Unearthing a life.....

Yesterday grandson Allie came to our house for a few hours ... so that I could take him out to Silverdale for his speech therapy and so that his Aunt Kelly could visit with him (and get better acquainted). They hit it off extremely well and posed for a few quick shots.

When we took him home at mid-afternoon, we trooped into the house with him and he immediately began giving Kelly a 'tour' .... "This is where I sit to have snacks!" etc.,. Then he began promoting a "sleepover, no boys invited". As we left to go do some grocery shopping, he hollered after us ... "You get done with you errands you bring her back for the sleepover!"

(Hmmm ... I meant for the pic to be 'large', but I ended up with 'medium' .... but you can enlarge it yourself by clicking on it.)

These are the cookies that grand-daughters Michal and Jessica made on Christmas Eve day. They are all history now. But we are still working on a large batch of chocolate chip cookies that son David's girlfriend Sarah brought. One gigantic weeklong sugar hit!

The problem with Christmas this year, in my humble opinion was that it needed spicing up ... rather than the 'dumbing down' that resulted from the various and sundry family and psuedo-family tensions. It is borderline impossible to create a Ho! Ho! time while in the immediate environs of (a) a warring mother and daughter and (b) a dark and surly looking uncommunicative Spanish-American male who is (minimally) on methadone. These are human elements that tend to drag down and rip the throat out of the relaxed risk-taking necessary for creating said Ho! Ho! times. In the future, I hope to use my persuasive powers to avert repeats of these social miscalculations. No more assholes at GoodGuy time!

Also note this fine whimsical wooden pepper mill that daughter Kelly gave me for Christmas.

Photo: Michal and the 'Ex'.


Thirty-eight years ago we went our separate ways. In order to get all three of our children here (at my house) for Xmas, it became necessary to invite their mother ... so that she wouldn't have to spend Christmas alone. As it turned out, the friction between her and the younger daughter was so intense that early Xmas Eve and most of Christmas Day were quite stress-ridden. There were a couple other 'un-natural acts' that worked to the detriment of the Day: Oldest daughter did not get here till 1:00 pm on Xmas Day and we had to wait gift opening for her .... and then we stalled additionally for grandson Allie and his Mom and her boyfriend who were supposed to be here by 1:30 and didn't show up till about 3:00. So when gift opening finally happened, I was into the finishing stages of Christmas Dinner for thirteen and didn't really get to enjoy what was going on.

There were some high points - such as ClearCreekGirl and Jessica singing a wad of carols to entertain and delight Erin and I (late Xmas Eve). However, the overall event leads me to wish for a more abbreviated version in the future. No 'Ex'. No boyfriends of my grandson's mother. No waiting for people who mindlessly keep a group of others waiting for an hour and offer no apologies whatsoever.

I enjoyed grand-daughter Michal and she was a workhorse cleaning up dirty dishes for a couple days. Daughter Kelly is our last remaining guest and will be here for several more days (till next sunday morning) .... and we always thoroughly enjoy time with her.

Grand-daughter Jessica and Grandson Allie watch 'some assembly required' in action....

Daughter Kelly and son Dave.......

Son David and his girfriend Sarah......

Grandson Allie with his mother Angela......

My daughter Erin and her two daughters (Michal and Jessica) arrived yesterday and we've spent most of the day cooking .... making corn chowder for Christmas Eve dinner ... a big double batch of my infamous cranberry sauce (with apple cider, candied ginger and orange peel zest .... a couple pumpkin pies .... and the granddaughters baked and decorated cookies.

I've noticed that kids and dogs are both into extreme close-ups ... I prefer kids to dogs 'cause kids don't tend to lick the lens.

ARTMOM just put up a posting in which she mentioned helping her daughter make a gingerbread house. Grandson Allie went thru that drill during this past week and it was hard to tell what his house might have looked like 'cause he had it half eaten when he got off the bus.

In Memoruim of these two events I am posting a couple shots of Allie and ArtMom's daughter having 'High Lunch' (ice cream cups) a bit over a year ago....

Grandson Allie informed me this morning that it was "Nine more days to Christmas, Papa Jim." And he was right ... maybe someone helped him count them up?



I grabbed this nice shot of Allie and his Mom when she picked him up after school today. No more school till after New Years ... and we may get at least a week's vacation from our normal daycare routine.

Here are a couple photos that must have been taken very close to my first Christmas. I was born late in April of 1934, so I would have been eight months old on my first Christmas and Mom would have been three months pregnant with brother Neil. The first one was probably taken around Thanksgiving and that is my parents home in the background. The second one has snow on the ground, so may be closer to Christmas ... we've pivoted 180 degrees and that is my paternal grandparent's home in the background. We lived within spitting distance of each other ... till Dad moved us 22 miles west to Smyrna in April of 1941.

For all my grade school years, there were never presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. Sometimes we knew where they were hidden and sometimes not -- like when the folks left them over in the grocery/postoffice building. The Christmas morning rule was that we had to stay in bed till Dad got up and got the fires going in the cookstove and the heater stove and things began to warm up a little (it was often well below zero at that time of year and we didn't have heating fires that burned all night) .... then he would call us and we'd come storming down the stairs to have a go at the gifts that had appeared so un-mysteriously under the tree overnight. Why, Santa must have stopped by! One Xmas when I was baout eleven, I tried hurtling down the stairs (they were very steep) with my baby brother David in my arms. I tripped at the first step down and threw Dave out into the air. He sailed all the way down without touching the stairs and landed in a box of old toys at the bottom. Neither of us were mortally wounded.

And then the drill was to bolt down breakfast, bail into the car, and drive the twenty-two miles to my grandparents in Othello where we would attend church services and have Christmas dinner with Grandma and Grandpa. Long about late afternoon we'd head home with a stop at the Chadbourne ranch to see what presents LouAnn and Harriet had received. And it would be well dark by the time we got home to our own gifts.

The grandson had his own out-of-the-home celebration today. It was Gingerbread Houses and Party Day for Mrs. Meadows kindergarten class.
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The flyer they sent home mentions 'Reindeer sandwiches'(?).
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This picture (above) of Allie's gingerbread house does not show it in all its original creative design. He was busy devouring it all the way home on the bus .... so this is what it looked like when he got it here.
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It wasn't even really gingerbread. It was graham crackers. And one giant sugar hit!

This is a picture posting run-through .... where I am writing step-by-step instructions for BrownShoes so that she can get the hang of entering personal photos, etc., into her blog postings.

This would be a photo of Brown Shoes in her incarnation as a youth.(?) Maybe....

Today was my big social day of the year. The annual Code 260 Retiree’s Christmas Party commenced this morn at 11:00. I’ve been retired now near on sixteen years so’s I’ve taken in a great number of these events … missed one when the ‘telephone tree’ failed to contact me … missed another bought and paid for when my mind went weak and I forgot about it till a week later. Mostly I’ve been there though. Mostly. Kay reminded me three times yesterday that the party was today. I might have made it without help, but who knows?
Code 260 at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard was the Piping and Machinery Design Group and was probably comprised of 120 men and women at its most. At the door they hand out these name badges done in nice big print. A good thing. I do recognize most of these people, but some faces I can’t place without a sneaky look at the label …. never did know some of them, but I pretend otherwise. And some of the ladies are widows of guys I maybe once new slightly and they are still there ever year clutching their door prize tickets.
Always at the Elks out on Pine Road up back of the Catholic Church there. Big room full of long tables and a nice bar around the el corner where I buy the whiskey that greases my way through these things. Me and my friend Jack sort of stake out a table near the bar’s big picture windows and hold forth there and greet all our once upon a time co-workers. These are drinking buddies that have hopped bars with us in Honolulu, San Diego, Alongopo (P.I.), Tokyo, Dunoon (Scotland). We tell each other mostly the same stories year after year … mostly, I think, just to make sure we still remember how to tell it. You start out with a “Hey, remember when we…” and the other person gets this wary look behind his eyeballs. Maybe he remembers, maybe he doesn’t, maybe he turns the tables on you with a “Ah think you got the wrong guy.” Not too likely, I got me a pretty good memory so far.
There’s always Billie Jean and Mike who I married on the foredeck of their boat about a million years ago. And ever’ year Billie gives me a big hug and asks if I’ve been arrested for being a fake preacher yet and have maybe all my marriages been declared null and void by some higher power. And Wayne, one of my former supervisors, who blew into our house one evening with a woman and another co-worker, presented papers, and demanded a hitching ceremony. Kay and the co-worker stood as witnesses and then slam bam they were gone again. I think that marriage lasted a couple months. He was there today with a different wife than anyone I ever hitched him up too, but he’s had a pretty bad stoke a couple years back and is getting smaller and smaller and doesn’t recall me correctly.
After an hour and a half of drinking and jawing there’s the ‘meal’ …. raw veggies for dipping, olives and pickles, a pasta salad and a potato salad with roughly the same taste, a lot of bread and sandwich makings (thin sliced turkey, ham and beef), deep-fried and battered pieces of skinny chickens, and meatballs in a tangy sauce. Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd to have a sandwich on a plate with two salads, chicken bits and meatballs …. It just seems so alien.
At the end of the meal, they begin the entertainment and that’s the point where I slip off back to the bar so as not to be inundated with ‘Ave Maria’ sung by the organizer’s Filipina wife for the leventy millionth time and other homegrown performances. Recongregated in the bar, my cronies and I listen only for the calling out of the door prize numbers …. usually a dozen bottle of cheap champagne and a dozen of those red Christmas plant things that my wife hates.
At 3:15, I toss down the remnants of the last whiskey that someone else bought me and say, “Gotta go! Gotta be home to grab my five-year old grandson off the schoolbus in ten minutes.” Next year….

This is our tree about half decorated with the spray painted leaves and stuff. Hopefully the sun will come out today and dry off the outside vegetation so that the process can move forward. Dry, brittle leaves do not work well. They tend to curl up and not look like leaves .... so green, leathery textured leaves are sought after raw materials. We'll have to venture out today and do some serious seeking.
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"Anchored God, this is the way I want you.
Small flour tamborine for the newborn child.
Breath of wind and matter exactly joined
for love of the flesh that doesn't know your name."
.....Federico Garcia Lorca

I got the outdoor lights hung and operating this morning and then did some more spray painting (silver, gold, copper, and red) on the 'greenery' that we're using this year to give our tree a 'natural' look. Now I'm going to take a break and watch the Seahawks vs Forty Niner's football game.

As a longtime non-believer, I wish to weigh in on the side of the 'Christmas Tree'. A 'Holiday Tree' has no personal or cultural meaning. There's no Holiday Tree on Memorial Day; no Holiday Tree on the Fourth of July; no Holiday Tree on Labor Day; no Holiday Tree on Thanksgiving; and, in my home, no Holiday Tree on Christmas. That Martha Stewart contraption I erected in the living room this morning is a Christmas Tree and stands there to commemorate Christmas as a day of celebration of a two-thousand year old tale of wonder and good will. I suspect a 'Holiday Tree celebrates a tradition of Red Tag Sales.
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When I was a wee lad living out my Christmases in the sagebrush steppes of the Columbia Basin, we did not have access to Christmas Trees. There were no Christmas Tree farms or Christmas Tree lots and I imagine most people didn't have an indoor tree at Christmas. My earliest memory of a tree may have been in Othello around 1939 or 1940 ... and all I recall is my mother clipping candles to the tree branches, lighting them while people stood around, and then shortly blowing the candles out to keep the tree from igniting ... and a cardinal and a robin that clipped to the branches.
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After my Dad became a Section Foreman on the Milwaukee Railroad and we moved to Smyrna (twenty-two miles west of Othello), we always had a tree. Several of the trainmen who worked in that Division, were high school classmates of Dad and Mom. They would stop an eastbound freight train up in the Cascade Mountains and cut a bunch of trees and 'pass them out' as they headed east towards Spokane. Due to train-times our tree usually arrived around dusk (4:00 or 4:30 pm). The trainmen would have phoned ahead on the company phone and let us know that delivery was imminent, and we'd be gathered near the tracks as the train hove into view. Delivery was just about the most exciting part of Christmas. The train did not slow down. The fireman would be out on a little platform holding the tree. The engine whistle would be shrieking. And as the locomotive swept past, the fireman would launch the tree into the air. And Christmas began!

I took this 'long shadow' picture at 2:00 pm this afternoon. Long shadows are falling into disfavor with me (the older I get). They are indicative of short days, a chilling in the bones, a mean-spirited dampness in the outdoors, icy treacherousness afoot, and the constant threat of even more heinous discomforts.
I rather like the picture though....

I just woke up to the fact that today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I can't say that I remember that day well, but I do remember it in a fragment or two. I was seven going on eight, living in Smyrna, WA, and going thru the First Grade for the second time.
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On that particular Sunday morning, we had driven the twenty-three miles of 'primitive' dirt road eastward to Othello -- to attend services with my paternal grandparents who were pillars of the Othello Christian Church. Grandpa was a Deacon and he was the one who heated the water (in barrels over an open fire back of the church) to fill the full immersion baptism pit concealed under trapdoors in the front of the church. Grandma was a Deaconess and she, with my occasional assistance, filled all the tiny communion glasses with her homemade grape juice and seated them in the round thingamabob that they went to worship in. For my help, I would get a little cheese-spread glass of the grape juice left over.
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We had finished this task and I had wandered outside and was standing on the ground-level part of the back porch. The sheltered higher level housed grandpa's cream separator machine and a long wooden bench. At the east edge of the porch stood a three foot section of bridge timber where ice was smashed in a gunny sack and the wooden ice cream freezer was elevated to a good cranking level. I'm wandering away here......
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Suddenly grandma came hurtling out of the house, flapping her apron up and down, and dashed off towards the barn shouting "The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor!" I was nonplused! The only 'Jap' I was familiar with was grandpa's old retired race horse ... and he had apparently attacked something I didn't understand. But how would she know? Grandpa was out in the barn, Jap was somewhere in the barnyard, and she was in the house. If anything was going on, I should have noticed it before her.
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And that is the end of my memory of that day. I do not recall being 'enlightened' about the event in progress.
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Photos: Me in 1941; Grandma Lena when she was a young woman; Grandpa Charlie on his horse Jap.

Grandson Allie has discovered the joys of mugging into the digital camera for a series of shots, then seeing them on the monitor screen. We did this yesterday and this morning and he assured me he'd be ready for another go at it anytime I wanted. Sort of reminds me of the fun of plugging quarters into the old photo booths in the Woolworth stores and getting back the strips of 'portraits'.

WHO IS THIS MAN?

In the interests of promoting obscure knowledge, I hereby post a scan of one of the postage stamps in my childhood stamp album ... and impart a modest bit of information to place the gentleman commemorated upon it into context for those who are drawn to useless data.

Mariscal Francisco Solano Lopez was the Dictator of Paraguay who got himself involved in a war against the triumvirate of Brazil, Argentina, and Uraguay. What followed was the bloodiest war in South American history, pretty much unknown in the U.S. because it was fought from 1864 to 1870 (almost simultaneously with our own Civil War). A half million people perished in this conflict. Some sources report that 80% of Paraguay's male population were killed.

The Intelligent Design Balloon Appears To Be Losing Altitude
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The proponents of Intelligent Design Theory have met unexpected resistance from within their own Christian Collegiate ranks. Between the vocal mobs of Creationists promoting Intelligent Design and the Atheists backing Darwinian Evolution is a vast ocean of people who apparently believe that science, in general, and Evolution, in particular, are God's methods of creating. Big oversight. Academics at Penecostal, Evangelical, and Baptist Colleges admit that Intelligent Design has not made the grade as a teachable subject. Not really a Theory. No papers submitted to the professional literature for peer review and publication. No proposals for research to establish supporting proofs. No intelligent design was invested in the proposition of Intelligent Design. Intellectual sloth. Sing the first and last verses and whoop it up ... it's not raining inside tonight!

"When Dad got out of Othello High School in 1929, there weren't many opportunities for employment and no land left to homestead, so he became a trapper. The government was offering a bounty ($3.50 I think) for coyotes ... and a good coyote hide taken at the right season was worth $3-$4 dollars on the fur market. So Dad had several trap lines running out of Othello. He also caught occasional bobcats and badgers. He made a good enough living at it that he owned a car and a house by the time he married my mother in 1933. I can remember (probably from the years 1938-1940) riding the backroads with my folks, collecting the 'kills' and resetting traps. When Dad began getting work on the Railroad, Mom ran the trap lines during the day (with three little kids in the car) and Dad did the skinning and hide curing in the evenings. We had a shed where he did this work and where the hides were stored to cure. I remember squating on my haunches and watching him do the skinning ... by the light of a kerosene lantern ... and his Case knife had red handles ... and there was the odor of kerosene from the lamp and the smell of sulfer which he rubbed on the wet side of the hides.He quit trapping when we moved to Smyrna in 1941 where he became a Section Foreman on the Milwaukee Railroad. Mom trapped the winter of '41-'42 and made $104 and bought Dad a Hamilton pocket watch (The Railroad required Foremen to have reliable watches -- within a few seconds per month)."

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I wrote the piece above last Spring to accompany a photo (one of these posted here) that I had posted to my yaFro photography site.
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In these pictures, Mom is thirteen or fourteen and Dad is around twenty. Her family moved to Othello in 1929 and she 'set her cap' immediately for this 'older fellow' who lived next to his parents out east of town. I have her old high school Autograph Book with numerous entries (by classmates) referring to her conquest of 'Gil' .... and this only a few months after she had moved to Othello.
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I have clear images of bouncing along the winding dirt roads out in the scablands with Mom and my younger brother and sister. When she found a live coyote in a trap, she'd shoot it and tie it to a front fender ... if the coyote had already died and was getting a trifle 'ripe', she'd lash it to the rear bumper. Once we came up on a badger that had torn up all the ground he could reach. She sat on the roof of the car to shoot the badger -- with Dad's lever action single-shot .22 rifle. I don't know if she was afraid of it, or if she was getting a high angle to make a shot to the head that would not damage the fur.
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Some of the traps were fastened to stakes driven into the ground, but often there wasn't much ground sitting atop the basalt bedrock, so traps set there would be attached to large rock anchors with baling wire. I recall one such anchor that was apparently way too small .... the folks had walked out maybe a hundred feet into the brush to check a set, when all of a sudden they broke into a run, running in circles, leaping sagebrush, passing each other going opposite directions -- and a little cloud of dust streaking along with and amongst them. One of the funniest things I've ever seen.
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A few years before Mom and Dad's romance, a rabid coyote got Grandma trapped in their barn for several hours. It laid down in the barnyard just outside the door and kept her penned in. When she knew Uncle Don would be coming home from school, she climbed up in the hayloft and hollered at him in the distance. Told him what was going on and gave him orders to go down to the railroad roundhouse and get Grandpa. Half hour later Grandpa came storming home in his old pick-up truck and dispatched the coyote with my Dad's .22 rifle.
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Old Man Coyote was/is never too far away.

Grandson Allie was dancing in a circle in the driveway a couple hours ago, singing "Happy, happy snow day!" repeatedly. And then the bus picked him up and whisked him off to kindergarten .... He has yet to get it straight that 'Snow Day' usually means school's cancelled, stay home and play. The snow continues to come down and is beginning to stick in the street.