(This was written a couple weeks ago when I was in Idaho).

I am not very optimistic right now.

No one seems to have any viable answers for anything more complex than next year’s garden. The people on top who are supposed to have all the answers are clueless, but won’t admit it.

My grandkids are college age now, or soon will be. Going to college is not all that difficult, but they could spend the rest of their lives paying for it. Not good. To make it even more scary there is no guarantee that they will find a job that is remotely in keeping with their eduction. The trends are not good.

My daughters and their spouses will work longer, meaning they will be older when they retire, but that longer work life will deprive a young person of a job. Will there be any kind of safety net when they retire? There are many who want to eliminate all such “foolishness.” And there aren’t enough jobs to go around now, and it does not seem that there will be much change in any future we can see from here.

We have a house that is paid for (thanks to a daughter). We sold her half interest in the house to pay for the rather modest student loans WE took out when we went to college.

The house is for sale, sort of. Yet, I wonder what the future will hold and if a house somewhere along the line would be of great benefit to some one in the family. No one knows.

Today I work on cabinets to make the down bedroom more useful and workable. I enjoy the work. I would be truly lost without some sort of a shop, I fear.

cold

It was a great Thanksgiving time, to be sure.

Saturday afternoon, the house was full of family I felt something funny in my throat. OhO. Within half an hour I had a full blown cold. My throat felt like someone had taken a wood rasp to it. My nose was running, and my feet were smelling.

The classic misery!

I drank water and stayed close to the couch in the Bus. lI took NyQuil, which is, hands down, the nastiest stuff in my cupboard. If a cold settles deep into my chest it takes weeks to get rid of it, so I puled out all the stops.

It is early Monday right now and i am feeling a lot better. I might even get to sleep in my own bed tonight.

Of course, it could all reverse and I could spend the next week in bed, but I hope not.

I want to go camping here next summer. It is beautiful and not too far away!

the women in my life

I am father to incredibly devious women. That is how I have to start this post.

Several weeks ago daughter 4, who lives in Portland asked if she could come to Fort Nash (my name for daughter 1’s house -- I’ll explain later). Her new husband was out of the country and she was looking for family.

Of course the answer was in the affirmative. That meant that we would have Thanksgiving with 3 of our 4 daughters. San Francisco is a LONG way away, and 3 is a good number.

Wednesday evening when I drove up to the front gate Wednesday evening on my trip back from Idaho, there was a visiting car in blocking the gate. I recognized the car and knew it would be leaving soon, so I got out of the car to open the gate.

Two figures (it was pretty dark by then) advanced toward me. At first glance I recognized the profile of daughter 1 and assumed the other was granddaughter Jessica, but the information did not all jig well. I didn’t have long to think about it.

It was daughter 3 from San Francisco! She noticed that the whole family (except her and hers) would be together for T day except them and decided to come up but keep it a secret from almost everyone else.

She was there with her husband and two teen sons. WOW. My cup was running over!

Daughter 4, from Portland, was due in another hour or so. She did not know her sister was coming either, and was as surprised as I. Thanksgiving day grandson 1 and his wife drove in from Sacramento, making the complete family together. It was good.

So, today is the day after Thanksgiving. It is called black Friday some places, but it is a great friday for grandpa! For dinner we had 4 daughters, three sons in law, 11 grandkids, a grand daughter in law, my aunt and her husband, my sister and a dear family friend, plus Miriam and I.

The house is not small, but with 25, it was a houseful and it was wonderful. Daughters are fab cooks alone or together, and the food was superb.

Today we are going to have a family picture taken. It has been 5 or 6 years. An old photographer friend who has photographed our family in one way or another for a very long time will do the honors. We will all be together, all that is except for the new son in law. I am very pleased.

These family portraits are getting more precious as the years go by. We have had a lot of them taken through the years. Those portraits are priceless.

fast trip

I woke up Tuesday thinking (not unusual!).

The car needs new front tires. If I am going to build anything, I desperately need some power tools that are in Idaho. I need to visit with a few friends about my building project. I needed a haircut (it takes a while to teach a new barber, and I haven’t done that in Washington yet). And, my sister needed a ride up for Thanksgiving.

That was a good list.

So, after consulting with daughters, I headed out. It was midmorning. It is a 3 1/2 to 4 hour and there is a time zone change. I drove right to the tire shop and got the two tires I needed. The two friends I needed to consult with were home, and I got good advice from them.

When I got to our house it was cold, of course, so I brought in an armload of firewood and built a fire in the wood stove, and boiled some ramen noodles. The bed was warm and comfortable and I slept well.

After breakfast wednesday I got that haircut. Since I still own the house and expect to for a while, I wanted the utility and insurance bills sent to our Washington address so I made several change of address, change of bank visits. In the middle of all of that I did a load of laundry and took a long hot shower.

You can take a good hot shower in an RV, but not a good LONG hot shower. The water heaters are in the 5 or 6 gallon size!

So, a little after noon, sister and I headed back for daughters homes. I was to leave my sister with daughter 2 who lives half an hour away from daughter 1, where Miriam and I now live.

My little car (a 20 year old Chevy Coupe) had the trunk loaded with tools (air compressor, chop saw, cords and hoses, 8 or 9 hand power tools, my chain saw, 4 or 5 air nailers along with nails for them, as well as a box of hand tools. The back seat was quite well loaded with my travel gear as well as my sisters.

But the trip went well. Sister and I visited. I left her off at daughter 2’s house and headed for home.

Boxes can be stacked in a number of different configurations and hold a LOT of books.

I bought two sheets of plywood for these boxes. When all was cut up there was one piece left, so I made the little box in the foreground!

notes from last week

There was a chance of snow last night.

We are in Idaho again, and the forecast was for cold in the 20s and a chance for snow. here in the desert cold does not guarantee snow. But tonight it is due to get down to 25 and they are predicting snow again.

I brought Miriam with me on this trip. I won’t get as much work done, but I’ll eat better (It is so easy to snack when alone and not eat real food). Yesterday we got the plywood that will be the center of our work for the week.

There is a list of work that has to be done before we can rent/sell the place. First on the list are book cases for the downstairs bedroom closet. I am also making some book boxes (stackable boxes for book cases) for daughter one.

With the infusion of our furniture into what was already a pretty crowded house, new book cases are in order. Back in the 80’s before we went to BSU full time and then on to Texas, I made a dozen or so of these boxes.

The idea was to fill them with books and the books are ready to move. The problem was that the size I made them (32” long) made them very heavy once filled, but they make great bookcases since they an be stacked so many different ways.

So today, I began cutting wood. I write this in the morning, but since we don’t have internet in the house right now, I’ll post it later in the day. Ahh disjointed technology.

At a rest stop in Oregon.

Note the dusting of snow in the background. Snow is due any time, and while it is possible to pull a trailer in all sorts of nasty weather, it is easier to do it on dry pavement.

I am getting old, I guess!

back in Washington

We are back in Washington State. In Idaho we don’t have internet, so keeping up with a blog is a bit tricky. Sorry about that one.

I pulled our now ancient travel trailer back last trip. We bought it almost 20 years ago. It was quite new then. Miriam had a good job and she paid for it, and lived in it for a year after I returned to Idaho (we would see each other on weekends here and there!).

After Miriam was diagnosed with AD, I gutted the trailer and rebuilt it with the idea that at some point it would provide me a living space. It is a bit small for two people for very long, but I could live there alone with a degree of comfort.

Miriam is starting to have mobility issues, so our lives will continue to evolve. Daughter has a space in her house that was originally set up as a small apartment for us and that will be our next “home” I know.

Meanwhile, I need a bit of studio space, I need a place to go hide. That is more reasons for bringing the trailer up here.

My plan is to build a shelter over the top of the trailer, to close it in tight and thoroughly insulate it so that it will be cool in summer and warmer in winter. That will take a bit, but I’ll make the first steps this week.

Once again we are glad to be here.

About the time we got back to Washington the front brakes on the pickup started making sounds I did not like. After we got the travel trailer in place, son in law looked at the brakes and they were not good. He said he would change the brake pads (disc brake pads are easier to replace than brake shoes) last evening if I would get the parts.

On Sunday evening? Yep. Bought the pads, Sid installed them and we have a pickup again with good brakes. Wow what a son in law.

I need an ice cream scoop!

wind

Motorhomes and busses are intreating creatures.

They are big aluminum tubes, not unlike “tube steaks.” And they are designed for 60 or 75 mile winds, coming from the front. This rig is a big 70’s Greyhound bus.

Today it is windy, pretty stiff winds, from the SW. It is a warm wind, so it is not cold. In the winter a warm wind like this is called a Chinook wind around here.

If the wind was blowing into the front of the bus it would be just as the designers figured, but from the back or side it is a bit different. So we rock a bit.

Most RV’s that are parked have jacks of some sort in the 4 corners, making it solid. This vintage capsule has a glitch in it’s built in leveling jacks, and I was sure I could live with that, and we have. In the morning when I am awake and Miriam is still in bed, I can feel slight movements when she gets up to go to the bathroom.

So today we sit here, being slightly rocked back and forth.

When I was 18 I spent a summer on a 60 foot high forest service fire look out tower. When the wind blew at all the tower rocked slightly. I found that strangely comforting.

And so it is here more than half a century later.

Logging lodging or was it lodging logging?

Pastor Emily

At church this week we had a woman preacher.

We attend a large church, membership in the multiple thousands. The church is part of a smallish bible college (2000 enrollment), hence the outsized enrollment.

My church is hardly on the leading edge of the women’s equality movement. The world church is dominated (numbers, at least) by Latino’s and Africans who are not about to let their women be equal, it is just not part of their system.

But this woman is on the staff of the church. She is young and she is attractive and she is a very good speaker.

She talked about hugs and how much we need to be hugged each day. We need mental hugs, but we also need physical hugs. She did not use the phrase, but we are all in this together, we need each other much more than we might think.

The push to strong individualism flies in the face of this reality. We can think we are independent and above the need for other humans, but we are not. Their happiness contributes to our happiness. Their freedom to ours.

So I return in my thoughts to Pastor Emily. As the father of daughters and the grandfather of granddaughters (and the grandfather of an Emily), I am really interested in my women getting a fair shake in this world.

They need to be strong, they need to be capable, but they also need each other. We all do.

rain

I am not much into rain.

Having lived in the desert most of my life, rain is not what we did a whole lot. I would joke that our rain came in the irrigation canal. We got lots of snow in the high country, when it melted the water ends up in the canals (eventually).

So today when it rained a good share of the time it was not what I was used to. Besides, there really is not too much to do here. I fed Miriam a couple of times, made a run to the grocery store, and played a hundred thousand rounds of a stupid computer game.

It is going to be a long time until spring!