Christmas 2008

What a different Christmas! Julie and I have been married 30 years and this is the first Christmas where we have been alone. Our very first married Christmas we spent with Gary and Tish, and the second we were blessed to have our first child, Melissa, with us. Ever since then it has been children, family, and grandchildren. This Christmas morning was quiet, very quiet.

As of Christmas day, we have had about eighteen inches of snow in Ferndale. The temperatures have been below freezing for two weeks, averaging twenty-five degrees, and hitting a low of six degrees. High winds and the chill factor kept us inside most of the time to avoid the outdoor sub zero freeze. Worst of all, we could not ride our bikes!

The Sunday before Christmas, one of the frozen water pipes to the kitchen sink finally thawed out exposing a burst pipe, leaving us without water until the next day when we were lucky enough to get a plumber in for the repair. The sound that a ruptured pipe makes when it thaws out is very peculiar. Kind of like your own personal jet engine.

We have had so much snow that the car has high centered several times in our own cul-de-sac. We were also stuck fast in the white plaque while delivering gifts on Christmas Eve, until a few good Samaritans pushed us out. I really think they had another motive since we were blocking the only driveway to the whole apartment complex. We have started carrying a shovel in the car at all times.

We live at the top of a large steep hill. We love riding our bikes down the hill, in summer, reaching speeds in excess of forty mile per hour. The day after Christmas the temperatures finally rose above freezing and we able to negotiate the hill, which was now totally lacking ice due to the warming and liberal sand from our overworked city crews. Later in the afternoon we had an entirely different experience. We left home to see a movie in town and naively started down the hill. Due to dropping temperatures and a light snow, the road surface had become a sheet of unseen ice. As the car started to pitch down from the top of the hill we saw a large red fire truck parked sideways halfway up the hill blocking the entire road. I started to wonder why a fire truck parked in the middle of the road? At that moment our little Toyota started sliding sideways down the hill in the direction of the before mentioned large red fire truck. Heart pumping and with thoughts of the mangled remains of our new blue Toyota stained with red paint, I was able to steer the sliding car into the three foot snow bank alongside the road. The car finally stopped, front bumper in the snow, sideways, now with two vehicles blocking the hill.

After a few skillful maneuvers, I was able to extract the car from the snow bank and bring the front of the car into a position ready for an attempt to go back up the hill. Where was the same skill a few minutes ago? Unfortunately the road was so slick that the car would not move up the hill in spite of the skillful driver behind the wheel. Now for my ace in the hole, I yelled, "Julie, get out and push!"

It's wonderful when Julie pushes. We gradually gained the crest of the hill and the exhausted driver pulled to the side of the road and rested. Julie dragged up hill and plopped into the car a few minutes later, chest heaving, and gasping for breath. What was her problem?

We never did find out what the fire truck was doing sideways in the road. When we returned from the movie it was raining, the road was wet and passable, and the fire truck was gone.

While we were exiting the movie theater, a nice old lady stepped over one of those barricade ropes in the theater lobby and fell flat onto her hands and knees on the hard floor. It was ugly and two other men reached out to help her before I realized it was Julie!

By the way, the movie "Marley and Me" was great. It reminded us of the black Labrador we had for fourteen years while our children were growing up. The dog we had for several years after they left home and the dog that passed away in Julie's arms, just like in the movie. Thank you "Little Ann" for the fourteen wonderful years you shared with us.

A day at the museum.

One of my favorite activities is visiting museums, as long as they have airplanes. Any kind of airplane will do. In fact my wife thinks that I have more pictures of airplanes than we have of our children, grandchildren, and extended family combined. I have never counted but airplanes seem to be a lot more photogenic than my children, maybe because most of my children look like me.

My new favorite museum is the Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington. This is a private museum owned by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame. Paul does a wonderful job of restoring historic aircraft to pristine condition and actually flying them for all of us to see. These planes are old, rare, and beautiful. The museum rates the airplanes on their accuracy of restoration and authenticity. The standard of restoration is extremely high and every effort is made to bring the aircraft back to the original factory condition.

Several times a year the museum will fly the aircraft in a miniature air show. This is a tremendous service for the public since the show is free of charge. There is a charge to enter the museum building but the price is low enough and well worth the money. The airplanes are so well kept that after flying, the museum staff thoroughly cleans the airplanes before rolling them back into the display areas. All the aircraft are displayed very well, with plenty of history and information. The museum has excellent examples of a Spitfire, Hellcat, Thunderbolt, Mustang, Oscar, Zero, Tomahawk, Fieseler Storch, Focke-Wolf Dora, Komet, and a stunning Hurricane. I shouldn’t single out the Hurricane since they are all stunning, but the interior of the Hurricane is dramatically exposed by removing access panels and cowl. The level of restoration workmanship is unbelievable. There are other not so well known aircraft including the Polikarpov UO-2/PO-2 biplane. A partial Lancaster can be viewed up close and examples of the V-1 and Fiesler Fi-103R are on display.

October 18, 2008 was the museums "Fly-Day" for the I-16 and Me-109. These two aircraft were pitched against each other in the Spanish Civil War and the Eastern Front of World War II. I wont bore you with their histories; please refer to the museums website http://www.flyingheritage.com/.

The weather was perfect and the crowd large. The pilots flew the aircraft flawlessly and I was enthralled. I don’t think I was the only one. It was a dream come true for most of us. The spouses were bored but mostly tolerant. My wife used the time to go for a long walk and purchase gifts for the grandchildren. At least she purchased an airplane t-shirt for an upcoming 4 year old birthday. Lucky kid!

I admit to being an airplane junkie all my life (my wife calls it an addiction) and have had a particular fondness for the I-16. Until recently I had only dreamed of seeing a real I-16 because there were very few remaining examples and they were all located in continents other than my own. That changed several years ago when a few I-16 remnants were found in Russia, retrieved, rebuilt, and additional aircraft built in the very factory that built the original aircraft in the 30's and 40's. These aircraft are now on display and flying in New Zealand, Europe, and the US. The Flying Heritage Collection purchased one of these aircraft and has displayed it for the last few years. My dream had been to just see one of these rare aircraft and I had never ever expected to see one fly.

Thank you, Paul Allen for using your resources and energy to provide this exceptional service to the aviation world.

Computer backup problems

I had an amazingly unproductive day on Saturday. The major crisis, among the other minor crisis’, was my complete ineptitude with computers. I had purchased a new external drive for my Apple MacBook because the internal drive was 98% full and I convinced myself that it would be easy to free up some space by transferring files from the internal drive to the new external drive. 160GB is not a very big drive any more with movies, pictures, and audio book files as large as they are.

My day began by plugging in the wonderfully small hard drive into the USB port of the MacBook and having everything work. It was a great feeling, I was half way done! I selected one of the MacBook folders(50GB) and happily transferred the files to the external drive and then blithely deleted the original files. I was a computer guru! I now had more space on my internal drive.

Problems started popping up almost immediately. My I-Tunes was not working the same. My I-pod was not syncing properly. All my books, movies, TV shows, etc had disappeared. Oh, what had I done! I dropped everything and trudged outside to cut the lawn in the rain. We live in western Washington and we pay a price for the green surroundings. If we don’t cut wet grass sometimes, we just don’t cut the grass and it gets a foot high before it dries out. As I struggled with the soggy grass balls bogging down the lawnmower, my feverous brain struggled with the solution to my ineptitude. If only I had backed up the hard drive before deleting the files! After all, isn’t that what a external “backup” drive is for? I finally decided to copy the files back to the internal drive, but I couldn’t remember the name of the folder I had copied. Again, I wondered, “What is the proper use for a backup drive and why had I not done it correctly!”

After finishing with the soggy lawn and dragging the grass clogged mower into the shed (wet, moldy grass really stinks), I announced to my wife that we had a computer emergency and she was not to bother me as I performed computer surgery. The files were copied back to a folder I thought was correct and miraculously the laptop and I-Tunes started behaving. I was once again a computer guru, but sadly no further ahead that I was at the beginning of the day. Now I was getting serious, I will back up the hard drive onto my fancy new drive and everything will be grand. The program that came with the WD hard drive was loaded into the laptop, installed and functioning, …until I tried to use it. After selecting the files to back up, I suddenly had 400GB of back files from an internal 160GB hard drive to back up onto my external 320GB drive. Something was not right! To top it all off, the new back up program would not quit and would not let me turn off my laptop. The “WD Anywhere Backup” program intercepted the laptop shutdown sequence and refused to let it happen. My pure, sweet, innocent Apple laptop will never, ever shut down again! What had I done!

Time to call my friendly customer support in… India? No problem, they have smart people in India. All I needed to do was read the serial number off the hard drive to verify to the customer support staff, in India, that I had a real, genuine WD drive in my hand. I am fifty three years old and wear reading glasses, but my eye site has always been good. I could not read the quarter inch high label on the 3”x5” hard drive case, even with a magnifying glass. No combination of numbers, real or imaginary would convince my friend from India that I had a real live WD hard drive in my hand. Was that a 6 or an 8, was that an S or a 5?  

What was I calling him for if I didn’t 

have one of his hard drives? My friend tried to help me but I think I was beyond help. During one of the “on hold” sessions, where I think he was questioning the sanity of all Americans who were born in Canada, I uninstalled the WD program, regained control of the laptop, and then told my friend I was going to hang up because I could not stand the WD support system any more.

Now that I had a method of escape from the control freak of a back up program, I installed 

and uninstalled the program several times until I thought I had it figured out. Now to finally back up my hard drive. I selected 40GB of the most important files and hit the back up button. The back up program took a few hours to configure the files, but I could live with that. When I came back in from the woodshop, I thought I was finally done, until I looked at the screen and stared in wonder at the time remaining to complete the back up process. The WD back up program had finished configuring the files and now was in the process of 146 hours of backing up the files. What had I done, again? The backup program had no stop button and I could not shut the laptop down(refer to the previous problems), I thought I would never have laptop control again. The guru in me finally pulled out the “final solution” and I uninstalled the backup program, and once again, I was in control!

To conclude this saga, I will never, ever use the “WD Anywhere Backup” program again, and my laptop is still acting OK. Does anyone know of a good, cheap backup program?

Bike ride with the scouts-June 2008

Wednesday after work and scouts and leaders assembled at the church for a bike ride.   A quick inspection of the bikes did not reveal any major problems.  The seat on Coopers bike was set so low that his knees were always above his seat. It took about ten minutes to convince him that his legs would get very tired on a long ride while sitting in this position.  Finally we were able to raise the seat to the proper position.  Cooper’s bike chain and gears had shredded the right leg of his sweat pants, but this did not seem to bother him.  I ended up giving him one of my leg ties.  Cooper also showed up without a helmet so we biked to my house to loan him one of my old helmets.  Strange, but Cooper is the best athlete of the bunch.

The first part of the bike ride gave us the choice of zipping down a steep hill on Church Road or winding our way through a series of smaller hills in an adjacent neighborhood.  The second route was chosen because the large hill does not have a shoulder, can be very busy with automobile traffic, and there is a stop sign at the very bottom of the hill where it tees into an even busier road.  Julie and I love to coast down Church Road hill and we regularly reach speeds of 43 mph.  A good set of brakes is needed to stop before the busy cross road.

Choosing the route with the smaller hills turned out to be a very good decision.  The sound of scrapping and dragging feet came from behind me as Jacob tried to slow down his borrowed bike on the first little hill.  A more thorough check of his bike showed that the brakes were moving but exerting little force on the wheel. The brakes were quickly adjusted.

Cooper, our athlete, complained the whole time. He wanted to stop and buy a drink.  We were going too fast.  The hills were too steep.  How much further did we have to go!  The only thing that took his mind off the work of riding was his efforts of trying to touch his front wheel to the back wheel of the bike in front of him.  He loved the rubbing sound of the two wheels.

Cooper also had problems with riding on the wrong side of the road, playing chicken with the oncoming automobile traffic.  Constant reminders did not seem to get him on the right side of the road.

Tyler had sore legs and seat at the end of the ride.  I think the other boys and one of the leaders did also.

The bike ride was ten miles long.  The boys had to stop five times to rest.  During one rest stop Cooper had to lay down and refused to get up.  We had one motorist yell at Jacob to get off the road.  Total time was seventy-five minutes for a whopping eight miles an hour.  The bicycling merit badge requires a fifty-mile bike ride. That will be interesting. 

ULCER ride August 2007

To start off my blog, I am posting a short description of our experience at the ULCER ride in Provo, Utah, August 2007.  Julie and I rode our Rans Screamer recumbent tandem.  Hope someone enjoys it.

What a treat it was to visit with Thom and Elise last weekend.  The 2000 mile trip in the car was brutal and the 111 mile bike ride was even worse.  All of this travel in three and a half days.  The heat rose from 75 degrees to 98 and then to 105 during the bike ride.  This is my idea of fun!!  Thom ran into a barbed wire fence about forty miles into the ride and thoroughly mangled his leg and arm on a barbed wire fence, but he kept on riding and finished in about 5 hours.  Julie and I finished in about 7 hours on our tandem.  What a guy!!!

Tom, Elise, and Julie went to the walk-in clinic and spent about four hours waiting and stitching.  While they were gone Melissa and I were babysitting Gini, Thomas, and William.  William was fussy and did not want to be held by me, but he did like Melissa.  He only liked Melissa while she was standing.  As soon as she sat down he started to fuss.

When we first arrived Gini and Thom wanted their pictures taken with my new digital camera, over and over again.  Gini made several odd shapes with her fingers and hands and wanted a new picture for each contortion.  Gini and Thomas wanted pictures with their new dinosaur stuffed toys that Grandma bought for them.

Back to the babysitting.  We had decided on pizza for dinner and I suggested that I could pick up the pizza at the Brickyard.  Melissa quickly decided that the only reason I volunteered to get the pizza was to get out of babysitting and countered by suggesting that I take Gini with me.  Gini was in the same room, heard the idea, and promptly got excited.  She started talking about her car booster seat and how we could move it to our car.  She went on and on until I suggested, that since Elise had given me here van keys, that we could take the van.  Gini looked at me and said brightly, “Good idea, Grandpa!!”  What a sweetheart.

Gini talked almost the whole time we were in the car and stores.  After ordering the pizza we drove across town and bought some diet pop at Albertsons.  She insisted on carrying the two liter bottle which almost dragged on the ground with her shoulder through the plastic bag handle.

The first time I got out of the van, I closed my door and opened the side sliding door to get Gini out and found that she wasn’t in her booster seat.  I looked around inside the van and found her standing by the front seat.  She looked at me and said, “I wanted to get out your door, Grandpa!”

In the Brickyard pizza place I had Gini by the hand and let go to pay the bill, looked around and found her on top of the table in the other room.  She was laughing, I wasn’t.

We drove by the bike store in town on the way to Albertsons and Gini commented that we needed to stop and buy a bicycle for Thomas.  Thomas does not have a bike and shares Gini’s Trek tricycle. Good thing the store was closed.  It sure was nice of her to think of her brother.

After getting home and feeding the children, we had the ordeal of bedtime with the Metge children.  William was a piece of cake, he was just hungry because he was breast feeding and mom wasn’t there.  Gini and Thomas played outside for a while until we figured out what they were doing.  They had taken the sidewalk chalk just out the door and colored on the concrete walkway.  It was great until we heard a lot of banging and noticed that they had taken a hammer outside and were smashing the chalk into the concrete rather than coloring.  We took the hammer away and had some more peace for a few minutes until we caught Thomas sneaking the hammer outside again.  That’s when the tantrums started.  Gini settled down pretty quickly and sat in my lap for a story, “Curious George goes camping”.  Thomas didn’t want to settle down so I had Melissa put him on my lap with Gini while I read the story.  Thomas was mad, rigid, and blowing raspberries constantly.  He did finally settle down by the end of the story.  He even pointed to Curious George during the last page of the book.

Then the fun really started.  Bathroom, brushing teeth, pajamas, and bed.  Both insisted on wearing heavy full toed sleepers in the warm night.  Thomas had to go to the bathroom after he we had inserted him into the pajamas.  After removing the pajamas, he wanted a different color of heavy pajamas.  When we refused, he threw a fit and wouldn’t get dressed at all.  They both went to bed screaming.  The screaming lasted about an hour until Thom and Elise came home.  What a relief!

Another event that I forgot to mention.  We tried to open the window to get more air in the kids bedroom, but Gini wouldn’t accept that.  She wanted the window and blinds closed.  This is August in Utah!!