Posts filed under 'Memories'
Yesterday, we drove by the house in Redondo Beach where I lived when I met Kathy. At one point (on November 13, 1985 to be exact), a section of the sidewalk in front was replaced, and we carved our initials in the wet cement. Take a look (click to open up a larger 450K picture):
In case you can’t make it out, it says:
BH {heart} KS
JH 11/13/85
GH
BH is me. KS is Kathy. JH and GH are brothers Josh and Gabe.
We also stopped for lunch at In -N- Out burger. For anyone who has never been to Southern California, and who doesn’t know about In -N- Out, I can only describe it as the best hamburger in the world, ever. The picture below is so typical of Los Angeles (click to open up a larger 450K picture):
December 21st, 2005
Several years ago, it was my normal routine to stop on the way home from work to refill my 44-ounce plastic cup with Diet Pepsi. As I’ve recounted before, I stop at a place where refills cost $0.69. On one particular occasion, I walked up to the cashier (a young woman in her early twenties), and she announced the price of the refill, with the intonation of a question: “Sixty nine?”
A quick side note: For those unaware, I may very well be losing some of my hearing. This is absolutely true, and is normally no laughing matter, though it does make this particular situation all the more funny.
I didn’t hear her actual words when she spoke the price of the drink, I just heard the change in the pitch of her voice, indicating that she was asking me a question. That, and the general number of syllables she used, made me think that she was asking me something like “Is that all?” I was buying nothing else, so my response to the perceived question was “Yes, please.”
I’ll pause here while you take a moment to re-read her question and my answer.
I paid my $0.69 and went out to my car, wondering why she was looking at me with a look of surprise, embarrasment, and disgust. It wasn’t until I started driving away that I finally figured out why the heck she looked so darn shocked at my answer. Once I realized how embarrased I should be for my mis-interpretation of her question, and my oh-so-wrong response, I laughed myself stupid.
I’ve never gone back inside that store. Now, whenever I happen to drive by, I can’t help but giggle uncontrollably.
December 13th, 2005
Moving from our rental house into an apartment last week-end was quite an experience. We’re finally now all unpacked, and just last night I got the boys’ beds put together. We’d been too busy at night after we got home from school and work to put them together, doing things like moving the last of the smaller stuff from the old place and getting it ready for the landlord. They’ve been sleeping on the mattresses on the floor, so it’s nice to finally have their room presentable now. We’ll see how long it lasts.
But anyway, back to my story. To help save money to buy a house in a year or so, we moved from a 1700sf house to an 1100sf apartment. The apartment comes with a refrigerator and washer/dryer, so we had to also rent a small space at a self-storage place to put our fridge, our upright freezer, our washer/dryer, as well as the lawnmower, and all the other things we won’t need while living here. The storage place has sturdy wooden carts to use for making it easier to get a stack of boxes from your car to your storage unit. When we were loading up one of those carts this week-end, I kept cracking up remembering something that happened to Kathy and I years ago, when we lived in the L.A. area, before we had kids.
We had rented a storage unit in a huge self-storage complex that sprawled over several acres, and was several stories tall. While I was at work, Kathy had made all the arrangements to rent the place, and the manager had taken her around the huge complex in a golf cart. The next week-end, Kathy, her sisters and I were going to start to move things there, and it was the first time I’d actually been there myself. We backed the car up to the door nearest our unit, and Kathy said she’d go get the cart to help unload things. The carts were kept chained up around the corner from the office, and she went inside to get the key.
A few minutes later, Kathy and her sisters come ripping around the corner almost full speed in the golf cart. With a puzzled look on my face, I asked if she was sure this was what they meant when they said we could use a “cart”. She was sure, and besides, the key that they gave her fit the golf cart’s ignition. It didn’t look like a regular key, though, it looked more like a padlock key. She put the key back in the ignition, but it wouldn’t turn this time. We couldn’t get the golf cart to move again.
I went to the office to explain the situation, to tell the guy that the key wouldn’t fit in the cart anymore, and so we couldn’t move it out of the roadway. The guy couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get the key to fit in the padlock, and why we couldn’t just move the push cart out of the way. When I was finally able to make him understand that I was talking about the golf cart, and not one of the push carts, he refused to believe me. “That key is to open the padlock on the chained up push carts. The golf cart uses a completely different kind of key. There is no way that you can make that padlock key fit in that golf cart’s ignition”, he said.
“You’ve never met my wife, have you?” I said.
September 16th, 2005
Well, they are finally all done. There are a lot of pictures for you all to enjoy in the photo gallery. Now maybe I can finally catch up with all the posts required by law from when a bunch of people recently tagged me. Patience…
September 7th, 2005
I have almost all the vacation pictures ready in the photo gallery. For lack of a better system, I have them organized by day. As of now, it is complete through day 13. Actually uploading the photos is trivial, but I want to have a caption for each one, which is proving to be a bit more time consuming than I thought it would. Day 14, which I hope to have ready sometime tomorrow, will have all the pictures from our trip through Yellowstone National Park. I took over 180 pictures that day, and I’m going to upload 70 of them for your viewing pleasure, plus I have five photos from Day 15, the very last day of our vacation, including the aftermath of a very scary and potentially deadly highway incident (don’t worry, we’re all fine).
I’m also going to have a bunch of posts soon about more specific things on the trip, general observations, as well as things we learned about long car trips, kind of like a how-to guide for family vacations via automobile. What worked and what didn’t, ya know?
This was an epic journey for us (5450 miles in 15 days through nine states to visit several family members, three national parks, and a seemingly endless parade of tourist traps), and I don’t know when (or if) we’ll ever be able to do it again. It was a lot more expensive than I’d planned (we spent $687.50 just in gasoline), but I would gladly do it again if given the chance, and if I had it to do over, I would change very little.
September 6th, 2005
Everyone has a list, right? Some people’s list contains the things they want to do before they die, and they check each one off as they do it. Skydiving, bungee jumping, running with the bulls, whatever. I don’t have a list like that. I’ve always thought that if I did manage to do everything on my list, what else would I have to live for? So my list isn’t titled “Fun things I must do before I die”, but instead “Fun things I’ve done while alive.” That way, my list can grow and grow, and I never feel I have to stop adding to the list, and I won’t be disappointed if I leave this life before my list is complete.
So I added “floating” to my list yesterday. The rivers here in Missouri are very different from the rivers in Oregon, at least the rivers I’m familiar with. Oregon rivers are deep, fast, and they seem to claim the lives of about a swimmer a week during summer. Here, the rivers are shallow, slow, clear, and warm. Kathy’s cousin and his family took us to a place called Dawt Mill, where we rented two canoes and four tubes. We were then taken by converted school bus, with the canoes and tubes and our coolers on a trailer behind us, upriver about eight miles, and we got in the water about 12:30. We floated back downriver, and arrived back at Dawt Mill at about 6:30.
During those six hours, the water never got more than about four feet deep, and in some places the bottom of the canoes actually scraped along rocks and submerged logs. We stopped a few times along the way at little sandbars along the banks, to have lunch or to relax. It was a completely wonderful time.
Now for the bad news. If you’ve ever been in a canoe, like Kathy and I had not, you know that they can be really hard to keep balanced. Number of times we flipped? Two. Seconds after we got in the water that we first flipped? About 15. At some point along the way, Kathy switched with Matt, so he was in the canoe with me, and she was floating in the tube behind us. We went through a bit of a “rapids” section, and Matt and I got hung up on a submerged log. Kathy came barreling toward us, and flipped her tube. As she was trying to right herself, her glasses came off, and she dumped her beer. Tragedy. She had just opened that beer. We never did find her glasses or the beer.
So this morning, we’re all putting aloe on our sunburns, massaging the bruises we got from falling in the water and hitting the rocks on the bottom, and getting in touch with a local optometrist to get Kathy replacement glasses. We leave Missouri tomorrow morning for a long slow drive back home through several points of interest none of us have ever seen.
August 29th, 2005
We leave Saturday on our big road trip. We’ll be driving about 2100 miles in three days. Beaverton, Oregon to Cabool, Missouri. We’ll be visiting Kathy’s aunt and uncle, and staying with her cousin (their son). Then, another 2100 mile drive back home. It’s gonna be nuts.
I’m actually really looking forward to it. We drive to southern California all the time, generally about once a year. Until recently, all of our immediate family (with the exception of brother Gabe) lived somewhere in the L.A. area. My dad sold his house in Orange County a few years ago (for a very healthy profit) and moved to the Phoenix area. Last summer, we took a long road trip to see his new place there, then continued on to L.A., and finally back home.
Besides that, this is going to be the first long road trip we’ve ever taken, and the first one where we haven’t already seen the same scenery dozens of times before. We’re going to be just like the Griswolds, except I’ll never be nearly as cool as Clark is, and, you know, I’m real. Come to think of it, there are a few other scary parallels there:
- Our minivan is green, like the family truckster (I don’t think the airbags are made from Hefty bags, though).
- I’ve plotted our course on the computer just like Sparky did, except I used Google Earth’s satellite imaging, not some blocky early ’80s Apple II graphics. Plus, Billy didn’t use Pacman to eat the family car.
- We’ll be staying at cheap motels each night, but I swear I won’t be ordering any drinks from the “pool waitress”.
We’ve got the portable DVD player and a bunch of movies, and I’ve got the DC to AC inverter ready to go, so the boys can power their Playstation 2. I never had this kind of entertainment for road trips when I was a kid.
I’m such a geek, I’ve even researched free wi-fi hot spots near each night’s motel, so I can hopefully upload photos and update this site every day.
August 18th, 2005
I wrote this a couple years ago and found it while I was packing. Hope it is an inspiration to you too.
1. Inward beauty must shine outward.
2. I am God’s answer to my husband’s incompleteness.
3. We were created for a position of honor so we must act like it.
4. Regardless of the circumstances, I am a significant and an important part of my families lives.
5. Through it all, I am still the mother of my children.
6. The Lord is my strength and salvation.
7. I can always lean on Him.
8. He is all I need.
August 18th, 2005
The next few weeks are going to be crazy. I have been packing for the last 2weeks for our official move on Sept. 10th. Then, the kids are starting the year out at the new schools. So, I had to go to each of the schools and register them. For the first four days I am going to have to drive them to and from school because we won’t physically be in the new place until the weekend.
I am also packing for our vacation. We will be leaving Saturday for Missouri. We are driving to go visit my family. It will be a long 3 day drive and roughly 2100 miles.
On top of all that, the house still has to stay presentable because the landlord is showing the house. He wants to make sure that it is rented before we actually move.
Needless-to-say, if I haven’t been the happiest or friendliest person to be around now you know why. Where’s my xanex when I need it!
August 17th, 2005
Years ago, before Billy and Matt were even in school, we lived in a tiny rental house in SE Portland. The house was really old and drafty, and we soon discovered we had a mouse problem. Before even getting in touch with the landlord, I figured I’d try to be mister responsible and take care of the problem myself, and I bought half a dozen or so mouse traps. These were the old fashioned, spring loaded, wood-base, Tom and Jerry cartoon style mouse traps.
We knew we had mice in the house because the boys’ pet hamster’s food was being eaten. (This was the replacement hamster, by the way, after the first one was found teats up in his cage early one morning for no apparent reason.) See, the hamster was a picky eater, and would only eat certain seeds from his bowl of expensive pet store brand hamster food, and he would shove the rest of the food (usually dried corn kernels) out of his cage, where it would gather on the top of the dresser until Kathy or I would clean it up. At some point we started noticing droppings outside the cage, and along the walls on the dresser and the floor, and so we knew that a mouse was coming in and eating the hamster’s rejects.
So I set the traps, and loaded them with, what else, swiss cheese. (Seriously, everything I knew about unwanted rodents, I learned from cartoons.) The cheese was never touched, and dried out and got moldy, but we knew the mice were still around, because we were still seeing droppings along the baseboards.
I next loaded up the spring traps with peanut butter. Same result, mouse ignores the peanut butter, still eats the hamsters rejected corn kernels. By the way, the irony of trying (unsuccessfully) to kill an apparently intelligent rodent with a strong sense of self-preservation that ate the unwanted rejected hamster food, while at the same time trying to keep alive another rodent that didn’t appreciate the food I worked so hard to put in his food bowl, and that was seemingly so fragile that a stiff overnight breeze would kill him, was lost on me.
Anyway, for round three, I tried embedding the corn kernels in the peanut butter. The next morning, the traps weren’t sprung, there were little kernel shaped holes in the blobs of peanut butter where the corn used to be, and more droppings along the walls. These were the same traps that took me like 15 minutes each to arm, and that would snap and spray me with peanut butter if I so much as looked at them the wrong way.
Finally, I gave up, and had the landlord bring over some kind of poison traps he set up around the perimeter of the house. Within a few days, there were no more visits from Jerry or his friends.
The best part of all this, however, was how jumpy Kathy was when she knew that there were rodents running around our house at will. She was taking a shower one day, and I sneaked into the bathroom, reached my hand into the tub under the shower curtain, and very gently tickled her toes while her face was lathered up and she couldn’t see anything. I think she might have actually left shampoo on the ceiling from how high she jumped. Oh, and I was very lonely for the next couple weeks, if you get my drift.
I sometimes wonder why Kathy still loves me…
July 25th, 2005
So are you kinda nervous ’cause today is Friday the 13th? Then you’re kinda dumb.
It’s just another day of the week, like all the others that came before it. I happen to have absolute proof that not only is Friday the 13th not unlucky, it is actually (for me at least) very lucky indeed.
Back when I was a teen-ager (decades ago, back when cars could still run on leaded gasoline), my uncle had a construction business. He bid on a construction clean-up job on a Nordstroms being built in Glendale, California. He loaded a bunch of us nephews in his van, loaded the trailer with equipment, and we drove the 1000 or so miles for the job. We were there for a couple months, and it was a pretty incredible summer.
One Friday at the job site, Friday the 13th to be exact, I was walking along from somewhere to someplace else, and came upon a huge ladder setup in the middle of the floor. I was about to walk around it, when I thought “what the heck * “, and started to walk under it. I figured that since I was walking under a ladder on Friday the 13th, I’d better think good thoughts to counteract the bad luck. So, I thought “good thoughts”. Literally. I was saying the words “good” and “thoughts” over and over in my head as I walked under the ladder. I didn’t really know any other way to think good thoughts.
And what did I find on the ground on the other side of the ladder? A crumpled $5 bill. Which, to a teen-ager in the early ’80s, was like finding a chest o’ gold. I pocketed it and spent it all on slurpees over the coming week or so.
I swear this is a completely true story.
* “Heck” wasn’t the actual word I thought. I was a teen-ager. You figure it out.
May 13th, 2005
In a comment to one of my recent posts, Tabitha reminded me of something that happened to us several years ago.
About 10 years ago, we were renting a pretty big old house in the heart of the ‘hood, on NE Fremont right down the street from MLK. We had just put the boys to bed (this was of course before we had Lexi), and Kathy and I hopped in the upstairs shower before going to bed. While we were in there, we heard kind of a “plink” sound, and thought that maybe one of the boys had gotten out of bed and were in the bathroom. They were sound asleep, however, and while checking out the source of the sound a bit later, we noticed flashing red and blue lights outside.
I went outside to talk to the police and see what was going on. Apparently a drug deal about 1/2 block away had gone bad, and someone took several shots at someone else with some sort of handgun. They missed the person, but at least one of the shots went wild.
The next morning, I saw a clean bullet hole in the 1st floor rain gutter. The bullet had been stopped by an old cast iron pipe that was capped off, but had been left in the wall of the old house. If the cast iron pipe had not been there, the trajectory was such that the bullet could have continued throught the wall and hit me or Kathy in the ankle or leg.
We moved about a month later.
April 4th, 2005
Hero of the day
This happened about 6 years ago at our old place in Lafayette. Kathy wasn’t feeling well, so she went to bed about 9:00. I came to bed at 10:00. At about 10:10, our motion sensing floodlight came on, and the dogs started barking. I figured it was just a cat walking on the van, but I got out of bed to check, and to quiet the dogs. As I got out of bed, through the blinds I saw three people walking between our house and the neighbor’s house, coming from the neighbor’s backyard, going toward the street. They came right next to our driveway, where the kids keep their bikes and helmets.
The first thing I thought was that they were stealing something from our driveway or the neighbor’s backyard. I grabbed my pants as I ran for the door. I looked down the street, but they were nowhere. I slowly walked down the street, looking in driveways and yards, trying to see where they were hiding. When I got past our neighbor’s house, I heard sounds coming from the backyard, it sounded like the chainlink fence being rattled. I walked back between the neighbor’s house and the vacant house next to them, trying to see anything in the dark. Right about this time, Kathy called 911.
As I peeked around the corner, I saw two people standing next to the fence, but I didn’t see the third. Without even thinking what I was doing, I shouted “What the hell are you doing back here?” The two turned to try to see who was talking, but they couldn’t see me in the dark. One of them said that they were trying to hop the fence, it was a shortcut to their house through the field behind our neighborhood. I said “Well stop it. Take the long away around. You’re waking up my kids.”, and he said O.K.
I started walking back out to the street, and stepped on some sort of spiny weed or plant (it hurt to put weight on my left foot for days afterward). As I was walking back to our house, I saw Kathy on the phone in the front yard, and a Sheriff’s deputy pulling up to her in his cruiser. I explained to him what happened, and he went into the back yards to look around.
He said that he saw an area behind the chainlink fence where the blackberry bushes had been trampled down over time, as if this shortcut had been used many times before, and he saw some fresh broken branches through the extra thorny part of the bushes. We figure that they were in fact just trying to find the shortcut, and had wandered into the wrong backyard, setting off our motion sensor, which made the dogs start barking. It wasn’t until later after the cop left that I realized just how stupid I had been. I went out in nothing but my pants, barefoot even, with no weapon, to confront three people that I thought had just robbed us.
March 24th, 2005
Brother Gabe and I were driving down Pacific Coast Highway years ago when we both lived south of L.A., and were stopped at a traffic signal. A woman in the car next to us made the universal “roll down your window” circular hand gesture with one hand while covering her eye with the other hand. We rolled down the window, and she asked if we knew how to get to a certain doctor’s office.
We had no idea what she was looking for based on just the doctor’s name, and she said something like “Darn, I just accidentally pierced my eyeball with my inkpen, and my doctor said I should have it checked out, but I don’t know how to get to his office.”
We told her that she should probably go straight to the hospital emergency room (which was about three blocks away behind us), but she said “No, I’ll just keep driving until I find it.”
Random old memory #2
Random old memory #3
March 17th, 2005
