December, 2013

Care to join us for our beach walk or would you prefer to shovel snow?

 NEWSFLASH!

We have the pleasure of announcing the birth of Mr. Ryan Stuckey who joined us on December 6th. Ryan is the baby brother of Ms. Kayla and the proud son of Steve and our daughter Cassie. They have requested a short delay in our arrival so that we could join them for Christmas, when we will be making the rounds to visit some of the kids and all the grand kids on the West Coast.

Ryan becomes # 8 on the grand kid pecking order and it seems that we are at that phase in our lives where they are being popped out like...well...pop tarts! He will be one of two grandsons we will introduce ourselves to, when we finally get to see James Wyatt also.

Mr. Ryan

We need to talk.

Last month I wrote that we decided to hire some outfit to re re-roof the house. Several of you wrote back saying how happy you were that I was not going to do it myself, especially at my age. 

Excuse me?  

AT MY AGE? Since when does MY AGE have anything to do with it? What am I, some old crotchety washed up flame out, some has been girly man?  What next? Should I  go coffin shopping? Get a box of Attends? Look into getting one of those walk in tubs? A rocking chair and a cane, maybe? I will slow down when I get old but gimme a break, I am nowhere near there. I simply chose not to participate. If I hear one more crack about my age, somebody is going to get hurt!!! And I don't want to hear anything about being oversensitive about my age either. Because I'm not, I'm not, I'm not,  I'm NOT @#&^!*!!!  One more thing. I don't need anger management, people just have to stop pis**** me off.


While we are on the subject, we hired someone to come prune our Palm trees also. This hiring people to do stuff is getting to be a bad habit but more fun than a half priced bikini car wash.

Janice asked why I couldn't trim them myself. I said as soon 
as she bought me a cherry picker, a chipper and a dump truck, I would.

Whats new around here? 

Stripping the old shake and solar panels

How to lower three 125 lb (57 Kilo) solar panels alone 
when all your friends are hiding, without breaking a sweat.

Whistle while you work...

Well this month, I quit goofing around an re-roofed my workshop. Janice continued landscaping up a storm and we burned a bunch of junk. The junk we burned ranged from old lumber to dead limbs to the wood shake from the shop roof. Years ago I started building an outdoor BBQ which to this day I have not quite gotten around to finishing.

The landscape goddess at it again

The thing is 40" high and 4' X 8' long (1M10cm X 1M 30cm X 2M 60 cm) and is intended to hold a pizza oven at one end and a BBQ at the other. This past month it served as an unofficial burn bin. We are not permitted to burn at this time of the year but there is no law against having a 'BBQ' and we had whoppers. In all, I figure that we filled it approximately 30 times. It takes quite a while to cut, gather, transport and load that much junk. In fact, we burned so much that we had to shovel the ash out several times to make room for more.

Burn baby, burn

I bet your glad your place doesn't look like this for Christmas

As seen below, the roofers were stripping the old wood shake when they came upon a secret message that had been hidden for 30 years. Janice was on her way home from work at the time, when she spotted her 24 foot high (8M) Valentine's day message from the freeway a mile from the house ( 2 Km) when I was building it. Once uncovered they began to refer it as the "Love shack".

Reminiscing

December 2013

Under construction 1985

C-IJQP, I miss you

I miss my plane. Hard to believe that it's been 3 months since I have flown but I am suffering from altitude sickness. No, not from too much altitude but too little. I miss the heart stopping exhilaration of putting the pedal to the metal and lifting off in a matter of seconds. While I understand the physics of lift I never stop marveling how it works every single time. I miss the thrill of looking down on the world from a thousand feet and crossing over every fence, road, back yard, field, factory or whatever with no restrictions, permission or anyone having any say in where I go or what I chose to see. I miss the adrenalin rush of forever looking for the next potential place to land in the event of the need to make an "unscheduled landing" or what non pilots hysterically call an emergency. 

I know people have all kinds of hobbies and get all wrapped up in them but flying is different. There is something to the lifestyle that can hardly be explained but is as significant in ones life as learning a new language, traveling the world or getting a degree. It's not like learning to drive or getting a new toy that can occupy you for a while. It's a whole new level in your consciousness of what the world has to offer.

Being such a smarty pants I thought that I would pick the skill up quickly, probably much faster than most. Yea, right. Most people, when asked, believe that they are better drivers than the average also. I thought I would be the same way with flying but I was wrong. Heck, it is arguable that I am even an average pilot relative to the hours I have. No matter, if I improve my landings before trashing my plane, I will get much better because I will work at it until I do. Determination is not my weak point.

Every warm sunny calm day here I am thinking how great it would be to be flying over the beaches, hills and valleys in our area. Alas, it is not to be. All I can ask is for Claude* to save me some airspace in the Islands to play in when I return in June.

* [ My friend Claude is my flight instructor and a regular reader of our little newsletter]
 .

A stroll down memory lane

It's never a good sign when you reach an age when your friends begin to drop off, but this month I lost one. Hopefully, we will continue do this alphabetically. I first meet him when I was 16 in high school. My girlfriend and I were making out by the river near my school while on our lunch break, when this big brute of a man suddenly shoved me, snarled and said "Let her breathe!"

What on earth potential did he see in this kid?

Testosterone was flying all over the place and I had visions of beating whoever this clown was to a pulp. The fact that he was twice my size helped me decide to give him a break. Besides, he had a point as I was so enthusiastically involved that she really did need to come up for air. Still, he was muscling in on my action and I didn't appreciate it. I looked up to see who this nut was, but he was walking back to his car which he had stopped in the middle of the road when he spotted us. As he got in, he turned and I could see his white collar.

A priest? He was a priest? This raving lunatic was a PRIEST? My jaw dropped and I worried that he would tell the principal or call my parents except that he didn't even know who I was. I figured he was jealous that I had not taken a vow of abstinence but my better judgment kept me from saying anything that would get me knocked into the middle of next week. Within a few weeks, I ran into him again while working on a volunteer project but he never mentioned the incident. I was hoping that he didn't remember me but more likely he was saving me from my own humiliation.

Soon he was involving me in all kinds of projects. He was a priest but I was in the "humanist" phase of my life. I refused to call him "father" but would only call him by his first name: Allan. He never balked at my insolence but kept on drawing me in further. He was the police chaplain so he had a radio and siren in his car and would respond to all domestic dispute calls. I remember on a number of occasions while eating dinner at home with my family, we would suddenly hear an approaching siren. 

The phone would ring and when I answered, he would only say "Be on your sidewalk in 10 seconds". As cell phones did not yet exist, he had the police dispatcher patch him through from his car radio. I had not hung up when we could hear the screeching of his tires as he pulled up to the front of the house with his siren still blaring. He was early. I was barely in the car as he burned rubber pulling away, leaving my parents at the kitchen window, gobsmacked.

We would arrive at some house where there would be two police cars already at the scene. He had me follow him in the house where the officers were only too happy to turn these 'no win' situations over to him. He told me to take care of the kids while he went straight for the husband and gave him the same kind of love and affection he had shown me the day we meet. It was my introduction to law enforcement and the experience would serve me well when I later became a police officer and had to deal with men who had beaten their wives, or in prison after they had killed them.

The man had far more influence on who I became that my own father. While initially pleased that I was hanging out with a priest, my parents began to resent my growing independence leading to my eventual departure from home at 18. Meanwhile, Father Cox exposed me to the world by taking a few of us to Europe several times. He didn't just preach the bible, he lived it. He was a religious Che Guevara, a commando for Christ and as such an outcast of the religious hierarchy. 

He was uncontrollable in the administrative sense, but a mentor to hundreds of teenagers over the years. I can remember him saying mass on an rocky outcrop thousands of feet up a Swiss mountain. There were 3 of us, including him. He told us that for some people, the sky was the limit but that was why they were underachievers. He expected much more of us.

With the help of a copy machine and whiteout, he even fudged my grades to allow me entrance to University. And, more than once, included me as a guest speaker when he was invited to address large businessman's meetings. I loved him and I have always been very grateful for his influence. I can only aspire to be half the man he was. Rest in peace, Father.

Californians: It's not an easy life we lead