out, all the schedules were messed up.  We got home the other morning at 3:30 a.m.  Needless to say, we slept very well when we got home.

I think we will try a destination a bit less expensive next trip.  We've talked about Belize or Costa Rica.  I'll let you know.

An Epic Battle

As everyone who knows me can attest, I have always had a problem with my weight.  And, of course, that problem has magnified itself as I've grown older.

When I graduated from high school, I weighed 187 pounds (Its funny that I can remember something like that!).  For my height, that was considered overweight.  I stayed around that weight during my college days and when I first got married.

Marriage does a lot of strange things to you, including making you gain weight.  After a year and a half of marriage and a good "desk" job, I weighed 225 pounds.  In October, 1971, while Louise and I were living in Detroit, I went on a diet.  I lost 50 pounds in 90 days and, by the time we got back to Oklahoma for Christmas, weighed 175 pounds!  This was the lightest I had been in years.

Eventually, though, the weight all came back, plus a whole lot more!  At one point in the late 1980's, I got on the shipping scales at work and they topped 300 pounds.  Once again, I lost some weight but didn't really change my lifestyle like we are told we have to do.

In fact, over the years, I figure I have gained and lost over 400 pounds going on diets and then gaining the weight back.

Last year, we had a couple of friends who really enjoyed some weight loss with bariatric surgery and Louise decided that she wanted to do that.  Her doctor gave her a reference to a bariatric clinic in Owasso and, on September 21, we attended a seminar there.

That seminar acted as a motivator for us and we decided to change our eating habits and get more exercise.  In the meantime, Louise started seeing the doctors there and preparing for her surgery.  I even talked to the doctors about the surgery for myself but decided that I might be able to lose enough weight on my own.

It was decided that she would have her surgery after we returned from south Texas this spring.  Over the winter, we were very diligent about our diet and exercise and got a big surprise when we returned home.  Louise had lost so much weight that our insurance would no longer cover the surgery!  The doctors at the bariatric hospital did tell us that they would be happy to go ahead and do it for cash.  It would only cost $17,000!  By now, we had decided that we could do it on our own.

As of today, I've lost 73 pounds and weigh 203.  My goal is in the 160-170 pound range so I still have a ways to go.  I'll let you know when I've reached my goal.

One of the nice things about losing weight, other than the health aspect, is having people notice and comment.  In fact, one friend saw me the other day and raved about my weight loss.  She wanted to know how I had done it.  I told her that I had discovered the real secret to weight loss and she really pressured me to tell her what it was.  When I told her that it was diet and exercise, she was really let down.

Louise and I are now beginning to think about maintenance.  We are going to be at our goals in a few months and don't want to ever have to go through the weight loss deal again so maintenance will be very important to us.  This is something we've never done before so it should prove challenging.  Wish us luck!