My wife Samantha makes handcrafted soap and candles and she opened up her own retail shop in Bellevue KY this week. I have to say that it looks great, in part because I designed it, but also because she told me how she would like it.
Here are some photos of me building the display counters, the inside of the shop as we got it ready and the opening night.
[Samantha, I am very proud of you for having the courage to do this!]
I decided to start off the day of the 14th wedding anniversary but getting up very early and putting down some weed-n-feed on the lawn since it was very wet with morning dew. In the process I slipped and fell dumping a 1/3 of the fertilizer on the lawn. Knowing that it would burn the grass, and still needing to finish the rest of the lawn with what I had, I put on some disposable gloves and scooped up what I could. When I was done – and being in a hurry to get the hose and wash off the fertilizer I couldn’t get up – I ripped off the gloves and threw them up the hill near the house, then finished with the yard.
Later that night after dinner with my Samantha I was walking the dog when I noticed that my wedding ring was not on my hand! I am also very careful with it if I ever take it off so I know it had fallen off somewhere, and that was when I remembered the gloves in the yard.
I went to Art’s Rentals and got metal detector and looked for it for about an hour without any luck. I kept getting false positives (beeps when there was nothing there) and was thinking that I needed a reference point to set the sensitivity. So disappointed, I went back to work thinking that I would try again when Sam gets home so I can set her ring on the ground and get a reference.
Well I was sitting at my desk and Samantha came up and asked me if I was cranky and I told her I wasn’t, it’s just that I was really busy. Then she held out her hand and gave me her ring and said “thanks”. As I put it on my little finger she said “Is that all, just ‘Thanks’?” as I noticed that either my fingers shrank more than I thought or it was my ring! And it was mine! She was untangling the dogs lead from the bottom of the stairs outside when she spotted it. Whew (pt.2).
The interesting thing is that last year the same thing happened, but the roles were reversed. She lost her ring for about three days and had no idea where it could have gone. I was sitting outside on the deck with her having “Mommy-Daddy Time” and we were talking about it when I glanced down under the table and saw her ring sitting in the patio umbrella stand’s ironwork. She said she twists and plays with it around her finger as kind of nervous habit and remembered hearing it drop, but because we were talking about something intensely she didn’t think to look. It was just pure luck that I saw it. Whew (pt.1)
With apologies to Bruce Brown, John Van Hamersveld and Bob, I mashed up my own Wordpress theme. Nothing fancy, but I wanted something that i could identify with.
Back in the the summer of 1990 after I got out of the Navy I lived in Pacific Beach in the 900 block of Tourmaline, two blocks away from the famed longboard haunt Tourmaline Surf Park. I had a 9′6″ Prodonovich longboard that I rode there and at Wilbur & Law streets. It was a summer of joblessness, surfing, sleeping in, getting drunk at Kahuna’s and general slackerness. Everyone should have at least one summer of complete irresponsibility I think. A lot of kids today are taking a gap year and I took a gap summer.
I had three friends as roommates in a one bedroom crash pad and there were at least three or four more guys who would come over on the weekend and sleep on the floor. In fact there was so little room in that apt that we had to strap our surfboards to teh ceiling. How my wife Samantha (only my girl friend for 6 months) stood it I’ll never know.
We all obsessed over the movie Endless Summer and think that we wore out two VHS tapes of it. Every once in a while someone would have a joint and we would just melt into the couch while we watched it and the sea breeze cooled the evening air. It is a great movie, complete with the Hang Ten clothing and 60’s haircuts. Some of the antics were corny, but those two guys Mike Hynson and Robert August (as well as Bruce) sure must have enjoyed living that adventure as much as we loved watching them do it.
Michael hung out in PB and I remember reading an article in the Reader about him. He didn’t fair so well in life. Kinda like my friend Dan I guess.
Mike Hynson is still alive, still shaping great surfboards. He was the one that went way druggie and spent time in jail. He has a reputation for being a jerk.
Robert August went the other direction and is highly regarded as a decent fellow.
Both are still surfing.
*Snaps to my friend JWL for that tidbit
No matter. Times like that only need the positive reflections and that summer of mine did seem endless.
In my youthful Navy days there was a guy that I had the greatest time with, Dan Haywood. He and I were roommates, drinking buddies, motorcycle companions – best friends. He made my laugh, and sometimes cringe. He was the best man at my wedding, and the reason I met my wife Samantha.
And he always seemingly had a lot of bad luck, though mostly he made bad decisions.
We all make bad decisions. I should have bought a house in San Diego in the 90’s instead of living on the beach for eight years. I should’ve studied Calculus and Physics harder. I should have left home to go to school in the 80’s. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things, but most of them were kind of “big picture” mistakes and the kind that you learn from. Whatever, possesses Dan into doing some of the things that he still does eludes me.
He is a drunk. Now, that’s not really a bad thing for some people. I know plenty of drunks that are doing fine. My Uncle George who lives in Victoria Canada and makes his own wine said to me one visit “I’m just a old drunk”. Of course we were both pissed at the time and I have no idea why he said it (maybe just to be funny in a “old guy set in my ways” way), but I never though of him as a alcoholic. And maybe that’s the point, he isn’t one.
Dan is. He’s had multiple DUI’s and even spent time in jail for them. The last time he confessed that he went to jail for a DUI I told him that I was glad that happened. At that time I had a daughter who was only 3 or so and I said that I didn’t want her on the road with someone like him. I don’t want to sound prudish, we all have at one time or another had too much to drink and still drove home, but how many times do you have to do that before you get caught two or three time? Answer in case you thick – too damn many.
Dan also doesn’t like authority. I am not really sure why. Maybe he got caught too many times doing something stupid, or maybe his Mom of Dad were too harsh on him when he was little (they are divorced and I know that was hard on him). I guess no one really likes a policeman until you need one.
And so comes his latest foray into stupidity. He lives on his 25′ Catalina sailboat somewhere in Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis (he claims the cove he stays is in Scooter Libby’s backyard, somehow appropriate). Well, forever getting drunk with some other dumbass this time he thought that he would try to swim away and hide from a rent-a-cop. you can read the article that made the front page of the Annapolis Chronicle here.
If it weren’t for the fact that I know Dan, if I had read this in my local paper I would have thought “what in the world is this guy thinking?” But, that is the answer – he wasn’t/doesn’t.
I talk with him on occasion (when he’s not in jail), and I do love him. I just wish that he would move up into the mountains in a cabin that would withstand winters, and he wouldn’t have any people around him to set him off.
More later, I guess (hope).
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