I just ran across this old picture on my computer. It's my oldest son Marshall sitting in front of one of his all-time favorite toys: the toy box. He and his little brother were in his room one day playing when I noticed that the noise level appeared to be quite a bit louder and more desperate than normal. I trotted down the hallway to see if they were really going to kill each other this time to find one of them sitting on top of it while the other was locked inside. Figuring that the little one was being held hostage and was most likely terrified of being trapped, I yelled at Marshall to let him out. Just then the wife walks by and says they do that all the time. Evidently, the way she explained how the game was played was for one to climb inside, the other then closed the lid and sat on it. They would both sit there and holler for about 10 minutes then switch places and start over. By now all 3 of them were looking at me as if they couldn't believe I hadn't ever heard of this game before. Sensing their impatience to get back to their claustrophobic fun, I just shook my head and wandered out to my workshop to the sound of blood chilling screams that would have even raised the hair on the back of Boris Karloff's neck.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Let me out! Let me out!
I just ran across this old picture on my computer. It's my oldest son Marshall sitting in front of one of his all-time favorite toys: the toy box. He and his little brother were in his room one day playing when I noticed that the noise level appeared to be quite a bit louder and more desperate than normal. I trotted down the hallway to see if they were really going to kill each other this time to find one of them sitting on top of it while the other was locked inside. Figuring that the little one was being held hostage and was most likely terrified of being trapped, I yelled at Marshall to let him out. Just then the wife walks by and says they do that all the time. Evidently, the way she explained how the game was played was for one to climb inside, the other then closed the lid and sat on it. They would both sit there and holler for about 10 minutes then switch places and start over. By now all 3 of them were looking at me as if they couldn't believe I hadn't ever heard of this game before. Sensing their impatience to get back to their claustrophobic fun, I just shook my head and wandered out to my workshop to the sound of blood chilling screams that would have even raised the hair on the back of Boris Karloff's neck.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
July 4th, 2010 in Destin Fl. for a mini vacation
Kathy asked me if I was going to write a journal of our trip to Destin, Fl. similar to what I did for our trip to Sanfrancisco. I’ll hit the highlights and points of interest (for me anyway), give my observations on the oil mess in the Gulf, and fill in the chinks with my usual catty remarks and sarcasm. It’s been a couple of weeks since we got back so I won’t attempt to put it all in order.
The ride down turned out to be really nice. Once we got off the interstate below Montgomery we turned off the beaten path and took the back roads all the way to Destin. It was all farm country on a two lane road. We passed thru several one-horse towns that looked as if they hadn’t changed in 50 years. Lucky for us that Kathy’s Toyota gets good gas mileage. We didn’t see a gas station for nearly the entire time. Some of the ones that we did see were shut down. If you weren’t a farmer in this part of the country, you were in big trouble. I don’t know what kind of work would be available other than farming. I even saw a sign on a trailer asking for work: “day laborer”, work needed. That guy must have been in serious money trouble. It started to rain on the way down and got worse the next day.
We were pelted with a steady downpour of rain the entire first day in Destin but we had a plan for it. Other than narrowly missing several drivers who appeared to be suicidal with their left turns immediately in front of us during the rain and testing the limits of our little buggy’s braking we spent the day shopping. We have been going to a lot of antique shops lately. I look for old woodworking planes and try not to buy tea pots and she looks for everything. I guess it’s a sign of getting slightly older when you see items you really don’t consider junk, just stuff you had 30-40 years or so ago and there is no way they could be considered antique. So we hit several antique stores and gathered a little information about an outdoor flea market that was upcoming on the weekend. Lunch found us nearly the only people occupying an out of the way Asian restaurant. I think it was Japanese and Chinese together. She had sushi and I had tofu. It was all excellent as I knew it would be, judging from my observations on the general hygiene of the place and tacky decorations on the walls. The best Chinese restaurants are to be found in the seedier parts of town and have to be really old and established before the food gets that down home flavor and they can be trusted. We also decided that sushi is the number one choice amongst the residents in that area because it was everywhere we went. I think we ate sushi nearly every day. At the little restaurant I bought her a pair of woven flip flops with some fancy needlework on them. She only has about 200 pairs of shoes in inventory and was worried that she was going to run out. I enjoy buying things for her and since they were smaller than a breadbox, watching her face light up is well worth the money.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find what I wanted in any of the antique stores and try as she might, Kathy couldn’t find anything she didn’t want. I had to talk her out of several items including some that were so large they wouldn’t even fit on top of the car, much less inside it.
The sun came out the next day and we didn’t see more than 5 minutes of rain for the remainder of our trip. We ran right for the beach and expected to be the only ones there because the media reported that everyone cancelled their vacations due to the oil spill in the Gulf. I guess the ones that were there already didn’t know how to listen because the beach was pretty packed. Beach real estate is pretty scarce and what little is available is shared by way too many people. We were given directions to our designated beach access by the hotel folks and told to keep a pass on the dashboard for the guards at the checkpoint. I told you that the beach is getting harder and harder to access and the guards and turnpike are a sure sign that access is being controlled tightly. We had a square of sandy beach that was about the length of the back of a sister hotel to ours with warning signs to stay the heck out of “their” beach on either side of the hotel next door. “No sunbathing or loitering” I pondered this a moment and decided that walking was neither of the two and took my chances and immigrated to the adjacent beaches. As I walked from hotel to hotel, the beach was much less crowded than ours. Beyond the hotels it was empty except for the FEMA crews who were patrolling looking for tar and oil.
The wife eventually decided she wanted to go out into the water. It was very rough due to the hurricane that was heading into Texas. I warned her not to go in above her knees as I figured she would get dragged out to sea by the rip tides and/or strong waves. She went out about 3’, lost her balance (and just about her bikini too), and was unable to get up. I was sitting there watching her flop around in the water wondering if she was ever going to be able to stand up again of if she would really get dragged out to sea when some guy walked over to her and fished her out. That was a close call.
Subsequent visits to the beach were pretty much the same except that one late afternoon on the July 4th weekend we were close to a bunch of college kids who were having way too much fun. Kathy stared and grinned at them the entire time. I figured that she wanted to go over there and hang out. If they would have so much as waved at her, she would probably still be down there with them. Maybe she was planning to conscript a few of the boys to rub suntan lotion on her. I wasn’t being too helpful in that dept. Probably would have been slightly more fun than sitting there listening to somebody bitch about how loud they were, I wish they would turn off that jungle music, when are they ever going to leave, just want some peace and quiet, etc. The kids ended their party by singing, “I’m proud to be an American” at the top of their drunken voices which ended with a round of applause by everybody within hearing distance. They stumbled off, leaving empty beer cans and beach chairs behind for others to clean up after them.
I did get to watch a pervert in action while he took a picture of a young girl in a bikini laying on the beach next to us. He walked past her in a straight line while his head turned around like it was caught in a tractor beam. Circling around behind her, he pulled out his cell phone then snapped the picture while pretending to make a call. He even held up the phone to his ear for a few seconds then walked off behind us. I don’t know if he got a shot of Kathy in her bikini or not since he walked behind me as well. I told her what happened and mentioned the possibility that he might have gotten her too and it freaked her out. Within minutes she knew that she was going to lose her nursing license and everyone from her work would recognize her on the website that this guy was going to put her picture on. She was laying on her belly so it would have had to been a shot of her behind. I had to ask her if she thought the people at work would recognize her rearend or not. She was sure that the pervert would have her on the internet in moments and we had to do something to stop it from happening. She wanted to shut down his website. I told her that it would be no problem as there couldn’t be more than a couple of websites with pictures of girls in bikinis on them. A little while later her ranting and general panic subsided.
She got a little oil on her suit at the beach and spend an hour back at the Hotel trying to get it out. I got a spot on my leg somehow. Other than that, there were a few chips of tar here and there but it wasn’t a big deal.
We ate a lot of seafood while there and paid a king’s ransom for it too. Lunch was nearly as expensive as supper. I paid $70 for a lunch of crab legs for her and grouper for me. We also got to wait for it for over an hour. As a matter of fact, the cost for a meal in the upscale places was even more horrible. I paid $100 for a couple of steaks and some drinks at a place called “Tommy Bahamas bar and grill”. We couldn’t get a table because more of those people who didn’t know about the oil crises were in there so they let us find a spot at the bar. Kathy wanted a Long Island Iced Tea so I got her one. Later I found out they were $11.25 each. She asked me for another so I got it and didn’t think too much about it until it was time to leave. She couldn’t finish her $35 steak so I told her to cut it up and we would take it home in a doggie bag. Watching her try to slice it up revealed that she might be impaired in some way. She was smearing that thing all over the plate and half of it was falling off onto the bar. I asked her if she was drunk but she assured me no problem, she was fine. We got out of there after having my wallet molested and I immediately confirmed my suspicion that she had one too many of those drinks. She was stumbling pretty bad and had bumped into me several times so I got her pointed in another direction and took her to the hotel. I was kind of thinking that the bartender sure did put a lot of alcohol in those drinks while I watched her make them and I also forgot that little miss muffet had trouble holding down even a half glass of wine without getting really silly. After the upscale fleecing, I went back to my usual lousy Chinese restaurants and found the food to be every bit as good, if not better, with pricing that even a cheapskate would smile at. Speaking of that, we were in Publix picking up some bagels and drinks and I also wanted to buy a small can of shaving cream. All they had were big cans which were more expensive than I was willing to shell out. I told Kathy there was no way I was going to pay $1.55 for a can of shaving cream when I knew I could get it at home for $.99. I told her I would just shave with soap and skip the shaving cream. About that time I thought I heard her muttering “cheapskate” under her breath. I turned around and asked her what that snarky comment was and she repeated it for me quite a bit louder. Anyway, I got to eat boiled shrimp that still had the heads on them at the Chinese place. Pretty cool. That and I had some of the hottest (spicy) chicken I had ever eaten. Those jalapeno peppers in there were enormous.
We found the flea market on Saturday morning but there was hardly anyone there. So we headed on down the highway to waste an hour or so in the hopes that more people would show up. Floridians aren’t much for getting up in the morning, that’s for sure. I even took Kathy to a yard sale to see if they were any different than the ones at home. After we got away from the tinsely, touristy part of Deston, it started to look more like the Florida I like. Local businesses, people, and the like. We didn’t see “Alvin’s Island”, the gift shop and junk emporium on every corner. No fancy outlet malls, shopping villages, or boutiques. The flea market turned out to be a lot of fun. They had a little bit of everything and it was obvious that nearly everyone there was a local. After lunch we started to head back to the hotel and got caught in a horrible traffic jam. It was the holiday weekend and I attributed it to tourists/vacationers but we later saw that there was a wicked wreck that slowed everything down. One car was on it’s roof and the other looked like it had been crushed in half. We found out the next day that there had been at least one death. I was bitching to Kathy about all of these tourists jamming everything up and that we were going to have to find another place to stay about the time we came upon the wreck. She didn’t care about the traffic and was simply happy to be there but indicated she was sick of all the complaining.
We looked around at the new trendy shopping villages and outlet malls but I hated every bit of it. There were signs in some of the clothing stores that they had exactly what the movie stars wore, the latest fashions, all priced accordingly. I didn’t find much that interested me. The hurricane that hit the area a few years ago, leveling it, ruined the entire town. Old Florida, with it’s beat up shell houses, old falling down restaurants and charm had been replaced with Hollywood wannabe designer outlets. One day I told her we would try and go inland a bit to find the old cracker Florida and we didn’t have to go too far. Another indoor flea market, some antique stores and my favorite; lousy Chinese restaurants, lifted my spirits.
At one antique store in the scary part of town, I found the holy grail of teapots; an English one that was made in Staffordshire, England. Exactly what I had been looking for and even on sale. I got it for around $16. In another one, I spied a pair of old Stanley woodworking planes laying on the floor halfway underneath some other things. I dragged them out and got down to some serious haggling with the owner. I got them both for $100. I didn’t need them but at that price I couldn’t resist. Those antique dealers are a pretty crafty bunch. The guy knew what they were worth. He told me that he asked someone he knew who was an expert and priced them on the high side for good measure. I told him my intention was to use them and not simply flip them for a profit. I think that’s why I got such a good deal.
On the way home we stopped at this tiny restaurant in the middle of nowhere. It had about 20 tables and was packed full. Everybody knew everybody. Our waitress was serving her Grandpa at the table next to us. The people waiting for a table were visiting with friends who were already seated. The food was incredible. We ate some real country cooking and the total was less than $20. During the meal Kathy had that interested smile on her face while she stared at the people across from us. When the waitress switched her plate and one of theirs, she saw her chance and jabbered with them for 15 minutes. I’ve got to get her out of the house more often.
I think I’m done with Destin. Next time we go to Florida I’m going to try and find a place that isn’t so developed. Navarre just might be the place; right next to the flea market. If I find somewhere fun, Kathy is likely to run off on me with a bunch of college kids or something.
The ride down turned out to be really nice. Once we got off the interstate below Montgomery we turned off the beaten path and took the back roads all the way to Destin. It was all farm country on a two lane road. We passed thru several one-horse towns that looked as if they hadn’t changed in 50 years. Lucky for us that Kathy’s Toyota gets good gas mileage. We didn’t see a gas station for nearly the entire time. Some of the ones that we did see were shut down. If you weren’t a farmer in this part of the country, you were in big trouble. I don’t know what kind of work would be available other than farming. I even saw a sign on a trailer asking for work: “day laborer”, work needed. That guy must have been in serious money trouble. It started to rain on the way down and got worse the next day.
We were pelted with a steady downpour of rain the entire first day in Destin but we had a plan for it. Other than narrowly missing several drivers who appeared to be suicidal with their left turns immediately in front of us during the rain and testing the limits of our little buggy’s braking we spent the day shopping. We have been going to a lot of antique shops lately. I look for old woodworking planes and try not to buy tea pots and she looks for everything. I guess it’s a sign of getting slightly older when you see items you really don’t consider junk, just stuff you had 30-40 years or so ago and there is no way they could be considered antique. So we hit several antique stores and gathered a little information about an outdoor flea market that was upcoming on the weekend. Lunch found us nearly the only people occupying an out of the way Asian restaurant. I think it was Japanese and Chinese together. She had sushi and I had tofu. It was all excellent as I knew it would be, judging from my observations on the general hygiene of the place and tacky decorations on the walls. The best Chinese restaurants are to be found in the seedier parts of town and have to be really old and established before the food gets that down home flavor and they can be trusted. We also decided that sushi is the number one choice amongst the residents in that area because it was everywhere we went. I think we ate sushi nearly every day. At the little restaurant I bought her a pair of woven flip flops with some fancy needlework on them. She only has about 200 pairs of shoes in inventory and was worried that she was going to run out. I enjoy buying things for her and since they were smaller than a breadbox, watching her face light up is well worth the money.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find what I wanted in any of the antique stores and try as she might, Kathy couldn’t find anything she didn’t want. I had to talk her out of several items including some that were so large they wouldn’t even fit on top of the car, much less inside it.
The sun came out the next day and we didn’t see more than 5 minutes of rain for the remainder of our trip. We ran right for the beach and expected to be the only ones there because the media reported that everyone cancelled their vacations due to the oil spill in the Gulf. I guess the ones that were there already didn’t know how to listen because the beach was pretty packed. Beach real estate is pretty scarce and what little is available is shared by way too many people. We were given directions to our designated beach access by the hotel folks and told to keep a pass on the dashboard for the guards at the checkpoint. I told you that the beach is getting harder and harder to access and the guards and turnpike are a sure sign that access is being controlled tightly. We had a square of sandy beach that was about the length of the back of a sister hotel to ours with warning signs to stay the heck out of “their” beach on either side of the hotel next door. “No sunbathing or loitering” I pondered this a moment and decided that walking was neither of the two and took my chances and immigrated to the adjacent beaches. As I walked from hotel to hotel, the beach was much less crowded than ours. Beyond the hotels it was empty except for the FEMA crews who were patrolling looking for tar and oil.
The wife eventually decided she wanted to go out into the water. It was very rough due to the hurricane that was heading into Texas. I warned her not to go in above her knees as I figured she would get dragged out to sea by the rip tides and/or strong waves. She went out about 3’, lost her balance (and just about her bikini too), and was unable to get up. I was sitting there watching her flop around in the water wondering if she was ever going to be able to stand up again of if she would really get dragged out to sea when some guy walked over to her and fished her out. That was a close call.
Subsequent visits to the beach were pretty much the same except that one late afternoon on the July 4th weekend we were close to a bunch of college kids who were having way too much fun. Kathy stared and grinned at them the entire time. I figured that she wanted to go over there and hang out. If they would have so much as waved at her, she would probably still be down there with them. Maybe she was planning to conscript a few of the boys to rub suntan lotion on her. I wasn’t being too helpful in that dept. Probably would have been slightly more fun than sitting there listening to somebody bitch about how loud they were, I wish they would turn off that jungle music, when are they ever going to leave, just want some peace and quiet, etc. The kids ended their party by singing, “I’m proud to be an American” at the top of their drunken voices which ended with a round of applause by everybody within hearing distance. They stumbled off, leaving empty beer cans and beach chairs behind for others to clean up after them.
I did get to watch a pervert in action while he took a picture of a young girl in a bikini laying on the beach next to us. He walked past her in a straight line while his head turned around like it was caught in a tractor beam. Circling around behind her, he pulled out his cell phone then snapped the picture while pretending to make a call. He even held up the phone to his ear for a few seconds then walked off behind us. I don’t know if he got a shot of Kathy in her bikini or not since he walked behind me as well. I told her what happened and mentioned the possibility that he might have gotten her too and it freaked her out. Within minutes she knew that she was going to lose her nursing license and everyone from her work would recognize her on the website that this guy was going to put her picture on. She was laying on her belly so it would have had to been a shot of her behind. I had to ask her if she thought the people at work would recognize her rearend or not. She was sure that the pervert would have her on the internet in moments and we had to do something to stop it from happening. She wanted to shut down his website. I told her that it would be no problem as there couldn’t be more than a couple of websites with pictures of girls in bikinis on them. A little while later her ranting and general panic subsided.
She got a little oil on her suit at the beach and spend an hour back at the Hotel trying to get it out. I got a spot on my leg somehow. Other than that, there were a few chips of tar here and there but it wasn’t a big deal.
We ate a lot of seafood while there and paid a king’s ransom for it too. Lunch was nearly as expensive as supper. I paid $70 for a lunch of crab legs for her and grouper for me. We also got to wait for it for over an hour. As a matter of fact, the cost for a meal in the upscale places was even more horrible. I paid $100 for a couple of steaks and some drinks at a place called “Tommy Bahamas bar and grill”. We couldn’t get a table because more of those people who didn’t know about the oil crises were in there so they let us find a spot at the bar. Kathy wanted a Long Island Iced Tea so I got her one. Later I found out they were $11.25 each. She asked me for another so I got it and didn’t think too much about it until it was time to leave. She couldn’t finish her $35 steak so I told her to cut it up and we would take it home in a doggie bag. Watching her try to slice it up revealed that she might be impaired in some way. She was smearing that thing all over the plate and half of it was falling off onto the bar. I asked her if she was drunk but she assured me no problem, she was fine. We got out of there after having my wallet molested and I immediately confirmed my suspicion that she had one too many of those drinks. She was stumbling pretty bad and had bumped into me several times so I got her pointed in another direction and took her to the hotel. I was kind of thinking that the bartender sure did put a lot of alcohol in those drinks while I watched her make them and I also forgot that little miss muffet had trouble holding down even a half glass of wine without getting really silly. After the upscale fleecing, I went back to my usual lousy Chinese restaurants and found the food to be every bit as good, if not better, with pricing that even a cheapskate would smile at. Speaking of that, we were in Publix picking up some bagels and drinks and I also wanted to buy a small can of shaving cream. All they had were big cans which were more expensive than I was willing to shell out. I told Kathy there was no way I was going to pay $1.55 for a can of shaving cream when I knew I could get it at home for $.99. I told her I would just shave with soap and skip the shaving cream. About that time I thought I heard her muttering “cheapskate” under her breath. I turned around and asked her what that snarky comment was and she repeated it for me quite a bit louder. Anyway, I got to eat boiled shrimp that still had the heads on them at the Chinese place. Pretty cool. That and I had some of the hottest (spicy) chicken I had ever eaten. Those jalapeno peppers in there were enormous.
We found the flea market on Saturday morning but there was hardly anyone there. So we headed on down the highway to waste an hour or so in the hopes that more people would show up. Floridians aren’t much for getting up in the morning, that’s for sure. I even took Kathy to a yard sale to see if they were any different than the ones at home. After we got away from the tinsely, touristy part of Deston, it started to look more like the Florida I like. Local businesses, people, and the like. We didn’t see “Alvin’s Island”, the gift shop and junk emporium on every corner. No fancy outlet malls, shopping villages, or boutiques. The flea market turned out to be a lot of fun. They had a little bit of everything and it was obvious that nearly everyone there was a local. After lunch we started to head back to the hotel and got caught in a horrible traffic jam. It was the holiday weekend and I attributed it to tourists/vacationers but we later saw that there was a wicked wreck that slowed everything down. One car was on it’s roof and the other looked like it had been crushed in half. We found out the next day that there had been at least one death. I was bitching to Kathy about all of these tourists jamming everything up and that we were going to have to find another place to stay about the time we came upon the wreck. She didn’t care about the traffic and was simply happy to be there but indicated she was sick of all the complaining.
We looked around at the new trendy shopping villages and outlet malls but I hated every bit of it. There were signs in some of the clothing stores that they had exactly what the movie stars wore, the latest fashions, all priced accordingly. I didn’t find much that interested me. The hurricane that hit the area a few years ago, leveling it, ruined the entire town. Old Florida, with it’s beat up shell houses, old falling down restaurants and charm had been replaced with Hollywood wannabe designer outlets. One day I told her we would try and go inland a bit to find the old cracker Florida and we didn’t have to go too far. Another indoor flea market, some antique stores and my favorite; lousy Chinese restaurants, lifted my spirits.
At one antique store in the scary part of town, I found the holy grail of teapots; an English one that was made in Staffordshire, England. Exactly what I had been looking for and even on sale. I got it for around $16. In another one, I spied a pair of old Stanley woodworking planes laying on the floor halfway underneath some other things. I dragged them out and got down to some serious haggling with the owner. I got them both for $100. I didn’t need them but at that price I couldn’t resist. Those antique dealers are a pretty crafty bunch. The guy knew what they were worth. He told me that he asked someone he knew who was an expert and priced them on the high side for good measure. I told him my intention was to use them and not simply flip them for a profit. I think that’s why I got such a good deal.
On the way home we stopped at this tiny restaurant in the middle of nowhere. It had about 20 tables and was packed full. Everybody knew everybody. Our waitress was serving her Grandpa at the table next to us. The people waiting for a table were visiting with friends who were already seated. The food was incredible. We ate some real country cooking and the total was less than $20. During the meal Kathy had that interested smile on her face while she stared at the people across from us. When the waitress switched her plate and one of theirs, she saw her chance and jabbered with them for 15 minutes. I’ve got to get her out of the house more often.
I think I’m done with Destin. Next time we go to Florida I’m going to try and find a place that isn’t so developed. Navarre just might be the place; right next to the flea market. If I find somewhere fun, Kathy is likely to run off on me with a bunch of college kids or something.
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