I have never spent much time around deaf people. While there are plenty of people in my family that are hard of hearing, I have no family members that are deaf. The people in my family who have the most severe hearing problems have never been so bad off that there was any consideration of them needing to learn sign language. At the same time, there were never any deaf people in the schools I attended, churches I went to, or places that I’ve worked. I’ve definitely been around people with hearing aids and who had hearing issues bad enough that it affected their speech. But I’ve never spent any significant time around people who regularly use sign language. So I was fascinated when I saw the couple at the bookstore signing at each other.
I’m writing this on my 53rd birthday. I am taking the day off from work and will be spending most of it at home alone. I do plan to get out and visit a music store later and will spend time with family tonight. It will be an enjoyable day. I wanted to take a little time this morning to look back at some of the places I have spent my birthday. Here is a very incomplete list and some notes about each one.
Not all stores are created equal. People with different sensibilities gravitate to different stores. Stores try to appeal to different types of customers. Stores do this with the types of products they carry and the environment they try to create. At first glance, Walmart and Target seem to be very similar. But as I look closer, I get the feeling that Target may be attempting to shoot for a slightly more sophisticated customer. Their products offerings seem to be less varied but aiming for a higher class customer. Likewise, when I encounter shoppers at Target, they seem to carry themselves like they are more important than the typical Walmart customer. You go to Target to impress, to be seen. For the same reasons you go to Starbucks. I think that’s why there is a Starbucks in our local target. You go to Walmart because they are cheap.
It was a Sunday afternoon. My mother and my sister had gone to a baby shower or a wedding shower. I was at home alone with my dad. It was raining. It was stormy and rainy enough outside that I couldn’t go out and play. My dad would usually have some sort of project going on outside but the weather was too bad for him to be out. He also wanted to spend time with me. It was his idea to make homemade ice cream.
Making homemade ice cream is an outdoor activity. I have seen people put an electric ice cream maker in the sink but our ice cream maker had a hand crank. We were going to have to put the ice cream maker in a large plastic dishpan in the middle of the floor of our kitchen. We were not ready for that yet. First, we had to mix our ingredients.
My mom would normally prepare the mix for the ice cream. Most of the time when we were making homemade ice cream, we had guests at our house and I would be playing with kids. I paid very little attention to what my mom was doing. My dad was usually trying to get the ice ready. My family would fill old milk cartons with water and put them in the freezer to make blocks of ice to use when making ice cream. This was a great way to make ice blocks but then you had to bust them up before you could use them. We had little to no idea what my mom would usually do when she was preparing the ice cream. Our decision to make ice cream was made at the last minute. If we were missing anything, there was a possibility we wouldn’t be able to make ice cream at all. This happening in the early 1970’s when all of the stores in our town would close on Sundays. My dad started looking for all of the ingredients. We had plenty of milk. We also had those little Junket tablets which was lucky because the package also had a recipe. Those were the only two ingredients that I knew for sure were included. Researching this story, I have seen recipes that use evaporated milk and others that use corn syrup. I’m sure that the recipe we were using was the most basic recipe possible. As far as I knew, the ingredients were just milk, junkets, sugar and magic. I know that the recipe we were using called for vanilla because my dad said we didn’t have any. This was not going to stop us.
What would you consider an acceptable substitute for vanilla? I would consider another flavor, wouldn’t you? Knowing my mom, I think there might have been some chocolate flavoring somewhere up there in the kitchen cabinet. I did not help my dad select what he chose as a substitute. At the time, I did not realize that his selection had very little flavor and what flavor it had was sort of bitter. But the food coloring would look cool, wouldn’t it?
Yes, we used food coloring as a substitute for vanilla. How much food coloring do you add when substituting for vanilla? I don’t think it really matters. What matters is putting enough in to make it look really cool. What happens when you add a lot of all of the colors in the package? We were hoping for a nice rainbow striped effect. What we got was a turquoise swirl effect.
Part of the fun of making ice cream was everyone getting to take turns with the crank. I was still young enough at the time that I wasn’t very much help. I could really only crank at the very first when it was relatively easy. But I didn’t have very much endurance either. Since it was just me and my dad, he ended up doing most of the work. In addition, he didn’t have the benefit of the ice cream maker sitting on the ground. It slid around in the dish pan as he hand cranked the concoction until it was done.
We tested our experiment. I don’t know if you can accurately call what we made “ice cream”. It might be best described as frozen turquoise milk. My mom and sister tried some of it when they got home but most of it remained uneaten. My mom put the rest of the dessert in the door of the freezer in a clear plastic container. Every time we went to get ice from the freezer, we would see the leftovers. Think it remained there until we moved to another house.
When my oldest daughter was in fifth and sixth grade, she school she attended would have an annual talent show. This talent show was held during the evening so parents, family and friends could attend. My daughter plays the piano and plays very well. She would always select a song that she liked from some of her recent lessons to perform. The songs she selected were never current hits. Most of the time, the songs she played would not be anything that most of the people in the audience would recognize. But she always did a great job with her performance and I was always a proud father.
While the main reason to go to this show was to see my daughter and support her, it was far from the only reason. We knew other kids that were performing. We had heard rumors about other performances. We knew that we would be entertained with good and bad performances. We knew that we would be entertained by an enthusiastic crowd.
Years ago, my wife was the news editor for the newspaper in the small town where we grew up. Being news editor for a paper like this meant that she covered a variety of events. If a story was going to be written about an event in our county, she almost always was the person going to the event to cover it. She went to city board meetings, fires, automobile accidents and lots of sporting events. I went with her many ball games and other gatherings that were more entertaining. We went to the county-wide NAACP banquet at least two years in a row. The first year we went it was 1992, an election year. Our local congressman was retiring and several of the candidates running for his seat attended this banquet. I spent time with several of the candidates. I watched the man that eventually won spend no less than five minutes trying to pick up a penny from the floor in the cafeteria of the county high school where the event was held. There was a meal, entertainment and a speaker. Also at the end of the event, they gave out door prizes.
I would like to be able to say that I was a fan of Saturday Night Live from the very beginning. In the fall of 1975, I was 13 years old. It was also the days of no cable and only 3 networks. I regularly studied the TV Guide for information about all shows, especially the new shows for the season. There were two shows beginning that fall that had “Saturday Night” in the title. The one that I was really interested in was called “Saturday Night Live”. Actually the full title of the show was “Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell”. I remember seeing the premiere, which was on September 20, 1975. I don’t remember the cast of regular comedy performers on the show, which included Bill Murray. The main thing that I remember about the show was that it included the highly touted first American performance by a Scottish Group called the Bay City Rollers. They were being promoted as the next Beatles and this performance was supposed to be the equivalent of the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed their song “Saturday Night” enough to buy the 45. But Howard Cosell was no Ed Sullivan. And The Bay City Rollers was the high point in the run of the show. It was soon obvious that whatever CBS was showing before Mary Tyler Moore/Bob Newhart/Carol Burnett line-up was preferable to Howard Cosell.
This past weekend, I did special music during the worship service at the church I attend. Most of the time I do special music, I just sing one of my songs. I try to select a song that relates to the scripture lesson for the service or at least the theme for the service. This Sunday, I chose to go with a theme that related to the passages from several recent Sundays and sessions from other programming.
I wore an old pair of jeans, sneakers, my oldest, favorite sweatshirt and a 2014 Elvis Week ball cap. I told everyone that my wife asked me before I left the house, “Why are you dressed like that?!?” I told her that I was going fishing.
“I’m sure the Huntsville has many fine hotels. This is not one of them…”
In June of 2011, I took a trip to Huntsville, Alabama. There were several odd things about the hotel and the neighborhood where we stayed that I recorded in a series of posts on Facebook. The quote above is the first post that made on this trip. There were several reasons for this.
We had a hard time booking a hotel room for this trip. There was some sort of soccer tournament going on in Huntsville that week that had all of the nice hotels booked. We were going to be in Huntsville for two nights and couldn’t find a place with available rooms for both nights other that one hotel that I was not that excited about. I showed pictures of this hotel to the guy that I was travelling with. He said he had good experience with this hotel chain in other cities and thought we would be ok. We weren’t.
I have used a Franklin Planner since the late 1980’s at work. I use it to keep up with appointments and tasks for work activities as well as my personal life. Over the years, I have come to rely on computers and tools like Outlook to manage my time but I still carry a planner. I still find it useful and enjoy going back to look at my past.
Most of the years, I have used the standard green shaded pages with a daily quote from some noteworthy person at the top of the notes page. In the late 1990’s, the Franklin Planner people made available filler pages that featured Dilbert comic strips. This was right around the time that Dilbert was possibly at the height of its popularity. I read it regularly and it was one of my favorites. I think the Dilbert planner fillers were available for two years and I used them both years. At the end of 1999, I was ready to purchase my planner filler for 2000 and found out that Dilbert pages were no longer available. I enjoyed having something other than the standard green fillers but very few of the ones available for 2000 appealed to me. The cartoon related fillers they carried that year didn’t appeal to me. The only licensed product filler that appealed to me was the ESPN planner pages. I’m not a big sports fan, but I thought it might be worth checking out at least for a year.
