Mom Is Gone.

Mom died on June 13th. It wasn't a surprise--she had been rapidly declining in health in recent months. We could all see it. Hell, she could see it. She kept mentioning that her dad "died when he was 84 and I'll be 84 soon" whenever we would get together. In retrospect, I'm sure she knew something was failing.

We made sure to throw a big birthday bash for her 84th at our house. We had everyone there, big balloon decorations, lots of food--it was great. Mom sat in her wheelchair, looking diminutive, weary, and slightly confused. We were so glad we were able to bring it all together for her last birthday. She lived for another 3 weeks.

Mom was an only child, arriving a little later in her parents' lives than some. She survived a hovering mother that loved to re-live her childhood vicariously through mom. "She went to everything," mom would say, "every practice, every birthday party, everything." It was plain that she grew to hate it as she got older. When she met dad, he had a "bad boy" charm. He had come into to the world unwanted by his parents (too busy nightclubbing), so was raised by his grandparents instead. Like many boys, he was no stranger to harsh punishment when he challenged his grandfather's authority. When he had finally come to our area to live with his real parents, he was a brooding loner, full of teen angst and resentment. Much to the dismay of mom's parents, the two grew close, leaning on each other as another only child could.

I never felt real grief when she passed. More like relief. She had been going through a lot in recent times, and it was good she never had to worry about pain or comfort again. No, I've been feeling something else. I can't quite put a finger on. It may have to do with me being the oldest of the five siblings--a kind of "buck stops here" sort of feeling. I feel like I'm watching all the cars of a train pass, then suddenly realizing the last car just went by. I hurry to catch up, finally settling in at the end of the line. I'm suddenly aware that there is no one behind me, and no longer any reason to look back. I'm at the back.

Mom was the glue of the family. She could make dad's income cover all our bases. She kept us fed, she made us clothes, and never missed a horrible school concert we kids performed in. In later years, she worked to keep busy, landing a job across the street at the Auburn High School in their cafeteria. Years later, when dad stopped working she was able to continue, working her way up within the school district cafeteria system until her retirement.

Mom had a huge heart. She was able to take dad back during a time in the 80's when he went philandering, seduced by a female that told him what he wanted to hear. Fortunately, for mom, it didn't last long. Fortunately for dad, mom let him come home. That was mom.

Yeah, I'm somewhat disconcerted. Of course I miss her, but I also have a feeling a something else being missing. Some sort of connection or placeholder--I dunno. Our odd little iceberg of a family (no aunts, uncles) used to be connected at the top of the family tree, by mom and dad. Then it was just mom, but the configuration still held. The family unit as we knew it was still intact. Now, with mom gone the whole structure feels as if it's in shambles. There is no family tree, just a few apples on the ground.

Now we siblings face the fact that mom and dad were married very young, and we were all born pretty close to each other--all five of us within a range of 7 years in age. Mortality is no longer too distant to worry about.

R.I.P. mom... I love you.

Privacy of the Back Yard Continues

After installation of our new fence this past fall, the last area I needed to address for good privacy at our house was the area between the shop and the gate. It wasn't practical to put a new fence in b           The cyclone fencing that was already there was well embedded in the ground, but being only 4’ tall meant there wasn’t much I could do with it that had any weight to it. Then there was also the problem of the trees that were leaning my direction. The neighbor already gave me the green light to cut anything I ever needed to cut that was infringing on our property, but that didn't mean I wanted to eliminate them completely. That’s when I found these shade cloths.

Most shade cloths I found on the web were the same type and thickness of fabric, varying only in size, grommets, quality of sewing, etc. They also didn't block anything other than some of the light getting through. You could still see through them pretty easily. That's when I found out the real story on the ratings. Most of these cloths are rated at 170 GSM, even though they may say 90% blockage. What I ended up buying was by Colourtree and it's rating is 220 GSM, meaning very little of anything gets through.

To get it to lay flat against the fence and be able to anchor it I needed to do a little housekeeping with my various implements of destruction. Here’s what the area looked like after I cleaned up the fence to flatten any foliage that was trying to peek through:

The bamboo that someone next door planted at some time in the past was most of what I had to clear. With some of it poking through the fence here and there I just hit it all with hedge trimmers. Cleaning up a few branches here and there was all that was left. Then I turned my attention to this "block" of shade material I had to work with:

After spreading it all out and eyeballing what I had to do, I opted to pre-hang the upper hooks at a measured height in all the trees that I would be using, then threaded some 3/8" poly rope through the upper grommet holes. After hanging the thing up all the way across, all I had to do was anchor the lower edge with the provided nylon zip ties.

I'm not totally enthusiastic about the finished product, but that's only due to the color. They don't make them in this size in brown, which was my first choice. It was either black, green, or tan. This just looks a bit "ghetto" to me. The reason I opted to use a fabric to begin with was because most of the trees are leaning, and I didn't want to deal with cutting them down. The varying angle of the finished install kind of adds to the cheesiness and gives it a tarp look. The good thing is, it totally works for what we wanted it to. We have great privacy over there now. We had a couple of good wind storms after I put it up and it didn't even move. It's stretched nice and tight and rock solid.

Maybe some day we'll get something better, but for now this will do nicely.

The Rise and Fall of the Motorhome

We had high hopes for our nudist palace on wheels, but truth is, it's just like the old adage: The two best days in your life might be the day you buy your [motorhome/boat/extravagance] and the day you sell your [motorhome/boat/extravagance].

We hadn't even owned it 4 years, but  Between COVID limiting people going anywhere and camping areas and nudist parks being closed, it got used very little. After it's initial summer of fun, it just sat and got older. Oddly, the only three places we ever camped in it were nudist parks! Our first outing was over near Spokane, at Kaniksu Ranch. We followed that up with a visit to Lake Bronson Nudist Park, near Sultan. Our final (though we didn't know it at the time) use of the motorhome was at our closest nudist park, Tiger Mountain Family Nudist Park, over near Issaquah. I just had to have the license plate frame made.

We looked high and low for a motorhome when we found ours, and we considered ourselves lucky to have found one the right size, with good options and good price. Like many folks are, we were overcome by the newness and overlooked things. I was excited by the plethora of good options, so other things got ignored or brushed off as not important during the buy. I made the mistake of brushing off the impact that mold traces would have on Brenda, but the truth is the longer we owned it, the older it got. Everyone knows that motorhomes seem to always seep water here and there no matter how well you tarp them. Traces of blackness around leaky areas never seem to really go away. We bought a custom-sized memory foam mattress that we never even got a chance to use before water dribbled down the wall onto it, leaving a nice water stain on one whole corner. Come to think of it, we never did use that new mattress! So, without a new roof there was little to no chance of Brenda being comfortable in it again. Who wants to breathe mold spores, right? I didn't feel justified in dumping roof money into a 20+ year-old motorhome. There were other things too, like the fabric on the seat cushions was starting to break down from age. I think I had grown to despise it without realizing it. It became nothing but a chore of ownership, and grew more worthless with each passing year of depreciation and degradation. Can you believe I actually found those mushrooms growing out of it one year?

A year or so ago I had a guy stop by out of the blue, asking me if I'd be willing to sell the motorhome. Well, like most people, I have the "right price and we'll see" attitude. We went out and looked it all over, starting it and checking things over. We arrived on a price, and the guy left to get his "money man" or relative that had funds. When he showed up with him they started in on me-attacking from two directions about why this or that should lower the price, etc. Finally, I said, "You know, I don't like where this deal is going. The deal is off. Goodbye" and sent them away. They continued trying as they left, and even contacted me a day or two later. Nope.

Maybe six months later the same thing happens. Out of the blue a gal comes to the door saying her husband wants to ask about the motorhome, motioning over towards the driveway at him sitting in his Suburban. After a bunch of song and dance, we arrive at a pretty cheap price (about half of what I could have sold it to the first guys for a year or so earlier. At this point they left to go get money. That's when I noted the similarities between all these guys--including the previous hagglers six months earlier. They could have been family. All of them were Mediterranean ancestry, all the same accents, all with the same methods of haggling and doing business. When these folks came back, they started in on fresh round of re-haggling, as if the price hadn't already been determined. When they saw I wasn't going to budge, the deal was made. Imagine my surprise--no, OUR surprise--when the same couple showed up a few days later, "Uhh, I hate to bother you, but the motorhome ended up costing us more to get repaired than we thought and we can't afford to pay the bill. We were wondering if you could lend us maybe $500 or so." Are you fucking kidding me? It was all I could keep from saying that, but I firmly sent them packing. I was flabbergasted. They even had their kids acting all lovey towards us, trying to win us over. Even the first guy that sold us the motorhome was from that family. He did all the exact same moves with the re-haggling, along with looking like they were all brothers. I don't want to step on too many ethnic toes here, but I doubt I will never again do business with someone of that group.

The good news though: the motorhome was gone. No more worrying about leaking, freezing, protecting, or storing. That was a pretty expensive motorhome when you count the depreciation and the costs--especially when you only use it three times. Then there's theft.

Oh, I didn't tell you about that?

Yes, we fell victim to the catalytic converter theft craze that swept the nation during the pandemic times. One day I took the garbage out and walked around the motorhome on the way back in, checking on the tarp after we had just had a big windstorm the previous day. The snow was patchy and frozen, with bare spots here and there. My foot caught on the edge of something on the driver's side, about halfway down. I bent down and found a rubber trunk mat-looking thing sticking out of the snow. "Hmm, that wind must have blown this thing from someone else's yard." I was just about to keep walking when something made me stop. "Wait... could it be..." I kneeled down. Sure enough, there was a sizeable gap in the 3" exhaust pipe where our low-mileage, factory catalytic converter used to reside. Sonuvabitch, they got me. Apparently, something spooked them to not get their mat when they left. Brenda is sure it was during a time Wendy was over visiting with Louie. She let the dogs out and they both barked and ran that direction, though none of us thought anything at the time. She was probably right.

 

Well, I bought a section of exhaust pipe nearby and welded it in so it was driveable, and let Bucky's down in Fife put a new one in. Our insurance paid about half of it. At least I got the adjuster gal to throw in some extra $$ for me because I appropriated and welded my own patch in instead of having it towed.

But it was fun. Yes, we kept the license plate frame.

The Fence - Part Two: Finished Fence!

 After a couple years of lackluster, stoned (more than likely) pondering, wondering, thinking, and time-wasting we finally have a finished fence! Wow, it's still almost hard to believe when I think about the crap I went through.

As I mentioned at the end of my previous post, I hired a team of professionals by the name of Olympic Fencing Solutions. To give you the quick overview, Jorge and his crew knew their business. Instead of "I can't make it today" excuses, I got, "Instead of Monday, can we start tomorrow?" It ended up being a two-and-a-half-day job, and they got right down to business.

Here are a few things that set them apart from the usual fencing folks:

• Instead of the fence posts being 3 1/2" x 3 1/2" in size they were full 4" x 4" in size
• Instead of the typical 8-foot fence posts, these fellows knew enough to use full 9-footers for good depth
• All concrete was premixed in the wheelbarrow--old school style--before pouring
• All of the posts were buried a full 3-feet deep
• The gate timbers were full 6" x 6" in size, again instead of the usual 5 1/2 x 5 1/2" size, and again--full 9-feet long
• The gates were custom-built to size on site by one man who knew his craft
• The lumber used on the gates was full-dimensional lumber (not nominal-sized like the box stores)
• The gates were both assembled with beautifully-done miters, assembled with screws, and well-braced

Now here's what we've all been waiting for: Picture time!

A lot of tree-trimming and chip pile-moving was needed beforehand

The gate-building specialist gathering his goods together

Side gate framing underway. Look at those miters!

Maybe you can get an idea of the size of these gate posts

Notice how it progressively gets farther from the chainlink fence?

A couple of side gates ready to go! The gate guy was my hero.

Time to start in on the driveway side

Posts are all in. Boards tomorrow!

Time for some gate hanging work

Get a good helper and they come out nice and straight!

Now that's what I call a beautiful privacy fence. Gap-free and stout.

The old posts show how far the property line moved in our favor

The front yard received a 'shadow' fence style - same on both sides

The sound side of the house - Finished!

Last day - time for the REAL gates to be built for the driveway

Wow! All finished! Now we can wash the cars naked!

The Fence - Part One: The Debacle

Or as was should call it: Chris Yurjevich: "NON-tractor." He was obviously not a contractor. Or, you could say since I was basically conned, the contractor moniker is somewhat accurate in a twisted sort of way.

Let's start at the beginning.

I found him on Craigslist, and honestly--I don't know what possessed me to hire him in the first place. Maybe it was my private nature--how I hate talking to people I don't know. Maybe it was my lack of leadership abilities--how I don't like directing people. It was such a perfect storm for a fuckup of fairly grand scale, and so it came to pass.

After meeting and talking about everything on the weekend, we agreed on the following Tuesday for a start date, citing Sunday/Monday as regular closed days for the lumber yard. I was aware of the quality of the wood from Mill Outlet in Tacoma, so I didn't question him or suggest going to another source--they have nice wood.

Also, we were excited! After so long it was finally going tot happen! We were actually going to get a new fence! It was underway! Well, Tuesday morning he texted me, "I completely forgot I have 2 diff DR appts today for labwork, so I'll be there about 8:30am tomorrow to get rolling." When I thanked him, he responded, adding, "I'll see you around 8-9 depending on how busy Mill Outlet is." He never did show up that day. Or message.

That's when the real excuses started flooding in. "Diverticulitis", "The wood at the mill was soaked", "I left my post hole digger at my last job, so I need to stop and get another one," etc. The excuses started to mount. You can read about some of them in the text pic on the right. (Viewing tip: click the image, then right-click and 'open in new tab'. From there you can zoom in on it.)

Some of his warning signs: 

• He was setting posts by pouring a (yes, ONE) bag of concrete into the hole and then filling it with water.
• One of the posts was at least the width of the post out of alignment from the other posts. "There was big rock down there. Don't worry--you won't even notice it." Wrong.
• Not one time did he ever even address the other half of fence project on the driveway side of the house. Whether supplies, process, etc... he probably never planned on getting that far...
• He had no tools to speak of. No wheelbarrow, no hose... the things that he did have looked freshly-bought.
• The posts he showed up with were regular 8-foot 4x4 posts from a box store, measuring 3.5" x 3.5" wide like most do. An 8-foot post is not long enough for a 6-foot fence!
• When I looked at the heights of the row of posts he had installed, the numbers were all over the map. When I measured what was protruding from the ground I found he had only buried them 1-1.5 feet deep! That was not going to hold a 6-foot privacy fence up. The wind would have taken the whole thing down in no time.
• The final straw: I went out to the street to look down at the row alignment and saw he hadn't even been following his own string line! He was off by almost a full 12 inches at the street end. Unbelievable... and after I shelled out $3k on a survey before we started.

On top of all this, it was getting dangerously close to winter weather, and he had already missed some primo weather days.

Being the non-combatant type that I am, I dreaded calling him. Lucky for me it was just a short time later that same day when he saved me the trouble by texting me. On the right is the text chain, which ends with me replying to dead air in fantasyland. Haha, I haven't heard from him since.

End didn't end there though. No. I had to deal with the mess he left behind. Cleaning up his shit is when I found out how many bags of concrete he had actually used. I had 12 posts to dig out. I wasn't about to add that additional labor charge to the fence guys I had since lined up to do the job. I didn't get any pictures, but I ended up using this method: tie a chain around the bottom of the post, run the chain over a car wheel/tire, hook it to Honda ATC110 3-wheeler. Well, the intent was good, the process was good, I just had a little power/weight deficiency with using the little Honda. Still, I used it--giving each one a slack chain before hitting the gas and giving myself minor whiplash. I managed to get them all out without too much trouble. Hell, I pulled two of them out by hand just by wiggling and lifting! Here's what I ended up with by the time I remembered I had forgotten take any stinkin' pictures. I took this one off my security camera (as you can tell). That was a lot of work for an old guy:

"Hold it!" The de-construction of an underway debacle

In that picture, you can see the whole reason for all the waffling I've done and all the time that's passed. There are no joggles in any of these property lines, so if that's the case who owns what with a fence line that contains a 3-foot joggle in it? Well, the Coronavirus lockdown threw a huge wrench into the picture, but we did eventually get a survey done to determine who owns what before we put a new fence in. Turns out the very back corner of the fence at the corner of the property is right on the dot, but by the time it gets to the joggle in the cyclone fence it's off by half that width. In other words, the property line goes right through the center of that fence joggle, off by almost 3 feet at the street. Good to know!

Back to the story: of course, I was going to keep those 4x4's I painstakingly removed from their post holes. In a matter of speaking I paid a shitload of money for those 20 4x4's, so they're gold to me! The residual concrete I cleaned off them practically fell off some of them. That "pour mix in the hole and add water'" method of making concrete is completely unacceptable. It has zero strength. Here you can get an idea of how shallow the posts were buried:

This time I wasn't going to waste any time finding a real contractor. I was running out of good weather. I was pissed that I had gotten screwed out of a bunch of cash, and I was completely frustrated with looking at the destruction and mess in the yard. I wanted closure. I got on the web and nailed down a couple bids of good companies, finally settling on Olympic Fencing Solutions.

Next: The Fence Part Two - The REAL Fence!

My Old Camera Collection

I used to have a nice little collection of old cameras. That is--until that one day I had some sort of brain fart. I don't know if I decided I was tired of them or if I needed tuition money or what, but I ended up selling them at our (then) local Midway Swap Meet or something until they were gone.

There have been many times I've wished I had them back, but 'oh well'. You learn through your mistakes, right? Anyway, here's an old picture I found from my days living in crime-riddled south Auburn. This was the display I had in the living room, complete with a tapestry I bought in Turkey providing the backdrop.

I wish the picture was better, but you should have seen it before I fixed it. It was an old, washed-out slide that I had trouble scanning in to begin with. I was able to help it a little with Adobe Lightroom:

Our current 'collection' is a lot more diverse than the old camera-only one above. In addition to cameras, it has all sorts of collectibles, knick-knacks, and family heirloom stuff:

My History With Photography

I guess my brush with photography began back in 6th grade with a 'free' camera offer. I don't know exactly what intrigued me about the deal at the time. Maybe it was the fact that it was endorsed by Bugs Bunny, the official sponsor of Kool-Aid at the time. Or maybe it was the fact that 6th-grade camp was on the horizon, and a camera would be cool. Whatever the reason, I saved up a bunch of empty Kool-Aid packages and mailed them in for a free camera. It was a plastic camera (I'm sure it was a Diana) that took 120 film. For those of you that don't know (or remember), 120 film is a type that you buy on a roll about 2-1/2" long and have to actually 'thread' it into the take-up roll inside the camera to start shooting. The advantage of 120 film was that it was dirt cheap and even a kid could afford it. I did end up using that camera during 6th grade camp. As I recall I took about 3 rolls with it, but I don't think I used it much more than that. I think I lost interest. Also, I was young enough to not have money for film and picture developing, so that was probably the reality. I only have a handful of pictures from those few shots I did take. Here are a few:

  

I'd like to think that camera film is trying to stage a comeback, but I'm not so sure. For a cheap, plastic camera, the fact that it used 120 film was its saving grace. 120 film was cheap, it was available everywhere (at that time), and being a 'medium format' film, was very easy to make enlargements from. The only way to make using film practical nowadays is to develop your own pictures... assuming you can find film. Nobody develops film for the broader markets any more. You've gotta search

Epix Pro

In the late 70's I was stationed in Northern Italy while in the Air Force, and I bought myself a new 35mm Nikon FM SLR camera. I had a great time taking pictures of everything in sight, and Northern Italy has its share of photo opportunities! I took almost exclusively slides with it because I liked the ease of using prepaid Kodak mailers. They made it a lot more convenient than trying to use local Italian developing and have to deal with the language barrier.

I was getting heavily into computers in the mid-80's, and it was somewhere during that time that digital photography made it's public appearance. Of course, being the computer geek that I am, I was interested! It didn't take all that long--my first digital camera came along in the mid-90's, called an Epix Pro. It must have been considerably ahead of it's time to include EXIF information with its picture files, a feature we take for granted. I have one surviving picture that I took  with it of my daughter, and it even still has the EXIF info intact. Here's the picture, along with the EXIF info that is embedded in it. Click on the picture to view it in its full-sized, pixelated glory...

[Picture]

DateTime=1997:11:27 11:48:37

Roll Number=IN01

Picture Number = 0007

[Camera info]

Manufacturer=EPix Imaging Systems, Inc

Model=EPixPro0001

Serial Number=S557400247

Shutter = 269

Gain = 10

Flash = 0

Mode = STILL

[Folder]

Name=Inside

Account Number=1

[end]

Is that a blast from the past or what? Anyway, it was only a 512k-pixel resolution camera. I think I bought it on eBay back when eBay was in it's infancy. As a matter of fact, I believe I actually bought it for eBay--To take pictures of things that I put up for sale. Here's a copy of a website I found and saved a few years ago. I saved it in case it disappeared:

Original article from Chip Shop - March 1996

Back then anyone that had a digital camera was a computer geek. Why? Because they were not treated as real cameras per se, but rather, as electronic devices. To the photographic world they were dismissed as novelties, and for good reason--Their pictures were nowhere near good enough quality to be called photography. As digital cameras became more common, they also became more powerful and came down in price as we all know by now. As that was happening I sold that Epix camera and bought a Kodak DC120.

Kodak DC120

It was a pretty nice camera in it's day. It was 1-megapixel (woo!) and took much better shots than my first digital camera did. It also had a built-in flash, a 3x zoom, and used Compactflash cards which were reasonably new then. I was getting into digital cameras and loved the aspect of being able to take as many pictures as I wanted and deleting them instantly if something went wrong. As the digital cameras became better and more affordable, I finally got to the point where I knew I'd never give my old trusty Nikon FM film camera the respect and attention it once had and I sold it.

The next upgrade for me was an Olympus C4000z digital camera. I loved this camera for the quality improvement it had over the Kodak! While it had it's share of issues, it took great pictures. I grew to hate the fact that it was limited by a 128-meg Smartmedia card, and grew also dissatisfied with the unintuitive menu structure it had. I basically used this camera more as a tool--using it for things like covering family events, taking pictures of things for my website, and that sort of thing. I still hadn't been bitten by the photography bug.

Early 2009 brought a reawakening of photography to my life when my (then) wife got herself into a photography class at our local community college. I accompanied her to our local Office Depot store one evening to buy herself a new Canon XTi DSLR camera. That really didn't clinch it for me--That happened a few days later. We both went out in the waning daylight hours when her photography class had an assignment to take pictures that showed motion. Helping her set up the shots brought back some excitement. I wrestled with it for a few days after that before finally succumbing and buying myself a used Canon XT camera. The seed was planted. Although my camera was one notch below hers, they were virtually brother and sister. It was a Canon EOS 350D, also known as the Digital Rebel XT. I was back having a great time taking pictures once again! I was fortunate that it came with an extra battery when I bought it (a necessity). It came with the standard 18-55 'kit' lens, and a crappy (but worked ok) 75-300 zoom.

A few upgrades followed after that. I upgraded to the Canon XTi like Sue had and ran that for a couple years, then bought a used Canon 7D. While I still have the 7D, I rarely take it out. Photography has taken yet another break from my life. We'll see if it comes back some day...