Some Early Jobs

My first paying job, one of the hardest with the lowest pay for the hours I worked, was delivering the morning newspaper. I worked three to four hours every morning, then on Thursday and Friday afternoons I worked 4 to 5 hours each day collecting payments. On Saturday morning I retraced my route another 4 hours to collect from customers who were not at home on my earlier visits. All this work earned me about $7 a week, a pitifully small amount of money. But when you’re 13 and 14 years old, your choice of jobs is limited. I delivered the morning paper for two years.

The only job I was fired from was drugstore delivery driver. I was 16. To this day I remember the delivery car, a rear-wheel drive Renault Dauphine with a badly worn clutch. With my foot off the gas pedal I could let out the clutch quickly without stalling the engine – that’s how much the clutch slipped. One dark night I was driving on a narrow country road when I realized I needed to be going in the opposite direction. While attempting to turn the car around I got a rear wheel off the pavement and there wasn’t enough clutch left to pull the car back onto the road. I left the car in gear with the engine running and got out to look at the rear wheels. I figured one wheel would be spinning and maybe I could do something to increase the traction. But, although the car was in gear and running, neither rear wheel was turning. The clutch had finally given out. Because I was driving the Renault when the clutch failed, it was deemed to be my fault, so I was let go.

The shortest job I’ve ever had was selling encyclopedias door to door when I was 17. (This was back when a set of encyclopedias consisted of twenty slick, beautifully made books.) I was terrible at it. After a week I quit and immediately started my second hardest job.

My second hardest job was as a “yard man” at a chemical factory. It was a summer job (I was still 17), and I got all the crappy tasks. I wasn’t union so any task too hard or too dirty or that required lifting something too heavy for the union employees became my job. Tasks such as: loading steel drums onto (and off) a flatbed truck, transferring drums from truck to warehouse and vice versa, stacking drums in the warehouse – all done “by hand”, no forklift or machinery involved – mowing acres of grass with a regular lawn mower (not a riding mower), cutting tall weeds along a railroad track with a swing blade. All the work was done under a hot summer sun or in a hot warehouse or railroad car. Did I mention scrubbing chemical tankers inside and out?

My next summer job was as technician at a company called Fairchild-Hiller in Bladensburg, Maryland. I lived in College Park, Maryland, in a fraternity house without electricity. Every day I showered in cold water, and when the sun went down it was literally “lights out.”

Later that summer, I was transferred to a plant in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I lived in a boarding house and rented a room on the top floor. The house had no air conditioning and the top floor baked under a metal roof during the day; at night the room was sweltering hot. I tried to sleep by lying on top of the sheet wearing only shorts, but I would just lie there awake and perspire. I had a roommate: another boarder. Every room had two boarders. All the rooms on the floor had access to a single bathroom on the floor. The meals were truly outstanding: southern farm-fresh country cooking prepared by the elderly woman who owned the house and her helper. She not only fed the boarders, she sold meal tickets and anyone could eat there. At dinner I often found myself seated with strangers who didn’t live at the house but who ate there. There were usually two or three kinds of meat to choose from, such as fried chicken and country ham, and several vegetables, and then several desserts to choose from. To participate in all this bounty, you only had to purchase a meal ticket for 95 cents. Because I rented a room there, my three meals a day were included in the $15 per week I paid for room and board. Yeah, it was a long time ago, but even then it was a bargain!

My next summer job was at a company in Charlottesville, Virginia, called Automated Specialties. I was an e-tech (electronics technician). I lived 12 miles away in a cottage at a small summer resort at Lake Albemarle. It was in horse country and there were miles of meadows, pastureland, and white fences. There was just one thing that made that summer job memorable. At the lake resort there was a pretty female lifeguard about a year younger than I. Her name was Dolores. With short blonde hair, blue eyes, a pretty face, and a swimmer’s body, she was a knockout. We dated that summer. I don’t have a photo of her – all I have is a sketch I drew one day in that long-ago summer. I was no artist and it’s fair to say she was a lot prettier than a sketch can show.

I’m Back!

I drove to DC early Thursday. That was unfortunate, because I wasn’t trying to drive to DC. I was aiming for the city of Reston in northern Virginia. I had planned to take I-95 to the Occoquan exit then 123N to 7100N to 606 into Reston. That bypasses some of the heaviest holiday traffic near DC. But oh no, I had to get into the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes north of Fredericksburg (at the urging of electric highway signs that proclaimed the HOV lanes were open, AND at the prompting of my GPS – it certainly wasn’t my idea!). And who knew that when you commit to the HOV lanes, you can’t get out?!

The HOV lanes are between the north and southbound lanes of I-95. As I soon discovered, there are no exits from the HOV lanes. There was the small consolation of being in less traffic, but I had no choice but to drive past my exit and into the denser regions of the DC area, where construction (for the Metro) seems to be going on everywhere, and where the highway twists and turns as though you’re driving on a single strand of spaghetti amidst a plate of spaghetti, with highways crossing above and highways crossing below – sometimes at the same time. The road jiggled left and right amongst orange and white construction barrels while signs beside the jersey walls warned ominously, “Stay In Your Lane”. At one point the GPS said “Exit right ahead,” and so I did exactly that – I took the next exit on the right. As soon as I exited I knew I had made a mistake. Taking this exit is NOT what the GPS had meant – it was simply giving me a heads up to get into the right lane. But the GPS knew I had exited too soon and began giving me a series of instructions to get me back on the interstate and headed in the right direction. I had no idea where I was, but the GPS did, and it got me back on the highway and on to my destination.

I visited Ron (my first cousin once removed) and his mother Betty and son Nick. As it happens, Betty is an excellent cook. For one thing, she enjoys cooking, and when you enjoy doing something it helps make you good at it. Plus, she’s attended cooking schools and cooking classes and watched hundreds of cooking shows and learned by doing. So the food was delicious, and of course I, having virtually no will power, pigged out and now I’m afraid to step onto the bathroom scale. I’m afraid I’ll break the little thing.

We had soups and salads and turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce, and ham and green beans with slivered almonds, and mashed potatoes and crescent rolls and pies and cake and other sweet things. Leftovers involved turkey-rice-carrot soup, turkey with brown gravy, fried potato cakes, biscuits made with wheat beer, and other goodies. And all the time there was the ever-present temptation of potato chips, pita chips, pastries, and other high-calorie carbs all calling out, “Eat me.” The morning of the day I left to drive home, Betty cooked French toast made with panatonni bread and drizzled with real maple syrup. Plus, oven-baked bacon.

 

Betty made this pie; it’s the one thing I didn’t taste. I think it was a cranberry pie. Betty said it tasted like cherry pie.

 

Betty’s grandson Nicholas made this pumpkin pie. For a topping, Betty made whipped cream with a little vanilla added. Outstanding!

 

The traffic driving back was much worse than the traffic driving up to DC. Bumper to bumper, high speed, slowing to 20 mph, then speeding up, then slowing to zero, creeping stop-and-go for a few miles, speeding up, slowing to 40 mph, speeding up, slowing to 10 mph, speeding up again … you get the picture. Not fun! But here I am, blogging again.

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! But heck, even if you’re alone – nothing wrong with that!  Kick back with nachos and beer and watch TV. Find a restaurant that’s open and that has a bar, and have a beer (or iced tea, or coffee) and chat with other people who are at the bar by themselves – chat with the bartender if she’s not busy.

And give thanks for something good in your life.

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot

Astronomer Carl Sagan was a consultant and adviser to NASA beginning in the 1950s. Among several spacecraft he helped design was Voyager 1, which completed its primary mission in 1990. One of the last instructions sent to the spacecraft was for it to take photos of all the planets. This photo of earth from 4 billion miles away has become one of the most popular photographs of our time. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a pixel. (Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.) In a coincidence of geometry and optics, Earth lies in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from pointing the camera so near the sun.

 

Video: (not viewable on most mobile phones)

Excerpt:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
-Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot,” 1994

Tiny Balls o’ Gunk

I am starting one of my annual autumn chores: cleaning the leaves and gunk out of the gutters on the garage. (By “gunk” I mean the black, moist, compost-like residue of rotted leaves and twigs.) I was going to do it tomorrow, but the weather forecast changed and we might get rain this evening, so at 3 PM I have decided to clean the gutters today while the leaves are still dry.

Usually I put a ladder at one end of a gutter, climb the ladder, scoop out leaves and gunk with a garden trowel, hammer any loose gutter nails, climb down, move the ladder a few feet, and repeat … repeat … repeat, until I get to the end of the gutter. Then I move the ladder to the other side of the garage and do the same procedure.

I start to do that today, but after about one minute of work I look at the long stretch of gutter brimming with leaves and I think, “There has to be a better way.” I drive to Home Depot and buy their cheapest leaf blower (about $30). It is rated at 150 mph, which seems strong enough to move a leaf. I drive home, rip open the box, hook up the blower to a long heavy-duty electric cord, climb the ladder, and wow! Why didn’t I do this a long time ago? I still have to climb up and down the ladder numerous times to hammer the gutter nails – they always loosen during the year – but wow, the blower moves a lot of leaves fast, and it moves a lot of the gunk, too. In fact, it showers me with tiny black balls of gunk, all over my shirt, my face, my hair, inside my shirt pocket, over the blower itself. The moist little balls of flying gunk stick to whatever they hit, and they hit everything within ten feet. But it is worth it too see all that crud coming out of the gutters. I still have to use the trowel on the heaviest gunk, but the job goes a lot faster.

Finally the job is finished. I put away the blower, put away the ladder, put away the electric cord, put away the trowel and the hammer, take off the gloves and put them away. Brush off my shirt. Close the garage, go into the house. Then I bathe, for the second time this day.

Roanoke

I used to live in the city of Roanoke, Virginia. It’s located in the mountains of southwest Virginia – in the Roanoke Valley. I was looking through some old photos and I found these photos I took from the balcony of my apartment in Roanoke.

A view of the parking lot. I drove a 4WD Subaru at that time. You can see why I wanted 4WD.

My car is parked at the left end of the row.

 

 

 
There are cars beneath those mounds of snow. You can tell by the side mirrors sticking out of the snow.

Ordinary mounds of snow don’t have side mirrors.

 

 

I have my Subaru cleaned off and ready to go. But I have to wait for the parking lot to be pushed. 4WD is great in snow, but it’s a Subaru, not a snowplow. If I can get to the street, there’ll be no stopping the Subaru.

 

 

This was the view of my neighbor’s balcony. I don’t recall when I took these photos, but probably in ‘93 or ‘96.

The March ‘93 “Superstorm” brought 18 inches of snow to Roanoke. The “Blizzard of ‘96” brought 2 feet of snow on January 6-7, with 22 inches falling in one day, and a total that winter of 56 inches.

Over the 17 years I lived in Roanoke, the city had two “storm of the century” snow events and several more “storm of the decade” snow events.

The only time I had any trouble driving in snow occurred before I bought the Subaru. I had a Honda Civic (FWD), and while driving up a long, curving driveway at a friend’s house, the Civic lost traction and came to a complete stop on the hill. I took my foot off the gas and put on the brakes, hoping to hold the Civic on the hill. But the Civic started sliding backward down the driveway. It picked up speed and as it slid downhill it began to rotate. The Civic rotated 180° until it was pointed in the direction it was sliding. At the bottom of the hill the driveway curved to the left but the Civic was going too fast to follow the curve – it went straight off the driveway and plunged into deep snow, which quickly stopped its forward motion. I exited the Civic and walked up the driveway, almost slipping on snow and ice and injuring my back in the process. After that event, I bought the Subaru, and never had another problem driving in snow. When it comes to 4WD, my theory is: better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

John Muir

I left the house for a neighborhood walk at 3:57 PM, exactly one hour before sunset. High, thin clouds dimmed the sunlight, making it seem later than it was. At 57° it felt a little cool. Most trees still have a lot of their leaves, and yet plenty of leaves litter the yards and lie in mounds in the gutters. I’d guess half the leaves have fallen; the rest will go quickly.

There is something about walking in the autumn air that makes me think of John Muir. Muir was an engineer, a naturalist, a writer, and a botanist. Among his accomplishments, he founded the Sierra Club. When I returned from my walk, I decided to include in today’s post a few quotes from his writings. So here you go – quotes by John Muir:

“Every time I pull up a wildflower, I find it connected to the Universe.”

"Bears are peaceable people and mind their own business, instead of going about like the devil seeking whom they may devour." OUR NP, pg. 28

"In my first interview with a Sierra bear we were frightened and embarrassed, both of us, but the bear's behavior was better than mine." OUR NP, pg. 174

“I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in 'creation's dawn.' The morning stars still sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.”

“Most people are on the world, not in it, - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.”

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.”
- Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, p.41-42

“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature -- inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”

VirtualWayne’s Quick Muffaletta

Here’s an idea for a quick lunch. Of course, not having any ingredients on hand will make it much less quick.

Start with a loaf of Italian bread. Cut it in half and scoop out some of the doughy bread.

On one half add:

Ham:

Provolone:

Salami:

Mozzarella:

On the other half add:

Sliced salad olives
Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil:

Hot banana pepper rings
Onion rings:

Close the loaf and slice it:

Wrap the leftover portions and put in the fridge or freezer.

When I Was A Rocket Scientist

There was a time, many yarns ago, when I was a “rocket scientist”. I was a design engineer on several missile guidance systems (the official terminology was Missile-Borne Guidance Equipment, or MBGE, to distinguish it from the ground-based portion of the system). The first guidance system I worked on was called the Series 600. The Series 600 MBGE was a radio-command guidance system, so called because the radar that tracked the missile’s flight also sent messages to the MBGE. The MBGE decoded these messages and used them to orient and steer the missile, initiate stage separation, and so on. Over hundreds of flights we never lost a missile because of a failure of the guidance system.

I worked at a design center in North Carolina. The missiles our guidance systems flew on were unmanned vehicles launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida and from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. One time I was sent to our company’s launch facility at Kennedy Space Center to install test equipment and get it working. While I was there, one of the engineers gave me a guided tour of the facility. I got to see a variety of rockets, from a Redstone like the one Alan Shephard rode into space in 1961, to a booster stage of a Saturn 5 moon rocket. (The Apollo capsule’s Launch Escape System, a small rocket attached to the top of the capsule to pull it out of harm’s way, was more powerful than Alan Shephard’s Redstone. From Redstone to moon rocket in eight years!)

Sometimes I was sent to an aerospace testing company in Roanoke, Virginia, to qualify the MBGE to fly on a different vehicle. The MBGE would be vibrated on a shaker table, spun in a centrifuge, made hot and cold, and dropped from a height into a sandbox. Sometimes I was sent to another plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, to troubleshoot production problems there. Sometimes I was sent to San Francisco to troubleshoot supplier problems. I got a chance to explore the city: driving up The Embarcadero to Fisherman’s Wharf (nice restaurants with a view of the Bay), driving across the Bay Bridge to visit Oakland (passing Treasure Island halfway). I visited a strip club or two on neon-lined Broadway Street. In the airport gift shop, I bought one of those cheesy, touristy plates with scenes of San Francisco: Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and so on. I gave it to my parents. They hung it on their dining room wall where it stayed until they both passed away. Now I have it once again.

You’ll recall I said “we never lost a missile because of a failure of the guidance system.” Even so, the day came that the Defense Department told us our radio-command system was old and obsolete, and they awarded the contract for guidance systems to another company. The new system was an “inertial” guidance system; it didn’t require radio commands to guide the missile. Our MBGE cost the government about $40,000 each. The new inertial systems cost over a million dollars each. The first two missiles launched with the new inertial system experienced guidance system failures and their hundred million dollar payloads fell into the ocean. The Defense Department then asked us to produce a few more of our guidance systems while they worked out bugs in the new system. But that was no longer possible. Long-standing production lines had been shut down, floor space reassigned, people transferred to other jobs. I was one of those people who were transferred. Goodbye series 600, hello Safeguard.

I was transferred to work on the guidance system for the Sprint and Spartan missiles of the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system. Safeguard used two types of missiles to protect us from incoming nuclear warheads. The first line of defense was the Spartan missile. If our country was attacked, Spartan missiles would be guided to an intercept with incoming missiles high above the atmosphere. Any warheads that got past the Spartan missiles would be close to their detonation points, so the aptly-named Sprint missiles would be launched for a last-chance intercept. A Sprint missile streaked across the sky almost too fast for the eye to follow. The guidance system had to function after being hit with gamma rays and neutrons from an exploding warhead. That made the design more interesting and more complicated.

As with the Series 600, I traveled to our suppliers to troubleshoot problems. I traveled to symposiums and to get specialized training. Travel by plane was pleasant then. There was no TSA, no security; it wasn’t needed. Airlines were regulated and planes had large, comfortable seats and were rarely full. I usually flew on 2-, 3-, and 4-engine jets like 727s, 737s, 747s, DC-8s, and DC-9s. When I flew into a small city, I flew the last leg of the trip on a low-and-slow commuter plane like the de Haviland Twin-Otter or Beechcraft 99.

I couldn’t tell you all the places I flew to. On one memorable trip I spent three weeks in Santa Monica, driving to a nearby McDonnell Douglas plant every day to perform tests on the Sprint missile’s electronics. My motel’s elevator was a glass box on the front of the building with a view of the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I ate dinner across the street at Cheerio. Or I might drive to Redondo Beach for dinner in a restaurant on a pier over the water. I visited Mount Wilson Observatory, drove through Thousand Oaks and back to LA on Ventura Highway.

Another time I spent several weeks at an Air Force facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, learning the ways an exploding nuclear weapon could affect electronics. I used that opportunity to also sight-see around Albuquerque, exploring Old Town and riding a cable car to a restaurant at the top of Mount Sandia. I flew to a symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and while there I spent my “off-time” traveling the area and visiting tourist spots like Garden of the Gods Park. Plane travel to other states to do your job can be a hassle; it’s only fair that there’s an upside to it.

The Safeguard system worked, but our country’s political leaders decided it worked too well. They determined that Safeguard, if fully deployed, would upset the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD was based on an assumption that the only way to maintain peace with the Soviets was to ensure both our populations would be vulnerable to the other’s weapons. So Safeguard was scrapped before it could be deployed. Goodbye Safeguard.

A Night At The Bar

I posted this originally on a blog I had in 1999. (I believe in recycling.)

---

I sit at the bar, I sip my beer, I look out the window. The restaurant is crowded, the bar is crowded. Tonight, I don't look at the people around me, I just listen to their voices. It's a babble of conversations, but now and then one voice momentarily rises above the babble for a few words, then all the voices blur together again. It sounds like …

babble ... babble … babble …

(man's voice) "hey there ... "

babble ... babble ...

(another man's voice) "So I said ..."

female laughter … more babble ...

(female voice) "And then I ran out of condoms ..."

Huh?

I take a quick look at the female who said that. Redhead, early 20s, very cute. What was that about?

I sit at the bar, I sip my beer, I look out the window. The manager walks out of the kitchen and up to my barstool.

"How do you spell Schwarzkopf?" he asks. "As in General Schwarzkopf."

Uh, like it sounds?

"Write it down." He hands me a notepad and pencil. I write it down. He walks around the bar and shows the pad to other bar customers. As he passes by me again he says, "You were right. I told the bartender to give you a beer on me." Then he disappears into the kitchen.

Huh? What was that about?

I sit at the bar, I sip my beer, I look out the window. A loud male voice to my right says, "You're very quiet tonight!" I look to my right and see a guy I recognize as a regular, though I never talk to him.

"Yes, I am," I agree with him.

"It's been a hell of a week," he says. "I'm being sued for two hundred thousand dollars."

"You are?"

"Yeah, I beat the crap out of this guy in a bar, so he's suing me."

"You beat him up?"

"He attacked me with a bottle -- a broken bottle. I used to be an expert at karate. I beat the crap out of him."

"He attacked you?"

"He threatened me. He threatened to attack me with the bottle. So I beat him up."

After a while he leaves to talk to another customer. I'm alone at the bar again. I sip my beer. I look out the window. Then, I look to my left at the woman sitting two seats from me.

"Hello. Are you from Roanoke?"

She looks at me, then turns her barstool slightly toward mine. "I live in Galax," she says with a smile. "I'm in Roanoke on business."

"What's your business?"

"I'm an investment broker," she says. "Stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Boring stuff."

Boring is ok. It's only a night at the bar.

Fort Clifton

Fort Clifton: that’s where I spent this November afternoon. The temperature was perfect – upper sixties – and the trees are cloaked in their autumn colors. I wanted to take photos, walk down to the river, take more photos. So I did, I walked to the river’s edge and I met two very nice people. Mike and Stacy were there with their dog Ruby. There is an overlook at the river – a platform that juts out over the river just a bit. There’s a bench on it, and I assume it’s also used by birders – those people with binoculars who used to be called bird-watchers. It is very peaceful, very quiet. Occasionally a fisherman came motoring by, and there was some kind of great bird at the very top of a tall tree watching us visitors to his domain.

Ruby was initially suspicious of my camera, looking at me and cocking her head every time she heard the lens motor whirring, not quite sure what to make of it.  Soon enough she decided whatever it was, it was harmless, and she became friendly and playful.

I wanted to take a photo of Mike and Stacy with Ruby, but Ruby wanted to look everywhere but at the camera. I feel for those people whose jobs involve taking photos of babies and small children; what patience they must have. I posted more photos in an online album. Maybe one day I’ll run into Mike and Stacy again. I like meeting nice people. I like being reminded that there are so many decent people in the world. Watching the nightly news can make one forget that.

When The World Was New

Roslyn Landing Park: that’s where I went today. It was a nice November day, about 63°, sunny, and the sky was clear and blue. I went there just after the noon hour.

When I was a boy there were places in my small city that were sacred, or almost so. I’m not talking about brick and mortar churches. I’m talking about large stretches of woodland dotted with all kinds of mystery: clear–running brooks with minnows, salamanders, and crayfish; swamps studded with cattails growing tall; springs that flowed from the ground; hidden gardens offering a profusion of wildflowers if you knew when and where to look.

I spent many hours roaming the woods, walking along railroad tracks, walking along deer trails, wandering through thick forest with no trail to guide me. I felt a closeness to nature that was almost magical. The world felt new. Certainly, it was new to me. It was pristine – at least, the parts I traveled.

There were minor secrets: the stream that you had to know just where to cross; the swamp that you had to know the hidden path through. There were minor challenges: there was an empty field with tall grass and weeds maybe five feet tall. It was said among the group of boys I hung out with that the owner of the field would shoot you if he caught you in his field. Naturally, I and some friends had to go to the field and walk through it until the owner came out and tried to catch us. I don’t know if he would have shot me, but he did come out of his house carrying a shotgun. I crouched, hidden in the weeds, as he walked past carrying his shotgun just feet from me. It was great fun.

There aren’t many road signs to Roslyn Landing Park. You have to know to turn onto the road to the animal pound. You have to know to go around and past the animal pound until you see the little park. If it’s a weekend, you’ll likely see pickup trucks with boat trailers; there’s a boat ramp there. You’ll also likely see a few people sitting near the river bank fishing. Off to the right side near the river (as you drive in) is a paved walkway that meanders through the woods along the river.

The paved foot path (officially it’s the Appomattox River Greenway Trail) is being built in sections that will eventually join. I walked the first section and took photos. It was nice. It was not pristine: there was the occasional plastic bottle on the ground and plastic jugs floating in the river. I don’t blame the Lord for kicking us out of Eden. Give us a beautiful place and we’ll turn it into a dumping ground and fill it with litter in no time. I took photos and posted some of them here. If you go to the park in warm weather and go off the paved path, remember to watch for snakes. You may see a water moccasin near the water’s edge or you may run across a copperhead in the woods. I’ve encountered both more than once in this city.

When I Was A Numismatist

I have nothing to write about on this day, so let me tell you about my stint as a teenage coin collector. When I delivered the morning paper at ages 13 - 15, I collected a lot of change. This led to a brief coin collecting hobby. Every Saturday morning I met with the “manager” from the publishing company to pay for the papers I had delivered that week and to order papers for the next week. Before that meeting I pored over coins I received from my customers that week to see which ones I might not have. Very occasionally, after that, I would take my meager profits to the bank and buy a few silver dollars. The best silver dollars were minted in the 19th century. Those dollars were the ones that had the least wear. I thought it was really cool that I could go to the bank and buy coins minted in a previous century. The silver dollar shown here is called a Morgan type dollar, named after its designer, George T. Morgan. The obverse shows Lady Liberty, so sometimes it’s called the Liberty Head dollar. The reverse side shows an eagle, reminiscent of the Great Seal of the United States. This particular dollar has no mint mark which means it was minted at the Philadelphia Mint in 1886. The more collectible dollars were minted at the Carson City mint because it minted fewer dollars, thus they’re scarcer. Dollars were also minted in Denver, New Orleans, and San Francisco.

I kept the coins in “books” designed to hold coins. I had many coins in every denomination from dollars down to cents. Most of them have a lot of wear on them, so they’re not worth much more than face value. The coins that are most valuable are in excellent condition, and those are difficult to find. But the aim of the hobby wasn’t to collect valuable coins. The aim was to collect coins I didn’t have. Now the coin books sit forgotten in the corner of a closet. These days, a coin collector should be prepared to buy coins from the mint. The coins in circulation are mostly junk. (That’s my humble opinion.)

Why I Don’t Cook

Once in a while I’m tempted to cook something. I know better, but occasionally I go against my better judgment. It happens like this:

I run across a recipe for super-spicy hummus. I like hummus and I like spicy food. It sounds tasty. I’m tempted. I decide to make some.

First, I need to buy a few items I’ll never use outside of this recipe. I’ll need a half teaspoon of this and a quarter teaspoon of that. A quarter cup of this and an ounce of that. By the time I’ve bought a can, box, bag, or jar of every ingredient I need, I’ve been to three stores and spent forty two dollars, not counting gas. I take everything home and begin preparation. Oops, I didn’t see the part about using a food processor. I don’t have a food processor – I haven’t needed one until now – but forty two dollar hummus is expensive enough and I draw the line at buying a food processor. I decide I can just stir the ingredients really hard. After three hours of toiling, almost all the big lumps and many of the smaller lumps are mixed in. I wash up the pots and pans and clean the spills off the counter. It was a lot of work but I have enough super-spicy hummus to feed approximately twenty people. The recipe says “serve with pita chips.” What’s a pita chip? It sounds like one more way to get too many carbs. I taste the hummus; it’s not bad, except for the small lumps. I eat a little hummus with dinner and put the rest in the fridge. I promptly forget about the hummus. When I accidentally discover the container two weeks later, the hummus is covered with mold. And what about the leftover ingredients? The fresh spices wilted after three days. The dried spices I bought just for this recipe will sit on my kitchen counter until next year when I throw them out. The next time I need garlic cloves, I’ll have to buy fresh. You can’t buy a tablespoon of flour, and the bag of flour goes into a container in the cabinet above the stove where it will sit undisturbed until the distant day that archeologists of the future uncover it.

I’ve repeated this scenario with various recipes enough times to know better than to make meals that require cooking skills. Even a “side” can be problematic. I love asparagus but hesitate to buy it because most of it will go directly into the garbage can. Even food that comes pre-spoiled, like kimchee, spoils before it’s used up.

The simple recipes I post, like stir-fry veggies and pizza wrap, are not “cooking”. I call ‘em “throwing stuff together.” I love chili, and on a winter day I may throw together some chili and slow-cook it all day. I love Pasta e Fagioli and have been known to throw some together from time to time – though it’s never as good as the same soup at Olive Garden. If I’m in a mood for carbs, I may throw together some spanish rice with sweet-and-sour beans. I don’t mind throwing stuff together for lunch or dinner, but don’t ask me to cook.

August 14

I wrote this little piece on August 14, 2000, when I lived in Roanoke, Virginia. I didn’t put it online then because I never finished it. But after ten years, I know it’s as finished as it’s ever going to get, so I’m posting it. It is what it is: a fragment of writing inspired by a storm.

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August 14, 2000
 
The moon is full tonight. Very full. Completely full. Round as a perfect circle, and so ruddy that it's almost red. Easy to imagine it's filled with blood. A big, fat tick-moon hanging in the sky. And tonight, there is even a man in the moon. I haven't seen him in a very long time. Usually the moon, if I notice it at all, seems merely a yellow-white asteroid of a sky-planet: mountainous and cratered highlands, ancient valleys, and dark, desolate plains. But tonight's ruddy moon has a man in it, and his face looks at me curiously.

Why does this blood-moon hang in my sky tonight? Why does it visit me in such vivid color?

Two weeks earlier: I take the first week of vacation I've taken in a long time. It rains every day. It rains hard every day. Very hard. The word "torrential" springs to mind. But I don't care. Let it rain, bring it on. Nowadays, I prefer the rain to the sun. The sun is too warm, too sunny, too happy. The sun is a feel-good thing, and I am not in a feel-good mood. I rejoice to see the clouds, and I want them to be dark, and heavy, and very full of water. I want the rain to come down in buckets as though it means to seal me in my little abode. Tonight, the sky obliges me.

I drive to my favorite bar. I steer into a parking space and sit in my Jeep with the engine ticking over, air conditioner running, while the rain comes down in torrents. Stepping outside would be more or less like jumping into a lake fully dressed. Ever done that? Ever jumped into a lake fully clothed, just for the hell of it? I've done that. But I don't want to do it tonight. I want to sit in an air-conditioned bar and sip a beer — in comfort, not with my clothes dripping onto the floor and with my hair matted wetly to my head.

So I sit in the Jeep with the engine running and watch the rain pour down. "It can't keep this up," I think. Brilliant white electric bolts strike the ground in every direction. Trees bend in the wind and the rain sweeps the parking lot in curtains of driving water. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes pass. I haven't seen a storm like this in a long time.

"Screw this. I'm going home." I pull the Jeep back onto Electric Road. The rain comes harder, and I see that the road ahead is too dark. The street lights are out. Power outage, not a good omen. The rain is like a fire hose trained on my windshield. The wipers make no impact at all. Water floods across my windshield in an unrelenting torrent. I drive at one mile per hour, inching along the road. I can no longer see the road. Hell, I can't even see the hood of my Jeep. I inch the vehicle gingerly to the right, hoping to park it for a while. I feel the right front wheel climb an unseen curb, invisible under a river of brown water flooding the street.

After a while the deluge relents and I decide to continue my trip home. At one point the road is blocked by a fallen tree. Suddenly the bar seems like a more reasonable place to be, and I swing the Jeep through a U-turn. The road is flooded, and even at slow speed the Jeep throws up a rooster tail of water on each side. Water noisily scours the underside of the Jeep, and I wonder how the engine keeps running. Nevertheless it does, and I arrive back at the restaurant parking lot. The rain abates somewhat, and I dash into the restaurant.

I sit at the bar for a while and listen to mundane conversations between the patrons. All the bar lights are on, even the cleanup lights, and the dimmers are turned up full. There is no ambiance tonight, and the customers seem blissfully unaware that the storm of the decade passed by them minutes earlier. There are times when mundane is ok, but mundane isn’t working for me tonight. I pay my tab and I go back out into the night.

When I Was Four

When I was four years old, I learned that I could be unconscious and yet, at the same time, still possess a strange kind of consciousness: an awareness that was too unreal to be reality and yet too real to be a dream.

When I was four, my tonsils were removed. The surgeon knocked me out with ether. Unfortunately, he administered too much ether. He gave me an overdose. If you’re a doctor, how do you know you’ve administered too much ether? Does your patient stop breathing? Probably. That’s what happened to me. On the outside, I was very peaceful — a little too peaceful, in fact. On the inside, it was quite another story.

I was unconscious, and perhaps my breathing had stopped, but I felt anything but unconscious. I could feel myself lying on the operating table in a dark room. Although I could not see them, I could sense around me the presence of others who I assumed were doctors and nurses. Above me in the blackness was a mighty, glowing spiral. It glowed with an intense white light as it slowly rotated. The spiral was ineffably intense and seemed to burn its brilliance into my brain. I struggled to get off the operating table. The unseen beings around me fought to keep me on the table, but I lashed out at them with all my strength: kicking, flailing my arms, thrashing, fighting. They held me down on the table while the burning white spiral spun slowly in space above me with an intensity words cannot express.

When I awoke from surgery, I remembered how I fought to get off the operating table. I hoped my struggle had happened only in my mind, but I couldn’t be sure; the struggle seemed so real. I knew the spiral had existed only in my mind, and therefore wasn’t “real”, but the memory was extremely vivid. For many years afterward, whenever I remembered that spiral I re-experienced its intensity.

And now, many years later, I wonder if, on some level of reality, might it have been real. Maybe something happened that my young mind tried to make sense of in the only way it could. With an overdose of ether in my brain, was I subconsciously fighting those who were administering it? Or was my soul about to leave my body, and the beings around me, the beings I assumed were doctors and nurses ... perhaps they were other-worldly guides and teachers – angels, if you prefer – working to keep my soul in my body to keep me alive. Perhaps it was simply an extraordinarily intense, ether-induced dream and nothing more.

I don’t know why I saw the spiral, but the spiral shape is surely a fundamental part of the Cosmos. From the design of a seashell to the shape of our galaxy, spirals are everywhere. That is a clue to something important.

One Thursday Night

This post is from a blog I wrote in 1999. 

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October 20, 1999

It's dark outside, and even the bar seems darker than usual. They must have some of the bar lights switched off, or the dimmers turned down. It really is a good atmosphere, and I really do love it. The bar never got crowded tonight, and after happy hour ended it thinned out even more, with only a half dozen or so bar-goers sitting around it.  I watch people at the bar, watch the waitstaff, watch people in the room, watch the bartender, Darlene. I'm a watcher now, I guess. I'm an observer. The Prime Directive prevents me from interfering.

Amy saves me a seat beside her and again we talk for a couple of hours. A guy sitting beside her talks to us and does little bar-type  magic tricks. I once performed magic tricks myself, long ago. Maybe that's why I see all his sleight-of-hand moves. At one point he tells Darlene to pour me another beer and put it on his tab. Nice guy, huh? Shortly after that, he gets up and walks out without paying for my beer which, at his request, was on his tab. "What do you want me to do?" Darlene asks. "Do you want me to run after him?" "I'll pay for it," I tell her. The people I meet – sometimes I just shake my head.

Amy says she has to go. We pay our tabs. I was intending to leave, too. But instead of leaving, I stay and order another beer. I want to soak in a little more atmosphere.  The ambiance is just too nice to leave just yet.

What is there about a dimly lit bar that feels so comfortable, that feels so much like … this is is the place to be? There is an unspoken camaraderie among the people sitting by themselves at the bar. We may not speak to each other, but we are in each others' company. We're people who have nothing special to do, no place special to be. We sit at the bar, we buy nachos, or wings, or ribs, and we order beer, or mixed drinks, or shots, and we chill. We soak in the ambiance. If you're a true bar-goer, it's a place you love to be. Amy knows what I'm talking about.

"God help me," she says, "I love sitting at the bar."

I can't say it any better than that.

How I Learned To Drive

When I was 13 years old and entering junior high (do they still call it that, I wonder), I felt the need to have a little money in my pocket. I needed a job. And I got one.

Today you can be an Internet wonder at 12 and a millionaire at 14. But back in the day, jobs for 13 year old kids: not so many. I got a job delivering the morning newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Technically, I was self-employed. I didn’t work for the newspaper company. I bought newspapers from the publisher and paid a wholesale price and sold them to my customers for a retail price. If a customer didn’t pay, I took the loss. The publisher always got paid.

Today’s newspapers are a shadow of what they were back in the day. If I threw one of my Sunday papers at you and it hit you, you’d be dead. The Thursday paper was no slouch, either. If I hit you with a Thursday paper it would knock you down. You’d be stunned for a few minutes, but you’d live. Probably.

I got up at 4 AM every morning for two years to deliver the morning paper. Cold, rainy mornings were bad; rainwater that felt like ice water ran down my raincoat and over my numbed hands. Winters were brutal. Every morning my hands got so cold they hurt badly and I couldn’t make my fingers work. Several times during a delivery I would have to stop and light a paper on fire and hold my hands close to warm them enough that I could use my fingers. I wore two pairs of gloves but it didn’t help much. One snowy morning the front tire on my bicycle went flat at the beginning of my route and I had to roll the bike from house to house through several inches of snow. The weight of the newspapers on the front wheel forced the tire flat causing the inner-tube to come out of the tire and jam in the forks, which prevented the wheel from turning. I cleared the jam but as soon as the wheel began rolling it jammed again. I lifted the front wheel (and the basket of newspapers) off the ground and half-carried the bike through the snow for the rest of my route, which was five miles long. By the time I got home it was 8:30 (I had to be in school at 9). My hands hurt so badly I couldn’t even ring the doorbell, so I kicked the storm door a few times to alert my mother to let me in. I went to the bathroom lavatory and put my hands under cool running water. As my hands warmed up and came back to life, the pain I experienced was unforgettably agonizing.

I could fill a book with stories from my paper route. Dog bites were a constant threat. There were no leash laws then; dogs ran loose and loved to attack kids on bicycles. I was bitten a half dozen times by fairly large dogs, like German shepherds and collies. If my mother found out I had been bitten I would have to go to the doctor and get a tetanus shot. (No one, including doctors, ever mentioned the possibility of rabies. It was a different era.) One afternoon as I rode my route collecting payments, a collie ran up from behind me (sneak attack, as usual) to bite me for the second time. (You might think after the first attack the dog’s owner would keep his dog in his yard, but people didn’t care.) That was it! I’d had enough. I threw down my bike and chased that dog all the way to its owner’s yard, fully intending to kill it if I could get my hands on it. When the dog’s owner came out of his house, I shouted at him that if I saw his dog again I would kill it. And I meant it. The dog-owner said nothing. I don’t know if he was alarmed, bewildered, or amused at my frothing-at-the-mouth fury but whichever, he decided to leave it alone.

A dog incident with a more satisfying outcome occurred one morning as I cycled past a house where a large black dog lived. The dog normally stayed in the back yard, but every day as I rode past the house and threw a rolled-up newspaper into the yard, the dog would come tearing around the side of the house and make an aggressive run at me. On this particular morning, I threw the paper toward the house as usual, intending to land it near the front steps about eighty feet away. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the paper arcing through the air end-over-end, I can still see the dog tearing around the side of the house to threaten me, and I can recall watching with amazement as their paths intersected perfectly. The rolled-up paper scored a direct hit on the dog’s nose. The dog was plenty impressed by my aim. He didn’t bother me again.

As I said, there are many stories I could tell you about my paper route. But my learning to drive started with the Sunday paper. That paper was so big I could fit only twenty into the basket on my bike. My route was 5 miles long and there was no way I could deliver over a hundred newspapers in a reasonable amount of time if I had to bicycle back to the drop spot after every 20 papers. So early every Sunday morning my dad got up with me and we would take his big Buick Electra to the drop spot and load the Sunday papers into the trunk. We drove to the first house on my route, at which point I would jump out of the car and start my deliveries. I would grab a paper and carry it to a house, run back to the car, grab a paper and carry it to the other side of the street. I ran back and forth across the street for the length of my five mile route, while my dad drove his Buick Electra with its 455 cubic inch, 325 horsepower V-8 engine down the street at 2 miles per hour. How many miles I ran every Sunday morning I don’t know. I didn’t mind the running. I was glad my dad was driving that Buick loaded with newspapers. Even so, it took several hours to complete the delivery. When we finished, dad would ask me if I wanted to drive the car back home. Early on a Sunday morning there was little to no traffic. I was always excited to drive the big Buick. It was a Sunday morning ritual: dad and I delivered the thick, heavy newspapers and then I drove the Buick home. One day he began letting me drive it in other places. I remember the first time I pulled the Buick onto a highway. I was motoring down the road quite comfortably, and dad remarked, “The minimum speed is 45.” Driving 45 felt like a bit of a stretch for me, but I wasn’t about to give up the driver’s seat. I drove faster.

My next job, when I was 15, was drugstore delivery driver (yes, there was a time when drugstores delivered your meds right to your front door). During a Friday afternoon interview, the pharmacist asked me if I had a drivers license. I hadn’t actually needed a drivers license until then, so I answered truthfully, “No, but I’ll have one by Monday.”

It wasn’t a problem. After all, I had been driving for years.

Sun Day

I open my front door and step outside to check the temperature. The dawning sun coming up behind my house casts early morning sunbeams between houses onto a tree across the street. Part of the tree glows with color while part is in shadow. I have to grab my camera and take a picture. Of course, a photo doesn’t capture the incandescent quality and the subtle glow of light my eyes perceive. A photo doesn’t capture the ruddy intensity I see. A photo is just a picture.

But now it’s time to make breakfast. I open a carton of eggs and … what’s this? A mutant egg! It has a little dome on one end. Weird.

Why would a hen lay a mutant egg? Was it a mutant hen? Will eating a mutant egg harm me? Will it endow me with super-powers? Because frankly, I wouldn’t mind having some super-powers, especially if it means I get to hang out with Jessica Alba (Sue Storm, one of the Fantastic Four, remember?) I break the egg into a bowl. It looks ok. It smells ok. I cook it and eat it. It tastes ok. I don’t feel any different. Yet. I guess it didn’t give me super-powers after all. But when you next see me, if I have horns or a tail or I’m growing scales or I’m green, you’ll know why. On the other hand, it’s possible I’ll have x-ray vision or super-strength or super-speed. I’m not telling.

The House On Saint Andrew Street

My previous post was about my dad’s laundry business. He invested his money and a lot of sweat equity but ultimately the business failed. However, that didn’t end his dream of making money with his own successful business, and it wasn’t long before dad tried a new business venture. This time his inspiration was taken from a book titled “How I Made A Million Dollars In Real Estate – In My Spare Time.” (Really.)

The gist of the book was this: you buy an old house – a “fixer-upper” in sound condition but in need of minor repairs. Because it needs repair work, you can negotiate a good deal on the price of the house. You make the repairs, rent out the property, and you have an asset producing a revenue stream. You then sell (or trade) the property for a larger property, or multiple properties, and do the same thing with them. And so on and so on until you’re a real estate tycoon.

So dad bought an old house in a nearby city. It would become known in the family as “the house on Saint Andrew Street”, and it was most definitely a fixer-upper. I was a teenager and I learned a few things about rental property, house repairs, and government bureaucracy.

The house had two floors and dad rented out each floor separately. Who do you suppose wants to pay rent for rooms in an old house located in a not-so-good neighborhood? People with little money, mostly. Collecting rent was an ordeal. Every month, tenants wanted to pay a portion of their rent with a promise to pay the rest next month. And every month they would get farther behind on the rent until dad had to evict them. The first time dad evicted a tenant, he gave him 30 days notice to pay or leave. When he didn’t pay, dad asked the sheriff to move him out. The sheriff said he couldn’t make the tenant move unless he was given 3 days notice. Dad pointed out he had given him 30 days notice, which is even better than 3 days. The sheriff said that wasn’t good enough – “the law says 3 days, not 30 days”, so dad went back to the house and put a new eviction notice on the tenant’s door. This time it was for 3 days.

It seemed every tenant would wreak damage to his apartment before leaving. They punched holes in walls, kicked out windows (“the room was hot”), clogged toilets with kitchen waste (“taking out garbage is a hassle so flush it instead”). Dad and I were frequently at the house on Saint Andrew Street to make repairs. I hated that house.

I especially hated repairing the old galvanized plumbing that rusted from the inside out. Removing a leaky pipe or fitting would inevitably break an adjoining pipe or fitting that had rusted to the point of failure and was waiting for the slightest extra stress to fail.

One summer, dad decided to renovate the upper floor by removing all the plaster and wood lath and replacing it with drywall. He enlisted me (I was 16) and my brother Ken (he was 11) to do most of the grunt work. We took hammers and pry bars to the walls and ceilings; we broke the plaster and pried off the lath. Then we shoveled the plaster and lath into a large steel washtub. Full of plaster, the tub was heavy and required two of us to carry it. My brother and I carried the tub to the stairwell, carried it down the stairs to the first floor, carried it through the front door out onto the porch, carried it down the porch steps to the yard, carried it around the side of the house and to the back yard, then to a ravine at the far end of the back yard, and that was where we dumped the contents of the tub. Then we walked back to the house, up the stairs, and filled the tub again. At first I counted the trips we made to the back yard ravine. After 200 trips, I quit counting.

When the plaster was finally gone, dad and I hung drywall. We hung drywall on every wall and every ceiling on that floor of the house. We measured and cut drywall. We measured and cut holes for switches and outlets. We covered joints with joint compound and paper tape and more compound. We installed metal drywall corners and covered them with compound. And we did a lot of sanding (joint compound today is so much easier to make smooth). I tied a strip of cloth over my mouth and nose to help me breathe air that was thick with dust from sanding joint compound. Even so, it got in my nose, it got in my ears, it got in my hair. Every day was more hard work, a summer job with no paycheck. Finally came the easy part: painting the walls and ceilings. Two coats. Dad used oil-based paint and the odor of petroleum solvent was strong enough to kill brain cells. (One of my chores was buying the solvent at a gas station when we needed it.) Thinning paint with solvent, cleaning brushes with solvent, cleaning paint off my hands with solvent – it was like washing my hands with kerosene. And how was your summer vacation?

After several years of struggling to make a successful business, dad sold the house on Saint Andrew Street. By then the bottom had fallen out of the market for old houses, and he got only a fraction of what he had paid for the house. If some branch of my family has a coat-of-arms, I’m sure you will find blazoned on it the phrase “Buy high and sell low.” It is the way of my people.

The Laundry and the Handbook

When I was a youngster, my parents owned a laundry. It wasn’t the coin-operated, self-serve kind that is prevalent today. You could use the machines yourself, or you could hand your laundry to the person at the customer counter, and a laundry employee would do the rest for you … washing, drying, pressing, folding. My father was an air-conditioning and refrigeration mechanic at a cigarette factory, but he always wanted to have his own business like his father and brother. The laundry was his chance to be his own boss. Which meant every day after work and all weekend long he worked at the laundry. Mostly, he worked on the machines to keep them running. My mother worked there, too. She worked behind the customer counter, taking in dirty clothes, handing back clean clothes, taking in money, handing back change. So, where was I?

I was right there, sitting in a metal chair, bored out of my 8-year-old mind. My parents were strict: I wasn’t allowed to go outside. Not that there was anything to do outside. The laundry was on a busy street in a commercial district. There were no other kids around. I was supposed to sit in my chair and do nothing for the entire time I was there, which was for hours every weekday afternoon and evening, and all day on weekends. There was absolutely nothing for an 8-year-old to do there. It was as bad as it sounds.

There was a plethora of machines: washers, commercial dryers, and extractors. After laundry was washed it was placed in an extractor to be spun to a very high speed, which extracted almost all the water from the laundry. Only then was the laundry put into a dryer.

Sometimes I watched my father work on a machine. A constant problem with every washer was stuff getting into the water pump and jamming the impeller so it couldn’t pump water. The gas-fired dryers tumbled the laundry in a drum which reversed direction several times every minute. The motors were controlled by micro-switches connected to cams, and occasionally there would be a problem with them. Sometimes I would open the lint filters in the dryers and find rhinestones. Oddly, there seemed to always be a few rhinestones in the lint filters.

One day my father brought in a large olive-colored book and handed it to me. It was about two inches thick. On the cover was printed, “Amateur Radio Relay League Handbook.” I had nothing to do so I started reading at page one and was soon hooked. The electronic components it described were easy for me to understand: resistors, capacitors, inductors. I could visualize how these things worked. I visualized moving electrons and in my mind I saw expanding and collapsing magnetic fields. I learned Ohm’s Law, that most fundamental law of electrical circuits. I learned about reactance and impedance and I learned there were real numbers and imaginary numbers. It all fascinated me. When I got to the concept of “resonance” I realized I was over my head. I plunged ahead anyway, reading about series resonance, parallel resonance, Quality factor (Q-factor). Hundreds of electronic mysteries lay revealed on the pages in my hands. I was absorbed for many hours – reading, re-reading, often struggling to understand, but always learning.

I began to study everything I could find about the workings of radios and televisions. I collected every radio I could get, I took them apart and built little circuits at home. When my dad went to night-school to study radio servicing, I attended class with him. By then I was 13 years old but still too young to officially enroll, so I audited the class. I did the homework and took all the exams. When I was about 14 or 15 I got my Novice-class amateur-radio license, which required passing a written test and a Morse-code proficiency test. I spent my hard-earned newspaper-delivery money on building an amateur radio transmitter and I bought a short-wave receiver. I put up a vertical antenna in the center of the back yard. I spent hours in the attic “talking” with people around the country. I communicated using Morse code … dots and dashes.

Dad’s laundry business didn’t succeed, though he put in the hours and worked hard at it. He added pressing and folding equipment so he could offer those services. He added a display case so he could have another revenue stream from selling trinkets like wristwatches and such. But the advent of coin-operated self-serve laundries doomed his business. People wanted the (cheaper to use) coin-op machines, and dad couldn’t afford to replace all his equipment. I still recall overhearing dad and mom discussing what they should do. Ultimately, he got rid of the laundry. He sold it for a fraction of what he paid for it.

And what of the Handbook my dad gave me to help ward off hours of boredom while I sat in his laundry? It launched me on a path to college and an engineering degree. It’s funny, sometimes, how things work out.

After mom passed, I found that Handbook in her garage. I flipped through pages that brought back so many memories and feelings. For a while, I kept the Handbook. But it was old; the front cover was missing, the binding was coming apart and pages were loose, and it was filled with knowledge about mostly obsolete technology. Ultimately, I got rid of the Handbook. I tossed it into a dumpster along with hundreds of other memories from mom’s house.

Spinach Wrap

Here’s an idea: Take a piece of wrap bread, sprinkle it with shredded mozzarella. Blanch spinach (or kale or collard greens) in boiling water (with salt and vinegar) for 3 minutes, dump in ice water, squeeze out the water and put the greens on the wrap. Add sliced garlic cloves and sliced mushrooms, drizzle with olive oil, and bake for 15 minutes at 375°. I’m no cook, but if you are, you may know how to make it better with spices. Maybe rosemary and thyme?

I added a ground beef steak topped with sautéed onion rings. A Merlot or Cabernet completes the meal. As much as I write about food you’d think I was planning to have my own cooking show.

Wednesday Morning

I awaken and lay in bed a long time. The room is cool; I haven’t turned on the central heat yet. The nights now drop into the 30s or 40s. It’s dark, too. I roll over and look at the clock: 6:52 AM. I drift back to sleep.

I awaken again. There is daylight now. It’s cold and cloudy; it might rain. More likely it will rain tonight. It will likely rain tomorrow, too.

Finally I get out of bed and look at the clock: 8:05 AM. I go to the kitchen and take my morning meds and debate turning on the heat. The thermometer on the the hall thermostat shows it’s 66° inside the house. I put on my warmup suit and sit at the computer. I have a little space heater beside me that has run full time for the past week. It’s small, six inches square and eight inches tall, but it’s enough to keep the house from getting uncomfortably cold. Though the house is 66°, I’m comfortable, which surprises me. According to the NWS, it’s 45° outside. The forecast is for a high today of 55°.

I remember it’s Wednesday, which is garbage pickup day, and I make a mental note to take out the kitchen garbage. I check my email and do some writing. I look at APOD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (there’s a permanent link to it from this blog). I go to the kitchen and prepare a quick breakfast: scrambled eggs and sausage crumbles, which I season with salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. Cayenne pepper is supposed to be healthy but that’s a bonus; I use it because I like it. I eat, dress, brush my teeth, and get in my car to drive to Walmart. It’s 9:30 AM. I have forgotten to take out the garbage.

I buy food items plus a case of 4-hour fireplace logs (cleaner burning than “real wood” it says on the box). I leave Walmart and drive to Martin’s to buy a couple more food items. I leave Martin’s and drive back home. I notice the gutters along the streets are filling up with brown leaves, as are many yards and sidewalks. I get home at 10:45 and check the temperature in the house: it’s 65°. I put away the food and remember to take out the kitchen garbage. I clean out the wood stove insert in the fireplace and place a 4-hour log in it and light it up.

By now it’s 11 AM. Usually I eat lunch after the noon hour, but today I eat early. I have a small garden salad with a side of tuna salad in the fridge.

I take the salad to the living room where I can sit and watch the news while I eat. The 2010 election day is over but the talking heads on TV are already talking about the 2012 elections.

By the time I finish eating my salad, the little Pine Mountain 4 hour fireplace log is going pretty good, so I take out my camera and shoot a small low-res video.

I write my blog, and I edit the video to remove the sound (fans in the stove blowing out heated air) and then I upload the video to Youtube so I can embed it in my blog. That was my Wednesday morning. How was yours?

Pizza Wrap

I wanted to try something different for dinner, so I made pizza wraps. (I wanted lavash bread but the store didn’t have it so I bought the wraps instead.) I used two wraps and started by putting a little olive oil on each one and spreading it across the top side of the wrap. Then pizza cheese, dollops of pizza sauce, sautéed onion, sautéed mushrooms, anchovies on one and pepperoni on the other. I baked them at 375° for 15 minutes and afterward sprinkled crushed red pepper over them.

Because I used thin wraps instead of pizza dough, they were easily foldable. I cut them in half then folded each half so the wrap bread was on the outside and the tasty goodness was inside. I was planning to eat one tonight and one tomorrow, but I couldn’t decide which one to eat today. So, unfortunately, I pigged out and ate both. That sounds bad, I know, but I had no lunch today, so this meal was both lunch and dinner (or as they say in some parts: dinner and supper).