My Favorite Valentine

This is a bit late in coming, but I have been super busy with the new job. Long days and long conference calls seem to sap all my energy and the last thing I want to do is spend more time with my computer. Right now, I am trying to squeeze some of this in before my next conference call.

I wanted to do a piece about my uncle. Technically he is my great uncle, but it’s kind of a lengthy title that doesn’t mean anything other than to identify him as my grandma’s brother. My uncle John lived with my grandparents for 40 years. My siblings and I grew up having him around whenever we were at grandmas. I call him my favorite valentine because his birthday is Feb 13. This year he has hit the ripe old age of 82. I suppose with the last few years taking so many people away from me, I wanted to take more of an interest in the “old guard” that’s left. Uncle John was a logical place to start.

He’s the baby in the family, the youngest of four. It was always explained to me that he was mentally retarded. If he is, I have to believe its borderline. This guy is sharp. He has a speech impediment which can sometimes make it hard to understand, but he manages to get his point across. Now that I am older, I wonder if perhaps it is more a form of autism instead, but what do I know? He is most comfortable with a set routine and environment, but I think we can all get that way.

He is enjoying his retirement at a home in Los Angeles, and what a home it is! I can’t recall which award show it is, but I think the Oscars make mention of a Motion Picture Retirement Fund each year. Apparently, the motion picture people get to have their own special retirement community too. I bring this up, because that’s where he is now. After working there for many years, he earned the opportunity to retire there. But I am getting ahead of myself. As you can imagine at the age of 82, it’s been a long road to retirement. Let me back up a bit and give you some of the highlights.

Uncle John was born in Ohio and the family lived in West Manchester where my great grandpa owned a Ford dealership. After a number of years, the family sold the dealership and moved to Florida where they bought a trailer park. Uncle John went to an Airframe and Power plant school where he earned his certificate enabling him to work on airplanes. As would be the case with much of his schooling experience, his peers would often tease him to the point of tears. The result of this teasing would be for his well meaning parents to pull him out and keep him at home.

I do find it interesting that nature often compensates for perceived deficiencies. Although he may have had some speech and/or slight learning problems, Mother Nature gave him excellent health and incredible strength. Once his long fuse had finally reached its end, Uncle John was one man you didn’t want to get a hold of you. I have personally never seen this side of him, but I have always known him to be super strong. I can imagine what it must have been like once the bullies from his past finally pushed him too far. Here is one of my favorite pictures of him with my brother.

Once his parents passed away, he moved from Florida to Plymouth, MI with my grandparents. My grandma made him a promise that as long as she had a home, he would always have a home. That promise was kept until the day she passed away in 2005. In 1966, they moved from MI to California where they remained.

Not long after moving, Uncle John started working at the Motion Picture home. He was employed as part of the kitchen staff and worked in the stock room. The orderliness and repetition of that type of work was perfect for him. He absolutely flourished in that environment and seemed to know everyone there. One of the perks of the job was coming to see new movies in the home’s personal movie theater. Every Thursday and Sunday, grandma would drop him off and pick him up from the movies. I asked her once why she didn’t stay for the movie with him. She explained that it was his time to go out and see friends and generally be independent. She didn’t want to intrude on that. Once I was old enough to drive, I would often go to the movies with him.

Sometime in the mid to late 80’s Uncle John was struck by a car while he was walking to work. He ended up with both legs broken and one of his knees was replaced. From that point on, he walked with a cane. Well, he was supposed to be using it. A lot of times I would just see him carrying the cane. I have a funny picture that shows him on a ladder with the cane hanging from one of the rungs. If the cane fell, he would climb down, pick it up and then go back up the ladder with it and hang it again.

Dad and I took a quick trip to Los Angeles to see him before his birthday. We took him out for dinner and then stayed the night so we could go to church with him the next day. The church he attends is the same church I attended any time I was in California with my grandparents. It was a fun little trip and I’m glad to see that he is doing well and really enjoying himself in his new surroundings. Here is a picture of the birthday boy with Dad.

The Week in Review- Part Two

I figured I’d better get this written while I it was still relatively fresh in my mind. This part will cover some other activities as well as goofy conversation.

Fuego!

The resort had theme nights during the week and offered some different types of entertainment for guests. The one we decided to check out were the fire dancers. This was a group of about 6-8 people who basically lit things on fire and then twirled them around themselves and each other. Since I am not about to get up and try it, I give them credit for being able to make a living out of it. However, I have to draw the line at “the band” that went along with the show.

This guy had an electric guitar that he pretended to play while the PA system played some sort of funky music. I’m still not entirely convinced he was singing either, at least not the whole time. It was weird. The group costumes bordered on fetish, which is fine with me. I assume that if you are going to set a hula hoop on fire and then dance with it, you don’t really want to wear something “that tastefully drapes your form”; you want a second skin and preferably something non flammable.

We ended up seeing this group again later when we took a trip to one of the other resorts, which is a nice segue to the next topic…

Rock the Boat!

I don’t like small boats. And by small I mean something smaller than a cruise ship but bigger than a canoe. I have tried to get over this aversion of mine and I have taken ferries to Alcatraz and to the Statue of Liberty. I hated them all. But, I decided to give things another try when we decided to take the ferry across the way to Cozumel for the day. Every night we would look out across the Gulf and see the lights twinkling in the distance. It really didn’t seem so far away. I thought it might be a bit unpleasant, but over quickly enough that I didn’t want to make a big fuss about it….

It took 30 minutes to get to Cozumel. 30 minutes. It was cloudy and windy and the water was choppy. If it had been a one way trip, things would have been manageable. But, once we finally arrived and Baby said she was feeling just as awful as I was we realized a new form of Hell existed and that we still had to make a return trip that night.

Forgetting for a moment about the return trip, we decided to try and make the best of the day. The weather didn’t really cooperate and so we didn’t end up snorkeling as we had planned. We decided to just hang by the pool and drink. ThreeL and Mimi attended a bartender class and learned how to make some fun drinks. Baby and I decided sobriety might be the wiser course for us, at least until we could locate some Dramamine.

Later that afternoon, the hotel provided us with a room where we could shower and change for dinner. They wanted to set a time limit for us of 40 minutes. Yeah, whatever. Still, we tried to stay on time with it. There weren’t enough towels, so we asked for more. What they brought to the room were 2 more bathrobes with the explanation that “they are made out of towel.” Uh-huh. But, being the resourceful girls we are, I think we managed fine. I ended up using a metal serving tray as a mirror since there were NO mirrors in the room except the bathroom.

Dinner was good. They offered a Mexican restaurant and Mimi asked for the special desert that they set on fire. The manager there made paper flowers for us out of napkins. The entertainment for the night was the fire dancers, so we felt pretty good about skipping that one. There was a house band in the lobby and they were pretty good. I loved the fact that the singer was an older lady and that she sang “These Boots are made for Walking.” So we sat there a bit and waited until it was time to head back to the ferry. Baby and I planned our drugs out to the minute so we would be ready for the return trip. The trip home was so much better. Granted, the weather was a bit calmer, but the drugs were fantastic. We even ended up on the same boat as the fire dancers.

Did You Hear That???

One of our sillier things we ended up doing all week was talking about funny movies. If I remember correctly, we started talking about Will Farrell because someone in the group had seen Stranger than Fiction. From there we ended up talking about Talladega Nights and of course, Elf. I love Elf. One of the lines we ended up repeating endlessly over the week was “Did you hear that?” which is a line from the scene where Will Farrell has downed a 2 liter of pop and then burps forever. So there was that, and giving thanks to the little baby nativity Jesus that kept us in stitches.

Who says girl talk is limited to shopping and relationships?

So, this may be it for the Mexico trip rehashing. I’ll leave you with a picture of me and my 4th place finish in the Pineapple decorating contest. Fourth place! Can’t these people appreciate the detail? Do you think its easy giving pineapple eyelashes???

Adios!

The Week in Review- Part One

Hmm. How to begin this one? I have so many notes about things that we said and did that will probably only be funny to the four of us. Still, it’s funny to think back about it all, so the rest will just have to deal. I think about the manager at the Japanese restaurant and he would say “Si, Como no?” (Yes, why not?) So, there you have it…

I Wish I Knew You

We knew going in to the week that there wasn’t going to be a lot to do in terms of entertainment. We prepared for this by each bringing a game to play. The 80’s trivia game that Baby brought was a lot of fun, but also a lot harder than I personally thought it would be. ThreeL got pounded with Sports questions. Mimi ruled 80’s TV. Mimi’s game (I think it was hers) was like Outburst except you had to sing. You had a single word and your teams had to go back and forth trying to name as many songs as you could with the word in it. The catch was that you couldn’t just name the song; you had to sing at least 6 words of it.

One of the best games was Apples to Apples. I won’t go in to the details here, but it is really fun and potentially hysterical. It does help to really know the people you are playing with, since it will help your strategy tremendously, but it isn’t necessary. We played this one a few times and I loved it. This game also sparked the phrase “I wish I knew You Better” which was funny (to us) since we have known each other since 1989.

Other than that we played cards a lot. We would just park ourselves in a lounge somewhere and drink and play for a while. We had a lot of people come up to us and ask what we were playing. And by “people” I mean men old enough to be our fathers. Given the fact that the four of us were some of the youngest people there that weren’t on our honeymoon, who can blame them for making conversation?

Senior Frog, Senior Café and Your Turkish Friend

We did venture out one night to the bar next door to the resort called Senior Frog’s. They had a live band which was pretty good and it was right on the beach. We had to buy a beer in order to claim a table, but that was fine. I think it was good for us to be able to get out and see some other nightlife than what we were doing at the hotel. This also helped us along with one topic of discussion that ran the whole week called “songs that need to be locked in a vault.” If you are thinking that another Top 5 list is coming, you would be correct. There are a heck of a lot more than 5 songs that need to be locked up, but I’m sure you will get the idea.

1. Anything Bryan Adams did for a movie soundtrack


2. Anything you hear at EVERY wedding you go to. (Brown-eyed Girl, Mony Mony, Shout, YMCA, Celebrate, and so on)


3. The Gambler


4. I Will Survive


5. Sussudio (Personally I like this one, but Mimi insisted)
   

Like I said, there are a lot more, but these are the ones I have written down. Sure enough, we heard a few of these at Senior Frog’s. I believe I even stood up in my chair to do YMCA.

We met a lot of super nice people from Canada while we were there. In particular, were 2 sisters named Barb and Sandy who were there with their husbands. Baby and Mimi met them at the bar and when ThreeL and I came along they were already good friends and we all did a series of fun shots together. Barb’s husband was Garth. Cool name, right? And I don’t remember how the story goes, but for some reason we called him Senior Café. I took one look at him and saw the actor Buddy Ebsen. I couldn’t remember what TV show he was in, but Baby saved me and said it was Barnaby Jones. Senior Café was a farmer. I don’t remember what exactly he was growing, but he was super nice and it was really great to hang out with all of them at the pool.

Barb and I ended up singing a song together for Karaoke night, but it was pretty much a disaster. I let her pick the song and she picked one that I don’t think she knew all the words. Luckily, the girls said they could barely hear us.

And finally, a brief word about your Turkish friend. This could be one of those topics that lose something in the retelling, but it was hysterical at the time.

Apparently, Mimi knows someone from Turkey and wants to be friends with her, except for the tiny problem of not being able to pronounce her name. According to Mimi, the correct pronunciation requires language skills on par with Darryl Hannah from Splash, in that no human can possibly make these sounds. To make matters worse, part of this girl’s name carries a French translation for a word not used in polite company. (But since it’s just us here, the word is asshole.) So, how easy would it be to be friends with someone whose name means asshole? You can see why this is funny, right?

It became even funnier as the week went on, but I may have to leave those stories out for now. For now, here is another picture of the hotties. This one was taken after dancing with the cutest guy there. His name was Santino and he was probably all of 2 years old. His grandpa took him out of his stroller and he started to do the dance that all babies do, which is bounce up and down while waving their arms. It was too cute and we all danced with him.

Playa Hotties

I have started to get some pictures of the trip back from the girls, so I think it’s time to tell you about Mexico. This first picture is us in the pool. Wow, so much for pictures being worth a thousand words, huh?

Since I know Jay loves details, I’ll start with the plane. When I first got off the plane and felt the air, my first thought was that I was breathing water. The air was so humid. Up until that point, I hadn’t really been all that excited about the travel part of the trip. It felt like another business trip until I stood in line at Customs and saw 2 of my girls on the other side waiting for me. We worked it out so the 4 of us arrived fairly close to each other. Mimi had a direct flight and arrived a few hours earlier. We just planned on meeting her at the hotel.

So the 3 of us piled into a taxi after running through the “Can I Help You?” gauntlet at the airport where people did everything but snatch the bags from your hands. It was such a weird experience but nowhere near what we went through in the Caribbean several years earlier. ThreeL, straight outta Compton, er… I mean New Jersey, had her “don’t even think about talking to me” face on as she is used to this sort of behavior from the gypsy cabbies, I guess. Whatever. I know when to shut up and let her do her thing. It all worked out fine and we were soon on our way to Playa.

A short 50 minutes later we were pulling in to the hotel. The entire lobby was an outdoor, open area. Mimi was there to greet us and once again the 4 of us were ready to do absolutely nothing, as long as we were together. The perfect vacation. First we had to sort out the room reservations. I won’t go through it, since it isn’t remotely interesting, but if you think about Abbott and Costello and the “Who’s on First” bit, you get an idea of us trying to explain which people belonged in which room and so on. They snapped a plastic yellow bracelet on us and we were officially there. (We ended up calling them our "Live Strong" bracelets.) Naturally, we headed outside to take a look around and to find the bar.

Now this was my first experience with an all-inclusive resort. I must say I heartily approve of this entire concept. It was so nice to not have to worry about carrying any sort of cash or ID or anything at all. And the bar in the swimming pool is freakin’ brilliant. The only bad bar experience was in one of the lounges and frankly, this remains a mystery for all of us. The place was basically empty the entire time we were there except for Karaoke night. One night we were there and playing one of the games we brought with us. We were prepared to basically camp out there for the evening except for the fact the no one seemed particularly interested in serving us. The rest of the hotel staff practically came to blows over who got to serve us, but not this place. So we left and went to another lounge.

There were 3 restaurants on the property. One was the buffet and then there was an Italian and Japanese restaurant. If you think it might be tough to speak Spanish, try throwing in some Italian and Japanese with that. Then try it with cocktails. The staff for each place was again, very accommodating and nice. We practiced our Spanish and they told us how pretty we were. It was a good system. Mimi was practically fluent, although she didn’t think so. Baby (yeah, she gets a new nickname now) and I were picking up about every other word like we were on some sort of 5 second time delay. I think we each have about 6 years of Spanish, but if you don’t practice it? Forget it. Things got better for us as the week progressed and we forced ourselves to speak it. ThreeL was pretty much out of luck, but she made a valiant effort to learn things along the way. I think her repertoire consisted of profanity, so she didn’t really get to use it.

I think the only complaint with the hotel would be housekeeping. It was always a mystery as to when they would appear and what items would receive attention. For the room Mimi and I shared, it was all about the breakfast menu. We had all decided that a good way to start each day was to lounge around in pj’s and bathrobe while enjoying breakfast in our rooms on the balcony. For the most part this worked out fine. Like I said, there were some discrepancies as to whether we would receive a menu and what food would appear, but it was all easily resolved. The other room had issues with shampoo, I think. They never received any the entire week. The funniest thing as far as I’m concerned is when all of our bathrobes disappeared the day before we were to leave the hotel. What was that about? Most hotels hope you’ll take something so they can charge you for it. Not this place.

I think that now that I have laid the groundwork for what the hotel was like, the next installment will be geared more toward what we actually did do while we were there, aside from eat, drink, and lay in the sun.

Hasta luego.

Wild Strawberries

Hola! Well, here I am back from Mexico. I had the best vacation ever. It was so nice to get away from a week and to not have to worry about coming back to a project. I started the new job today and guess what? I’m already on a project……so there went that theory.

The resort where we stayed in Playa del Carmen was great. It was my first time staying at an all-inclusive resort. I would recommend it to anyone. It was so nice to get up in the morning, have breakfast then head down to the pool where we would sit all day drinking just about anything we could think of. Our biggest decision each day was which restaurant to have dinner. Such a dilemma!

I’ll go into more details of the trip in a later blog, but for now I just wanted to say it was fun, I’m back and I ended up bringing home any extra souvenir. Unfortunately, this isn’t the kind of thing you want to show off to family and friends. I apparently was bitten by something or managed to get something on me that has given me this really lovely rash on both arms. Sounds like fun, right? I have no idea what it is and I am not seeing my doctor until Wednesday. So far, it doesn’t appear to be spreading, so no trip to my friendly ER down the road.

The real mind bender here is that I have exerted strong will power and NOT gone out to WebMD to try and diagnose myself. In the past I have amused my doctors with my brilliant yet completely wrong assessment of whatever condition I may have. My last doctor actually told me to stay off the web. I am afraid that if I go out there I am going to convince myself that I have some sort of flesh eating bacteria or malaria or something equally gruesome. I talked to a pharmacist over the weekend and he thought it might be a bad reaction to a bug bite. I’m skeptical, but what the heck do I know? Wednesday can’t get here soon enough. I am losing my will power to stay off the web.

So until I can sort out the “wild strawberry” looking things on my arms, I really can’t concentrate on regaling you with stories of Mexico. I think one of them is shaped like Australia. This is my latest entertainment, apparently. Instead of seeing shapes in clouds, I am apparently doing it with the “creeping crud”.

Moving on….the other reference I will make to “wild strawberries” is my hair. Those that know me best know that when I start something new (in this case, a new job) I need other new things to go with it. I really, really wanted to put some purple in my hair, but I think Marienne would have a heart attack. So I went red instead. It’s quite bright right now, but red fades pretty fast. I took a picture so you could see it in all its glory. It’s a lot brighter than I thought it would be, but it’s just hair, right? The last time I did something like this was right before I started the job I just left. In that case, it was much worse. I thought I looked like a Strawberry Shortcake character. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you could have scratched my head and smelled raspberries. I think this looks better than that disaster.

I found out that at the end of this month I get to travel to the corporate office so it will be interesting to see how people take to the hair color. As long as it doesn’t turn pink, I think I may be ok.

And finally, here is another bit of information for you from my Who Knew? Book:

Bulls are color-blind and cannot see red. It is the bright color and motion of the cape that causes them to charge.