Journal: Tricycles, Loaders, & Jeeps

It went on raining last Tuesday, as it had been doing since Sunday.  I did the laundry... a bit of cleaning in the kitchen... and then finally finished a webpage on my quilting website, adding all my pantographs, and the prices of each:  Pantographs, Sarah Lynn's Quilting

I should’ve finished that webpage years ago...  Or maybe not.  Years ago, I wouldn’t have known as well which pantographs work well, and which ones I never want to do again – unless by some miracle I find myself with a computer-driven longarm.

That done, I went back to scanning photos.  It’s a looong project, yessirree, but I’ve been wanting to do it for years, and what better time to do it than right now, when all the quilt shows have been canceled?

Here are a few from a funny series with Caleb, 7, and Victoria, 4, having a race at Pawnee Park.  Caleb always slowed down so his little sister didn’t get left too far behind, and sometimes he even let her win.  In this set, he wound up tripping and falling ker-splat, after all his gallantry – and his little sister couldn’t keep from laughing.  😅

The things we did in all these pictures don’t seem all that long ago, and yet Caleb and Victoria are both all grown up now, married, and with their own sweet little ones!

Victoria loved to ‘race’ with Caleb, who is 3 ½ years older than she is.  At this age, I suspect she really had no idea that her older brother slowed his pace in order to let her keep up.  And no, I didn’t tell him to do that; that was just the way he was.

But note those last two shots, where he thought he’d pull a fast one, whirl around and take off again – and things didn’t quite pan out.  😂

Wednesday, I scanned these photos from May 2001.  Beside me are Hester, Lydia, and Caleb, and Victoria is in the front.

Friday afternoon, I took Loren a supper of a tall hamburger made with Black Angus burger, lettuce, romaine tomatoes, sweet relish, mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard on a toasted whole wheat bun, a vegetable mixture of green beans, peas, corn, and carrots, Chobani Greek strawberry yogurt drink, Dannon blueberry yogurt, and a banana.

Home again, I paid a few of Loren’s bills, then went on scanning photos.  I really don’t see how I can get them all scanned in time to give those thumb drives full of photos to the kids for Christmas.  But I’m working as fast as I can!

Do you ever hear ad jingles that you don’t like – but can’t stop remembering?  The McDonalds jingle bothers my musical sensibilities.  The ads themselves are usually okay (stupid, but okay), but that jingle!  I don’t care if it’s done with a xylophone, or an opera singer, or a mandolin; it’s totally grating.  You know the tune I mean?  If it’s in the key of G flat (which it sometimes is), the notes would be G flat, A flat, B flat, E flat, D flat.  They do vary it once in a while to A flat, B flat, B, E flat, D flat.  Or maybe it isn’t supposed to be varied, but someone is just singing off tune.  Both versions are baaaaad.

McDonalds never makes an ad without that stupid little tune in one form or another, whether by fife, tuba, bagpipe, spoons on water glasses, bows on saws, or human voice, ugly or nice.  Simply typing ‘McDonalds jingle’ makes the thing play in my head, now with the most recent ad, which features an old man humming it in a hoarse voice, “Buh, buh, buh, buh-buh!”

Aaaccckkk.

I scanned this picture and sent it to Keith, asking, “Remember when you pulled this picture out of the garbage where I’d tossed it and ‘fixed’ it?  Made us laugh so hard.”

My camera had focused on the background, thus causing Keith to be blurry and the flash to go off way too bright, totally obliterating his face.  He pulled out a crayon and got busy, adding in eyes and mouth, and shadowing the ears.

It looked so funny, I put it right into the photo album.

Here are Keith and Hannah at Christmastime, 1985.

I found a few of the five older children’s class photo cards from West Park School, where they went before we had our church school.  There are thumbnails of all the students and the teacher.  I’m glad I wrote their names on the cards; it’s surprising how names fade into the mists, when once I thought I could never possibly forget them.

My Kindergarten teacher – at West Park, the same school our children attended – got married in the middle of the year, and we had to learn a whole new name for her.  I don’t remember her maiden name, but her married name was Mrs. Babst.  I really liked her.  She taught us The Hot Dog Song, after all!

 

I know a wiener man;

He owns a wiener stand;

He sells most anything,

From hotdogs on down;

Someday he’ll marry me;

I’ll be his wiener wife;

Hot dog!  I love that wiener man!

 

I sang it very quietly and sedately in school; I was shy!  But when I got home, mind you, and sang it to my parents, I belted it out with full gusto and vigor.  🤣

Upon telling this to Keith, he said, “I feel like I remember Grandpa singing that song to us as kids... or was it just you?”

It’s quite possible my father did sing it to the kids.  I only had to sing it to him once or twice, and he had it all down pat.  Daddy could memorize things at the drop of a hat, and never forget them.  He knew a great deal of the Bible by heart, and knew right where a passage was located, too.

When he was 5 years old, his Sunday School teacher gave the children a poem on Easter Sunday.  It was a full page long.  He had it memorized before the following church service was over.  “But I have no idea what the sermon was about!” he’d laugh, telling us this story.

Why did I never write that poem down??  I remember very little of it now.  I don’t believe Daddy ever quoted the entire thing right through, but he’d often rattle off a verse or two, if the words happened to ‘fit’ the occasion.  Let’s see what I can recall:

 

It’s raining too, I do declare; there are dandy raindrops in the air!

(and sometimes, ‘dandy puddles everywhere’.)

The ducklings rushed out in the yard, and laughed to see it rain so hard.

The wind, it blew; it blew so hard, it blew Dab’s hat into Dolly’s yard.

Said she, “Why, I believe this hat was meant for me, for it fits quite perfectly!”

 

That’s it; that’s all I can remember.  I did an online search... but Mr. Google has not heard of the poem.  The search function on various poetry pages yielded nothing helpful.  Who knows, maybe the Sunday School teacher herself wrote the poem, and the only airing it ever got was when she handed it out to the five-year-olds in her class!

Here are Dorcas and Teddy, Christmastime 1985.

Speaking of rain, at about 9:30 p.m. it was suddenly pouring rain, thunder crashing.  WeatherBug right that minute was saying, “Slight chance of rain before midnight.” 

It rained almost every day last week. The cats go outside (though they don’t need to, as there are litter boxes in the laundry room and in the garage, and they have access to the garage via a pet door)... they get all wet... and then they come back in, stare at me reproachfully, and loudly demand, “MeeeeeOWWWWWW!!!” – which I’m fairly certain means, “Turn it off!!!” Teensy always wants up on my lap, to dry off and warm up his cold, wet little feet.

“No, stay down!” I tell him, holding up a hand like a traffic cop.  “You’re all wet!  Dirty!  Icky!  Yuck!”  I make a big production of dusting off my skirt, if he has put a paw on it.

He looks at me.  Of all the noive.  Then he takes himself off a little distance and conducts thorough ablutions.  Isn’t it amazing how cats’ tongues can be either sponges or squeegies, whichever they deem necessary at the moment?

When he thinks he’s all dry and clean again, he comes back, sits beside me, and requests, “Mrrrowpprrrrrow?”

“Okay,” I tell him, “Jump up.”

And up he comes.

They say (whoever ‘they’ are) cats can learn 25-35 words, while dogs can learn an average of 165 – with the really smart ones learning up to 250 words.  Well, I personally think cats can learn at least 100-150, but simply prefer not to let us know they can.

Here’s Joseph in early Spring of 1986.

This album started with several pages of me as a baby and toddler.  My sister Lura Kay, 20 years older than me, is holding me in this picture.  She made me that cute little sailor coat, and under it is a matching dress.  I remember it well, for I loved it, and I loved those little white gloves, too.

With WeatherBug still proclaiming that ‘slight chance of rain up until midnight, then a chance of rain after midnight,’ it went on pouring rain and thundering.  At 10:00 p.m., hail started coming down.  It was a slushy hail, and soon it was about two inches deep on the front porch.

A couple of hours later, I was sitting in my recliner, laptop on lap, when a mosquito went sailing past!  It always seems so odd when, right in the middle of nearly-insectless weather, a mosquito comes visiting.

Saturday afternoon, about half an hour before I usually call him, Loren showed up to inform me, “Your Jeep needs the oil changed, and the dash is displaying something else that needs to be done, too... and I thought you’d want to have Larry take care of it.”

This confused me, because my Jeep is indeed displaying a ‘Needs Oil Change’ notice on the dash, along with a ‘Service 4WD’ notice and a few other odd things; but ... how would Loren know?

I looked at him.  He looked back.

“My Jeep?” I asked.

He nodded.  “Yes, it’s right there on the dash of your Jeep,” (with an expression indicating that he wondered why I hadn’t done something about it already).

“What Jeep are we talking about?” I asked.

He laughed.  “Your red one!”

Oh. 

“That’s your Jeep!” I said, and he laughed, like I’d cracked a funny.

I asked who usually changes his oil.  “Does Jerry do it?”  (Jerry is Larry’s cousin’s husband, who owns an auto repair shop.)

This puzzled him a bit.  After agreeing that Jerry does it sometimes, he then got Larry and Jerry’s names (and maybe their entire personages) mixed up. 

He laughed again, “Well, they do rhyme!”

I promised to tell Larry about it, saying that Larry was working (this always amazes him) and might not be able to do it that day, but probably can in a couple of days.

Loren thanked me, explaining that he doesn’t really feel up to changing oil himself anymore.  He was a bit hoarse, and being out in the chilly wind makes it worse.

Larry later told me that Loren has always changed his own oil, which explains why he couldn’t really remember Jerry doing it. 

I considered giving Loren the new insurance cards I’d just received for his vehicles; they were right there on the table.  But then I thought that might confuse matters all the more right then, since it says “c/o Sarah Lynn Jackson” under his name.  Maybe Larry can sneak them into the proper glove compartments when he goes there to change the oil.

Loren noticed right away when the registration paper for his camper said “c/o Sarah Lynn Jackson”, and wondered why it said that.

Larry explained (in his usual ‘tell ’em about New York City when they ask about Los Angeles’ way), “That’s so that when you die, the state won’t take everything.” 

Aaarrrggghhh, Larry, aaarrrggghhh.  🙄  Nice mix of apples and oranges there.

Larry thought it was a dandy explanation, since Loren didn’t ask anything else, and ‘seemed satisfied’.

“He wasn’t ‘satisfied’!” I exclaimed.  “He was just so bumfizzled by that ‘explanation’ that he couldn’t at all form another question; he probably didn’t even know what the subject was, anymore!  And he didn’t want you putting him even closer to the grave with some incomprehensible follow-up explanation.”

Larry, of course, laughed.

On the other hand, is that why Loren thought his Jeep was mine?

I noticed yesterday that there are multiple broken branches in our big sugar maple.  We should really take that thing down before it lands on the house.  But... I like it!  And so do the birds and squirrels.  It arrived out here at our country house as a one-inch, two-leaf sprig in the middle of the irises I’d dug up at the house in town and transported out here.  The sprig came from a tree at my sister Lura Kay’s house next door to us there in town.  I extracted the itty-bitty thing from the irises, planted it – and in 18 years it has grown to about 75’ tall.  Our son-in-law Jeremy, who owns a tree-removal service, calls sugar maples ‘weeds with trunks’.  That, because they break easily in high winds or ice storms – and we have both, fairly often.

Someone sent me some pages out of an old magazine the other day. 

I commented, “Hey, I need that list of 1,001 things I can get for free!”

She retorted, “They can skip the 50¢ list and just send me the 1,001 things!” 

I told her, “You’ll wind up with a gel pen with your name engraved on it (misspelled), a sheet of address labels (with a long-ago previous address), a box of expired Avon cologne samples, a small pair of round-tipped scissors (that don’t cut anything) with glow-in-the-dark handles, Oil of Olay face cream in a jar the size of the tip of your little finger, a wee bottle of lime green metallic fingernail polish (with a brush that doesn’t reach the liquid), a miniature box of Crunch Bunch Kellogg’s cereal (stale), a small magnetic-wand flashlight with someone else’s name inscribed on it, a plastic shower loofah in construction orange, a hotpad that cannot be used with anything above the temperature of 98°, and three fuzzy ponytail holders.

“You will only get the other 990 freebies if you are willing to fork over a credit card number ‘for security purposes’ (not your security, obviously).”

Here are a couple more photos of me as a toddler.

When I quit with the photo-scanning Saturday night, I was up to 14,008 photos, and close to finishing the 48^th album.  There are 78 albums to go... unless I have some with identical numbers and an ‘A’ or ‘B’ after the number.  I’ve found a couple like that, evidently because when I got a new album and went to the bookcase to see what the previous number was, the last album was out of the bookcase and I wound up with two of the same number.  Let’s blame the kids for that, shall we?  😏

Yesterday was Palm Sunday.  A young girls’ choir sang before Sunday School.  We are appreciating these things a lot, since last year our services were shut down.  It was ridiculous, really, because Covid-19 had not yet even hit our area. 

I’m just glad we have a good governor who didn’t let Big Important Hats keep us closed down.  Our state has weathered the pandemic a lot better than most, in terms of not only illnesses and death, but also economics.  For many months through the last year, we had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation.

“That’s because the buffalo didn’t know the phone number for the Department of Labor,” one of my disrespectful friends told me.

Right.  Haha.

For the last couple of months, we have tied for third lowest at 3.1%.  South Dakota has an unemployment rate of 2.9%, Utah has 3.0%, and Vermont has 3.1%, same as us.  Kansas is next at 3.2, and Idaho and New Hampshire both have 3.3.  Highest are New York and Hawaii, at 8.9 and 9.2, respectively. 

Wanna make any guesses what the politics of each of the above-listed states are?  Do I need to tell you?

After the morning church service, we took Loren a big bowl of KFC stew, a cookie, iced tea, and V8 cocktail juice.  Noticing that the Bunn coffee maker was not on his counter, I asked about it, and learned that it had quit working.  We told him we’d get him one after church that night.

After the evening service, I happened to mention the coffee maker to Hester, and she told me that they had a nearly-new Mr. Coffee they never use anymore since getting one of those fancy-schmancy Keurigs, and they’d be glad to give it to Loren. 

So upon leaving the church, we went to Andrew and Hester’s house, ate some Oreo cake she’d made, got lots of hugs from dear little Keira, and then took the coffee maker to Loren.  He was quite happy with it, and kept asking how much he needed to pay Hester.  I assured him that I’d asked several times how much it cost, and she wouldn’t tell me.  😊

The Bunn filters fit it, and he had a big can half full of Folgers coffee, so I got it all ready to start; he would only need to switch it on in the morning.  It’s like one he used to have, so he’ll have no trouble using it.

Larry put batteries in a large clock high on a wall over Loren’s refrigerator, just under his vaulted ceiling, while we were there.  He and Loren had to bring in a tall ladder from the garage in order to reach it, and then they rummaged through a large bin full of batteries to find a ‘good’ one.  I played the piano to keep them entertained while they did the job.  Or maybe it was to entertain myself.

Then off we went to Schuyler for the elusive E-85 gas.

In answer to someone’s question as to why we use E-85:  The Jeep is a flex-fuel auto.  We had no troubles with it for several years... but a couple of years ago the motor started missing and sometimes dying, even at highway speeds.  Neither Larry nor the mechanics at the Jeep dealership could figure it out; but Larry learned from online forums that some Commander owners had solved the problem by switching to E-85.  We switched – and the problem was solved.  Now and then we put in a tank of unleaded by necessity; but two or three of those in a row, and the thing starts missing again.

I hope to get a few bills paid off before the vehicle goes kaput.  We’d like a newer model of... something.  I wish Jeep hadn’t stopped making the Commander in 2010.  This has been my favorite SUV I’ve ever had.

Here are Keith, 5; Teddy, 2; Joseph, 6 months; Hannah, 4; and Dorcas, 3.  

And here’s Joseph, again at 6 months.

This afternoon, I emailed Hester: 

 

Subject:  Heavy equipment

 

Ah haff a birthday qveshun!  (raising hand)

Now, you have to promise to be honest, and just answer exactly what you think, all right?  Promise?

Okay.  Here it is:

I ordered a little loader, complete with tools to take it apart and put it back together again, for Ian’s birthday.

Problem:  The description online said it was for ages 5+ ..... but when it came, I discovered on the box that it was for ages 3+.

Figuring that any 5-year-old grandson of mine would be waaaaaay too bright for a toy for a 3-year-old, I got him something else.

Problem #2:  We have no 3-year-old grandsons, nor any 2-year-old-soon-to-be-3-year-old grandsons, nor any 1-year-old-soon-to-be-2-year-old-soon-to-be-3-year-old grandsons! 

So the question is, do you think your li’l girlchild would suffer from an identity crisis, should we give her a loader for her birthday?  (I have something else that’s pink to give her, too, heh.)  If you think a loader would be a ridiculous gift for a little girl, I can save it for possible future grandsons or great-grandsons.

You know, Steve Koch (Carolyn and Violet’s great-grandpa who owns an excavating company) gave his little great-granddaughters loaders and backhoes and suchlike for Christmas... but that’s different.  😉

Just tell me whatya druther (à la Rufus, in Gasoline Alley), and don’t be timid with your opinion!

 

                  Love,

,,,>^..^<,,,     Mama     ,,,>^..^<,,,

 

Soon she replied:

😄😄😄😄   Keira would Absolutely Love that.   She has cars and trucks that were Andrew’s that she really enjoys, and one of her favorite things to do is get little screwdrivers and go around “fixing” things.      

 

So a loader it is (along with a little pink First Bible with lots of pictures and a pink faux leather cover).  Keira will be three on April 16.

I loved tools, too, when I was that age.  One winter when my little red tricycle was downstairs in our basement where I could ride it out of the snow, I gathered up a handful of my father’s tools from the connected garage (I was out there ‘helping’ him work on a vehicle), and headed down the basement steps.

It really was amazing that one small tricycle had so many parts to it.

Some time later, I came back upstairs and asked if anybody could help me put a ‘few pieces’ back together.

I recall people looking amazed, and I remember either Daddy or Mama (or both) saying in an astonished tone, “Why, Sarah Lynn!” ... and I remember that I was sad that it took a little while for them to get the trike back together again so I could ride it; but I don’t remember much of anything else.

They probably looked at my face and thought, “Her own sin corrected her,” and Daddy was doubtless secretly as proud as he could be of his small daughter’s ‘mechanical prowess’.

Oh! – I just looked in my folder of recently-scanned photos, and whataya know, there I am on that very tricycle!  This picture was taken in my room.  It was 1963, and I was two years old.

Here’s another picture of Joseph at about 7 months.

This afternoon I took Loren deer burger meatloaf, broccoli, a banana, a blueberry streusel muffin, yogurt, and mango juice. 

He pointed out the clock that Larry had put a ‘new’ battery in last night.  It had run for about four hours, making it to 12:30, before stalling out.

This makes a very good argument against buying truckloads of batteries all at once when they’re on sale for a smashing bargain, like Loren and Janice used to do.  There’s almost always a reason for those ‘bargain batteries’ – old age being the first on the list.  Janice used to store them in the freezer, which further shortened their life spans.  To make matters worse, Loren likes to toss used batteries back in the bin with the new ones, because they just might have a little spark of life left in them, and who knows when someone might want a flashlight with a nice, soft, barely-there beam, right?

Sigghhhhh... I think I’ll send Larry back to Loren’s house with a nice, new battery.

I should start a load of clothes... wash the dishes... dust a few things...

That’s one of the chores I don’t get done nearly often enough – dusting.  Therefore, I instruct all visitors to kindly turn toward shelves and flat tops of furniture when they feel sneezes coming on, and not to block said sneeze.

Off I go to my little office!

 

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah I Can Dissemble Things Lynn          ,,,>^..^<,,,