My So Called Life

Weekend Wrap-up

/ Shane / 2 Comments

We had a weekend at home, and it felt like we got so much done! We’ve been away from home so much for the past few months, that it feels like we are always doing catchup whenever we are home. So it was nice to get some time just to sort of kick around the house for once.

Evie and I had a little baking project. We made “candy chestnuts” (a.k.a. buckeyes to everyone else). I had a stroke of brilliance combining her love of the peanut butter cups she got when trick-or-treating with the chestnuts she collected all over Paris. This ended up being the perfect recipe since A) you have to mix all the dough by hand, B) you then have to make little balls out of the dough, Play-Doh style, and C) she had fun dipping them in chocolate as well. Oh, and eating them of course. The only problem is, she figured the entire batch was for her, since she made it.

On Saturday we went to a Family Jam at music class, which is always fun because the entire family can go (usually they go when I’m at work, unless I take them for a make-up). We had a good time, as usual, but this time they were doing something different – encouraging people to bring their instruments. They started a beginner guitar class, so I figured all of those folks would go, and the Family Jam would be a pretty easy thing to do. They would probably select easy songs for the beginners, and they’d probably sound terrible, two things that would work in my favor! 🙂

However,  none of them showed up. So somehow I ended up being the main guitar person (besides the teacher of course). I’ve been playing for about 8 years or so, but I very rarely play for anyone except Sara, Evie and Oliver. Also, I usually like to play songs a time or two to get everything down, especially if anybody else is going to hear me play. Of course at home I usually play the same songs all the time, so those ones I’ve got down. So anyway, I winged it and it worked out okay. I sounded good when it counted and only messed up when it was too loud for anybody to notice anyway! It was fun. Eventually though it was a little too crazy with all the kids and stuff, so I was needed to kid-wrangle instead of play guitar.

Finally, on Sunday we went to pick up the meat order from the farm. We’re in a little buying group that buys organic meat and eggs from a farm downstate. You put in your order once a month and pick it up at someone’s house. As part of being in the group, you agree to go pick up the shipment, maybe once a year or so. This happened to be our turn.

We planned it so that we could pick it up at the farm, so that Evie could see the animals. During farmer’s market season, they’ll drop it off at the market in Chicago, although not the one by our house. Still, it’s a little closer than going to the actual farm. But someone has to take the trips during the winter, and that someone might as well be us. They had chickens, turkeys, sheep and lambs, calves, and pigs and piglets. I have to say, it was amazing the amount of room the chickens had to run around in. In chicken-selling standards, it was ridiculous! Made me feel a lot better about getting food there.

Evie liked to see the animals, but she was disappointed because she was under the impression that they would be killing the animals for our order right then and there. (Maybe she was hoping to see a guillotine in action?) She was really grilling the people who worked there on how they killed the animals, and they were obviously very reluctant to tell her. I got the impression they didn’t feel like they should tell her, either because we wouldn’t want them to, or because they just didn’t think a little girl aught to know.

This got me thinking. Obviously back in the day, when everybody was in charge of their own food, (as opposed to getting it from the grocery store) kids were around animals that they later ate, and it wasn’t weird. (Yes, my friends that live in the country, maybe you’re STILL around animals that you later eat for food (Lisa), but Evie’s not, and neither are the majority of kids). Kids are sort of a blank slate about it, until we TEACH them it’s weird to kill the animals and eat them. We’ve discussed with Evie how the sausage patties we got used to be pigs on that farm, and she couldn’t have cared less. If anything, she was MORE excited to eat the sausage.

So I guess I’ll try to do my best not to instill this disgust in her. I myself throw my hands up and shriek like a little girl when presented with any evidence that my chicken was ever anything other than a tasteless, boneless, marinated 7 pound monster-breast. So wouldn’t it be great if Evie never learned that from me? Yeah, yeah, things were better in the old days. My curmudgeony is starting to be a major theme around here.

Zounds!

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Moments ago, as the bathroom experienced an extremely rare, empty moment during the great bath hand-off (switching from Oliver to Evie), the heavy glass dome on the ceiling light worked itself loose and crashed to the ground. A big heavy glass dome gets a lot of speed falling from our super-high ceilings, and the destruction was loud, swift, and total.

I couldn’t help but think that, had it fallen two minutes earlier or two minutes later, someone in my family would be dead. (Sara says it probably wouldn’t have killed the adults at least, maybe only knocked us unconscious)

As it was, no harm, no foul, and we even have a spare globe in the basement. Makes me want to tighten all the rest of the lights though! Maybe we’re safe; I’m assuming that this one was particularly likely to come loose, since every time the upstairs neighbor flushes the toilet it sounds like someone dropped a bowling ball right above that light.

Watch your heads!

Real Life Ghost Stories

/ Shane / 9 Comments

Since my mom sold the house, I think it is safe to share these stories. Just in time for Halloween, these are real, honest-to-goodness ghost stories that happened to me or my family growing up in our house.

Let me just give a little background here. That house was haunted, no two ways about it. I used to be in my bedroom upstairs, and I would hear people downstairs, talking, walking around, etc. So I would go downstairs to see who was home and nobody would be there. Also, the basement creeped me out to no end. I was mostly terrified of the place. If you saw our basement, you would think I was crazy. It was a nice, finished basement, nice carpet, a bathroom with a shower, nice furniture, etc. It doesn’t make any sense. Therefore, I can only attribute it to a malevolent supernatural entity that wished me harm.

So, without further ado, here are 3 specific examples:

  1. The walls bleed. We never actually saw them bleed, but there were stains on the wall that would sort of start as if blood had welled out of the wall, and then the drop ran down until it ran out of liquid. Just one fat, red drop, here and there. I’ve heard all sorts of explanations as to why this could be, but none of them ever made sense to me. One common explanation was that pipes in the walls are bleeding water, and it is either rusty or just looks red. However, that room was the attic later converted over to a bedroom, and there wasn’t any reason there should be plumbing up there, because there was no running water.
  2. I once saw a man who didn’t exist. Growing up, people usually went to bed pretty early around my house. It was pretty common for me to be the last one up, because I had my nose stuck in a book that I couldn’t put down. In my room there was a little window seat by one of the other windows. At that time, I had my bed pushed into the little nook, with the window seat as my night stand at the head of the bed. When I realized that it was pretty late, I turned around and reached over my head to turn off the light. You know how when the light is on inside, but it’s dark outside, the window turns into a mirror? At the foot of my bed stood a tall man looking at me. He was neither smiling or frowning, just sort of looking at me somberly. Of course I flipped around as fast as I could, but there was nobody there. Aside from the fact that he disappeared, there was nobody awake in my house, and nobody in my family is that tall.
  3. My brother was nearly dragged off to hell. Of all the creepy parts of the basement, none was creepier than the back room. This room contained the laundry area, a workbench and a pantry where we stored canned food. I don’t know why this part was particularly creepy, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. So my mom sent my brother downstairs to get something from the pantry. Naturally he was scared, but he got the food. The lights back there weren’t on a switch, but were instead on those little pull strings. To avoid being in the dark any longer than he had to, he decided to get a running start and pull the string as he went past, once he got up to full speed. He started running and pulled the light. Right at that moment, something from under the workbench grabbed his leg. Shrieking and kicking, he pulled himself free and dove out of the room. Behind him he heard terrible crashing. He kept running until he got upstairs to my mom where he huddled at her feet, crying. When she finally got him to explain what had happened, she decided to take him downstairs to show him that he was just being silly. When they got into the back room, there were things from the workbench lying everywhere. The bench itself was pretty high, so it is unlikely he would have knocked things off, but he especially couldn’t reach the shelves which went all the way to the ceiling. He was pretty small and there’s simply no way he could have gotten some of those things down.

Anybody else have any good stories? My friend Jeremy has a good one about a teddy bear balloon that tried to swallow his soul once, maybe he’ll pop on and leave it in the comments. (I still remember it like it was yesterday, even though it must have been more than 10 years ago when he told me, but it’s his story to tell.)

A one car family

/ Shane / 8 Comments

The other day, Sara told me that her heat wasn’t working on her car. “Better get that looked at before winter,” I said. A couple of days later I drove her car to the grocery store and I noticed that the temperature gage was showing the engine getting pretty hot. Usually Sara drives the car for very short distances only, around the neighborhood, but I was on the highway here. So the first thing I did when I saw it getting hot was to turn on the heat, full blast. Of course, the heat didn’t work, so it was only blowing out cool air and not cooling down the engine. However, when it would get really hot, the heat would suddenly kick on and the engine would cool.

Now this was a bigger problem than just the heat, but the two things were obviously connected. My guess was maybe a thermostat problem or something. So I made an appointment to take it in. My mechanic is out by my work so that I can drop the car off in the morning, work all day, and then pick it up at night. This seems to be the least disruptive way to handle car problems. However, that means driving the car out 45 minutes on the highway to get there. You can probably see where this is going. The heat would not kick on and, despite keeping my eye glued to the thermostat and driving as slow as I could without being rear-ended, the car overheated and I had to pull over on the side of the highway. It took half an hour for the tow truck to get there.

It turns out that there was a crack inside the intake manifold which allowed all of the coolant to leak out (hence the overheating and no heat). This might not have been so bad, except that the leak was directly over the engine, so all of the coolant that was leaking out was being sucked into a lot of really bad places. They said it would be $900 to fix the damage they knew about, but there was a high likelihood that there would be more problems with the engine. Later, when I learned that at least one cylinder completely filled up with anti-freeze and had to be drained, I suspected that there was a high, high, high likelihood that at least some of the engine would need to be replaced.

Thus began the great debate: do I fix the car or get rid of it? The car was 15 years old and a few minor things had started to go wrong with it all at once recently, which I took as a sign. According to what I found online, it was worth between $1,000 and $1,500. If the repairs were $900+ (and maybe a big plus if the engine had to go), so it just didn’t seem like it was worth fixing. On the other hand, until the day the intake manifold cracked, it was a perfectly good car that seemed like it had some good years in it yet. Eventually we decided that it wasn’t worth keeping the car. Sara had bought it used for like $3,000 and we had it for 8 years. That seemed like a pretty good go.

I thought that making that decision meant the hard part was over, but it was just the beginning. The next question was, if we’re not going to keep it, what were we going to do with it? I didn’t want to pay to fix it and then try to sell it, because that’s a gamble: if we didn’t sell it for what we put into it, then we lost money. So instead I decided to not fix it, and try to sell it anyway. I thought if I explained the problem and set the price really low, maybe someone who could do the work themselves or get the parts for cheap might want it. I figured that the car was worth between $1k and $1.5k, so split the difference and call it $1,250. The repairs were around $900, plus a little more, so I figured the magic number was around $300 or so.

But how to get it home? It was way out in the suburbs. I got some towing estimates, and it was around $150. Our insurance would cover the original tow into the shop, but not the “convenience tow” (their words, not mine). It seemed kind of silly to pay $150 for a tow if I was only going to sell the car for $300, but I didn’t know what choice I had. Finally I called the place and said, “If I stuff it full of coolant, could I make it back to the city?” “Maybe,” he said, “Probably.” Very well, decision made. Until, that is, he called me back a little later. “I changed my mind. The leak is a lot worse than we thought. I don’t think you could make it.” This is where I learned that the coolant had filled up the cylinders. After they drained that, they put some water in to see how bad it was leaking and the water flowed right through.

Well, I still didn’t want to pay to have it towed, and they were getting antsy about keeping it on their lot any longer, so I still didn’t have a choice. I showed up bright and early the next morning, 2 jugs of anti-freeze in my hand. I figured I wouldn’t make it home, but every mile I drove was less money I’d have to pay for the inevitable tow.

“Oh, you can’t drive it, it doesn’t start.”
“Wait, what now? You said you didn’t think I could make it home, but you didn’t say it didn’t start!”
“Oh, well I thought they had got is started, but I guess they didn’t. The water we put in yesterday ran into the cylinders and hydro-statically locked them. You can’t even turn it on.”
::blank stare from me, standing there stupidly with my anti-freeze::
“Well, I guess I won’t be picking it up today…”

Ugh.

At this point, I was running out of options, so I started calling scrap yards. I found a place that would tow the car for me and give me $310 for it (above my magical $300 line). So, not only could I get about what I wanted from it, but I wouldn’t have the extra expense of towing it home, and I wouldn’t have the hassle of trying to sell it. I still debated for another day or so, after all it seemed such a shame for a car to go from perfectly fine to junked in a matter of days, but eventually I just didn’t have any other viable choice.

All of the trouble, time and effort this had cost me so far wasn’t quite over with yet, there was one more hurrah left! I needed to be at the car with the keys and title, so they could tow it away. They wanted to do it on Friday, which wasn’t super convenient for me, but I arranged to be there between 1 and 2. I would just try to bring enough stuff to keep Oliver and Evie occupied until the truck showed up.

He called at 11 and said, “Okay, I’m ready to do this.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m in the city. I have to pick up my daughter from school at 12. That’s why I scheduled it for between 1 and 2.”
“Hey, no problem,” he said in an understanding voice, “these things come up during the day. Just try to get here as soon as possible.”

Well, no, my day was all planned out. YOU were the thing that was unexpectedly cropping up! But it was nice of him for being so understanding (that was sarcasm). Nonetheless, I picked up Evie from school and we managed to make it out there by 12:30, and I gave him a call.

“Well, I’m picking up someone else right now. Let me call you when I’m coming out so that you can wait at home until then.”
“I’m already here, at the car. I came as early as I could.”
“I can be there in an hour.”

Okay, no big deal, that would put him there at 1:30, which was solidly between my 1 and 2 appointment. We brought food and stuff to do, we could occupy ourselves for an hour.

After 2 I gave him a call. I was a little steamed by this point.
“Well, sir, I just have one more pickup to do first…”
“That’s what you said last time, and that was an hour and a half ago!”
“I’m very sorry, but we’re very busy today.”
“So am I, that’s why I scheduled an appointment!”
“Towing is very unpredictable. We don’t know how long these things are going to take. That’s why I told you to wait at home until I called.”
“Then why are you picking up another car? I’ve been waiting for an hour and a half. How long has he been waiting?”
“Well, he’s very close to base, so my dispatcher told me to pick him up first.”
“Next time tell him too bad! Tell him I’ve been waiting with an infant and a toddler in an alley next to a dumpster for an hour and a half, and you have to do me next!”
“Well, I have no control over it. You’re welcome to call and complain. If you can’t wait then call back and schedule another pickup at your convenience.”
“Today between 1 and 2 WAS my convenience. THAT’S WHY I SCHEDULED AN APPOINTMENT!”

The tow truck finally arrived at 3:20, an hour and 20 minutes after the end of my appointment and almost 3 hours after I arrived. We had walked around the neighborhood, had a dance contest on a nearby stump, eaten a bagel at Dunkin Donuts, re-read the same book several times, given Oliver a bottle, played any number of games I could make up, and Oliver had even had a nap. Things were looking desperate.

Finally, Evie had said her goodbyes, the check was in my hand, and the car was gone. What a day!

So.

Thus ends the saga of the old car, and begins the new saga: finding a new car!

Originally I had figured that when Sara’s car died we would buy a van. However, we thought about it a little bit and decided we didn’t really need a van, at least not yet. There are only two times a year or so when we are hurting for space, and we’ve always managed to make do thus far. So what we decided to get instead was a very small car with great fuel economy for me to take back and forth to work. With the money we save on gas, we can rent a van twice a year.

We’re currently cross-referencing the consumer report’s reliability list with the fuel economy list and price guidelines, and making a spreadsheet. While we’re doing all the research, however, we have to figure out how to manage our hectic weekly schedule with only one car. Sara has been busy learning the bus route, and it’s actually working okay so far.

In fact, it’s working out so well that it’s got us thinking: do we even need a second car? Of course, it’s not going to be easy, but it is going to be a lot cheaper. If we could make some of the difficult things work, it could be worth it. The one hitch in our plan was that Sara had to go one day a week to another hospital, so we would need two cars for sure on that day. However, it looks like she coincidentally might not need to do that anymore. Is the universe trying to tell us something?

So, for now, the plan is to give it a go with only one car until Thanksgiving, as a trial run. Can we do it? I’m sure I will keep you posted.

Saying Goodbye to the Homestead

/ Shane / 4 Comments

The house that I grew up in is no longer in the possession of my family.

Overall I would say that it was less emotional than I would have guessed. Certainly it is weird to think I will never be back in that house again. Obviously there are so many memories, etc. But, on the other hand, I hardly went back to that house as it was. My mom had already moved, and my sister was living there for awhile, but we didn’t really go and stay there. And I guess I’m old enough to know that nothing like that lasts forever.

That being said, there have been a few times where a particular memory surfaces, or when I was driving around Fort Wayne and I thought, “Hmm, I’m never really going to need to go to that part of town again”, or drive down that street or know how to get to that particular thing, etc. It’s not just the house, it’s practically giving up my entire hometown. The parts of town I go to now look nothing like they did when I lived there. I might as well be going to a completely different place. It seems like every day that goes by, I have one less tie to home. It’s kind of weird to think about.

However, all of this minor weirdness is overwhelmed by relief for my mom.

The fact is, our neighborhood went way downhill. When we moved in, the neighborhood was full of old people. Those old people died. Some of them were replaced by good clean families like us. Some of them were replaced by low-lifes that used to live in some of the surrounding neighborhoods.

I think my mom had an overly optimistic attitude about the neighborhood; she saw the good and didn’t notice or ignored the bad. I think the neighborhood sucked, and was getting suckier by the minute. There was a drive by shooting down the street. The hotel behind us had an explosion when the meth lab caught fire. The 3 houses across the street from us all had their copper pipes stolen. The house next door was abandoned and housing meth makers/sellers/addicts. Now, the neighborhood’s not as rough as that actually sounds, but it can’t be denied that those things are facts, and those facts don’t add up to a nice neighborhood. I almost feel bad for the poor person who bought our house, because they might not realize they just bought one of the nicest, kept up places in the middle of a starting-to-be-not-that-nice neighborhood.

So I’m not trying to diss the neighborhood. It certainly wasn’t that bad when we were growing up there. The shopping center used to be a nice place (even the movie theater!) I’m just trying to say, thank god she got out when she did. I don’t see home prices rising in that neighborhood anytime soon. And lets not forget that the house across the street was on the market for FOUR YEARS. This could have gone much worse. You can see why my mom was getting nervous as it got close to the final sale. She even moved back into the house, to make sure nothing happened to it.

So, I’m sorry to see this house and all of its associated memories leave our possession, but I’m more happy that my mom was able to get out before it was too late, and get some money out of it. If that wasn’t the situation, maybe the sadness would be more of a factor, I don’t know. But as it is, I think it all worked out for the best.

(By the way, I just discovered that if you tag a post “Family”, “growing up”, “Home” and “meth” like I just did, WordPress will helpfully suggest the related tag “Washington DC”. Jeez, take that our nation’s capitol!)