Back when I was a kid...
Reminiscing about the past, mine and others
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Friday, September 08, 2006
Happy Birthday
To blogger Tim at My Money Forest. Ah, to be a mere 26 again…
Speaking of being younger, seeing the abbreviation MMF reminds me of the days when we’d all go to Applebee’s periodically after work, or have going away parties there for departing colleagues. In the early days, the usual bartender was a young woman named Jody. I was introduced to a drink that was a specialty of hers, best ordered when she was there because nobody else could make it half as well. It was called a Mongolian Motherfucker, or MMF for short. It amused the waitresses sometimes to make me ask for it by its full name, rather than its initials. It was delicious, but very strong, based on Midori, with whatever the blue stuff is called, a couple other alcohols, and I think a bit of sour mix as the only thing that wasn’t alcohol in it. My alternate drink of choice at the time was their amazing frozen mudslides, better than I have had anywhere else, and probably about 1500 calories each. Somewhere among my non-digital pictures I have one of our bartender buddy sitting on the lap of one of my colleagues. Those were the days.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Also On August 19th…
Today would have been the 100th birthday of my father’s father, unless I’ve had his year of birth wrong for all the years.
It would also have been my brother’s 33rd anniversary with his first wife, who knocked him up just before he turned 18, had they stayed married, but we don’t need to talk about that.
If I recall correctly, my grandfather was 84 when he died. I keep thinking he was 86, but that can’t be because of where I lived at the time. In any event, here are a couple of pictures. In the first one, he’s in the middle, with guys he worked with, probably on a farm. In the second one, he’s in my uncle’s van at an Ellis family reunion at Green Provicial Park in Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Memorial Surprise
Here’s the town hall, with a large lawn and the obligatory major monument to the war of northern aggression out front:
On that large lawn is an impressive, newer-fangled war memorial, seen walking toward it and then facing into it:
Besides the main memorial at the back, the perimeter is line with granite benches, each for a war or conflict and apparently sponsored by some person or group, interspersed with some black monuments like this one:
That’s the most distinctive, war-specific of the black stones. Mostly they are generically “hooray for the VFW,” “in memory of the disabled,” that sort of thing.
Each of the benches represent a conflict. You expect some, like:
Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, naturally you’d expect World War II and the War of 1812, not to mention many others. Around here it’s no surprise at all to see this:
This was where it was at, after all. In Halifax alone there’s a stone marker on White Island, commemorating the start of King Philip’s War (or whatever it says exactly; it’s been forever since I read it), and there’s a memorial on Thompson Street, route 105, where the Thompson homestead was destroyed. So yeah, King Philip’s War fits.
But this made us do a double-take:
A memorial to the Texas Revolution? In Middleborough, Massachusetts? One of these things is not like the others. Must have been a family connection or something.
Not that it isn’t cool, but what a surprise.
Well They Tell Me I Was Born There…
As we continue the tour of scenic Star’s Hollow Middleboro, here’s a not very good set of pictures of the boarded up hospital formerly known as St. Lukes, which is where I careened heedlessly into the world on my mother’s 26th birthday, unaware what I was in for.
The first and third pictures are brightened, and the first, just in case, has smudged license plates, which are something that will happen without mention in other pictures as appropriate.
I didn’t go up onto Oak Street to get a good picture of the long side of the building. That’s where it looks most shamefully empty. Every time we go by it we talk about how sad that something isn’t being done with it. Someone was trimming growth as we walked by, so I wondered if that was a good sign.
My first doctor when I was a baby and for my first several years was located in a house-like building near this place. He also delivered the landlord’s wife, I learned when I used the “born in Middleboro” card while trying to ensure that we, not anyone else, would be rented this apartment.
The building looks so little to me now! It seemed so big when I was a kid, when we visited my aunt when she was having her gallbladder removed.
Of Trains And History
We walked a couple miles yesterday, and I remembered to take the camera along. This was not enough for Sadie, so she also played in the sandbox for a while afterward, then went with me and hung out in and around the server room and an attorney’s office while I did some work. She is soooo good, being able to do that. Though the lollipop I snagged her from the reception desk didn’t hurt.
This set is the view from two bridges over the railroad tracks looking roughly north, then from adjacent to another bridge looking roughly south. This is the trainyard area near enough to us to fill the apartment with diesel fumes when certain engines idle there, viewed from opposite directions.
In the first pictures, the more spiffed up looking stretches are the ones used by the MBTA commuter rail, which terminates not far beyond these bridges.
The third picture is retouched, brightened 15% because the camera was acting up. Though not as much as it did later, when it corrupted several pictures and ruined my getting a complete war memorial set. The card has now been reformatted and we’re going to order a new, higher capacity one.
In that last picture, the decrepit building to the left of the tracks is the old C.P. Washburn building. I’d noticed they were no longer open for business, but I had no idea why. This is significant because when I was growing up, when they also had a store near us in Halifax, right beside the same railroad tracks, they were the oldest continuously operated family business in America. Besides being a long separate branch of the same Washburn family my father’s mother was from.
This post made me look into it and I learned what happened:
As the survey progressed, we were, of course, eager to learn which is the oldest existing family business in America. The answer seemed easy: the C.P. Washburn Company (1632) of Middleborough, Massachusetts. Then came the crushing news: on November 1, 1998, The Boston Globe reported the company’s untimely demise. Charles P. Washburn IV, a member of the 11th generation, was apparently unable to pay $120,000 in back taxes and the town closed the company’s doors, bringing an end to a noble family business that got its start as a granary in nearby Duxbury, long before this country became a nation.
In the course of this, I also came across an interesting list of historic sites for Middleboro and other towns in Plymouth County.
Another Washburn building is among those historic sites, as is basically the entire part of town where we live, which includes the post office, which is itself a distinct historic site, which would fit with my taking a picture of it because it looks so cool.
As the above implies, there will be more pictures, including a war memorial curiosity I managed to photograph, even though I didn’t collect the complete set. Stay tuned…
Thursday, August 17, 2006
You Know You Have Kids When…
Snakes on a Plane? Amateurs. Here we have crayons in a speaker:
This ancient set of computer speakers I bought years ago for my Pentium 200, after I bought a SoundBlaster Gold card for it. Since that sound card has traditional speaker jacks and these speakers have the same, the two go together. I use the speaker cables from a stereo I bought at Zayre in or around 1978.
Because the computer has not been hooked up, the speakers have been kicking around near my desk. Both kids loved playing with them.
When I went to hook them up the other day, I found the controls had fallen into the case, barely lining up with the holes. Not useful. So I opened it up to fix it, and the picture is what I saw; crayons everywhere! Apparently Sadie had been pushing crayons into the speaker unobserved. You’ll notice that no crayon is allowed to remain clothed. The wrappers must be torn methodically off each and every one as soon as possible. She’s so funny.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Taiwan: Insect Encrusted Paradise?
Back when I worked in receiving at The Renovator’s Supply, we’d get containers full of boxes of parts from Taiwan, and all you could smell was pesticides. It was as if the cardboard had been soaked in it, then had a chance to dry during shipping.
By the time we were done unloading, we’d smell of it too. Ugh.
It was never as bad with any other international shipments, though granted, none were as large at a time.
So it was that I knew the place of manufacture of the two new UPS units I unpacked today at the office, for temporary use setting up new servers, then coming home to protect these machines. The smell was unmistakable, and more concentrated than I remember it ever being before.
The second one actually had white pesticide residue crusted on the power cord. Ick.
Soooo glad they’ll have an extensive opportunity to air out there before coming home. Especially at the rate I am getting these servers deployed, but that’s another story. Somehow I got the idea it was fairly easy to upgrade NT4 to Windows 2003 Server. Ha! I might actually have to buy another computer to use as a bridge unit, and while I could use a new one, now’s not the best of times. But I digress.
Are insect escapees really that much of a problem coming from Taiwan as opposed to other places?
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Death With Dignity
I’d been hoping to keep the Sentra going through September, when its inspection sticker expires. Nor was I sure it would fail the safety inspection, so it might have been fine for longer.
Yesterday it developed - or made clear that it had been developing - a fuel leak. That might explain the reduced mileage and altered performance it’s been experiencing for months. (Google U. also says it might be an oxygen sensor or something like that, for some of the behavior.)
On the driver’s side, a little ahead of the rear wheel, up near the gas tank, there are what appear to be multiple fuel lines that disappear and then presumably get to the front of the car somehow. Up where I can’t really see or reach without a better jack or lift, it dribbles gas down onto the lower bits of gas line and the ground below. Last night on the damp driveway it showed up as a trail of circular silvery slicks up behind the left side of the car.
It’s impressive enough that I’m not sure I’d dare drive the car much farther than the service station around the corner. It doesn’t leak at all when the car isn’t running.
Anyway, if we take it to a shop, they’ll probably want to replace the whole fuel line, if not more, and charge a bunch of money. If I could get it jacked up far enough, or on a lift, it’s likely even I could patch it. Perhaps one of my brothers or my nephew could bring a jack over and help me out, and we’ll have a reprieve, but despite that, it’s time.
The poor Sentra is coming up on 19 years old. I’ve owned it for 10 1/2 years of the almost 28 years I’ve been driving, and 104,000 of its 155,000 miles. It’s been as reliable and low cost as you could ever dream of having a car be. I love that car more than anyone probably should; it’s just a car, after all. Even now it starts right up and if you don’t mind trailing absurd amounts of gas and smelling it in the car, it can get you where you’re going rather well. You could probably take out the engine, transplant it to another body, give it a tuneup and replace some of the rustier exterior bits, and run it another 100,000+ miles. The body is dying, though. It’s earned its rest. But it feels like having the family dog put to sleep.
So we’ll be looking for a replacement starting as early as next week; at least something temporary. We’re not sure there won’t be need for a vehicle that holds three carseats down the line, so we’ve been assuming needing a van or SUV. However, my brother had a rental car, not even full size, that would hold three, so such things exist. It even got 34 MPG, which compares favorably with the almost 30 MPG the Sentra usually got prior to the last several months. For now we don’t strictly require anything larger than the Sentra.
We’re trying to avoid payments (though that option is available in a pinch), and assuming something used will promptly need a grand of work. The Sentra was $2000 and immediately needed $400, though that was the last it needed for a long time. The van was $2500 and immediately needed $1400, but that turned out to be merely the start for that traitorous moneysink. I can afford something in the $1000 - $2000 range as early as next week (preferably lower rather than higher for a couple of reasons), so we’ll be asking people to keep an eye out for the proverbial friend or family getting rid of a car cheap kind of thing.
Luckily, it’s at least a few weeks before there’s anywhere we all need to be at the same time. As far as we know or can anticipate.
After discussing it, though, we’re pretty well set on death with dignity for the venerable old car. If it runs with a cheap-as-possible patch, cool, and we could use the little bit more time, but basically it’s done. No more money for repairs beyond a few bucks for do-it-yourself parts.
On a less somber note, I’d forgotten how much stuff I had in the trunk. I felt like one of those clowns with the endless handkerchiefs. To get at the jack I removed:
Pack & play
Two folding chairs we take to cookouts so we still have nowhere to sit
Tool bag
Husky socket set
Cheap driver set
Gas can
Air tank
Battery charger
Tarp in unopened package
Hammer
Hatchet
Hacksaw
Bow saw
Collapsible mini snow shovel
12-pack of cherry Fresca
Not removed from the trunk were the spare tire, a couple ponchos, a blanket, light sticks, several quarts of oil, several containers of other automotive fluids and sprays, empty gallon container, old battery, emergency belt kit, emergency hose repair kit, other stuff I’m forgetting. Not like I could restart civilization out of the trunk, but add to it my briefcase and I’d be well on my way to emergency camping. For proper bugout/emergency I’d want the knives from the briefcase, some clothes, food, and maybe a few other odds and ends.
For a tiny car the trunk holds an insane amount of stuff. I’d almost be as happy to have another car, because in a van or SUV I’d miss the trunk. Guess we’ll see what happens.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
History
This is my father when he was young. Young enough to have hair! He lost his mighty early. I am amazed how much he reminds me of my cousins Wally and Chad. Not to mention my brother and my oldest nephew.
In the wagon are my late aunt Joan and my aunt Jean, who gave me a copy of this picture, of which this is a digital photo. A scan would be better, but this was expedient. I’m not sure how old they all were, but my father was already well beyond they age when he had polio.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
A Walk On The Howland Side
This is my great-grandmother, Sarah “Sadie” Margaret Tranmer nee Howland. She died in April 1971,around the time I turned 10. Which means she lived to be just short of 75; younger than I always thought. These are great pictures, exactly as I remember her, reflecting her personality. Reportedly she was a real wise-ass, could cut you to ribbons with her tongue, but would do anything to help you if you needed it.
She married James Edmund Tranmer, and they had six kids, my grandmother, Hazel Margaret, being the oldest. The others were Richard, Natalie, Ellery, Winona, and Shirley. Besides my grandmother, only her sister Winnie and one cousin, Dutchy, remain alive out of that generation.
My great grandfather was a rogue, so besides who knows how many local “milkman” spawn, he hopped the train, ran off and had more than one other family, including one in Connecticut that’s been in touch with my mother to compare information. He reportedly was involved in early computer systems for the government.
More stuff about Howland genealogy, at some length, follows the pictures…
So last night I’m going through these pictures I took of sheets of pictures my mother got from some relatives who are also part of the whole Howland lineage. Forever it’s been “known” that one of the Howlands married a Wampanoag indian woman, and she’s one of my ancestors a few generations back. Most recently my understanding was she’d have been my great-great-great grandmother. Yet looking at what I had on record for names, that would have made her Philena Haskins, which sounded not like an indian’s name. I called to ask my mother more about it, and she thought her name might have been Keturah, married to Malachi Howland, one generation back from Seth Howland, who was born in 1789) and Philena Haskins (who was his second wife). Trouble is, you go back too far and it’s not possible to have a picture like this:
Which may or may not be the ancestor in question, and may or may not be an indian ancestor in the Ashley line instead.
So I enthusiastically found Malachi Howland and Keturah, whose name in this case was Howland because they were cousins, not boding well for the indian idea. I gave my mother their entire lineage, available easily online, back to 1481. Then I poked around more and got suspicious about the fact that those two were listed as having no kids, not to mention that they moved from Middleboro to Manhattan, and that meant the lineage had to make its way back to Massachusetts. I found evidence that they had one daughter, but that’s it.
Later I found a near-match of our own lineage that I could match us to, with a totally different path up the Howland lineage to the same place. Starting with my great-grandmother’s parents and going down the generations of paternal parentage, that one went:
Seth A. Howland
Emily Martha Ashley
Seth Howland
Philena Haskins (2nd wife; 1st wife was Abigail Ashley, Seth A. was youngest of a grand total of 15 children)
Joshua Howland
Abigail Pierce (see paragraph below)
Joshua Howland
Mary Allen
Joshua Howland
Elizabeth Holloway (one source had her spelled Halloway, which is apparently wrong)
Samuel Howland
Mary Sampson
Henry Howland Jr
Mary Newland
Henry Howland Sr
Margaret Aires
John Howland
Emma Revell
John Howland
Agnes Greenway
John Howland b.1481
Agnes Agnette
The trouble is, if I went to the seemingly better source on overall Howland lineage up to a few generations ago, or less, depending, and come down from the top, I came up to the third Joshua being married to Phebe Chase, so I thought my conclusion was wrong. I also thought I had too long a break between a couple of the generations. However, it turned out that Phebe Chase was third Joshua Howland’s first wife, with whom he had four girls, including that same Keturah who married Malachi, and the online source I was treating as particularly comprehensive and authoritative made no mention of his second wife, Abigail Pierce, and their one child, the first Seth Howland. As for the dates, I’d noted them wrong when trying to get it straight on paper. In reality it all fits fine. Which allowed me to stop demonstrating, to Deb’s amusement, where Sadie might possibly have inherited her obsessive tendencies.
I still have no idea which one was an indian. If there was a picture, even a tintype, it couldn’t have been too far back. My great-grandmother had a picture displayed in her house, and I believe my mother said she claimed it was her grandmother or great-grandmother. Which would be Philena Haskins or Abigail Pierce, if it’s in the Howland lineage.
Finally, finishing off this post I started yesterday morning, here is my grandmother, daughter of my great-grandmother pictured near the top of the post, at the age of 11, and then 79 years later, this past Sunday, with Sadie looking as she talks with my brother-in-law’s mother, not pictured.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Flowers and Berries
I don’t remember what the flowers in the second picture above are called, but their shade of purplish rose-red is one of my favorite colors. Once upon a time I had double impatiens in approximately the same shade and they were like Best Flowers Ever. My mother has to keep pulling up and tossing away some of the above plants because they spread like weeds. The lillies, in the top picture, are something we had in the yard the whole time I was growing up. Along with some tiger lillies.
Sadie tried a couple of these and seemed to like them. I ate a whole handful, but most of them were pretty sour, even when they appeared quite ripe. I was thinking they were thimbleberries, but apparently those are always red. Turns out they are black raspberries, which I always thought was a silly term people used for blackberries, which are different. At any rate, they were bearing impressively.
Friday, June 30, 2006
These Are Not Your Nephew’s Transformers
The Transformers were after my time, more of a thing for my younger brother and especially my nephew. I used to piss off my nephew by singing the start of the Transformers song with the words “the Transformers… Gobots in disguise” when we lived in the same house.
There is a teaser trailer at the Transformers Movie site. It really only sets the tone. But holy crap, what a tone it sets. I can’t wait to see the final result.
Via Opposable Thumbs at Ars Technica.
The Theory of Money And Credit Goes HTML
I was excited to see Billy Beck reporting that The Theory of Money And Credit by Ludwig von Mises is now online.
Beck notes it’s on his list of recommended books, itself a fascinating post to read. I’m not so sure about some of the “know your enemy” selections, on which it’s heavy, but I found myself lusting after many of the titles listed… and contemplating rereads.
At any rate, it’s not as if I read the whole Mises book, but in referencing it in the college library for this old paper, it was hard to keep myself from getting sucked in, dry as it may be. It resonated.
Monday, June 26, 2006
The Man
Via Lynn, this post on Meeting the Man brings back memories.
When I did Microsoft support, when someone from our way visited Washington, our counterparts in Bellevue would take them to Dixie’s as one of the “must go” places, and would try to get them to try that hot sauce. Word got around before too many actually tried it, but I heard firsthand from one of the victims. He was pretty much fooled into it, as I recall.
Monday, June 19, 2006
My First Computer
This was my first computer, called a “PC” for Pocket Computer. Click for a larger, clearer picture.
This was a Christmas present from my father and stepmother in I believe 1983. 1982 Was the big winter overcoat I still have, that needs to be retired, but has served well as coat, blanket and pillow over the years. But I digress.
As far as I know, this should still run, except for needing batteries. It takes a pair of lithiums, which I never got around to replacing when they died after several years.
It has 1k of bubble memory. They were also available with 2k. You could use it as a basic calculator, and for things like storing addresses. You could also program in a modified version of BASIC. For instance, instead of the entire word INPUT for that command, it was shortened to the letter I.
The most significant thing I did with it was program it to return present and future value interest factors based on inputs then applied to the relevant formulas. That was pretty cool.
I’d played with other computers before then, starting with a friend’s TRS80 in… 1977? I believe it was the latter half of 10th grade, but maybe it was later. He had gotten his parents to co-sign a loan for $1000 to buy the thing, at any rate. That was probably where I learned the first elements of BASIC, at Bill Knight’s house on the computer.
I got my first computer larger than the pocket one in 1985, as a hand-me-down TRS80 Color Computer 2. When it died, instead of realizing the way the world was heading, I dead-ended myself into a Color Computer 3 and encountered my first software/hardware incompatibility. With the 2 I was using a superlative word processing software that would not run on the 3, so I had to spend a bunch of money on more software, and I spent too much on a mouse and on a 5 1/4” external floppy drive back when single and double sided and density were distinctions that mattered. The OS for the 3 was called OS/9 and was written by some company called Microsoft.
My first IBM compatible, which for an old-timer is not a strange term to use thankyouverymuch, I bought in early 1988 for way too much money. It was a Packard-Bell 286. I think it was 12 MHz. It had a huge 60 MB hard drive when 20 MB was pretty standard; I at least knew that much. It ran DOS 3.3, so no DOS Edit, just Edlin or Copy Con. What I didn’t know was it was nuts to buy an EGA monitor and a machine that required same, as VGA already existed and was the future. Oh well.
After all that has transpired, I still think of that old pocket computer as one of the coolest things ever.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Now There’s A Challenge
Today’s adventure, besides getting e-mail and spam filtering back working reliably and cleaning up stubborn malware on a computer that is sending out spam via a mail server in Russia, is to retrieve a document from 1995 from an old AS/400 system that was turned off about five years ago when it got noisy and they realized they weren’t even accessing it once in a while for archival accounting info anymore.
I don’t know the first thing about using an AS/400, apart from having used internal e-mail of sorts at a terminal connected to one, and a custom inventory system written in RPG on that same one.
Oh boy.
Update:
I Rule
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Over The Rainbow
Allegedly the judge’s choice for Katharine this week, selected by Simon, is Over The Rainbow. Interesting choice indeed. It could make or easily break her. Here’s hoping for the latter.
That song was a huge favorite of mine when I was very young. I liked to sing it, and would attempt to play it on my grandfather’s organ, using a song book that told you what to press without having to know how to read music.
When I was in first grade, I don’t remember how or why the topic of songs came up, but I sang the beginning of the song in class. The kids made so much fun of me - not for my singing, but for the lyrics and choice of song - that it was a major formative experience in making me more rather than less introverted, and skittish about performing in front of others or making my likes known to others. Other experiences reinforced the “singing in the presence of others” thing over the years, most memorably ones involving a cousin and a stepsister, but that’s where I remember it starting, associated with Over The Rainbow.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
And They Wonder Why I’d Switch
Once upon a time, I got my first domain. It was in 1997, for my business, which we started ten years ago this summer. Network Solutions was the only option for domain registration, and hosting was expensive. We looked into hosting and chose a place right in Massachusetts. It was over $1200 a year for less than I can get for $112.20 a year now, and recently I found that $9.35 a month is no longer necessarily competetive.
Fast forward a few years, when the big client started making plans to get online someday, and when they started to need e-mail. We picked a domain that wasn’t too bad, given that all the most logical ones were taken, lined up hosting for them with our hosting guy, and for convenience had him deal with Network Solutions and get the domain.
On a side note, the guy was a retired spook, and observed that a lot of people with ties to the intelligence community emplaced themselves similarly in internet businesses. He was fascinating.
After a while, our host got too sick to remain in business. He gave everyone a window to find new hosting and helped move you as needed, then shut down. It is entirely possible he’s dead by now, or in a nursing home.
We switched the business and the client to XO Communications, which in part had formerly been Concentric, which at one point was one of those big names up there with Mindspring and Earthlink. I think XO may have been Nexlink when we started with them, then changed, but they remain XO now. I still get customer newsletter e-mails from them. They were so dramatically cheaper that it was shocking. We’re talking moving from $1200-odd a year to under $300 a year. They had excellent support and service, and apart from probably not being competetive with the likes of Hosting Matters, GoDaddy, or pretty much any commoditized modern web hosting service, I would recommend XO Communications highly.
At that point the original guy whose name was primary contact on the client’s domain should have changed, and I thought it did. You look it up and I am listed as primary and as billing. I had also originally hosted elhide.com with the first web host, parked it briefly, then put it at Hosting Matters for blogging. After a while I decided to move the business to HM, and a while later I moved the client to HM. Unlike their original hosting, by long since the outside host only matters for the web site, and there’s an appropriate MX record sending e-mail straight to the building.
Well, on my domains, it’s all me, except where HM is the technical contact. I’ve been meaning to move the domain registration from Network Solutions to elsewhere almost as long at that has been an option. Saturday I did that with minimal fuss, except for having to find out my ID for each one, reset or remember my passwords, and turn off domain locking designed so nobody can steal your domain.
On the client’s domain, multiple primary contacts are listed: the original guy, Concentric.net (XO Communications), and me. Apparently they not only never dropped those, but also my being the primary never superceded them anywhere but in WhoIs. I can do all kinds of things, but unlocking the domain is not one of them.
I put in a web-based support request and as promised they were back at me within 24 hours. Kudos there.
Since I am the primary contact but not allowed to unlock the domain, I have to fax them a form changing the primary contact to me! WTF, over?
Sigh…
Good thing I trust NSI so much that I am trying to transfer the domain in May that expires in September (and that they breathlessly warned me - maybe because I am the person who matters on the account - in January was “about to expire in September so renew now!") before they can have any justification for doing their classic “it’s going to expire within two months so nyah nyah you gotta renew with us before you can transfer” trick.
Good riddance.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
They’re taking down the old Carquinez Bridge…
And my progress-loving ass is sort of sad.
Some of you know that I used to live at the base of the Vallejo side of that bridge...I was a student at the California Maritime Academy for a couple of years. It’s just so damned uncomfortable for something so seemingly immutable to cease to exist outside of memory.
Am I the only one who thinks about going back to places I’ll never actually go back to? I know they’ve changed the campus quite a bit, as they have many, many more students now than they did when I was there, but imagining that is not so jarring. You can take a mind-tour and add in a building here and a building there without it seeming all that strange. Trying to picture walking around with the wrong bridge in the background, though, makes me feel funny, and not really in a good way.
Ah, well. The sepia tone gets a shade darker, and life trundles on. I’m quite certain I won’t mind that I’ll likely never find myself there again, though.
It’s pretty neat the way they’re dismantling it.
UPDATE: Here are more pictures.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Time for Updating
I just finished the Massachusetts Form 1 and schedules C, E, Y, and DI, which left me with a blogworthy thing that irritates me each year. I mean, besides the whole legalized theft thing in general.
It’s the Massachusetts rental deduction.
We paid $13,125 in rent last year, which is more than my total income for most years prior to 1993. The deduction is half your rent, up to a maximum of $3000.
This particular tax deduction was part of the famous Proposition 2 1/2, which was inspired by California’s Prop 13 (which from what I understand was poorly written in a way that has led to increasing weirdness, but I digress). The law limited property taxes, benefitting homeowners and, of course, owners of rental property.
On the theory that renters wouldn’t get a break the way homeowners would, the benefit being absorbed entirely by landlords, a deduction of 50% of rent paid was included. Well, that and it helped the referendum pass because it gave many more people a stake in the outcome.
Circa the time of Prtop 2 1/2 my first apartment was $225 a month, $2700 for the year, which would have been a deduction of $1350. Great! But they slapped the maximum on it, and the maximum has had no relation to the reality of rents for most of that time.
And so it is that the lovely 50% rent deduction is less than a quarter rent deduction, with our rent low by many people’s standards. Nobody pays $500 unless they’re splitting a place or have some particularly fortuitous situation renting from a relative.
I think it’s time to go by the original law, or raise the limit to a more realistic amount. $6000 would be acceptable. If you’re gonna give breaks, you should do it right, and keep up with the times. Sheesh.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Not Baby Pictures
These are a couple of pictures of pictures of my late grandfather, my mother’s father, who would be turning 100 in August if he were still around. He died ten years ago. The pictures give some idea why I always regretted not having had kids while he was still around. I think pictures of him not holding a baby or little kid are rarities.
Speaking of grandparents, my late grandmother, my father’s mother, would have been 95 today if she’d hung around past her all too early expiration date, which was thirty years ago. She’s the short-lived anomaly among my grandparents, though I think middling among her own family.
Anyway, here they are, one size only…
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Mental Respect
I meant to link this post as soon as I first saw it. This is what we are worried about with Sadie, and I expect no less of her siblings. This is the problem we both had in school, especially Deb.
At the same time we dread trying to send her to school to be quashed into blandly sheeplike (appearance of) ordinary intelligence and hatred of education, we also feel overwhelmed at trying to do it ourselves. What’s it going to be like with a kid who would rather invent her own often obscurely symbolic means of communication than use the English she darn well knows? One who is already easily bored. At the same time, one who is highly social compared to us. Or at last not yet jaded into often avoiding rather than straight on encountering other people.
I certainly won’t hold her back. I’m not going to sit well with her in a position for others to do so. This should prove interesting as it unfolds. Why should I treat her as an intelligent human until she’s 5 or 6, encouraging her to learn everything she wants to take in, then turn her over for mental torture?
Thursday, February 02, 2006
After The Fire
I hadn’t seen the Great White fire mentioned anywhere in ages. These things take time, so it makes sense that about three years later there’s news. It was the topic of my second post ever. The page I’d linked to there is now gone. Then I posted about it on March 1st. That link still works, but to get to what I’d actually linked, you’d need to hit this and scroll.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Yay for Saving Money!
Boo for having to move things!
Once upon a time, our big client had spare conference rooms in their building that were not contiguous to the rest of their space and were seldom used. We started working for them, had no office yet, and so ended up renting a large hunk of spacious hallway plus two conference rooms, one of them containing a large conference table they gave us. A third, smaller, “landlocked” room was within our space, still used for storage by the big client.
After several months, we had a more temporary client, Marine Optical, for whom we were doing a substantial software project. So my partner and the guy he was working with from the other company could have a quiet place to work, we added that third room, increasing our rent $200 a month to $1001.50 (a buck a foot).
A few months later, my partner got a day job, that room gradually morphed primarily into space where we stored old computer stuff belonging to the big client, Marine Optical refused to pay us the last $20,000-odd when the work was complete enough for their staff to tweak and deploy and then went bankrupt (one of those business lessons you learn; all the signs of it pending were there), and we’ve been paying the extra $200 a month ever since. It always irks me because it was largely for the benefit of the company that stiffed us and my now former partner, and subsequently benefitted the landlord (ignoring distinctions like realty trusts) who was being paid for our use of it as much as it did us. Of course, my blood pressure goes up every time I think about that 20 grand stiffing, since essentially I absorbed the brunt of it and neither I nor the business have ever recovered. It’s also made me leary of the accrual method as applied to revenues.
But I digress.
The big client has decided to remodel. They use the entire third floor and part of the second floor. The third floor is reception, conference rooms, offices and cubicles. The second floor is offices and storage space. They are turning the second floor, which is the floor we’re on, into reception and conference space, leaving some storage and a couple offices that make sense to stay there. The third floor will be all offices and cubicles, except for the largest conference room. I’m impressed with the plan, as it makes a load of sense.
Seeing this, I detected a golden opportunity to ask them again (I did once before, right after it turned out renting it was a mistake) if they’d like that third room back for storage, or maybe our conference room back as additional conference space. It’s the chance I’d been waiting for.
This was the answer to their storage prayers. They’re more aggressively outsourcing file storage now, but there are things they have to keep in-house, and quarters would have been extremely tight.
I just have to move everything out of that room, into what has become rather cluttered quarters, though it’ll all work when some planned purging is done and things are organized better. I figured I had until the first, but they’d love to start moving stuff in this weekend.
Thus what I will be doing the most of for a couple days, maybe into Saturday. But damn, it’s worth the $200 a month. Woohoo!
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Happy Anniversary
To Deb’s brother Mike and his lovely wife Esther! Longtime readers may recall that the two of them were married just three days after the two of us, in something a smidgeon closer to a real wedding with - gasp! - a reception. Thus the source of this picture of us, and more importantly, this picture that includes the other happy couple.
Monday, January 02, 2006
Happy Anniversary
To us! As implied in this late night post full of historical links, today is our second anniversary. Talk about a chance well taken. After less than three months of close, regular contact, and almost eight days of in-person contact, we got married in Las Vegas and it’s like living a dream.
Things didn’t go exactly as planned, and it’s funny to picture the alternative, but we’re thrilled with Sadie and really it’s as well to get having the kids out of the way. Sadie was obviously quite impatient to join us, given her improbability. I’ll take the kids over yuppiedom any day.
Then again, Deb and I were improbable in ways that go well beyond meeting through blogging, being disparate ages, and being on opposite coasts. In a more normal lifetime, I’d have long since married someone else. The armada of butterflies that went into leaving me available for her at 42 are almost the stuff of fiction.
It’s enough to make you wonder. Sad as it was for me, she’s glad I was seemingly reserved for her, and I think it turned out for the best.
Two years have seemed like no time and a lifetime. It’s easy to imagine looking back from thirty years out and saying “has it really been that long?” And “was what came before really as long or longer?”
Here’s to a lifetime of love, completeness, and giving the kids positive starts to even better lives.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Welcome to Next Year
On today’s agenda, we finally finish Christmas. Yay! My father and stepmother are supposed to come by in the afternoon, bearing gifts for the Sadie. Then we will undecorate and be done with it until next year, when who knows what will happen.
I reason to believe that today’s gifts will involve books and a bear, unless anything has changed. This’ll be cool, as Sadie has “aged” significantly since the last visit, and seems to be quite fond of them.
In fact, just days ago she hit the milestone of moving out of a highchair. Today she hit the milestone of being able to climb down from the booster seat on the chair at the table by herself. She’s also become attached to that being where she eats. At one point we were just going to hand her a snack and she insisted on sitting at the table. Such orderliness.
A funny thought: I have particularly strong memories of December 31, 1969, when the calendar was flipping over into 1970. There was some kind of party the parents were going to, though for some reason I only remember interacting with my mother that day. I think it was a year and a couple months after that they split up. Or maybe it was only a couple months, but 1971 counts for the divorce becoming final. It was all exciting, to me, because us kids were left home with munchies and noise makers, to stay up late and celebrate. The funny thought is that my mother was 35 then, nine years younger than I am now. I thought of this when we discussed being too old to appreciate all the partying people do this night.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Time Flies
Two years ago at this time I was thousands of feet in the air, about the heart of the United States, on my way to meet Deb in person.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Ellis Family Band Comes Out of Retirement
My father forwarded this to me recently. I tried to find it online at The Journal-Pioneer, but if it’s still available online, it’s well hidden. Which would explain why the initial e-mail source of this is someone my uncle knows at The Journal-Pioneer.
These are cousins of ours, sort of a real life Partridge Family. Oh wait, the Cowsills were the real life Partridges…
The late Russell Ellis, my father’s first cousin, used to play the fiddle with them. He was great, and that was my favorite part. I love fiddle music. Before retiring, he was also a navigator (or pilot?) on the ferries from New Brunswick to PEI that were supplanted by the giant bridge. One of our trips up there, he was “driving” and we got to ride in the control room up at the front of the ferry. That was like Coolest. Thing. Ever. At least to my perception at perhaps 15 years old.
Anyway, here’s the article about the band coming out of retirement…
Ellis Family Band retires from retirement
BY AMBER SHEA
The Journal-PioneerRetirement is getting old for the Ellis Family Band.
The Island family band is back, no longer content to be part of the audience.
The five members have just released a new digitally re-mastered CD, a compilation of 20 of their most popular songs from three albums: Easy to Love, Summer Nights and Heart on Fire. And they’re not stopping there.
The five members are also looking to perform live again.
Member Brian Ellis explained they would like to start off with about half a dozen gigs a year at theatres, arenas, weddings and dances.
Last week, four of the five band members ‹ Rick, Brian, Steve and Dave Ellis (Greg MacDonald was unable to attend) ‹ sat around a table at the Journal-Pioneer.
During the interview, it became evident the band is not only entertaining on stage. About half the conversation is serious; the other half is spent joking and laughing.
For the four men, retirement from the stage began about seven years ago.
Retirement was a big decision.
It meant leaving behind about 30 years of success and memories. Their list of achievements is too long to print, but it includes several nominations and awards, songs that made the top 10 on a national level and a chance to tour with country stars like George Jones and Prairie Oyster.
During their first stint in music, the band also decided to walk away from something else—an opportunity to sign with CBS records in Nashville and tour internationally.
The opportunity was discussed among the whole family and the band decided they weren’t ready to spend that much time away from home.
The band decided to move back to P.E.I. in 1989.
“We love P.E.I. It’s our home. It’s a great place to live and raise a family,” Brian said.
For the next 10 years, the band played locally, but as their children grew older they became involved in sports and other activities.
Finding time to jam was difficult. In 1999, the men decided they needed a break and retired from performing altogether so they could invest in their number one priority—their families.“I don’t know if it was the way we were brought up or how mom and dad always were with us, but family comes first and foremost,” Rick said.
Shortly after retirement, band members lost their fathers, Russell Ellis and Arnold MacDonald.
Through grief, the men came together to reminisce and overcome the loss the best way they knew how—through music.
The five started jamming again and eventually constructed their own recording studio, which they dedicated to their fathers.
According to the biography included with the CD, the studio proved to be “what the boys needed in order to rekindle some of their musical flame”.
Slowly stages and large audiences became more appealing.
Last year, they played at the Silver Fox twice and this month they took the stage at the P.E.I. Music Awards, where they received a standing ovation.
At that point, going back to being audience members was not an option.
Rick said performing at the awards brought back a lot of good memories. Dave added that audience members also told him their performance created a lot of nostalgia.
“To be out of the business that long and still see people sing along with the songs word for word was… wonderful,” Rick said.
The group said it was also exciting to look at their children’s smiling faces as they watched their fathers perform.
The five said their families are delighted the band is getting back into the music scene. That includes the Ellis’ mother, Ethel Ellis, who has written songs for the band and is dubbed their biggest fan.The men noted that since they retired, people have been asking them when they would start playing again. Brian added they have also been questioned about putting out a CD for years.
Many of the Ellis Family Band’s albums were released in the 1980s on cassette or vinyl. Those copies are now getting old and might have been lost or ruined over the years. Plus, tapes and records are becoming less popular, Brian said.
“This is our thank you to our fans,” Brian said.
The group noted it’s possible they might release more singles or even tour more extensively.
Rick said getting a response like the one at the music awards “definitely gets you thinking about writing again.”
Still, he drew a laugh from the others when he added: “I’m not sure how much of a market there is out there for some old, fat, balding guys.”
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Blogger Marriages
The two of us are arguably the prime example of bloggers who met and married as a result of blogging. I’d like to collect the rest.
The rules are that both husband and wife must have been bloggers prior to knowing each other, and have partially gotten to know each other and met as a result of their blogs and associated activities.
We’d tend to discount situations where one was a well known blogger and oh by the way the other had a blog that nobody ever read or heard of, though in theory a nobody blogger could be a commenter and get noticed by the other blogger that way. No counting it if one partner started a blog or joined as a co-blogger after they met.
I am pretty sure I know of two such couples who preceded us, and one that just followed us. I’m intentionally leaving them unnamed to see if they get named by anyone in the comments. The latest one is, of course, a no brainer, if anything better known than the two of us were at our peak.
Fire away. Perhaps I’ll start maintaining a comprehensive list.