Old Photo of the Day.....

Yeah, begs to ask Why the hell would I post such an unflattering picture? or maybe What was I doing wearing pants that short?  Well, it was sometime around 1990, by the ages of my nieces and nephew.  Maybe earlier.  If I recognize the background, this was taken on an old bridge on the road between Capitol Reef and Hanksville, headed towards Lake Powell.  The back row is my older brother and myself. The next row is my older brother's wife, his oldest daughter and the two Gearheads. In front is the only other niece I had at the time and my nephew (who happens to be Naptime Nostalgia's husband now). Some pictures should never see the day of light.  But it has such pretty colors.

Where did all the 2 door sedans go?

When I bought my last car (used) I wanted a sedan with AWD and a manual transmission, and in order to get the latter two I had to settle for a wagon. Then I started my Master's program and promised myself a new car if and when I ever got done.   I figured get my degree, get the raise that accompanied it and pick up a the sedan I really wanted.  Considering the current economic situation, this is a good time to get a new car, so I started looking.

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Now you look out at the sea of new cars and figure man, there's a ton of choices, the selection is better than ever!  Yeah, if you want an SUV or a 4 door sedan.  Not if you want a 2 door sedan.  I went to the NADA site and searched for 2 door sedans and came up with two. 2. A Ford Focus for $18,000 and a Bentley for $341,000.  Not the selection I expected.

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I remember the time when pretty much every basic car came in at least 3 different iterations; 2 door sedan, 4 door sedan and a wagon.  This included both foreign and domestic cars.  In many cases there were even more choices, adding on the 2 door hardtop, 4 door hardtop and sometimes the all exciting fastback. 

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There are a slew of coupes, the modern day version of the fastback, but they are all their very own model and few have a sedan version.  Sedans are 4 door, coupes 2 door and no longer the twain shall meet. 

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I don't think I'm going to buy a new car.  None of the coupes (that I can afford) attract me and if I'm gonna be stuck with 4 doors, I might as well stay with the Subaru wagon.  Guess I'll just have to find a '71 LTD 2 door to add to the collection instead......

Match Game 2009.

We had an assembly today, honored the students who earned Academic Letter sweaters.  Since we don't have competitive sports at our school, the faculty decided to work this out so the students could "letter" in academics.  Out of a student body of 350, we honored our first 4 students.  Now, to make the assembly a little more fun, we surrounded the awarding with something from the Dance Company and our own version of the Match Game.  The basic rules (for those of you who don't remember) are that we are given a sentence with a blank in it, such as (this was one of ours) "Eric got kicked out of the department store for giving all the mannequins a _________." A panel of 6 celebrities fill in the blank and then the contestant comes up with their own answer and gets points for each celebrity answer they match.  (Answers were kept relatively clean, such as "kiss", "foot massage" and "wedgie".)

Well, I was on the celebrity panel, and the subject of one of the sentences. "Mr. Rossi is going to star in a new soap opera called The Old and the ______less."

• I came up with clueless,
• the History teacher came up with pointless,
• the English teacher came up with careless,
• the Science teacher came up with womenless,
• the Counselor came up with gutless,
• the ISS guy came up with toothless,
• and the student contestant came up with useless.

It's a good thing I didn't go into this job looking for an ego boost.

Good Garbage

I routinely find trash in front of my house. From empty beer cans to half empty KFC cups, people just can't seem to carry their trash all the way home. Today, as I went to pick up my newspaper from the end of the driveway, seeing some paper laying down by it I thought "another slob leaves their mess for me to clean up." As I leaned down to pick it up and realized what it was, I thought "This kind of mess, I'm happy to have to pick up."

Yeah, it's only a $5 bill, but at 6 am when the two cups of coffee have yet to kick in, it's quite a find. Just enough to start the day off on a good note.....

Patrick

Decorating Style.

I took a little test on decorating style over at Naptime Nostalgia, and wasn't too suprised with the results. According to Sproost, my decorating style is

• 43% Mountain Lodge,
• 33% Arts & Crafts and
• 24% Southwest.

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And I thought it was just Cluttered and Random.

Old pictures of the day.

Camping at Lake Powell, like much of Southern Utah, used to be a lot of fun.  Then, about 10 years ago the rest of the world discovered it and ruined it for those of us who have been enjoying it since the mid 70's (and before).  Edward Abbey knew this and was smart enough to die before it happened.

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Anyway, it was about 1979, I was working at Free Wheeler Pizza and had just bought my first brand new car.  The 1979 Mazda GLC Wagon you see below.  ($4,500 with tax & license).  Free Wheeler decided to shut down the store and have a company party at Lake Powell.  This was not an unusual thing, Free Wheeler would open 2 to 3 hours late so we could all play in the company football team up at the U.  So my best friend Ed, another worker (Kathy if I remember correctly), her dog and I packed all our stuff into my great little car and headed down.  You may or may not have heard of the Burr Trail, in '79 it was 100 miles of dirt road between Capitol Reef and Bullfrog, through an area called Waterpocket Fold.  The road  was on the map, even showed the town of Notom about 15 miles down.  I'd always  wanted to drive down Waterpocket Fold, so we decided to make a day of it and go down the dirt road rather than take the longer (distance, not time) highway route.  I had about a quarter tank of gas and planned on filling up in Notom.  We get about 20 miles down the road without any sign of Notom, stop at wash that crossed the road to determine if the car was going to make it across and take a break.  While we were stretching our legs a ranger comes from the other side, says "howdy" and we get to talking.  I was a little concerned about how deep the wash got, since I didn't have 4WD I didn't want to get stuck, but the ranger assured me the car would make it through fine.  The I ask "How much further to Notom?"  Notom, well, Notom's about 5 miles back.  "Five miles back?" I sez, "All I saw there was a clump of trees."  Yup, that's Notom.  Nice, it's just a farm, no gas station.  Well, it's 75 miles to Bullfrog and all I've got is 1/4 of a tank of gas.  I ought to turn back, go to Capitol Reef and fill up, right?  Yeah, right.  I'm 19, Ed's 19, Kathy's maybe 21.  No way we're going back.  Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead.  Now, 50 miles later we come over a little hill.  The road goes down, through the wash again and up another hill.  On the other side of the wash, on my uphill side, are three Jeep's parked at the side of the road.  The guys are out locking in the hubs, getting ready to forge this huge river when they see that overloaded Mazda come over the hill.  I could hear them chuckle.  I came to a stop, surveyed the situation, determined the wash was no deeper than the spot we went through earlier, hit the gas, come screeming down the hill, splash through the water, continue straight up the hill and over to the other side.  Laughing all the way, 'cause you should have seen their faces.  Jaws on the ground, eyes wide open in disbelief.  Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about the gas situation at that moment.  As for the gas, we did make it to Bullfrog.  Put 11.9 gallons in an 11.5 gallon tank.  Drivin' on fumes I was. 

The contrast between the red rock canyons and the blue water is beautiful.

This is Al, Mitch and Mike, the original owners of Free Wheeler Pizza.

Todd

Old photo of the day...

In honor of my little brother's birthday, I chose this as the "old photo of the day". It's from the Motel West BBS days, back around 1987. He, his wife, another friend and I rented a house out in West Valley City, it became the Motel West hangout. To this day we refer to it as "HQ". Those were fun times, people coming and going at all times, like freakin' Grand Central station. Nobody bothered calling to see what was going on that night, they just showed up. One of my funniest memories from that time was when we had a water fight with the neighbor kids. The kids had the hose and some buckets or something like that outside, and the "adults" were throwing water at them from inside the house. We got soaked. They got soaked. The house got soaked. Fun times.

In the picture below are (by their screen name);

Sitting up : Your Conscience, Sir Duke, White Lioness, Ed Broadbent, Professor Faust.

Laying down : Frankie the Z

The head you can just barely see, underneath everyone else : The late, great Mr. Coffee.

Danny

Old Photo of the Day

The last time I went to Yellowstone Park was back around 1980, in the picture is (left to right) my sister, my older brother, my oldest niece and my brother's wife.  We stayed in a campground despite bear sightings in the neighborhood, and instead of preparing a legal brief, we planned out exactly who was going to grab the child and which door of which car we all were going to get into in the event a bear showed up.  I remember we left the cars unlocked with the keys in them for a quick getaway.  My, how times have changed since then.

More cute email pictures

I've always loved the William Tell Overture....

Old Picture of the Day

This is a picture I took of the Salt Lake City skyline, sometime right around 1980.

Ya picked the wrong day...

to miss class.  I was the only one of the Triumphant Trio of IDET that showed up to class today.  One was sick, the other, well, as I told the professor, had something else she had to do.  Anyway, it was an easy day at class.  This professor usually takes the entire 3 hours for lecture and in class work, the only way we get a break is to just take it.  But not tonight.  She only lectured for 45 minutes and then let us work on our Design Brief, which was what the lecture was on.  We didn't even do the class discussion on the readings for this week, we're going to discuss them and this weeks next time.  Anyway, I hope the one of you is feeling better and the other one enjoyed Maui.  See ya next week.....

Another member joins the cast.

At 3:49 this evening another person joined the cast of my life.  My niece Jenn gave birth to her and her husband's second child, another daughter.  Congratulations.  They named her Sage Harper and she came into the world weighing 6lbs & 15oz.  According to my older borther (her grandfather) she is awake, eyes open, apare and wondering who all the people hovering over her are. 

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Welcome to the family, Sage.

Old Picture of the day.

This must have been taken sometime in 1980, by the size of my older brother's family.

• Back row - left to right - My mother, my dad's father, my little brother, my dad's mother and her sister.
• Middle row - my sister, my older brother with his son on his knee and my dad.
• Front row - me, my sister-in-law and right in front of her my oldest neice.

Generations.

Got this in an email and just had to share.

You learn something EVERY day!
I've always wondered about this myself. Now I know!

• The Silent generation, people born before 1944.
• The Baby Boomers, people born between 1945 and 1962.
• Generation X , people born between 1963 and 1979.
• Generation Y, people born between 1980 and 2001.

Why do we call the last one generation Y?

I did not know, but a cartoonist explains it eloquently below...

I'm gonna bore you with old photos.

I'm still going through my old photo CD's, dating back to '97 (with pictures even further back), and I'm getting close to done. So, expect to see a few of them up. First up; the house. I found a great old cache of pictures of my house dating back to the mid 90's, showing pretty much the way it looked when I bought it. (If I ever find the original appraisal papers, you'll see it exactly that way). So, here's my house through the years:

The only change I had made before taking these first two was to cut down the bush in the middle of the lawn. You can see the stump in the picture, and it it still there now, just with a wagon wheel in front of it. You can, sort of, see the front porch is still just cement, you can't see how badly in need of repair it is. Because of the bush you can't tell, but there was no railing around it. These were taken sometime before 1997.

Here is the first iteration of the front porch. Instead of repairing the concrete, I just covered it with a wood porch, kind of like a redwood deck over it, and added the wood steps over the concrete ones. I also added a railing around it. This one was taken on April 24th, 1997.

Here the porch is the same, but you also can see the yard without the fence around it. I originally added the fence because people from the apartment next door liked using my front yard as a shortcut to the bus stop.

By 2003 I had addded the fence to the yard, and sort of a boardwalk over the front path, which you can't see because of the snow. I had also, by request of the post office, moved the mail box from the front porch to the fence right by the sidewalk. (They paid for the new mailbox and it's installation).

The big change happened in the summer of 2004. The boardwalk came out, the wood porch came off and the lawn got covered over with woodchips. My older brother helped me fix the cement on the porch and cover it with slate tiles. I also extended the front porch out, and between it and the wood chips, completely covered the old walkway. I also removed the bush blocking the front porch and most of the abundance of overgrown bushes in the corner of the yard. Oh, and in case you didn't notice, I painted the house a different color also. I took some redrock from the Moab area and had Home Depot scan the color and make paint for me. The color of the house didn't change between the two pictures, it's just the lighting.