Life Happens has an idea for a family cookbook entitled "The Spaghetti Mistake". It is a great idea and while they were here we came up with several recipes to put in it. But the recipes have special signifigance...it has to do with the title...so here's how it happened: We were living at Patch Barracks in Stuttgart-Vaihingen. The Hyperborean Wanderer was about 12 or 13 years old, he probably remembers the exactness of it better than me, and one night in the kitchen decided he could handle m...
Last week we had HBW, LH and the littlies with us. The visit was so fun (marred only by MamaCharlie's severe cold and a little bit of snow on the day we were to take "old Blue" out for a tire spin). While he was here he received some really good career news which I will allow him or her to tell you about, and we had lots of good time to just talk. Watching my little people being parents is a remarkable thing...and I have a whole passle (SP?) of brilliant grandchildren.&nb...
Grandma was a picture of Pennsylvania Dutch-ness. She had two sisters who looked so much like her that I couldn't tell them apart unless they were right next to each other. They were round and jolly and full of mischief, gray hair rolled up in a bun and clacked their false teeth at each other as they sat around the dining room table playing Canasta or Dominoes. Their humor and bawdiness was infectious. All my memories of her and her brothers and sisters are treasures to me. Even at our last mee...
I already told you how my '65 GTO came to be in the Tucson Pontiac dealer to have the rear end rebuilt...see "MamaCharlie learns to drive a stick". I won't repeat all that. But once all the dust settled, it got rebuilt and was ready to be picked up. I also mentioned the difficulty I had getting up to Tucson before everything closed...but we finally got it worked out, just barely, and I got the word it was done and I should pick it up right away. Couple days later I was able to work out schedule...
I bought my '65 GTO from a Chevy dealer in El Cajon, CA. I was on a three day pass from Fort Huachuca at the time and after thundering around the home grounds for the rest of the weekend, I drove my new trophy out to Arizona...it was a sweet ride. Shortly after I got back into the swing of things at Huachuca, one of my buddies pointed out that the left rear wheel wobbled. We discovered that the axle was torqued and I took it to the Pontiac dealer in Tucson to get repairs. That was the beginning...
One of Betty Lou's favorite stories was about how one of her junior high classmates handled an embarassing situation. We all remember those terrible memorizations we had to do in school, right? I can still start "Abou Ben Adim" but can't finish it. In this particular incident, Betty Lou's class was required to memorize a Kipling poem called, "Recessional". It's recurring phrase at the end of each stanza is "Lord God of Hosts be with us yet, Lest we forget, Lest we forget." As each member of ...
I was watching FOX News the other morning. The teaser just before the top of the hour was a school shooting in Lousiana...details to come. In the next hour there was not another word about Lousiana. As the hour began, we were told of a bus stop shooting in Los Angeles...Turkey has invaded Northern Iraq...a plane crashed in Los Angeles, a light plane fell right in a neighborhood...Another shooting in Tennessee...Israel has launched 60 rockets in two days at Hamas targets... one in six sixth grad...
A lot of Army trucks are equipped with a Tach-O-Graph, a recording device that keeps a seven day record of just about everything the truck does ...when the engines starts, how many rpms it turns, truck speed, when it is moving and when it is sitting still, how many times the gears are shifted, how far it goes, etc. Everything is recorded on a wax-like disc. Expert disc readers can pretty much trace a truck's travels by matching data from the disc to known routes the truck is on and maps of the ...
I got to Fort Huachuca in January of 1967. I was not impressed. I was a seabag baby, grew up Navy all the way, which meant that I was always near the ocean...some ocean. I had never been to a desert in my entire life. When my teenage friends suggested a trip to the desert for fun, my response was always..."what fun?"...the ocean was closer and I LOVED the ocean. Any how, my travels from San Diego to Fort Huachuca are subject for a coming post, this ain't about that. It IS about how I met MamaCha...
Betty Lou was a very young girl when the family packed up everything they owned and lit out of Prior, Oklahoma bound for California. They weren't alone...it was the early thirties and most "Okies" were leaving the dust bowl for better climes. The Doren family looked a lot like the folks in the movie "Grapes of Wrath"...all their wordly possessions tied on to the Model A truck, kids stacked on the back. Their destination was the work camps of central California but because of good luck and a f...
When I was in high school and looking for a new series to read...I had just devoured all the 007s there were at the time...I picked up a Mike Hammer Mystery and started in. I knew there were a lot of books in the series so I figured if it was good...I was set. In the opening paragraphs, establishing the character and all, Mike mentions (all the great mysteries are in the first person) that he is just a shade under six one. Somehow in my adolescant mind, I read that to mean the was 61 years...
A little while ago I told you about the troubles a recently widowed friend of ours was going through with her bank and insurance company. Here is the latest, it ain't pretty. After lawyers had at each other, the result is that the insurance company had a signed contract that clearly states that the policy is not in force once the insured turns 70 years old. (They sold the policy to him on a five year contract when he was 68 years old...go figure). The claim that the insured didn't und...
Okay, now how do I get rid of all the extra white stuff?