Snap, crackle and pop

That's the sound of my bones, muscles and joints this week, like a bowl of cracklin' breakfast cereal. After who knows what caused a debilitating lower back malfunction, commonly referred to as being 'backed out' in the family parlance, slept the wrong way or something last week, I forced myself out of bed before dawn Saturday to help a group of guys finish the interior of the garage at our local meeting place. With the rain falling steadily if not hurriedly all day, it was in and out of the rain for materials and up and down ladders and scaffolds hanging insulation and sheet metal for six or so hours. Not enough to hurt most of the crew who work construction jobs all week to begin with but for irregular heavy lifters like myself, a real workout. Nothing like it to let you know it might be time to add some regular activites to the schedule to keep body parts from seizing up like an engine what ain't been oiled for a month of Sundays when it's impressed into service once in a while. Sheesh!

So 'Oldies' on the radio is sure appropriate. It's interesting how a number of the songs they play now as 'oldies' I remember hearing for the first time on the radio. Some we used to sing along with in music classes in junior high school(we called it middle school though). 'Billy, Don't Be A Hero'. 'My Eyes Adored You'. 'She's Havin' My Baby'. Imagine twenty or thirty thirteen-year-olds singing, 'She's havin' my baby!' Surreal. I remember riding the school bus from Pequea, the driver played the radio to keep us young savages soothed somewhat, hearing Ray Charles' 'Hit The Road, Jack'. I didn't care for it and my pal, Scott Bechtold, said, 'You don't like this?!? It's rock'n'roll, man!' A hoot to think of that now, 'rock'n'roll', sure.

My favorite oldies? Roy Orbison's 'Oh Pretty Woman'. I used to get a kick out of Winchester Cathedral too. That whistling melody and old-timey, nasal song style was cool, daddy-o. My folks listened to Hee-Haw style country at the time so I like some of that vintage stuff too.(Not the 'new' country, faux country I call it.)They were more than a little mortified- and my brother, the dyed-in-the-wool KISS fan, overjoyed -when I came home from college listening to Scorpions and Van Halen.

Rain on the roof...

...was a wake-up call this AM. Good thing I got most of the grass cut yesterday afternoon, looks 100% better, was becoming a wee bit wavy with the slow growing of the cooling past few weeks catching up to me. Spent the morning on a slow driving tour of the countryside around Brogue and Lucky close to the river where my folks spent their formative years, myself too for that matter. I wondered as I went along how many people still lived roundabout there who are pictured in the three old-timey school pictures I scanned off for my Mum this week. The first is from the Shenk's Ferry school in 1947, my Dad was nine! Here he is now...

And then there are pics from '50 and '51. At least one kid I know, Tim Gordon, I passed on the road this morning, in fact. He was an impish looking youngster and still looks mischievous with a twinkle in his eye but with a gray beard so that he reminds you of one of those yard gnomes! When my sibs and I were small tots he and his wife were 'Uncle Tim and Aunt Judy', my brother and I spent a lot of time traded between their place and ours along with their two girls, playing dolls as I recall. Maybe that was the germination of my own fascination with figurative playthings. I'm pretty sure that at least one of the school pictures was posed at side of the homestead-slash-country store my great-grandmother had there by the river but I don't remember my folks saying they held school there too, I'll have to ask about that.

Whirlwind afternoon in store despite the rain, doctor appointment for the wyfe, drop the girl at work, make a mail run, haircuts for the boy and I, drop him at his uncle's for a weekend hunting trip, then a casual dinner date with some friends. I guess becoming I'm anti-social in my old age, I'd rather come home and fool around in the dark of the toy cave with the radio playing 'House of Hair'. Humbug!

 

Bitter vs. sweet

As if to prove apropos the moniker of this journal, the last week or two have been a real roller coaster. Bitter is parting from a job you hated anyway, no, wait that's super-sweet. Hopefully, those left behind know how much fun I had with them that made it tolerable and, twice as hopefully, them that made it taste like a morsel of death on the days in between enjoy doing without me. Bitter, certainly, is the uncertainty of where the scratch to pay the rent, dentist and doctor and every other money-sucking facet of everyday life is coming from now. But it is sweet to contemplate the days as autumn weighs in, beautiful, sunny, breezy and cooling. Excellent, excellent weather. One of my nieces stayed over the weekend and we made a day at Sam Lewis park, frolicking on the giant rocks that jut from the ground in the most unlikely of places and collecting hickory nuts along the wooded trails. I don't know what you can do with hickory nuts? Sam has an incredible view of the Susquehanna River valley from Wrightsville to Columbia, you can spot parts of Washington Boro between the trees. I'll bet with a telescope you could see all the way to Millersville and Lancaster.

But I'm having fun with my homespun enterprise, sweet, making rubber goodies for action figure aficianados from coast-to-coast and Canada even. It's keeping me busy enough that I wonder how I got any of it done wasting eight hours a day at a real job, hmmm. My wyfe says I need a 'business plan' if I want to work for myself. I don't have a clue what that means except maybe what can I do on my own that somebody else might pay actual money to get me to do it. So I'm thinking real hard about that, Uncle Jed. You know, when I was in the fourth grade at Conestoga Elementary School, Mrs. Rankin- a formidably grandmotherly woman, not unlike the teacher in Calvin & Hobbes -drew a big, red line through the name 'Jed' when I used it in a sentence writing exercise and wrote above it, 'This is NOT a proper name!' 'Well', I protested(quite out of character for the backward youngster I was), 'It's a proper name on The Beverly Hillbillies.' While quite amusing to my classmates, that did not elicit a positive response from Mrs. Rankin and the red mark stayed. These days any oddball combination of syllables serves as a proper name. Moon Unit and Dweezil come readily to mind. Somehow I don't think Mrs. Rankin would have condoned those in writing exercises either.

Well, time to make the rubber gloves. Suh-weeet!

On the road to hell with Fred and Barney

...Hahahaha, that gets your attention, doesn't it?!? They say that particular figurative byway is paved with good intentions, I must be on it 'cause good intentions I got. They say that and they say 'No good deed goes unpunished.', right? Sometimes I think that is true enough. Try to please everybody and you're bound to get kicked in the teeth for it once in a while just to remind you that, while, yes, there are plenty of sweethearts in the general populace, some people are just bastids looking for a fight and none too particular about where they pick it. What am I talking about, you ask? Well, nothing I'd publicize more than to wax philosophical about what happens when you give an unknown a chance to prove themselves and they sneak up and bite ya where the sun don't shine. Hahahaha, take that, nasty bastids! You know who you are, I guess. Or do nasty people know they're nasty? Like Klingons. They know they're behaving badly and they revel in it. Or do your garden variety, run-of-the-mill malcontents just think they're on an even keel while everybody else is A) out to get them or B) is a natural born sucker from way back? I wonder. I suppose they have flashes of insight every now and again, momentary revelations, how might you say? -epiphanies of self-awareness, maybe? Maybe not. Probably less than anybody else at any rate. Too busy sharpening their claws.

Aaaahhhh, I just like to hear myself talk, that's all. Yadda-yadda-yadda. Yabba Dabba Doo! Bah-hah-hah-HEE-Hoooo! I could do this all night! Rock on! Optimism RULES! Oh, Mr. Sunshine, won't you sing me a song? Mr. Sunshine, shine all day long!

Speaking of The Flintstones- Remember how they used to 'Flintstone-ize' movie stars, making their names into stone age parodies? Cary Granite. Rock Hudstone. Ann Margarock. A little stretch that last one, if you ask me. Who else did they do? Tony, no, Stony Curtis. I haven't watched the show for ages, lacking cable access and too cheap to spring for it on DVD so I can't bring up any more from the morass of memory. The point is: One episode featured a cameo, not a walk-on but a ride-on, if you will, of the Bonanza guys, the Cartrocks, hahahahaha. Riding dinosaurs as horses. Now that I'd like to see again. Did they carry six-shooters, I wonder? Or maybe they had slingshots on their hips? Did they wear pants? Fred and Barney didn't, after all! Man, I'm glad it's not the stone age. I'd hate wearing a fur skirt year 'round! Hoo hoooo!

...

...I was thinking when I woke up this morning about the little railroad station in Red Lion, when I first became aware of it a local musician/entrepreneur- John Farmer, quite well-known as a local bluegrass player -was running his antique shop/music studio out of it. I was between my first and second years at Millersville, working at one of the wood shops in town and killin' time after work, waiting for a ride home and it might have been the first time I'd ventured inside when I spied my Charvel for sale. I was pretty green as a guitar player, still wonking around on a no-name hollow body clunker through a cassette player. If you plugged the guitar into the microphone input and pushed 'Play/Record' the guitar sounded through the teensy speaker, even distorted enough to get a rock'n'roll sound... sorta. I only knew the intro to Barracuda and the first lick from Sweet Home Alabama, I guess, enough to amuse myself for hours.

   399 smackers the Charvel was- John said he got it from a guy who played it in the U.S. Navy Band -and being a cautious shopper I called up the only real guitarist I was acquainted with at the time, Bob Riegel, formerly of Gimmesome Roy and Wizzard, to gimme his learned estimate of it's value. And he was a guitar wizard too, a real talent. Later on I bought an Ampeg half stack from him and when we showed up at his place to look at it he was 'foolin' around', playing along with some Triumph record, then he did a little of Van Halen's Spanish Fly for us, really impressive. Still is, I'm sure, though I haven't seen or heard from him in twenty years. Bob worked at another local wood shop at that time along with my cousin, Ronnie, and the singer/bassist in the band, Kirk Folk, and I winced every time I thought of these amazing musicians running table saws and drill presses, endangering their digits every day. Bob looked over the Charvel, sped through a coupla licks without plugging it in and said, 'Well, if you don't buy it, I'm gonna!', so I did. Later I would haunt the railroad station looking for vintage Batman toys as John and his brother, Steve, had become auctioneers and purveyors of sundry antique and collectible goods.

   Nowadays they have their business in the old Kingdom Hall in Red Lion. In fact, the sign out front calls it 'The Old Kingdom Hall Auction House'. Comical. I don't know what's in the railroad station right now.   

Rainy Days and Mondays

How many 'rain songs' are there anyway? Kentucky Rain - Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head - Rain On Me... Man, it's been a dry coupla weeks, maybe more, and now we're making up for lost time, er, precipitation. It was supposed to taper off this afternoon but decided to stay a while and set up camp, I guess. Well, it's a good thing, the grass was brown and dry and crackly underfoot. Maybe it'll green up once more and we'll get one more good mowing in before autumn really takes hold and things cool off for good.

What else is there besides weather to report? Not much. well, there's a lot to report but nothing for a public forum that calls for a certain amount of discretion regarding family details, habits, workplaces and so forth, religious persuasion and hot button topics like that. So it's more mundanities - Is that a real word? -and meaningless chatter... Made a coupla fun road trips for my burgeoning toy enterprise this past week, searching out fabrics for various getups for little plastic men. Lemoyne, home of the PA Fabric Outlet also has half a dozen music stores. We went in one because my son wanted some guitar picks of his own and a pair of drumsticks(what he's going to drum on, I'm not sure...!). Fella was demonstrating an 80s Washburn guitar, the A-20V, a nice, creamy off-white, neck-thru, I used to have one like it but in black. One of those 'Honey, look what I bought even though the rent is due and it's a week from payday' stories, seemed like the thing to do at the time. And then over to New Holland, outside Lancaster. I have more fun just browsing the fabric stores, feeling this and that, slick and textured, glossy and colorful stuff. All the bric-a-brac is neat too, cords and lace and trimming for all sorts of finery. Not to mention the buttons! The trick is thinking ahead to what you can mix-and-match with the next handful of projects or stocking up for things you haven't even thought of as yet!

Boy, it's late and I'm not going to wanna get up in the morning. I got started working on a coupla things here in the basement lab and then browsed the mighty eBay for a while. Running out of things-I-don't-need to search for and running out of steam in general.... zzzz.....

Begone, vile bugs!

Oooooh, bite my tongue next time I mention freedom from illness! This stuff is hangin' in there like a trouper. Or a trooper, one of the two. Sore throat, wheeziness, general achiness. 'Ugh' with a capital 'gh'...

But at least it leaves me enough energy to do some toy making in between narcoleptic bouts and general malaise. And entertain my brother, Brad, who stopped in yesterday with a gift of a guitar effects box. But I'm being paged now to make breakfast- even sick, I'm still the 'Breakfast King'! -so I better answer the call. More later perhaps!