Joe claims I think there aren’t 17 odd things about me but there are really are really 6000. Not at all. What I told him was I couldn’t come up with 17 anythings about me, let alone odd ones.

Oh, ok.

1. In a high school psychology class, after a battery of tests I was told that my strengths were Science and outdoors. (My mother said I should get a book about science and read it in a hammock).

I was also told that I should avoid professions where i had to deal with people all the time.

so I became a teacher of history and at times of geography.

1. I have never asked anyone for advice and never taken any advice that was given.

2. hey maybe I can break this last one down into several.

I never had a decent job till I started teaching.

I have:

a. Picked fruit for a living.

Cherries, Strawberries and Apples mostly.

b. Loaded 28 and a half pound boxes with frozen peas, For Rich Crop Frozen Peas and Corn.

c. glued the boxes shut and loaded them into a quick freeze

while freezing myself on those broiling summer days.

d. Later loaded those boxes onto Simi trailers.

e. Worked at “The Pipe Plant” digging up Vinca, slapping it with the back of the shovel, extracting the weeds and re planting it.

f. Leveled the ground for planting grass by nailing two two by fours down to the earth and dragging a two by four back and forth on cleats between those boards till the ground was level. if you ever walked across the lawn for Helaman halls or any other of the Halls on campus think of me.

g. I once had a job chopping down Aspens and making tent platforms up one of the canyons above provo.

1. While attending School at UCLA I had a night job at Safe Way Cookie factory on the Sanitation crew.

a. i laid on my back and crawled under the rollers that moved the Chocolate cookies and scraped the chocolate of the rollers.

b. I crawled over the top of the ovens and washed them while they were on. two foremen finally gave up that experiment when they noticed “he’s looking a little white.”

c. swept and mopped the place into gleaming cleanliness.

1. Worked at night shift at Knudsens Dairy in beautiful Down Town Commerce. Sanitation crew again.

a. Scrubbed out the retorts where all your deep fried potatoes were first cooked.

b. Loaded 100 pound bags of potatoes onto the rollers that began the process.

c. hooked up the large steel “cages” that held the potatoes while they were being steamed, while wearing a large plastic face guard lowered the steel cages, weighing several hundred pounds into enormous vats of acid.

d. Took a short cut through the cooler, driving a cart full of potatoes, hit the doors at about fifteen miles an hour and found they had stacked a days run of jello just inside the door.

1. i am cool under pressure. ( not to mention under jello)

2. I like to read. I used to go to the Provo Public library and check out three books at a time and return them the same day. i did it even though it gave me a headache.

3. I don’t like directing people so I ended up a sergeant in the National Guard.

4. I was a Combat engineer in the Guard, for six years.

5. i like guns. One of my earliest memories is dad standing behind me holding a 45 in my hands and pulling the trigger. good times.

6. I got six months regular army training when I entered the national guard.

a. i couldn’t believe they let us play with all those weapons and we didn’t have to pay for the ammunition.

b. Firecrackers are fun but quarter pound blocks of TNT are better.

c. dynamite will give you a splitting nitroglycerin headache if handled without gloves. See thats an odd thing i know.

1. Steve Hambly is trying to kill me. in my old age he has inveigled me into

a. kayaking around Santa Barbara Island. if the wind or currents take you its a long paddle to hawaii.

b. white water rafting on the Middle Fork of the American River and class four and four and a half rapids on the Tuolome River.

(well, not on the river so much as in and under it)

c. Top dog Aerial combat down at Palomar Air Base.

d. Canyoneering in Costa Rica. (rappelling down waterfalls)

i don’t like heights. Ok heights scare me silly

e. Zip lining in the jungle.

f. horse back riding at arizona Grapevine Ranch and over the Continental Divide in Costa Rica. did I mention I don’t particularly like horses. they were made for pulling plows not trying to kill me by running down shale and clay paths slick after a rain. besides when they run I bounce.

1. when I was a kid my Grandfather was the only one in Provo still driving a horse and wagon around town.

a. I once rode with him over to Springville on the highway in a wagon. When we came to a sign signaling that the speed limit was 50 miles an hour grandpa said ” I don’t think we can do it but ‘cummon horses’ “”.

1. i have walked across northern england and halfway or more down from the top of Wales to the bottom. joe can vouch for this.

2. I have memorized about sixty hours of lecture on U.S. History and English Medieval History and now have retired and there’s no one to tell it to. Avoid me.

3. In the last sunday school lecture about “the salt loosing its savor” it was pointed out that i have gotten salty. Ok, so i occasionally use damn and hell or various combinations of them (in church). i didn’t till i was about sixty. that ought to count for something.

4. My wife has gotten antrograde amnesia from Valley fever. She can remember everything to 1992 or so but has trouble fixing new memories. So she has this vague feeling that I have just done something wrong but cant remember what it was. Its very annoying to her. She knows I am a damn jerk but the reason eludes her. A while back she said to me, “why am I mad at you?” i said “you aren’t.” “yes I am, I am furious, and you are too gutless to tell me why”.

seventeen! Whoo Ha!

Every window shakes like its going to break.

The house creaks under the pressure of the wind gusts.

somehow branches that shouldn’t be even close to touching the house are slapping it.

My wife went to bed early but got up and came half way down the stairs convinced that I was down there with someone. I mean how else explain how the whole house was shaking.

I’ve never been so complimented.

And I’m not sure how long this post is going to stay.

he is looking so much better I am in fear for my life again.

If I remember rightly just before the heart attack he was contemplating involving kent and I in a jump from 16,000 feet on oxygen.

I’m planning on carrying a twenty in my teeth and giving it to whoever jumps strapped to me if he will hit me in the head with a rubber mallet around the time the plane rises to 5,000 feet.

No! No on second thought he may have to come to my house to hit me. Otherwise the plane may rise without me.

I mean Steve is looking better!

Damn!

I have been cleaning the garage for a month now, just doing a four foot by six foot section at a time. You have no idea. Things are turning up that stun me. I just ran across an “army personal flotation device” apparently devised to let you cross a jungle stream under full field pack and not drown. it is a twelve (?) inch by four inch rubber bladder inflated by a twelve inch tube. there are also twenty pound sleeping bags. I didn’t actually weigh them but … things were obviously different thirty five years ago. I also found a bottle capping devise. My mother used to make home made root beer. You collected quart bottles, about thirty of them, bought bottle caps, mixed the Hires Root Beer mixture with water, sugar and yeast, filled the bottles and slid them under the device, placed the cap on top and pushed down on the lever, firmly affixing the caps to the bottle. The bottles were carefully stored on shelves in the basement. You knew the root beer was ready when a few weak bottles exploded in the basement. the stuff was good. I loved it.

I realize now that we had a different sort of family. Nothing was forbidden and nothing was extolled. Oh, wait. dad did give me one bit of advice about dating. A little crude but very straight forward. Good advice too. it turned out to be Totally unnecessary since Girls in Provo in the 1950’s had apparently been given and taken,roughly the same advice. but other than that you sort of found your own way with no real direction. I just knew that disappointing my parents was absolutely unthinkable. What happened with that was you had higher standards than they did cause they never told you what their standards were.

Ok, back to the root beer. I was never told not to drink “real” beer. my parents did but I assumed it was for some unknown reason out of bounds for me except for the occasional ceremonial jelly glass of beer with cheese and crackers. That happened about once a year at a camp-out in the mountains. I enjoyed it because I found out you could put salt in it and it fizzed. I suppose I could have, in my teen years opened a bottle of “Fisher Beer” brewed with “Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water” and nothing would have been said, but that lay in the gray area of “do they think I should or don’t they”. We didn’t talk about that stuff in my family. It seemed gauche. You were supposed to figure out what was good and what was bad and just by hell do it and no unseemly talk about it.

So when the root beer was ready I would come home from School and knock of a quart a day or so. I have no idea what the alcohol content was but the presence of water, yeast and sugar seems to indicate it was at least present. i miss the stuff. I wonder if you can still buy the extract and bottle caps cause the bottle capper which has been following me around fifty years still seems to be in tip top shape.

And that brings me back to the lecture notes for a class on England in the 1820’s. I seem to have run across the original notes for the lecture, on a three by five card, obviously written in haste, for a looming deadline, apparently minutes away. in an illegible scrawl, resembling an early form of shorthand crossed with the italic form of Arrigio, a scribe to Henry the seventh (or fifth or…) I had noted that English families: “scrimped and saved and did without out in an already do without life, bought tickets to America and arrived with next to nothing in order to achieve what they could not in England of the time, that is, “jobs for the family, steady employment, shoes, blankets; to be dry, warm, well fed, out of the bad section of town-the sin ridden, gin sodden, crime filled, fog laden (?), polluted dark alleys, away from those muddy streets with the open [running] sewers and into [America] into” two room apartments” “far away from the cold night air, with one enormous chair, Lots of coal making lots of heat, lots of chocolate to them to eat.”

yeah, I actually quoted “My Fair Lady” despite the fact that those American slum apartments were often heatless and no one was chocking down much chocolate.

it is apparent now that I, not Charles Dickens wrote all of it but the My Fair Lady bit which didn’t fit anyway. it’s also painfully apparent that its not as good as I remembered it.

This is a constant. Its hard to know when to quit an activity and when to leave a memory alone. Artists and body builders really need to hire someone to say “STOP”. You don’t need one more line or one more bump. There just comes a time when its better to quit before you spoil it all.

Therefore

“So no more for the present”.

(My favorite quote from Brigham Young)

Sat 14 nov More cleaning in the garage and. .. found what was once a box of bottle caps. the cardboard has long ago given up any pretense of being a box but the caps are in prime shape.

isn’t that something. They have to be 56 years old.

Does anyone know what a flourishing garlic plant looks like? Im afraid that if they actually grow I will inadvertently weed them.

Steve had totally recovered and we were apparently on a kayak trip down some raging river on a gray rainy day. i guess dream.

In the dream we had reached the apex of the trip, and were poised in a turbulent swirling gunmetal gray backwater above a water fall. I was not feeling good about this but I have felt worse about several real events.

In the raging eddy, above the falls i yelled “how far down is it” and steve replied , “only 150 feet”. Even in the dream that seemed extreme. yet, I had done stupider things in a waking state, or it seems now. So we Pointed our kayaks toward the foaming brink and prepared to push over the edge and someone whispered “Its Niagara Falls”. Dream or no dream that was it for me and I woke up.

metaphor?

i suppose steve made it and I will never forgive myself. I just pray I never dream that one again.

On the other hand, there were no crocodiles in this dream. Don’t you hate that one. i think its he screaming in the night that gets me most.

hah! as i finished the last word Steve phoned. and then my wife yelled “are you planning another death defying outing. No I yelled, boastfully, “we more tentatively tip toe up and peer at than defy”. A lie but i like to feel macho occasionally rather than the gut wrenching fear most of these adventures have engendered.

failed: "to maintain clearance from terrain”...

And,..

“Contributing to the accident was the low altitude."

Yes, I expect many airplane crashes would not have happened if the pilot had managed to avoid the ground.

I was cleaning another section of the garage yesterday. A hopeless task that I am approaching one four foot by two foot section a week. I began it a few weeks ago when I was doing a load of laundry out there and thought ,”this is going to be hell to clean and its going to be the kids who have to do it.” So yesterday I was sorting and throwing when I found a bag with letters and such somehow left over from only the 1980’s. I idly picked up a letter and found it was from an adult son writing home from far away.

Sitting here today listening to something on Television and unbidden, I was standing in front of the window in the hospital nursery while the nurse held up that baby version of the now mature boy. And I was saying again “ my hell! Oh hell, its amazing! (He might as well have been the only baby on earth) I was transported. “We did that?” It didn’t seem remotely possible. Talk about miracles.

Sitting on the couch today I thought about that, and the next thing I knew I was remembering being on the north side of our new house, planting shrubs and a little boy wearing only his diaper was sitting on his heels next to me watching every move. I thought I had never seen a more perfectly formed human being. The sweet curve of his shoulder stunned me. it was clearly my duty to teach him everything I could. I pointed to a rock and said “rock, rock” and the little guy, looking me in the eye rocked. I think that is one of the sweetest memories in my life.

Since Steve had his heart attack I haven’t been doing anything dangerous or interesting. And I still haven’t been able to complete the retirement process so I am more or less glued to the homestead. All the interesting stuff is going on only in my head. Its gotten so bad that for two nights running I have gone to bed with a story theme in my head and found that four to six hours later I was still awake mining out the theme and telling myself that story. Unfortunately it involved football as a peripheral theme and I played whole games, down by down. I’m going to be a total sleepless wreck if I cant finish it.

I, noticing that she favors eating out every meal, have begun cooking in again.

Last week it was French Onion Soup. I cheated and used canned consume this time. Then I made beef stew. I threw the last of that out today. Cooking for two is different than cooking for nine.

This week I made Pork chops baked in french Onion soup with a little dijon mustard mixed in, and poured over the chops. Seemed to be acceptable.

Today took chicken tenders and flattened and tenderized them, browned them in butter, spread marinated artichoke hearts over them, roughly chopped.

Laid swiss cheese over that.

baked in 350 degree oven for 30 min till tender (and it was!)

served to yo momma (And you know who yo momma is, you kids who read this)

and she said,” and I quote, ” why in the world would you serve something that looks like its wrapped in a dirty dish cloth?” un quote.

Still smiling. i pretty much expected it. At least she took it out of the front room and the recliner where i served it and put the whole thing in the sink. i was pretty pleased with that.

I used to cook a lot. I found that if the thing cooked had an unacceptable name it wouldn’t be eaten. I began calling everything I cooked “Ick Soup”. Might as well get it over with quick

Next time I think I will use more marinated artichoke heart. Nice taste. i wonder who figured that out.

He is pretty doped up but awake and aware.

The nurse said “His Numbers are all good” His doctor seemed pleased.

They seemed to have the impression that I was his brother, which is why I guess they were so forthcoming.

Sue says they may have him up and walking tomorrow. Pretty remarkable considering how out of it he is today. they have that little transparent oxygen/hydration? mask on him and told him to work on his breathing. that would have been good for a five minute skit if he had been feeling well. The fact that his monitor says he is on dopeamine would be a good take off place for merriment too, but another time another place. When i was taking pictures to document the heavily sedated lad, and laughingly asked him to smile he actually opened his eyes and gave me a grin.

8 pm sue says they have now moved him from intensive care into some more like pretty careful care. Ok, i cant remember what “scientific” term she used but thats about it. i think it started with … what? an R? rigorous; or perhaps a P. Pretty concentrated but not intensive?

tuesday

Triple By-Pass. He is in I/C. Everything looks good

the list

Steve and I have worked down our list and enjoyed the hell out of it. We didn’t quite make it all. Sky diving, floating on the propeller driven cushion of air and riding horseback fast are still hanging out there. September is the month. Yesterday Steve called to say he is on the edge of having another heart attack and there isn’t much they can do if they can do anything. He has had the stents. He goes in soon for a catheter to see just what is going on. Its been a good run. … As it is I look back and revel in “aerial combat” with the Top Dog Program, Arizona Dude Ranching, Canyoneering in Costa Rica, Horseback riding in the rain and mist over the continental…

Ah hell! Sue just now called .

Steve is now in the hospital. with a heart attack. It doesn’t look good. She was so overcome when she called me that she said, “Oh… sob…Steve is ….[long, long silence while I thought, “Oh no. He has died!] And then the news that he was having a heart attack. I am going over to Kaiser now. 2:27 PM

5:48 P.M. Just got back from Kaiser. Yes he was having a heart attack but is ok for the moment. he looks good but isn’’t. Scotty and I gave him a blessing. Ran into Shannon, his daughter, as I was headed in. she said that as she was driving him in he got so short of breath he was sucking on the air conditioner trying to get enough air.

Sat with him for several hours. At one point he made a call to his work to let them know he wouldn’t be in tomorrow. He told the guy he was talking to that they told him that when he was admitted it was just a matter of minutes and it would have been over. He had actually gone in to work today.

Steve will be transported to Kaiser in Sunset [?] for a catheter and perhaps stent(s) or whatever is needed, up to open heart surgery, in the morning. He is in good spirits and his kids have been there. Sue is flying in from Dallas, probably arriving at 8 or 8:30 tonight.

I just got home and can’t find Sandy. {sandy is my wife and as you probably know has anterograde amnesia from a bout of valley fever that the doctors said would kill her] Had tried to call from the hospital and if I could have gotten her I would have stayed till sue got there but when I kept getting a busy signal I decided she had used the phone to call a cab to take her to a restaurant to eat and had not hung it up properly and would probably forget how she got there and be wandering around scared so I left and came home.

The phone was off the hook. Going over to Millies [her favorite restaurant] to see if she went there.

Found her.

Ok, She apparently did take a cab to go out to Millies All American Restaurant and after eating forgot how she got there and when I wasn’t there walked to Steve’s and just sat there confused on the wall by his place. I thought she would and its a good thing because she would otherwise still be there.

Los Angeles Times

Sunday, May 16, 1982

Noting:

Oil Glut

the Depressed Real Estate Market

Airline Bankruptcy

I ran across this newspaper piece while cleaning out my office the other day. Notice that in 1982 the:

“Oil Glut, Recession Prove Even California’s Top Firms Are Vulnerable”

The article by Paul Richter says:

“California’s largest industrial companies, which have proven durable in some past recessions, found 1981 a trying year as the U.S. economic slowdown increasingly took hold on the West Coast and world overproduction depressed the states all-important oil industry.” …. “The Times Roster of the state’s 100 largest publicly traded industrial firms shows an abrupt reversal in the fortunes of the states five giant oil companies which stood out from the pack in 1980 with their seam-bursting growth.”

“in addition, the annual roster’s 1981 revenue and income figures for the leading California companies show the effects of a languishing real estate market….”

on the same page the times commented directly on the Real estate problem in an article
titled:

Making Money Work Time Is Ripe for Real Estate Bargain Hunters By Doris A. Byron

“One mans misfortune can be another’s windfall, and the current depressed real estate market is a graphic case in point.”

“With home sales at a near-standstill and the prices of many houses declining, bargain-hunters have their best chance in years to round up real estate at below-market prices.”

“It”s definitely a buyer’s market,” says Alan Crittenden, a real estate industry analyst who publishes the weekly Crittenden Report on real estate trends. “The bargains run the gamut from ordinary tract homes to big ticket office buildings, but the key in most good buys are cash, quickness and tenacity, say the experts.”

….

Eerie if a bit backwards on the oil thing. So do we now have to worry about over correcting and throwing ourselves into a recession by once more getting more oil than we need.

Oh, the final article, number three of three laments the “bankruptcy filing last week “ of Braniff Airways’s which “was generally seen as good news for the nations surviving airlines, which no longer have to contend with the fare-cutting competitor.”

Just odd

We had breakfast at the Lodge and then just walked out the front door and up the steps to the road. A few yards down the road a path turned up into the overgrowth. We followed a fairly steep path through the “jungle” up to the beginning of the tour. I was out of breath a lot and had to call a halt a couple of times. Thats not to say that this was a hard climb but to admit that I am 74 and have a problem with my blood not carrying the requisite amount of oxygen anymore. With my head down like that I did get a pretty good view of life on the jungle floor. Lots of cutter ants followed one another in unending lines from somewhere to somewhere else, with their section of leaf carried erect and oriented. That was odd.

We arrived at our departure place and put on our equipment, the so called “diaper” harness used for rappelling and for zip lining. Its a kind of strap around your middle and thongs through which you insert your legs so that you are sitting in a secure web with a strap that is fastened to the support, either the rope or the pulley, depending on whether you are rappelling or zip lining. In the case of zip lining you eventually do both.

I don’t remember much about our take off. it seemed at almost ground level but trailing off in to the lower depths of the forest. They hooked us up so we were attached to the steel cable by a pulley. You use your “weak hand” to take hold of the strap you are hanging from, place your other gloved hand on the line behind you, making an O so you don’t create a drag until you want to stop. Increasing the pressure on the line with that gloved hand is in fact the brake you will use to slow yourself down as you come zinging in to the tree platform at the end of each segment of ride. Not using it will blow your “catcher” right off the platform. Using it too much will strand you a hundred feet above the forest floor, somewhere short of the platform. When that happened I just hand over handed up the line into the tree. No sweat. Having done the rappelling already took some but not all of the fear factor out of the equation,. You were still a hundred or so feet above the ground, both during the ride and when you reached the next platform.

The ride was sheer exhilaration. It was a sweet smooth acceleration through beautiful tree tops, above a distant forest floor and over all too soon. Then and once during

we rappeled down to the forest floor (and from pretty good heights). There was just enough speed and just enough fright factor to make it worth while. It doesn’t begin to touch canyoneering but is still an excellent thing to do.