Blog Refarkling and SGMAaGC

Please bear with me.  I can’t export the postings from the old blog, so I’m trying to import a select few and I don’t have them ordered by posting date yet.

And I’m celebrating 14 years of membership in the Sensitive Guys Martial Arts and Gun Club this year.

 

- Poppa

We’ve Moved

After much frustration with our previous blog host we’ve decided to try WordPress.  The old blog was a Yahoo beta site and had bare-bones functionality, clumsy composition tools, and wouldn’t let us edit most posts, forcing us to delete, reformat, and load them as new, wiping out any comments associated with them.  We’re going with WordPress because we’re impressed by the good looking WordPress blogs maintained friends and family.

So far, so good.

I’m including the cow tipping diagram as a public service.

8 Things You Don’t Know About Me

Meme-ing for the very first time – I’m shy about this – I got tagged (is that the right term?) by the wonderful homeinkabul so I have been thinking about this in spare moments during my day.

1. The very first odd thing I can recall about myself is that I use my middle name (or at least a variant of my middle name) to refer to myself.  I have NEVER been called by my first name, except by strangers who assume that I use my first name.  My actual first name is the same as my mother’s name.  My parents never intended to call me by that name.  So, you might ask, why didn’t they put my mother’s name as my middle name?  The answer is – religion.  The religion my parents followed was insistent that babies must be baptized with the name of a saint.  Sadly, my middle name, the name I use (or at least a variant of that name), is not a saint.

2. I never expected to be living in Saint Louis at this time of my life.  I left Saint Louis when I went to college.  I expected that I would never return.  I imagined living in a different town every decade.  In the decades since then, I’ve lived in 3 cities.  And 1 of those 3 cities is Saint Louis again!  So I’m falling a little behind on this part of my life list.

3. I regularly forget how old I am.  And I regularly forget how old my family members are.  I always have to do the math.

4. Although I’m capable of behaving in an extroverted manner, I am actually a shy, quiet person – except when I’m feeling blustery.

5. Once, I saw a house on fire and I didn’t call 911.  This was before cell phones existed.  I told myself that someone else had probably already called 911, so I convinced myself I didn’t need to find a phone booth and make the call.  I still feel guilty about that, almost 30 years later.

6. I love to read, but mostly I forget the plot and characters after I read the book – what does that mean about me?  Remember “Lazy Eye”, where the child had to wear an eye patch over the “good eye” to make the weak eye work harder/become stronger?  Maybe I have the equivalent “Lazy Memory”.  But I can’t figure out where to put the patch, to improve the weak memory.

7. I know I have a fortunate life, with many material benefits.  But I have always been insecure about money.  At least a decade of my adult life trickled away with me very reluctant to spend money on myself for pleasure.  And then the pendulum swung the other way, toward retail therapy.  It’s hard for me to find a healthy balance with money.  It’s hard for me to feel that I’ll have adequate resources for retirement, despite consistently saving in 401(k) plans ever since they were created.

8. I have a short attention span.

-Nan

Comments (1 total)
Author:Anonymous
Yay! I’m so happy that you responded to the meme. They are so much fun.
—-homeinkabul
2007-06-09 02:39:24 GMT

8.1 Things You Don’t Know About Me …

… Unless You’re My Wife or One of My Daughters and You’ve Had to Listen to These Stories for Years.

Continuing the meme.

1.) My college aptitude tests told me I was best suited to be either a printer or a mercenary.   I’ve pumped gas.  I’ve painted vending machines.  I’ve delivered furniture (it always seemed to be a damn hide-a-bed and had to go upstairs).  I’ve baled hay (for one day, and got sea-sick on dry land).  I’ve operated machines that stuff junk mail envelopes.  I’ve flipped burgers and worked with Colonel Sanders’ eleven secret herbs and spices.  I’ve been a bean walker, a detasseler, a deroguer, a lard puller, a belly wrapper, and a kidney popper.  I’ve been a brickyard worker, a ram press operator, a spot welder, a jackhammer operator (for one day, it was as bad as hay-baling), a circuit card assembler, a NASA-certified solder inspector, an expeditor, a coordinator, a production control supervisor, an assistant project administrator, a manufacturing specialist, and a business analyst.  Subsistence level drug dealing friends once tried to recruit me to be a collector for them (their “muscle”) but I was too shy and didn’t like confrontation.  I’ve been a garbage man and urinated in the back of garbage trucks.  I’ve worked in slipform construction and urinated in the walls of grain elevators while the cement was still curing.  Think about that the next time you have corn flakes.  Your corn flakes probably didn’t come from the elevators I built, you say?  Well, I wasn’t the only one doing it.  I’ve never been either a printer or a mercenary.  Now I’m a computer programmer.

2.) In 1966 my high school guidance counselor told me I’d never be a computer programmer because I didn’t have an aptitude for math.

3.) I once got in trouble for trying to derail a train.  It didn’t get on my permanent record because I was four years old at the time.  The police came to my house and gave my parents a Stern Lecture, however.  A year or so later, my parents reported me missing because I wasn’t home from school when they got home from work.  I’d gone to visit my grandmother, but she wasn’t home.  A friend and I were playing on a pile of mud at a construction site when the police found us and escorted us home.  This was my last run-in with the police until 1974 when I found myself staring down the barrel of a .38 caliber Police Special.  Once again I found myself being escorted by the police, this time back to a party I’d escaped from by crawling out the second story bathroom window and taking a stroll on the roof of the drugstore next door.  I don’t drink tequila to excess any more.

4.) I was a TAR (Teen Age Republican) and campaigned for Tricky Dick in 1968.  Why, you ask?  Because I couldn’t tolerate the thought of having a president named “Hubert.”  Fortunately I was too young to vote for Nixon, so at least I don’t have that on my conscience.  Four years later I was carrying banners that said “Don’t change Dicks in the middle of a screw, vote for Nixon in ’72!” and “Fuck for peace!”

5.) In the summer of ’73 I used to hang occasionally with Hells Angels, the Iowa branch, so they were relatively polite.  Things to remember when dealing with the potentially volatile; don’t ever show fear, exude confidence at all times, make sure your eye contact is firm but non-confrontational.

6.) If I need to know where “O” is relative to “R” in the alphabet, I still need to recite the whole thing from the beginning.  If I ever have to recite the alphabet backwards to stay out of the drunk tank, I’m doomed.

7.) Science Fiction turned me into an atheist when I was a kid.  Organized religion ensures that I remain an atheist now that I’m an adult.

8.0.) I’m still keeping secrets involving cemeteries and sloe gin.  8.1.) I believe I know the meaning of life.  It’s not 42.  I didn’t find it in either cemeteries or sloe gin.  I found it while reading Tolstoy, not in his words, but from the state if mind he put me in while I was reading him.  You may not learn details of any of this until after my death (if then, bwah ha ha ha ha).

- Poppa

Comments (3 total)

Poppa – I believe your number 8 falls into the category of “8 Things You Still Don’t Know About Me”. Thanks for meme-ing, its always an interesting read.
–erin-bob 2007-06-24 16:59:46 GMT

Yeah, thanks. I learned some new things but you’ve still managed to maintain an air of mystery…
–Leah 2007-06-25 19:58:21 GMT

Really cool, thanks for sharing.It’s a good thing I don’t eat cornflakes…
–asiyah 2007-06-29 14:22:03 GMT

The Monster

I was surfing past the Discovery Channel the other day when I noticed some familiar scenery.  It looked just like a lake we saw on the road between Bo and Bergen in Norway.  I paused at the channel and read the program summary.  The show was a documentary about Selma, a sea serpent thought to live in Lake Seljordsvatnet in Seljord, Norway.  There were the usual accounts of locals who had seen the monster with their own eyes.  It reminded me of the time I saw a monster in a lake.In the summer of 1964 I was twelve years old and experiencing my first trip to a foreign country.  Every summer, my parents, Aunt Anita and Unca Gail (I was enamored of Donald Duck back then, hence the “Unca”), and cousins Don and Sally used to spend a week at a fishing camp in Minnesota.  This year my parents decided to splurge and go to a camp in Canada.  My younger brother Jim was parked with my Aunt and Uncle.  Mom, Dad, cousin Don, and I headed north to a back-woodsy place called Penney’s Timberlane Lodge on Lac Suel in Ontario.Being in a foreign country was an unsettling experience.  It was almost like home, but there were differences.  The candy bars were strange and they weren’t celebrating the 4th of July for some reason.

But the fishing!

The lake was huge, over 150 miles long, far larger than any I’d ever been on.  It took hours to get to some of our fishing spots.  And the fish!  At the little lake we usually went to in Minnesota, catching a Northern Pike was a major event and Walleye were unheard of.  At Lake Suel it seemed as though every time you dropped a hook in the water the Northern and Walleye were waiting to strike.  I didn’t like fish unless it was Mrs. Paul’s and served with lots of tartar sauce, but that summer I discovered how good Walleye could taste.  We caught far more than we could eat and froze a lot to take home.

The camp seemed primitive and remote compared to the Midwest.  In Iowa you were never more than a few miles away from some little town with a store and no matter how deep in the woods you went, you were never more than a 20 minute walk to a farmhouse.  Here, there were trees and then more trees.  Once we got to the camp I felt like we were cut off from the world.  All of the food we brought with us was preserved.  Until then, I didn’t realize potatoes or bacon could be put in cans.  The cabin was made of rough-cut logs and the kitchen area was like something out of the Wild West.

Fishing was my Dad’s thing, not mine.  I was always more interested in comic books, science fiction, and military stuff.  My cousin Don was (and still is) an avid fisherman and hunter, but I was just there because my parents were, although the fishing was so good it was easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm.

But even though I was enjoying the fishing, I was most assuredly not a morning person and my Dad and Don liked to be out on the lake at an hour when I was usually still snug in bed.  They would drag me out in the boat with them and I would spend the first hour or so huddled in my jacket, trying to stay warm and wishing I was still in the sack. One morning we were going through the usual routine, Dad and Don with their lines in the water and me wishing I was someplace warm and cozy.  And then I saw something I’ll never forget.

The water was smooth as glass and it was completely quiet, not a breath of air moving.   I was staring over the side of the boat when, without warning, fifteen or twenty feet directly in front of me, a half-dozen gigantic tentacles thrust up from the depths, loomed over the boat for a few moments, and then withdrew under the water.  I was petrified.  My brain was operating on overdrive but my body seemed paralyzed.  What I was looking at should have been impossible, something out of a horror film or a fairytale.  But it was real and it was happening to me.

I froze for what felt like a long time but couldn’t have been more than a second or two.  I was experiencing what special effects people call “bullet time” in the movies.  You know, the scene where everything slows down to the point where you can observe a bullet in flight or the protagonist flying through the air to kick an opponent in the head.  These exaggerations are intended to represent a real phenomenon, the feeling of time distortion that sometimes accompanies stressful events, the “my whole life flashed before my eyes” cliché.  Some speculate that the sensation may be triggered when our brains are trying to process a lot of information faster than usual, causing perceived time to subjectively slow down.  I’ve experienced it once since then, when an oncoming car on a two-lane road went out of control and slid sideways toward Nan and me at 50 miles an hour.  Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.  To the right was a steep drop off and to the left was oncoming traffic.  I had no choice but to remain in our lane, slam on the brakes, and hope we’d be moving slowly enough to survive the impact.  We did.  Our car didn’t.  Always wear seatbelts.

As I sat there, stunned, the tentacles emerged again, just a few feet this time.  I became aware that what I was seeing were the limbs of a submerged tree bobbing on the surface.  Our boat was in the midst of a drowned forest and our anchor or one of our fishing lines had disturbed a tree that had been precariously attached to the lake bed.  If it had come up directly under us it could have been a much more uncomfortable experience, possibly capsizing the boat or punching a hole in the bottom.

I don’t even remember how my Dad or my cousin Don reacted to the experience, if they shrugged it off, or just said, “Huh, that was weird,” or perhaps didn’t even notice it.  It didn’t make much noise and was over in seconds.  If they’d been looking in the opposite  direction they wouldn’t have even been aware of it.

But, for a second or two, I saw a monster.

- Poppa

good story

–erin-bob 2007-09-06 22:07:28 GMT

Forward, Into the Past! Dining at Ruggeri’s in the ’40s

Ruggeri’s was a landmark St. Louis Restaurant located on The Hill.  Earl and Barbara would take the kids there for special occasions.  I got to go with Nan just once just before it closed in the mid-seventies (I’m sure Nan’s parents treated us).  The cumberbunded and starched-shirted waiters all looked as though they’d worked there since WWII.  For a small-town boy from Iowa, it was like living a Damon Runyon story.  We found a 1945 Ruggeri’s Menu while cleaning out 312 Spoede over Labor Day (pictures at: http://johnandnan.benjerin.com/Photos/Labor_Day_2007/index.htm).  It presented an interesting view of the times.

There were several reminders that there was a war on and that people were expected to make sacrifices.

“All prices listed are our ceiling prices unless otherwise indicated, in which case, they are below ceiling prices.  By O.P.A (Office of Price Administration) regulation, our ceilings are our highest prices from April 4th to April 10th, 1943.  Records of these prices are available for your inspection.”

“Keep ‘em flying.”

“Buy more War bonds and stamps.”

“Due to War Time Restrictions we are striving to help our Government in conserving meats for our Armed Forces–Please note that we have added additional Sea Food and Italian Dishes.”

Aside from the wartime reminders, it was interesting to note what people were eating those days.

Cold Tongue Sandwich (20¢)

Combination Sandwich (35¢) Combination of what?  It doesn’t say.

Frog Leg Sandwich (90¢)

Imported Sardine Sandwich (50¢)

Eight kinds of cheese sandwiches!  Swiss, Brick, Pimento, American, Roquefort, Liederkranz (now an “extinct cheese” because the bacterial culture was corrupted and lost in 1985), Camembert, and Cheese Soufflé for between 20¢ and 40¢.

Vegetable Plate with Poached Egg (75¢)

For dessert there was Parmeggiano, Philadelphia Cream Cheese with Currant Jelly, American Cheese, Camembert, Swiss, Gorgonzola, Roquefort, and Liederkranz along with Ice Cream, Spumoni, Zabaglione, and “Pies in Season.”

The Entrees were notable because there were no Italian dishes included, just good old American fare, such as Charcoal Broiled Milkfed Chicken served with a Rasher of Bacon ($1.25) and Braised Tid Bits O’Beef (also $1.25).  The Italian dishes were in two separate categories, Special Italian Dinners (no pasta) and Special Italian Dishes (pasta).  The only unusual items I noticed in this section were Spaghetti with Chicken Livers (85¢), Spaghetti a la Tuna (also 85¢), and Chili-Mac (35¢).  A side-bar touted “Spaghetti with Bottle of Wine” for $1.

Appetizers were mostly what we would think of today as garnishes or condiments: Pickles, Raw Bermuda Onions, Celery, Celery and Olives, Green Olives, Ripe Olives, Radishes, Green Onions, and Sliced Tomatoes and ranged between 15 and 50 cents.

Seafood Specials included both Jumbo and Medium Frog Legs for $1.50 and $1.25 respectively.

Prices are always interesting when you look at menus from earlier eras.  I Googled a dollar value calculator and found one that says $1.00 in 2006 had about the same buying power as $.09 in 1945 so it’s not that everything was dirt cheap back then.  But the values were still a little skewed by today’s standards.  For instance, you could get the “Special Seafood Platter: One-half Lobster, Fried Oysters, Scallops, Shrimps, Filet of Sole, Tarter Sauce, Potatoes and Salad” for $1.50 ($16.67 in 2006 dollars, a hell of a good deal today).  The current St. Louis Fish Market “Catch Combo: Chilean Seabass & Atlantic Salmon” costs $28.  But apparently spending 50¢ ($5.56 in 2006 dollars) for the Celery and Olives appetizer was considered reasonable.  I’d need to get a whole lotta celery and olives to make that look cost-effective.

Now, to find me a cold tongue sandwich with Liederkranz.

- Poppa

2007-09-19 02:09:48 GMTComments: 0 |Permanent Link

Vision Quest

One of our annual tasks at Boeing is to create a personal development plan. This year we were given a list of “vision questions” to help us create our very own “Vision Statement.” It’s both easy and fashionable to deride exercises like this, but I found the vision questions to be thought- provoking.

What is the story I want to tell with my life? “He was honorable and worthy of trust.” “He was loved by his family and friends.” “He lived in a manner consistent with his principles.” Please be aware that this is the story I WANT to tell, not necessarily the one I AM telling so far.

What is the difference or contribution I want to make in the world? I want to leave the world a better place. What is a reasonable person going to say? “I want to amass more wealth and pile up more stuff?” “I want to acquire more power over others?”

What gives me energy? Feeling passionate about something.

What things do I enjoy doing? Reading, watching movies/TV, writing.

What brings me joy and happiness in my life now? Family, cats, internet.

What do I value most? The good opinion of others. The drawback of this is that sometimes I care too much about what people think of me.

What do I like about my life right now? I have more freedom than I’ve ever had before: due to a combination of empty-nest, an income vs. expense ratio based on the “Micawber Principle,” and the ability to work “anytime, anywhere.”

What would I like to stop doing? Watching too much TV.

What would I like to start doing? Exercise.

What is the life I would like to be living 10 years from now? Flitting about from one interest to another.

What is the life I would like to be living one year from now? Flitting about from one interest to another. But this (my current life) will do for now.

What things do I do better than most people I know? Communicate. Cajole.

What are the descriptions that describe my strengths? Personable. Good communicator. Capable of applying intense focus to a task.

What is my ideal career? That of J. K. Rowling.

What relationships do I want to have? The relationships I currently have are the relationships I want to have.

What do people say I’ll be known for? A weird sense of humor and a head full of useless information.

- Poppa

P.S. Photos from Xmas through the Ides of March. Cats, naps, feasting, fruit, fowl, Fast Eddies.

P.P.S. I put the cow/cat picture in for no particular reason other than because I like it.

Egizzle! Whizzle nizzle?

Every now and then you learn something about yourself that makes you reevaluate your life, question your core values, and ask, “Is nothing sacred?” I’ve recently had such an experience.

Oh, I’ve flirted with it for years. My initial reaction was completely negative. I thought it crude and pointless. But I admired the willingness to take on issues no one else would touch, even though their methods seemed puerile and offensive. And crude, crude in content, and crude in execution. It seemed to cheapen the art, taking a great leap backwards in technique and sophistication.

But occasionally I’d cruise past and find myself drawn to what I was hearing; a clever phrase here, a penetrating observation there. I found myself lingering and appreciating for the first time the nuanced dialogue and complex characterizations. I was forced to reevaluate my original response. Had I changed? Had I become desensitized? Or had I finally recognized the layer of sophistication always present beneath the orgy of flatulence and projectile defecation that is Southpark?

Additional analysis is required. I’m grasping the nettle. I’m watching every episode of Southpark.

Egad! What next? Will I start wearing my hat sideways and speaking in cant?

- Pizzle