The Two Jacks visit Chuck E. Cheese

The Two Jacks - one has the other wrapped around him. Little Jack convinced Grandpa Jack to play with him ad infinitum during our visit to Chuck E. Cheese tonight. Big brother David took a cup full of tokens and disappeared into the game jungle on the other end of the restaurant, but he was around just long enough for me to snap just one pic of him the whole evening:

At one point David and I were playing road racing games - the kind with seats, steering wheels, gas pedals etc. - and he somehow managed to network the two machines together. Here I am, driving in Arizona on my screen, and I get sideswiped by a gold Corvette. "Dad, I just smacked you." What the? I looked over on his screen and there was my `40 Ford. How did he do that? I'm still not sure.

Grandma Dee and Sherry sat in the booth most of the time talking. Visits from Dee and Grandpa Jack are always welcome, since they live so far away. It was amazingly relaxing tonight at CEC, despite the dings, dongs, beeps, rings, and screams of over-stimulated children throughout the establishment. Maybe we've become accustomed to mayhem!


By the way, their pizza is pretty decent!

More Blogging about The Quilt

Thank God for Aunt Carolyn; you'll see why later in the post...

Click on the picture to the right and you'll see a larger version of the photo. Aunt Carolyn replied today with some more information about this quilt. You can bet it's old, and the history we know was touched on in my Thanksgiving blog posting. Turns out there's more. Here is was Aunt Carolyn has to say about it:

"According to what my mother told me, Grandma Anna made it before she was married in March 1906. When your mother and I looked at that quilt when I gave it to them several years back, we discovered two sets of initials: AB and HB. That would be Anna and Helen, sisters. Your mother thinks that the materials perhaps were samples since some of them seem very new.

I had never seen the quilt until about 1988. When Grandpa and Grandma were preparing to move to Milwaukee they had an "attic sale" in order to gear down for a smaller living space. When I talked with my mother following the sale, she told me, among other things, the quilt had not sold. Imagine my surprise that she had such a quilt and had even had tried to sell it.

When I offered to buy it for her $50 selling price, she told me I could have it and brought it with her when they moved here. I didn't want to use such a heirloom on a bed, but did not have a suitable wall to hang it. It was stored in my cedar chest. So I am extremely pleased that Janice now has it on display in her home. This was the only tangible object we had from that grandmother since she died in January 1918. We call her Grandma Anna, to distinguish her from Grandma Daisy, whom my Grandfather married several years after his wife died. Grandma Daisy was the only grandmother I knew on the that side, of course.

Ask your dad about her sometime. She was very competent as a farm wife, but not a warm fuzzy Grandma."

The Clark Truck

Our 1994 Chevy truck is much like an old friend; it starts, drives, stops, and repeats said steps over and over and over. Since buying it two days before David was born, we've added 80,000 hard-earned miles to the odometer. We've put more miles on it than it had when we bought it. Yes, it's lowered. And No, the lowering job doesn't pose a problem usually. Yes, the purple paint is from the factory. And No, it is not Husky Purple. You won't see any videos here of rancid tire-smoke shows and touts of 1/4 mile prowess. It's no speed demon, but knows how to get out of traffic's way (plus it rumbles nicely through the pipes I had installed a few years back). While the Clarks are known for naming their vehicles, this truck never got a name that caught on. "The Truck" has served it well.

It's possible that aliens landed on our street this week - cloaked of course and probably behind a fence - because our electronic marvel of a pickup took a big hit. The wiper motor, the battery, and the alternator went bad, all in a matter of 24 hours. To be truthful the wiper motor has been on the fritz for 3 years, inadvertently shutting off at the most inappropriate times unless run on Delay, but it waited patiently until last Monday night for a torrential downpour to seize up entirely and become a paperweight. Once the wiper motor was replaced ($69.99 and an hour/half of elbow grease), the alternator started howling like a air raid siren while the volt meter fluctuated all over the dial. Turns out the alternator had built up resistance to doing its job over 13 years, and took the battery out with it. That second frazzled event - finished up in the rain with water dripping off the open hood and down my back - cost about $200. (side note: all the parts running for this wave of electronic failure was done by our crustier trustier road warrior - Big Daddy the `59 Chevy). Last summer we put $1000 into the truck when the transmission quit using 1st gear and overdrive; yeah, that was an enlightening drive home from Seattle, with the engine turning over at 3000RPM and chugging fuel like a Coug Beta House post-game function. That $1000 was a turning point for us, and with some divine intervention I got a $1000 bonus just in time to pay for the repairs. It was then we decided to keep it. So why on earth would we hold onto and put this kind of money into a truck that was around when Kurt Cobain was still alive?

Because it's paid for.

It's hard to argue with owning a truck that has a very low cost per mile overall, because in suburban America - like it or not - a pickup makes life a lot easier. I came home from my wiper motor test drive with a ten-foot piece of downspout pipe in the six-foot bed. You going to get that home in a Kia Spectra? Not likely unless you cut it into three-foot sections, thereby nullifying any reason for getting the pipe in the first place. Bikes For Tykes has benefited from the Purple Pickup in more ways than just hauling bikes; people know Bikes For Tykes by the truck. Law Enforcement knows Bikes For Tykes by the truck, which helps because hauling ten bicycles in the back of a lowered short bed can look really sketchy (I was pulled over once, and thankfully I had a business card with me).

I'm hoping we can put a lot more miles on this identifiable paid-for vehicle in the coming years. Maybe in time we'll finally name it.

David's Hydroplanes

As I've mentioned before in another posting, this appears to be a Seattle-only phenomenon. Pulling wooden hydroplanes behind a bike mimics the real thing in bizarre ways, only without the extreme expence of actually racing on the water. Heck, they even float...

David is never satisfied with just one hydroplane either. He must have two, so they can race each other (he's very innovative). The following video shows him in the midst of "The Cul De Sac Cup" and ultimately being chased by neighbor Rachel. I love watching this, because it reminds me of being 9 years old and pulling some scrappy piece of plywood behind my banana seat bike in Shoreline. For some reason lately I'm being drawn to them again, and David ends up hauling all the boats I build (with the exception of a few that I'm putting a lot of detail into).

More on these wooden wonders in later blog posts!

What Would Mercedes Do?

What would Mercedes do? Well for starters, I'm sure they wouldn't permit this color combo on their assembly line. Kind of hard to tell from the cameraphone photo, but the roof is white...really really white. I'm thinking the body color is named "For Hire Blue." Would "moxie" be the right word to describe the act of painting a $96,000 car to look like a taxi cab?

The colors are somewhat alluring on this car, until you realize you've seen it on a whole line of ex-cop Crown Victorias while dropping someone off at the airport...

Christmas Season has Started

There's no telling what a job layoff and FotoFlexer does to my spare time! Fotoflexer's new "Holiday Card" feature leaves the world open to new interpretations. David and Jack have new roles with Santa now!

David & The Swing

Taken last summer during one of our many many many playground visits. Not much you can say about this one, other than "That's David for you!"