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

November, 2013

Why would anyone not want to live here?

Life on the coast

It's  been said that it is a woman's prerogative to change her mind. Well, I am no woman but in a concession to my softer side, I have changed mine.  In spite of my planning to re-roof the house myself, we decided to get bids just to cover all our bases. When all was said and done, we determined that while obviously more expensive than if I did it myself, it was not nearly enough more to make doing the task worthwhile. The fellas have equipment that would be expensive for me to rent (a 30 foot [10 M] remotely operated articulated boom [think cherry picker] kinda looking thing). Besides, the real issue is that if it is not installed by one of their certified 'experts' the warrantee is void. Bah, humbug!

This will allow many more secondary projects to move forward which would have been impossible had I spent the entire time here on the one task. To prevent me from going squishy on you, I will re-roof my workshop myself...a mere 1000 square feet [ 92 sm]

How do you re-do the flashing on a 12' [4 m] skylight? Simple! You remove the 165 screws, disassemble the pieces, chemically strip the paint, etch the metal, prime, add 3 coats of paint and reinstall and caulk. Piece of cake.

Meanwhile, Janice is going gangbusters, replanting some areas that she had landscaped last fall but that did not survive our 8 month absence. We  had to re-think our approach here regarding that subject. It is hard to believe but over the years I buried over a half mile (1 km) of water and electrical pipe and tubing, crisscrossing the entire property. It is now questionable if it will ever be used. Meanwhile, we have become big fans of  walk on redwood bark as it is not only attractive but covers a multitude of landscaping sins. We are in the process of spreading the 23 pickup truck loads -a mere 275 wheel barrow's worth- we got for the immediate 5000 sf (460 sq m) around the house.

Years ago, we set in motion all kinds of plans to landscape most of our 3 acre property (1 hectare +), with visions of another Golden Gate Park. At the time, we had no idea that we would eventually be spending 4 months a year lollygagging around in Europe and 4 months on the East coast. We thought that we would retire and spend our days here working on the property like good little worker bee's till we dropped . 

Abject poverty precludes our having a year round chef, driver, towel boy or landscaper, so we simply have to resign ourselves to the fact that we can't put a timer on to water plants and walk away from it for 8 months. These things need maintenance and supervision and we are not here to provide it.

The landscaping goddess

Anyway, we are in the process of trying to make the immediate area around the house more palatable. Notice I am not saying great, just acceptable. After all, we are catching up with a 9 year absence so 'acceptable' would be huge. We hope that when we return next year we will have the time and money to kick things up a notch. While we did get the vast majority of the interior of the house up and running to our satisfaction last fall, we still had a few loose ends. Like replacing a 30 year old oven. I mean pleeeease... Sure it looked OK, but it was time for it to go. Ditto for the redwood hot tub. It served us well but it was time for it to go push up daisies. Finally, we got a new garage door to replace the one that had given its all.

Then there are the little details like the fact that I ran out of time last year to finish the Travertine flooring in a hall closet and the laundry room. One down, one on the current schedule for those two. Surprisingly, to me at least, is how much darn time I have spent cleaning out..eh...junk. 

Last month I mentioned that I had cleared a bunch of stuff out of my workshop. Since then, I have gone in all directions all over the property, going through little stashes here and there, finding bone piles of odds and ends. I soon realized that I was on the verge of having to check myself in for anti-hoarding therapy. Instead, we threw out a staggering amount, donated hoards of stuff to Goodwill and sold some on Craigslist. 

In fact, I put so much stuff up for sale that had there been any kids or small animals around, they would have gone too. Then, we put aside a pickup load to take to some of our kids we will visit before Christmas. Finally, I put gathered enough magic props to take up for my 13 year old budding magician granddaughter Maddie to do a half hour show at kids birthday parties.

I will not disclose how much time I worked on all of this out of fear that it would give you a clue as to the quantity of junk there was to dispose of. Suffice it to say that had my kids shown up to clean up after dear old dad augured his plane in, the emotional response would be hard to reflect in print. It would have surely involved a lot of swearing and vein popping fury. Hare Krishna's name would have been mentioned loudly and often. 

Relax kids, its all been cleaned up.

Speaking of kids, we just got back from a whirlwind trip to Los Angeles to meet up with daughter Kami who flew in from her new home in New Orleans. The purpose of her trip was to gather her remaining furniture and belongings to have them shipped by truck. We provided our pick up truck, a moving dollie, manual labor and moral support. Always great to see the kid.

Movie magic

Kami is working in the film industry in New Orleans as she was in Los Angeles. While packing, she disposed of some things she was not taking with her and I found the items seen above. While we do all we can to get rid of cobwebs, she has cans of the stuff to create the right atmosphere.  As for the can of "dirt spray", I wondered if that is what the fellas in the joint meant when they said they missed dirty movies :-)

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Is that you, NSA?

Several yeas ago, I mentioned that while I don't track who reads our little newsletter, I have on rare occasion taken a peek to see if both of you open it at least. This blog service offers statistics on all kinds of stuff if you are interested, especially if you were trying to make money at it. (Ha, ha, ha!) I have noted that friends and family in 9 countries are, in some cases unwittingly, recipients of our newsletter but over the past months a new country was added. Someone is receiving our blog where I adamantly claim to know no one. Russia.

With all the talk lately about the NSA (No Such Agency) spying on phone calls, e-mails and all manner of communications I want them to read that I LOVE President Obama, all Democrats and I am a fervent supporter of Obamacare and the whole Liberal agenda...eh...including welfare, all entitlement programs, income redistribution, food stamps, give a way's of all stripes and all the other great ideas and stuff that come out of that brilliant think tank that is the White House. And about those comments I was wont to make from time to time? Well, they were just a figure of speech...eh... like a manner of speaking, sort of. You know, lighthearted commentary. Right?

OK guys? Ah c'mon, don't raise my taxes again.....please!!

On the other hand, if this is the KGB that is monitoring my stuff...please note that as seen below, it has been reported below that I died. So make like Michael Jackson and just "Beat it".

The holy grail of shipwrecks was within Michael LaPrade’s grasp when he vanished.

As he drifted 25 feet above the skeletal remains of the ship, buffeted by icy currents, LaPrade let go of the rope that anchored him and two other divers to the surface 20 stories above.“They turned around, and he was gone,’’ Edward V. Ecker Jr., chief of the Police Department, said yesterday. “Just  all of a sudden.’’ Fellow divers found LaPrade’s body Sunday afternoon on the ocean floor near the wreck, three hours after he disappeared, officials said, and took it to shore. The cause of death is under investigation.

OK, so the reports of my death are a little premature. Still, it was unnerving to follow a suggestion to Google up my own name. Not being rich or famous, there could be nothing there, right? Yikes! The first link was to a report on the death of...well...me! Or someone with the same name as me. Curious, I switched to images to see what pictures there could possibly be of Michael Laprade and found this.

I am not sure I like how my namesake is being represented online. Further research showed a surprising number of pictures I did recognize, including  of Janice that have appeared in one format or another (the blog, our web sites and various media articles) with my name being associated with them. It is said that you only get one chance at making a first impression. If anyone stumbles on the pics above, I'm toast.

Gum alley

Many towns have some unique off the wall little known feature. Some have weird things like the largest ball of twine in the world or the largest frying pan. Our town of San Luis Obispo has …eh… gum. No, not the largest wad of gum but two full walls of it. 

Bubble Gum alley is located right off the main street (Higuerra) going through the center of town. A narrow alley with walls 15 feet high (5M) and 70 feet long (22M), they are literally plastered from bottom to top with every variety and color of chewing gum known to man. One story is that it was started as a rivalry between schools, others say it was a high school graduation stunt.

Much to the delight – and disgust - of locals it is mostly regarded for what it is- a fun, silly tradition that draws attention from people all over the world. It has appeared on several nationwide television programs and is seen as a good luck charm for area sports teams. It is also a favorite for those wanting to express their love and affection to their mates, similar to carving your initials in a tree.

Some places have to be seen to be believed. Gum alley is one of them.

Hey! I resemble that remark!

By the way, if you are not in California and can take pictures of clouds or the rain, be sure to send us some. We would hate to forget what they look like :-)

October, 2013

Is this a great life, or what?
This is where we take our beach walks near our house

Home sweet home

Well, we are back home in California.  After the usual week of 'closing up the island' chores, we boarded the plane and headed home. We have the routine down so pat, we could do this blindfolded. Toss one set of car and house keys in the travel bag and pull out the next. I traveled with one set of underwear, socks and shirt only because we had an overnight in Syracuse for scheduled medical check ups for Janice before flying out. Otherwise, everything we will want or need (except my airplane) is here.

Once again, our return here will not be all fun and games. Last year we did a total makeover of the interior of the house over the 4 months we were here. This year calls for my re-roofing the house. Considering that a dome is 85% roof, it will be quite a task. Heck, while we are at it, we will replace the fireplace and some appliances too. Next year promises to have its own set of projects but like the Bee and the house in France, the biggies will be out of the way, allowing for way more free time.

We spent the first week getting ourselves organized, ordering supplies and working out the logistics. There was also the issue of getting my workshop put back together after it had served as a storage unit for all of our furniture as well as my tools over the previous 8 years while the house was rented out. 

Much to my dismay, I spent days clearing out 'stuff' that I had hoarded in silly expectation of 'possibly' needing some day. I would hold anything I came across the way a clothes dryer holds lint. When you are a serious DIY guy, no bit of wire, wood or metal is ever seen as trash, only reserve stock that 'might' serve a purpose....some day.


Fair enough, but when you have enough stuff hoarded for 3 lifetimes worth of projects, it was time to get my head out of my a**, it is not a hat.

I never used the building as a workshop last year as I was strictly working on my hands and knees in the house, laying what seemed to be acres of Travertine floor tile over the entire main level of the house. But now, I am ready to get down to business.

San Luis Obispo Farmers market

We are enjoying getting back into the swing of things here, like hanging out at the Thursday night farmers market In San Luis Obispo. A bit of a misnomer, as it as much of a market (After all, California is the land of 'fruits and nuts') as it is a street fair. The main drag is closed to vehicles and thousands of people turn it into a 10 block party. Home to some of the best BBQ on the planet, it is accompanied by street musicians and  all manner of vendors hawking their wares. And yes, every religious zealot and fruity loop organization known to man was there to make their pitch. 

Including Democrats, of course.

I had one ask me to sign up and I said "Great! That way we could go down together with all the warmth of companions locked up in the steerage compartment of the Titanic".

The Little Free Library

Revisited

Last month, I wrote about the Cottage Life Magazine folks who came out to do an article on the Bee for next next summers edition of the magazine. However, there is another very popular online magazine in the area called "Thousand Island Life". With a subscription base of 5,000 readers, it is targeted to the hard core Thousand Islanders. Our friend Kim had written an article about the Bee back in 2009 and after the little blurb in Cottage life last month, the editor of Thousand Island Life asked us to write about the Little Free Library for them also.The result, as seen below, was published this morning. You can also read it online HERE.

 Final thoughts for season

Shortly before we left the Bee, a friend asked me if I was ever put in a situation where I had to choose, which home would I prefer to live in? Over the years we have been asked this by folks on both sides of the Atlantic and our answer is always the same.

"It would be like asking us which one of our kids would we save if they were all drowning?" we say. The day may come where we will have to pull back some, but it is not today or as far out as we can see. We simply cannot envision being in one place year round. Once we had a taste of this incredible lifestyle, we simply couldn't go back. 

Try to imagine your life being reduced to a third of what you currently have. That is how we would feel if we stopped doing what we do. Shudder the thought. 

One thing I did discover this summer though was just how much fun Jet Skiing is. We had always thought that is would be a blast but other priorities and our usual state of abject poverty kept us from finding out. Finally, at the end of last season we picked up a pair and I rode the tar out of mine this summer. I have to say that it is second only to flying on the thrill factor and I intend to do much more of it and farther afield next summer. It is an absolute rush!

Second only to flying in fun and usually easier to land