Old Stomping Grounds

One thing about being in Lemoore, it makes it harder to get home. It's right at the cusp of being too far to drive and too close to fly. 9 in a half hours makes huge difference in how I schedule thing but when I finally get to the end, it makes it that much sweeter seeing the smiling faces at the end of the journey. In my elder age, I'm not the fly by the wire speeder that I was at 20, now I ponder my moves and am fearful of what tickets can do. When Google maps says something is going to take a certain amount of time to drive, its fairly close to the mark I hit.

We just got back from one of my fly by trips to Arizona, a week isn't much time when you have friends and family scattered across an entire state and considering that I do come by a couple times a year, I don't expect them to drop everything when I'm driving through their town. Never the less, our trip was packed, spent the first couple of days in Chandler staying at my uncle Larry's, he has an apartment at his hanger which he makes available to family such as I when we're in the area and we are really appreciative!

Part of my uncles collection of Things

Where we stayed

While there, got to see my oldest friend in the world, Leslie and her husband Scott. I met Leslie the summer before 6th grade and she was the coolest person on the block because she had a couple of quads and an empty field besides her house that had a track. We went out to dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings where she met my wife for the first time and seemed delighted with the company. Good people!

The next couple of days were spent hanging out with the pop, my step mom Diane , Uncle Larry, Aunt Michele and Aunt Mary and Uncle Gordo had just flown in from Australia and there was a good night of tale exchanging.

From the left, May, Gordo, Larry, Michele bride at the bottom

Bride, Dad and Diane

Next Prescott where I got to hang out with my bald but beautiful sister who was in good spirits even with the tough times she's going through.

I spent an afternoon updating her computers and setting up her audible.com account (which is my account and has entirely too much money sunk into it). I went over to my second oldest friend Jason's house and passed on my old 30 gig Zune (I had 4 Zunes but only room for 3 on my account). He's a music freak and had yet to own an MP3 player, me giving him the Zune was my coin tossed into the pool of karma. I couldn't think of anybody who would have got better use out of it then him and I just installed a new battery. Hmm, maybe I need to blog about my love of Luddites sometime soon.

While hanging out with my mom, her neighbor came by with a laptop that was made in 2000 that was new still in it's plastic that he picked up at some auction that he wanted to use to track his different jobs and wanted me to make it do that for him. Hmm, a spreadsheet would probably be albe to do that. Excel was out of the question because it cost money so I figured I would plug it into my sisters high speed internet and update everything and find something free. Alas, I get to my sisters and find the laptop only had a phone line. So I went online with my computer, found a great free spreadsheep program called Gnumeric, read the directions and used a little bit of computer savvy and downloaded the program to a disk and installed it on the dinosaur and placed a different file with the names for each month of the year on the desktop, it would track the job, with names, supplies, add the money and miles traveled at the end of the month and his accountant should be happy.

Sunday, I introduced my favorite city girl to some light climbing at the Dells with Larry and Jennifer. At first it was a little spotty, it's hard to introduce someone who's walked of flat ground 99.9 percent of their life to clambering over rocks, by the time we left, she was getting her footing. Both of us being not used to that sort of exercise felt it the next day.

The above picture was taken using the Canon setting Color Accent

Me and Larry

Larry and Jennifer

Finally back to work on Tuesday, it's hard to cram all of the people that I wanted to see in just a week. Hopefully next time I can get a little more time out there.

Dinner with one of my oldest friends

Last night I was invited out to dinner with one of my oldest friends Leslie and her husband Scott at Buffalo Wild Wings (the Mango Habanero sauce rocks). Back story on Leslie, we met the summer before my 6th grade, she lived a stones throw away from me and had a big empty lot next to her house with ATV’s that we used to carve up trails around the place with (I also ran over her big sister which scarred me for life, sorry Shelia!). Sixth grade, she was probably one of my best friends and was in fact my first girl friend before we both knew the full meaning of the word. Meaning we held hands a few times and kissed once… in her shed next to the quads. I think her dad telling me that he was watching me might have stopped that back then.

Talk about some old memories, talking with her reminded me just how much I forgot over the years. Items that were important to her back then aren’t even blips that I have thought about since they happened back then. A few items that I had totally forgotten about, I went to Thailand in 7th grade and brought her and her sister back souvenirs, I remember buying souvenirs but I don’t remember who I gave them to, she still has hers. I have a talent for drawing mazes, something I think I could do before I could actually write and I drew her name in bubble letters and made a maze out of it and I guess I drew her a some other drawings, I have no idea what they were but she still has them. In 7th grade, we had wood shop together and she told me that she was going to fail if she didn’t get a box she was making routed and I routed it for her. It was a big deal to her but all I remember was her asking me for a favor, I didn’t even remember what that favor was. The funny thing is, her parents are still using that box (and think that she routed it, heh). I don’t even have any of the my wood shop projects from back in the day. I think my mom sold them at garage sales or gave them away (like she did my comic books). 

Those are definitely some items out of my prehistory that were important to her and she was able to hold on to the memory because she had kept those mementos. They had fallen out of my memory because I had lost so many items from my past like most of us do. I had thought that I had a great memory compared to most of my friends about those days but seeing Leslie showed much of my past I had forgotten, I didn’t have a diary or a camera and most of those items had been added to the rubbish bin over the years meaning that they also fell out of my consciousness because I didn’t have those bookmarks in my memory to keep them fresh.

Forward to today, we both have kids who are in high school, we’re both happily married, in fact, she’s been married to the same guy for 16 years a cool dude. Anyone who stays married for 16 years and be as happy and as comfortable as they looked made the right choice. We both have tattoos, hah, never thought I would see that day. It’s strange experience seeing us both as adults because the last time we were close to each other, we were still children. We were friends after we moved away from that little neighborhood but after 7th grade we didn’t really hang out and grew two different ways but for that year and a couple of months, we were two peas in a pod and our memories of that time are still locked in place and unsullied by the process of puberty and growing up.

Another homecoming

The planning for the trip started out with discovering a nail in the sidewall of one of my rear tires, no problem, plug it enough to get me to Costco and grab a set of new rear tires, out of there in an hour and load up the fridge. Arrive only to find that they were out of my size of tires so I hit up Big-O and 2 hours later I was back home ready to man handle the fridge.

One of the good things about being the guy that everyone goes to for help when you move is that eventually you get smart and start collecting tools to make moving those big objects not such back breaking chore, of those, my favorite is my wheeled furniture mover and with it’s help, I was able to make short work of the fridge.

Once loaded, I packed odds and ends around it and beat feet out of San Diego, the clock said it was 7 when I left and 2 when I pulled up into my mom’s place. I’ve made this trip more then anybody in his right mind should, I crawled onto the couch and the next morning the roosters crowed me awake at 8. Damn country life.

Took a shower and called my buddy Justin, who had kindly offered to store my fridge a couple of weeks ago in his garage along with some beer that he had sitting around. Well it saves me paying for storage and in reality, my mom really didn’t need another fridge, she has 3. We all came out ahead, well actually, he did, I just broke out even. No stickers man!

After lending a very brief hand with some water leaks on his travel trailer, I went to another appointment with a friend whom I haven’t seen since 1993, Minnie. She was the best friend of Heather number one (I haven’t wrote about here yet but I seem to have bad luck with all of the gorgeous Heathers in my life, #1 was the girl I went to Prom with and thoughts of her took up a sizable portion of my conscious mind for a couple of years, she’s now happily married to a guy named Frank and just had her first child)

Minnie asked me to help make her myspace shine so we met at Hotel St. Michael’s, there’s a coffee place downstairs that has free WiFi for paying customers. I’m mildly worried about my new first impression to her. I was wiped out from driving most of the night before and my inner voice sounded like one of those adult voices in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Yet she force fed me coffee and I hacked out something to make her myspace look bit better, far from my best work but my brain wasn’t firing with all of it’s cylinders. Don’t worry hun, I hate it when I do shoddy work, I’ll reach into my bag and work on your place when I get home and am more awake and people will make “aahhhhs” and “oohhhss” when they visit.

We parted at 6 vowing to meet in an hour or so at Prescott Brewing Company with her husband and another couple that I see way too little off, Nathan and Aimee (it ended up being a little over an hour and a half). It was supposed to be more people then just the 5 of us but one had hurt his back at work, another was out of state and the other one had just finished putting tires on his trailer and wasn’t up for anything (slackers and pudwackers). Instead of a large loud dinner, it ended up being a small intimate thing, beer was flowing and me being the story keeper, I gathered up the loose ends of the other side of the mysteries that have plagued me in the dark hours of the night.

You might have noticed, one of my daily food groups is information, I’m a junkie, I eat it and the digestive process of my mind labels it and sticks it into a corner of my large head to regurgitate at a later date either in writing or over a beverage with some buddies. I know curiosity killed the cat but I can’t help myself, I was the kid that always asked “Why?” not just about the physical world but the social chemistry that make people make certain decisions in their life.

If you’re lucky in your life, you have a person in your group of friends that carries your story in their head. Someone who will never forget you no matter what happens and will be interested in your life. I’m the one that talks to everyone, not just here on the blog but in person. I couldn’t imagine being different then the way I am and after watching people, I know I’m far from normal. I tend to reach down or up into someone’s life, put a hand on their shoulder and shake the be-Jesus out of them and dredge up the things they haven’t thought about in years. It shocks some into seeing beyond the new lives they’ve built up and reminds them of the history that has faded into grainy pictures into the background. This past week was Minnie’s turn to be pulled back in my fold.

Seeing Minnie tonight cleaned up an entire corner of that project I have growing in my head. She’s grown in to an amazingly beautiful adult and hasn’t lost any of her natural cheeriness. Her enthusiasm is contagious and my tiredness left me. We were perched at the corner of the table and the stories were flying back and forth, the world rotated off the movements of our lips and for a little while, everything else went away. After timeless period of time, we took a breath and played musical chairs and I was talking to her husband Ryan.

Minnie, I have to hand it to you, you did well, you picked mate who complements the person that you are and totally adores you, great choice. Within a couple of minutes of meeting, Ryan and I were talking like old buddies, he slid right into the conversation without any hesitation and I added a few new pieces to the monument. He’s definitely a cool cat.

Not to forget Aimee and Nathan, we have a unique relationship, we used to double date. I was going out Aimee’s best friend back in high school and Nathan was my buddy. Since I had the only car at the time the four of use went on some interesting adventures together, they have see a side of me….well lets just say it’s a side that’s been rarely seen. Lot of good memories were rehashed.

Much beer was drunk that night and Minnie even talked me on the dance floor to two-step at Matt’s Saloon. Good times and I’m eagerly awaiting the next meet up.

Oh and pictures from that night can be found here.

Memory

It’s funny how memory works.

One of the guys I work with, I won’t mention names, was telling me a story about living out in the country. I guess where he lived, there where cats everywhere and these feral beasts got into everything. I didn’t realize that that city folk, when they got tired of their pets, would take them out to country and let them go and some how a fair number of the cat family took up resident around his house.

Back when he was 4, he was out playing in a small children’s pool, you know one of those blue round ones you see at Walmart? And in his young mind, an idea popped up. He started running around in circles in the pool, making a whorl pool in the center and tossed 4 of these cats in. He knew his dogs could swim but wanted to see how well the cats did. Using his hand as a paddle, he kept the water moving like a merry-go-round. He thought the cats were alright because they kept moving with the water going around in circles. He was still making them go around when his uncle found him and he realized that 4 cats were dead.

Go forward in time more then 2 decades, he’s grown up into a well adjusted, responsible adult that most people could never imagine hurting a fly. There’s a big reunion where he takes his wife and kids to meet the rest of the family. And making the rounds with his wife, what’s the statement that kept popping up without fail? How is Iraq? Navy? How is your family doing?

Nope.

“I remember when you were a kid and killed all of those cats”.

Once you earn the name cat killer, you’ll can never live that down.