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Do they even make station wagons anymore? It seems to me it’s the perfect family vehicle – well, perfect if you aren’t concerned about ‘safety’ for children, but back in my childhood, seatbelts were optional and we liked it that way. In fact, if memory serves, the seat belts in the back seat were always buried in the crack.

Anyway, I loved our station wagon. We would do a cross-country trek once a year to visit both sets of grandparents, and the back of the wagon was prime riding real estate. It would hold the cooler (so you could sneak snacks), and I could stretch out on a blanket or sleeping bag and either read or look upside-down at the sky.

Good thing I didn’t get carsick. or thrown from the vehicle.

The place where I grew up had beautiful surroundings. Delta is at the base of Grand Mesa, and up on Grand Mesa, aspen trees grow like weeds. Aspen trees are nice enough during the summer, but during the fall they turn all golden and beautiful and sound fantastic. I imagine it’s like hearing the ocean a little – lots of wooshing and rustling.

Anyway, sometime during the fall, while the trees were still golden and not yet brown, my parents would round their ungrateful children up, put clean clothes on them, pack them in the car and then put up with their bickering and whining for twenty minutes while we drove to the beautiful trees for a family photo.

This was pre-digital, too, when posing nicely mattered. We couldn’t take this shot twenty times and pick the best one. You smiled when it was time to smile and let your eyes dry out so you wouldn’t be blinking for the photo.

See? We look happy, but secretly we are plotting one another’s demise. Well…. maybe that was just me….. Huh. Maybe all of it – the bickering and whining – was me.

Our good friends the Peperkorns are moving to California and will be stopping by soon. Lloyd and I were trying to spiff the place up, and as he was vacuuming, there was suddenly a terrible, terrible noise.

(Question: If you were driving a vacuum and it suddenly made a terrible, terrible noise, wouldn’t you stop said vacuum immediately? Somebody didn’t, and can’t seem to explain his actions. I maintain that it is because he is so unfamiliar with using a vacuum that he thought the sound was normal. He does the same thing when a spoon is in the disposal.)

Back to the story: I screamed, “Stop!”, then we turned over the vacuum to see all the length of my phone charger cord wrapped around the beater bar. The plug-in part was far, far away from it.

Boooo.

Hmmmmm. This could be a problem. It’s not that I call people very much, but I do use the alarm clock feature (three alarms: The ‘wake up’ one, the ‘you should be out of the shower by now’ one, and the ‘you should be eating breakfast by now’ one). When I go on home visits I set the alarm so I leave in time for the next visit. I can’t lose battery power!

I thought I could just use my car charger, but I don’t drive enough to charge up the phone without wearing out the car battery. I went to buy a replacement charger at Wal-Mart, but they didn’t have the right size. They did have a cool car-charger-to-outlet gadget, though. Perfect!

Guess what? I can’t find my car charger anywhere. Have you seen it?

Not a big deal. We have a U.S. Cellular place in town and I thought I could just stop by every couple of days and switch out the battery, or just break down and buy a new charger. Until then, I’m returning calls from my Google account:

Funny true story: At my last home visit, I sat down at the table and there was my phone’s twin! I told the parents my sob story and asked if I could borrow a cup of electricity as we visited. They very kindly obliged.

So, it’s time to buy a new charger…… or a new phone. 😀

I grew up in western Colorado where the humidity is very low. Our house didn’t have central air conditioning because it really didn’t need it. If we opened our windows at night and closed them in the morning the house stayed relatively cool. Now, being the temperature-control-freak that I am, I can understand my Dad getting upset if my window was still open at noon.

We did have a large air-conditioning unit off off the dining room. Mostly it served as a place for the family cat to sit – staring through the window, waiting for us to notice she was ready to come inside – but once in a great while we got to turn it on.

That was sheer bliss! I would stand right in front the vents, holding up my shirt to catch that chilly air, ignoring the shouts of everyone else to move so the rest of the house could cool off. I was deaf with freezing-cold joy.

Note: I am entering the time of year where I work during the day and make home visits to students during the evenings. These ‘Memories’ posts are part of a system to keep me sane. Enjoy these silly stories.

A long time ago, way, way back in the early 90’s, Lloyd and I worked together up in Minnesota for Oetting’s Detasseling during the summers. Actually, Lloyd and Brad had worked for them since the 80’s, but they both had the yucky job of actually detasseling in the fields.

‘What is detassleling?’, you ask? Well, it’s basically corn castration. Big companies that grow seed corn (corn grown to sell as seed) like to make mutant hybrid versions. So they plant a field with a pattern of four rows of one kind of corn followed by one row of another kind of corn. Slaves strong, young, well-paid workers walk through the fields and pull off the tippy-top of the corn plant – the tassel – off the four rows so that the tassels from the one row will fertilize all the plants. Here endeth the lesson.

I am not up for that kind of hard labor. Those kids got up at four in the morning so they could be in the fields before the harsh sun showed its face and burned them all alive. Nope, I landed myself a cushy office job. I had the pleasure of letting which crews know where they’d be sweating that day, then fielding phone calls from angry mothers asking if I knew how hard their child was working. “Builds character,” I would reply between mouthfuls of bon-bons.

I also got to use the fax machine – the premier technology of the day.. I liked to make my own cover sheets when requesting items from the home office back in Nebraska.

Whew. I really sweated making that one. I should have had my mom call me to complain.

There is a nail behind the door to the upstairs that usually holds the flyswatter and my back scratcher. (If you don’t have a back scratcher, get one.) This summer that nail was reassigned to hold up the Record Of Awesomeness.

Actually, it was the Record of Funny (which in my book is the same the thing). We decided that a point would be awarded when somebody said the absolute funniest thing that could be said in a given situation.

We were pretty good at keeping the record straight for the first few, but then I just wound up giving myself a whole bunch, trusting that I would be funny sometime in the future.

Well, Brad is gone,so there was no reason to keep my ‘winning’ record up. (They knew where the marker was.) Now that nail is helping to solve a completely different problem.

Lloyd really likes Special K Red Berries but he only eats it once in a blue moon, so I wind up finishing the box. Without fail then next day he wants some cereal.

Today, we bought two boxes. One for the cereal cupboard, and one for the nail.