passing it on

A while back my youngest daughter, Lia, decided to tile her front porch.

She went to the tile store and bought the tile and mastic. Then she went to the rental store and rented a tile saw.

The guy at the rental store asked her if she was sure knew what she was doing. She assured him she would do fine. Her dad was a retired tile contractor, after all.

When a problem popped up, she wold stop and ask herself: “what would dad do?”

It came out good of course.

Amazing what she learned by hanging around dad.


Miriam and I were professional photographers when the girls were little. Dea, daughter 3 recently needed to do some food photographs for an account she had. She called for a little advice, and then produced wonderful pictures. I was almost stunned at her understanding of light.

Later she did some architectural photography, with the same results. She said it was amazing how much about photography she remembered from just being around us those years. She was about 10 when we got out of the business.

So a month or so ago a grandson called. He wanted some advice on photographing food. He was entering a competition and needed some coaching. His photographs were pretty good, really.

Can’t say he learned anything from hanging around watching me, we quit professional photographs 20 years before he was born. HIs photographs were very decent.

I am proud of them all.

Sometimes it is amazing what we pass on to our kids. It is also amazing what a positive attitude does!

canning and freezing

My family always were food preservers.

Mom canned, both grandmas did too. When our daughters were home we canned a lot of anything we could find. It was good.

Then we went to Texas to go graduate school, and there was not time, and not much affordable fruit, so we ate from the grocery store.

When we came back to Idaho the last time our orchard was starting to produce. We did not and do not get a crop each year, so when we have a crop we put it away as much as possible.

This was an interesting year. Some of our trees were loaded. I canned 42 pints of apricots (I remember when we often canned in 2 quart jars!) and froze 25 quarts of peaches. The other peach tree will ripen next week and much of that will go in the freezer as well.

Apricots are on in mid summer when it is hot, for the last few years I have set up a table in our back yard, put my trusty camping stove on it and canned outside. I even did most of the prep work outside.

Next month it will be grape juice.

A couple of weeks ago we went to CostCo with friends (they are members, we are not) and I got a flat of strawberries. We ate from it for a while, but there was a lot of good things to eat tight then.

So I checked on line for recipe for frozen strawberry jam. I got 8 half pints of very fine jam. It was easy and fun.

Miriam could not remember her doing frozen jam and she was sure it was the dumbest things she had ever seen.

But on my fresh bread, even she can’t resist that jam!

my vw pickup

The back window was made from the tailgate of a VW Squareback. It was welded in place. The flat bed was all wood, and I had the back seat area filled with foam to cut engine noise.
It was a lot of fun to build and drive.
Unfortunately, like all air cooled VW's engines did not last very long.

interior VW pickup

more on pickups

A few more words about pickups.

I spent much of my life in the building trades. I have worked out of everything imaginable. Old Ford and Chevy Panels, a sedan delivery or two, a hand full of import pickups, and as nutty as it sounds my VW bug that I cut down and made into a pickup.

That was quite a sight. I would put the carpet pad on the bed the the cuts of carpet on top of that and tie it all down. That model had a swing axle and those back wheels would be at a wild angle and the engine pan was about an inch above the ground.

I did not travel far for work in those days and it worked quite well.

As much as I would drive, gas price was always a factor. I had a new Chevy Luv that would only get 18 mpg and not with any power either. Same for my Ford Courier and my Dodge D50.

Then I saw a full size chevy pickup with a V6 and a 5 speed that the sticker said would get 23 mpg and I as hooked.

That was a truly wonderful rig. Basic as can be, no AC, but a sliding back window which helped a lot on hot days.

My current Dodge is a pretty basic rig, as pickups go, but it is more luxurious that any rig I ever owned! It has a 19 mpg rating and will do that pretty regularly.

I would have bought a new chevy like my old one, but the current version is listed at 20 mpg and for the difference I got a lot more comfort and capacity.

So it goes.

With the pice of gas now, I have not filled that tank for close to a year! I buy enough to get along each month and drive the Cavalier mostly.

Oh well.

pickups

I officially retired a few years ago, actually when I turned 65.

My trusty 1992 Chevy pickup was nearing the end of it’s easy life, with 240,000 miles. I knew large repairs were ahead, so I decided that the best thing to do was to buy a new pickup.

I went shopping. The new version of my trusty Chevy has 20 more horse power, for some vanity reasons I guess, but the killer was that it got 2 or 3 mpg less that my old one.

The Ford people just laughed at me. The idea of buying a Chevy (“It’s a piece of junk”) was horrible to them, but they made no offer to help me find a Ford that would fill my needs.

Then we stopped at the Dodge store. Before it was over I was the owner of a new Dodge pickup.

My theory, which you can argue with easily, is to buy as new as possible, and to drive the whole life out of the vehicle. If it fits your needs and if you like it why not. Miriam’s little car (I bought it for her 55th birthday) is 16 years old now and still goes right along.

So the idea was that if we had to be reduced to one vehicle a pickup would be the most versatile rig for us.

One point I did not anticipate. Gas was a buck and a half a gallon when I bought the Dodge. Now it is “down” to $3.75.

My what a difference that makes.

changes

As we age we seem to live just so we can take medications.

My doctor says I am “amazingly healthy” but I take a couple of medications any way.

This last week I visited our doctor, a wonderful young woman not too long out of medical school (a while back she told me she had her student loans paid down to $200,000 now).

We talked about Miriam’s anti depressant, which we tell her is a blood pressure medicine. There are some rather irritating side affects and I wondered to the doctor if we could change her from that one to the one I am taking which has fewer side affects, at least we hope so.

I tried to explain to Miriam that the new pills were the same as the ones I take and since they are taken twice a day and since I often forget to take the evening pill, I have a surplus, and yes for the next month you will be taking a medicine that has my name on the bottle.

Seems simple enough to the doctor and me. But any kind of change is really hard for Miriam. She asked me about a dozen times what was going on and scolded me for making changes without talking to her (I have talked to her from the beginning).

Just reminds me of how much routine is to the Alzheimer patient, and how much they fear change.

extra innings

Three score and ten, the Big Book says.

But we might make it to four score it says in Psalm 90.

Once you pass that magic number, I guess it is extra innings.

Then if there is Alzheimer's in the mix all those numbers mean little.

I did a fair job of keeping up with my garden this summer, then it got ahead of me, during the hot days. I apologized to my neighbor who has a perfect landscape. “Dave that just goes to show that you had more important things to do.”

Each day is special during this time.

Our doctor and I decide to try Miriam on a new anti depressant. There might be fewer side affects. But to Miriam it is a vast conspiracy and no amount of explaining gets the point across permanently. We finally came to an agreement.

That, of course, meant that I stretch the truth a bit. I tell her the med is for blood pressure, and my kids agree saying it is dad’s blood pressure medicine that mom takes.

We discovered a year or so ago that if we could give her a mild anti depressant she was a mile easier to get along with, which does help my blood pressure a lot. The joy of extra innings.

We have been on this Alzheimer's plot for 9 years now and she does pretty well. Love those extra innings.

But today is good, my task is to make it wonderful.