Month: June 2016

Today I celebrate my dear friend, Renee, on one of her milestone birthdays, I want to share some of the fun and adventures we have had over the years. We met at The Space Between, a mid-week, 20-something gathering at Southland Christian Church.  As engineers are apt to do, we gravitated to each other, or maybe we were divinely guided, either way, the fun started immediately and has never stopped.

Here is just a fraction of the fun we have had together over the last 12+ years:

We tap into our creative side at Halloween coming up with no-cost costumes we can wear together. As engineers, we still have to be thrifty! We’ve have been the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding duo, beach volleyball players, and one year there was a biohazard theme going on at my house.

We have celebrated birthdays and weddings.

There have been bad recipe parties, progressive dinners, Oreo elections, free root beer float runs all around town, and weekly dinners together where the only rule is a new recipe must be tried and pizza is always the back-up plan.

Renee and I have met up in Huntington, West Virginia; Vasteras, Sweden; and the Noordam cruise boat in Vancouver, BC. I have visited her in Columbia, South Carolina. We have traveled to MI and NY together.

Renee invited me to Pumpkinfest one year, an annual event I always look forward to assuming Renee still invites me!

My only ice skating lesson came about because of Renee. I had a blast and know why she likes it! We have attempted “vaulting” at the Horse Park during a warm-up event prior to the World Equestrian Games. Attended musical events together. I have watched ice skating shows and routines. We have even made pretzels together. Truly I think we would try just about anything!

We have looked after each other’s houses, collected mail, checked on pets, painted, cleaned, removed wallpaper, worked in the yard, and all sorts of other chores and duties for and with each other.  I can only imagine the people we have entertained taking all sorts of crazy items down the street from one house to the other – a vacuum comes to mind as one of the items.

Renee – you are my best friend and I cherish the silly, the fun, and the crazy that happens when we get together. You have taught me how to snag a good deal, shared the best places to thrift shop, taught me that just about anything can be categorized and analyzed with spreadsheets, inspired me in your adult hobbies, introduced me to a cat with the biggest personality, and I discovered our comfort zone is huge when the two of us are doing it together. I look forward to where in the world we will rendezvous in the next 12 years. I also chuckle thinking about us as old ladies! I send you all my best today from Kentucky and wish hugs and smiles could fit in an envelope to sent through the mail. I love you my friend.

 

 

Today, on what would have been Pap’s 92nd birthday, I wanted to share a story about fifty bucks I have supposedly owed him since the day I was born.

I am the oldest grandchild on my father’s side and with that I feel like I have a particularly special relationship with my pap (grandfather). There are a couple reasons for this. To me, Pap made me feel special.  His kind words as we said goodbyes after a visit, his compliments when introducing me to friends and extended family members, his instructions to boyfriends/husband to take care of me, or the way I just “fit” in his arms for those awesome Pap hugs made me feel extra special in his eyes.  Now, I imagine each one of us grandchildren can say similar things about Pap.  But one thing that was just between us was me being teased by my pap, as long as I can remember, that I cost him fifty bucks when I was born and therefore I owed him those fifty bucks,

Since I can’t remember the day I was born, from what I have been told, this is how it all went down and why I have owed Pap fifty bucks:

Pap had a hunting camp in Tionesta, PA.  The camp was being built the year I was born. As a matter of fact, Pap was up at camp on Friday, September 23, 1977. He had headed up early and my parents were planning to join him after my dad got off work that Friday.

Let me pause here and say that my mom was pregnant and due in November.  Mom and Dad had just attended their first lamaze class the night before, Thursday, September 22. My mom had been feeling a bit crampy that afternoon and mentioned this to the instructor after class. The instructor was not concerned and my mom went home to a fitful night’s sleep.

The next morning she told dad she was ok and didn’t feel any worse and he went off to work. Mom planned on canning bread and butter pickles with a friend, Barb, that day. Barb was to cut up and deliver the cucumbers and mom was going to can them.  She wasn’t feeling great at this point, worse than the night before actually, when the cucumbers were delivered by Mike, Barb’s husband. So Barb ended up canning the pickles while mom watched and with the encouragement of Barb ended up going to the hospital.  It became apparent that I was not waiting until November to enter the world and mom had been experiencing labor.

To continue the story: due to the events transpiring back home in Butler, there was need to talk with Pap.  No cell phones back then kids, so Grandma called the state police and asked them to get a message to Pap.  A policeman drove up to the cabin and found that Pap was not there, so he tacked a note to the door with a message saying “call home immediately.”

Pap had been in Tionesta, probably for dinner, and when he returned to the cabin he saw the note and accurately thought something happened at home. His mind thought his wife or one of his children had been hurt, in an accident, or had an emergency. His first grandchild about to enter the world did not even cross his mind.

So Pap jumped back into the vehicle and drove quickly back to Tionesta to make a call home. In his haste, he blew through a stop sign and was seen and promptly pulled over by a policeman.  As the policeman wrote out a ticket, Pap explained that his reason for failing to stop at the stop sign was due to a note he found on the cabin door instructing him to call home immediately and he was concerned something had happened at home. At this point the policeman realized he was already familiar with this situation because he was the very same policeman who had delivered the note.

You would think Pap would be off the hook right? But the policeman had already started writing out the ticket and apologized to Pap saying he could not tear it up. So Pap got a fifty dollar ticket for failing to stop at a stop sign while driving to town to call home to find out his first grandchild was born.

And with this, Pap thought it quite appropriate to remind me as often as he thought of it that I owed him fifty bucks for being born because that is what I cost him.