Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 53

As I mentioned in RST 52, the area around the Red River Gorge reminds me a lot of home, especially all the backroads. A younger C.L. driving his blue 1979 Chevy Monte Carlo would have loved to tackle the highways and byways of this region. This is despite of the fact that his father disconnected the four-barrel carburetor to keep him from killing himself. He also would have loved driving the white 1984 Ford Escort – a base model with manual transmission and no air conditioning and funky paint job – because its rack-and-pinion steering loved the curves. He even would have enjoyed driving the gunmetal gray 1982 VW Rabbit Diesel – a four-speed manual transmission whose German-engineered steering made up for a lack of power. He instead, this week, must drive through the twisty-turny mountain roads with a 2019 VW Atlas. He is quite, quite sure that his much more sedate navigation of the local terrain has to do with the fact that the Atlas is top heavy and leans and has absolutely nothing to with the fact that he’s older and more aware of the potential consequences of crashing and may have lost a step or two.

At one point in our lives, the Bosses were pretty damn poor – I’m talking feeding the family for the week on a budget that is half of what we paid for dinner last night. The low point of this time in our lives occurred when the transmission let go in our 2002 Chevy Suburban. Only the even numbered gears would work with absolutely no reverse. This vehicle was crucial to our existence because it was the only vehicle that would haul all six of us and navigate our driveway (see RST 47 for that story). A tow truck in this situation was simply out of the question. Fortunately, Ms. Boss had parked the vehicle in such a way that we could drive through our (fortunately) dirt yard and around the house. Once we got out on the road, I’d give it plenty gas so it didn’t stall out in second to get it going, then run the RPM up enough so that I could drop it into fourth. I drove backroads like this for fifteen miles to get us to the transmission shop. We defaulted on our mortgage that month to get it fixed. It was a low point in our lives together. Hard work by the two of us means these kind of things don’t happen to us anymore.

The ‘79 Monte Carlo was loaned to me by my parents… and taken away by my parents and given to my step-brother… who promptly wrecked it. When it came to be my turn to get a ‘college car’, the ‘84 Ford Escort became my transportation for the last two years of college and for a year beyond. I was okay with driving the car known as the ‘clown car’, but that otherwise ‘jolly’ vehicle was decidedly unhappy with the road salt laid down in Northern Illinois and began rusting with great abandon. That lead me to purchase my first new car: a white 1994 Chevy S10 manual five-speed with a single cab and a 1.9 liter engine. As much as my father and my step-brother wanted me to ‘upgrade’, I bought the truck that met my needs with air conditioning and an AM/FM radio and nothing else. Confident in my purchase and after a week of visiting family and friends, I started back home towards Northern Illinois. I was driving down the road with 800 miles on the odometer when all of the sudden, the car made a terrible noise and began slowing down. I pulled over, unable to get any further and stood by the side of the road. A guy in a Ford dually pickup stopped and gave me a lift to the gas station where I called AAA and had it towed to the closest Chevy dealership. Eventually, the truck got back to the Chevy dealership who discovered they failed to dealer prep the crankcase which caused it to drop into all five gears at once. Me and Chevy transmissions, right? The biggest of the situation is that the transmission failed right in front of the Ford transmission factory.

Despite inauspicious beginnings with the S10, it treated me well until we parted ways 2003. I have fond memories of that truck. It transported the soon-to-be Ms. Boss and I to Canada on our very first trip together, Not long after, it carried the two us through Colorado and Utah in search of adventure. Most notably, however, it was the reason why she knew where I lived when she placed a note about whether I would be interested in getting to know her better, but that’s a different tale for another time.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 52

I write this from the bedroom of our lodging for the first full day of vacation. We were forced into executing ‘Plan C’ this year. Our first choice, a long-planned trip to Toronto, became yet another victim of the pandemic. ‘Revenge travel’ scuttled a fallback to our usual destination when everyone decided that the Outer Banks was the place to go for Summer 2021. We ended up in the Red River Gorge of Kentucky for a long weekend just under three hours from our house. Ms. Boss, a most excellent travel agent, booked us the second floor of a building at a remote crossroads over a ice cream/pottery/coffee shop and across the street from a bar and grill. We’ve already consumed some excellent barbecue and beverages at a very reasonable price. It doesn’t hurt that this area feels very much like where I grew up. I read and hiked yesterday afternoon and am writing this morning. It’s safe to say that all my needs are met.

We have more than one reason to celebrate this weekend – Bosslets 2 and 3 turn eighteen today. I can scarcely wrap my mind around that. What’s even harder to comprehend is that Bosslet 3 applied for a job at the facility where I work. Her boyfriend has made the trip with us. They certainly aren’t the small babies I used to haul around two at a time in pumpkin seats anymore. I feel it necessary to point out that Ms. Boss does not look nearly old enough to have two eighteen year-old daughters, much less one that’s twenty-two. Time flies…

Best vacation ever? Our honeymoon in the Outer Banks . We had a house on the beach during the off season and had the entire development to ourselves. We drew… actually the newly-minted Ms. Boss drew and I tried to… we ate, we explored, and we loved one another. Ms. Boss keeps a picture of me on her dresser wearing a maroon hoodie standing in the kitchen of our house that was taken that week. She says it’s her favorite all-time picture of me. That particular hoodie was placed in storage for a long time because… well… I outgrew it. A year or so ago, I pulled it out of storage while doing some cleaning. Somehow, it founds its way into Bosslet 3’s wardrobe. She wears it quite frequently, including when she took her senior pictures. The layers of sentimentality found in that circumstance cannot be overstated.

I’m obsessed with the Appalachian Trail. Despite the fact I’ve never backcountry camped in my life, I would love to say that I hiked at least a sizable part the trail. My plan to dip my toe in the water and test my mettle revolves around tackling the longest climb on the trail from the Nanthala Gorge to Cheoah Bald – a climb of over 3,000 feet in five miles. Yesterday’s hike here at Red River Gorge consisted of 362 of vertical without a backpack or anything else. I hit my heart rate cutoff of 150 bpm and was forced to rest twice in the 0.75 miles of our excursion. I, obviously, need more work on my fitness.

My goals for this trip? A little bit of reading, a little bit of recreation, more than my share of eating, and a whole lot of love for the life Ms. Boss and I have built together.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 51

While mowing the lawn this afternoon, I saw some furry thing go rolling across the front porch, then get its legs underneath itself and go running towards the house. It took me a moment to realize that it was small rabbit, definitely younger, that was running towards a small amount of shelter under the window of the front of our house. I moved towards it to get a better look, figuring it was scared from the lawn mower, when I saw another small rabbit doing the same thing about four feet away. I took a picture of the sight, send it via text to the entire Boss family, and went back to mowing. No sooner had I started mowing, then two other small rabbits came running out from under the mower. Unbeknownst to me, I had mowed over their burrow. While one of the second two rabbits escaped to somewhere I could not find them, the other stood frozen with its ears drawn all the way back so they were touching each other behind its head where it remained for several minutes. I felt really bad about the situation and I still do – the two rabbits that I saw first are huddled against one another in the corner a full three hours after this happened. I feel like a complete asshole.

I mentioned in RST 48 that Ms. Boss purchase squirrel-proof bird feeders for my birthday. I must now revise that remark. A couple of months after I posted that, a particularly clever squirrel managed to find a way to climb the shepherd’s hook, hold on with his back legs, and get seeds from the feeder. Not satisfied with that, he graduated to hanging of the feeder with his back legs, then basically doing a sit up to grab seeds out of the feeder. Impressed, we began to start calling him Tom Cruise (as an aside, he must have killer abs). Soon enough he brought ‘assistants’ who worked towards maximum ‘seed haul”. I bought a hummingbird feeder to attract a hummingbird I’ve seen flying around the area, they knocked that over and started drinking out of that. This week, however, was the final straw. Not one, but two of my bird feeders have gone missing. We’ve not had storms this week, that isn’t the answer. I’m blaming Tom Cruise and company. Ms. Boss, who shares my disdain for squirrels, decided to take matters in her own hands. She covered the two shepherds hooks with spray olive oil. As we speak, I see them out there scheming to get up the pole. They’ve made several aborted attempts and made one nearly successful jump from a nearby tree. The battle is not yet over.

Haiku 47 talks about a mother cardinal who decided to make a nest in a small real Christmas tree on our front porch right outside the window. We waited for the two eggs to hatch – rejoicing when the one egg hatched and lamenting when she shoved the egg that didn’t hatch out of the nest. Over and over, we watched mother and father taking their turns feeding the young, gaping mouth. Ms. Boss just happened to be watching out the window as baby took their first flight and captured a video of their second. She, and by extension we, were fortunate, because we never knowingly saw baby again. We wish them well.

Shortly after baby cardinal’s departure, we returned home find an old, torn soccer ball moving oddly, almost like a jumping bean. Soon enough, a birds head – probably a sparrow – comes poking out of a hole in the side. They no sooner make it out, then another head appears. Their departure from this strangest of nests was followed by a third. Just when I thought it was over, the ball keeps moving – a fourth bird that could not get out. While I know these things generally work themselves out, I couldn’t help but change the shape of the hole slightly to ease their exit. We spent the next hour watching the new family try and try their new wings in an effort to get over our privacy fence with mama bird standing watch nearby. Eventually all four made it over, never to be seen again.

I’m back at work five days a week now. While in some ways it feels good occupationally to return to work, I miss so many things about being home. Ms. Boss, obviously, tops the list, but I miss my back yard ‘coworkers’ as well. Birds, deer, chipmunks, rabbits, foxes… and, yes… even Tom Cruise – I miss them all. It was good to catch up with all of them today.

Random Semicoherent Thoughts – Volume 50

Now that I’m back to driving into work every morning, I find myself with at least ninety minutes of time on my hands that needs to be filled with… something. It used to be NPR all the time, but I got a little tired of it just before I started working from home and switched to podcasts. Now the podcasts I’ve been listing to lately have become tedious, so I pivoted to audiobooks. I chose Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as my starting point as a number of the books I have read have pointed back to that one. I’m still plowing through the academic discussion that makes up the second part of the book, but the first half where he talks about the psychology of surviving the concentration camp is one of the more impactful things that I have ever heard. While I’ve always known about the Holocaust generally, thinking about the impact to a whole race of people is not nearly devastating as reading one man’s detailed account about his story of survival. I’m contemplating listening to Elie Weisel’s Night next or possibly pivoting to a similar expense in the form of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s.

I vacillated between reading and not through my entire life. I can read to distraction when I enjoy a book, but often struggle to get through those that I don’t. I would often pass over tremendously interesting books because I knew they would get me in trouble in favor of drier tomes that I didn’t mind putting down. Another part of the problem here is that I have a personal hang up over reading more than one book at a time. When I get stuck in a space where I can’t get into a book and move forward, I’m usually stuck for a good long time. Such is the case right now.

When I was young, I used to get a World Almanac every year. It contained over a thousand pages of facts and figures and trivial items. I read it cover to cover, every year and often reread random pages as time went on. I kept all the versions on a bookshelf in my room like trophies. Reading them, I crammed my head full of knowledge because you never knew when I’d need it. As might imagine, I absolutely crushed all-comers in Trivial Pursuit. These days, you don’t have to – you carry your cell phone everywhere you go. In some ways, this make me sad.

I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne when I was a junior in high school. To tell the truth, I just had to look up the entry on Wikipedia to remember just exactly how the plot went, but I vividly remember how the book made me feel at the time. Discovering the notion that a man of the cloth was fallible became the first sizable crack in my naïveté.

I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve even started several. I rush headlong into the project and write thirty or so pages before it all falls apart. Steven Pressfield calls this ‘the Resistance’ (note the big ‘R’). My hard drive is littered with the abandoned husks of failed attempts. It’s a miracle that this blog gets posted at times. Fortunately, the entries are short enough that my ‘Sesame Street’ attention span can occasionally make it through one.

I enjoy cookbooks. This shouldn’t be surprising to someone who loves to cook almost as much as I love to eat (and I do love to eat). The cookbooks I like, however, are a bit strange. I love old compilations that people used to throw together at a church or women’s groups or similar entities. Give me a spiralbound cookbook from a Methodist church and I will read it from cover to cover and be greatly entertained while doing so. They always contain interesting recipes, things thrown together that speak of the culture of the group. I can imagine potluck dish after potluck dish coming out of these books. Perhaps the king (or perhaps ‘queen’ would be the better choice of word here) of all cookbooks of this genre is More-with-Less by Doris Janzen Longacre. This Mennonite cookbook, given to me used by my roommate from college, contains not only recipes obtained from congregations all over the world, but practical advice on how to stretch your food budget as much as possible. It did its fair share in getting the Boss family through some very lean times. A quick search of Amazon shows that I have an older version of the book. Newer versions apparently have more pictures, less wisdom, and content skewed towards modern tastes. I’ll keep my tried and true version, thank you.