![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Jon already mentioned this, but there were always animals. I don't remember before Carlton, but at Carlton there was Meyer (doberman-great dane cross) and Truman (an orange cat) and a bunch of sheep. The latter were, of course, being raised for meat, not as pets. At the dinner table I would ask my Mom who we were eating and then thank them (the animal) by name. Not when we first moved - I wasn't old enough to talk then - but later. I don't really remember that time of my life, but my Mom sure did and mentioned it now and then. It feels very me-ish.
One story my parents loved to tell, and which I wish I had written down when I was still able to ask questions, involves me deciding to go into the pasture where the sheep were to collect filberts off the trees. I took a little pail with me, and Mom told me not to use that one, to get a different one because it looked like the bucket the sheep were given apples in. I pointed out that I didn't have any apples in it, she tried to tell me that they wouldn't understand that, and (I'm not clear if I was in the pasture or not when the conversation started) long story short, I was in with the sheep and got knocked head over teakettle by a ram. I wasn't badly hurt or anything, so Mom found it funny. (I suspect I was indignant, but I also bet I learned not to assume the sheep knew what I had in the bucket...or didn't have in the bucket....)
Mom also has stories of me licking their salt lick, stealing finger-tip tastes of their molasses, and sliding on my backside down the, pardon my language, shit-covered ramp to where the sheep were. Apparently I thought it made a great slide...probably did, too. I imagine Mom was not as fond of the cleanup as I was of the sliding, though. (How many freak-outs will I have caused people who think that children should be protected from anything unsanitary or dangerous, by this point? *grins*)
Later on when we lived at Ribbon Ridge, we had Mickey (a Belgian Tervuren) and then Sam (a Brittany Spaniel) for dogs. And cats beyond counting, though some were more family cats and more precious than others. Some of the outside cats weren't even named. People (I use the term here with some reservations) dump cats (and dogs) out in the country because they think it's kinder than taking them to a shelter where, if they can't find a home, they might be put down. It's not. The vast majority of domestic cats, dumped in the countryside, won't live out the year and they will die in some unpleasant way, of injury, illness, or just flat starvation. Don't do it.
So we fed them. Put cat food out in the barn and let the feral ones eat from it, tame them down, tame the kittens, spay or neuter the ones you can catch...at any given time we usually had 1-3 cats that we called "indoor cats" (allowed out, but usually spent the night in), a bunch of indoor-outdoor cats (allowed in, but usually not overnight), and a bunch of "outdoor cats" (ferals and semi-ferals who wouldn't come into the house or couldn't entirely be trusted in the house). I am, by the by, still feeding the feral cats that Dad was feeding. However, I'm not sure what to do about them. I can't afford to take them in, the odds of getting them with a live trap for spaying/neutering aren't that good, and unless we keep the house (no idea yet), I won't be able to go on feeding them. Gah!
Anyway, for a while recently, the food was going down more rapidly than the resident cat population could explain. So Dad put a video camera on them, captured the input, and had a look. He made a really funny video from it, though alas, one of the early finds that had me rolling is not on there - Dad thought he had deleted or lost it by mistake, and regretted that. It really was funny - a mouse climbed up the post, skittered across the beam on the wall, hopped onto the shelves, climbed into the dish, ate his fill (hardly any effect on the levels) and then scampered off. BOLD mouse. Anyway, the video Dad made doesn't include that but does include some other fun scenes.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
porpentine has very kindly uploaded it to his web space for me; please be kind to his bandwidth by downloading it if you want to view it repeatedly. It's a .avi format and is about 12 megabytes, as a warning! It's here.
I made a 'garage' out of something, I think either blocks or a cardboard box, and then put blocks in it. My toy cars were sitting nearby. Mom asked when I was going to put the cars in the garage and I looked up at her in astonishment. "Cars don't go in garages, Mommy!" Dad's tag-line when telling this story was: "Well, in your experience, they didn't." The garage was an area to store stuff - ours is too, come to that. For Dad it was an area to store tools and suchlike. Garages were full of wood and boards and saws (which I wasn't supposed to touch) and air compressors and welding sets (also not supposed to touch) and things like that. Who'd put a car in a garage? (And we have two good spots in our driveway, and who wants to be parked into the garage, so the tradition continues, although our garage hasn't got so much in the way of tools.)
Mom liked to solve word puzzles especially - cryptograms, crossword puzzles, cryptic crosswords. I sometimes like cryptograms, but I'm not great at them, so only sometimes. As a child I learned cross words and kriss cross, cross sums (kakuro) and number place (sudoku), logic puzzles and mazes by doing puzzles out of the magazines Mom got. I wonder how many puzzles I did that she would otherwise have done herself, if she hadn't been letting me explore and learn. Not the math ones, I think - or at least I doubt she'd have missed them as much. I sometimes did crossword puzzles, but the cryptic crosswords made me want to scream in frustration. They required a twist to the thinking that I just couldn't master. Mom could, and did, and enjoyed puzzling them out, I believe.
Dad mentored Jon Howell in computers. He taught me about computers, too - but I played around only a bit with Basic, and had no real deep interest in hardware at all. I took away the user's perspective more - communication and words, oh how I loved Usenet and email - and also an interest in making computers go, but coupled with no hardware knowledge. As a result, I didn't learn a lot of what Jon did (and I think Dad was glad to have someone to share that knowledge with), but I did learn other things and ultimately went into programming. I'm a wimp with hardware, and I'm a lot less likely to use something that requires much poking at the technical underpinnings - I like things to be of the "pop it in and use it" variety, or at least not to require me to learn seven or eight new facts before I can deploy it. I'm not, alas, a tinkerer. But I do love technology and computers, and I am a software engineer, so in that sense I carry a lot of my Dad in me - a different facet, but still from him.
And from both of them, the love of words - the love of reading, of communication. Poetry, and word-play, and puns. We used to play Scrabble a lot (and also other games, of course - Mille Bornes, which Dad and I played a couple hands of the weekend before he died - Monopoly, Upwords, lots of various card games including pinochle...). When I was little, Dad got or made a card holder so I didn't have to try to keep all the cards in my hand, which was difficult for me. Got, or made - I suspect made, but I don't know. Just a pair of small boards, one glued perpendicular to and in the center of the other, to form a 'back' for the cards to lean against, and a narrow channel in the other to hold the cards. Worked nicely.
We used to have a card-shuffling machine. Pop the cards in and it would shuffle them. I thought that was very neat, especially as it took me a while to learn to shuffle without bending the cards or spraying them everywhere, or just getting them stuck. I have no clue what happened to that machine. It probably broke, and wasn't replaced, or got put away; it would be very old by now. But wow, was it cool to me when I was a kid.
At some point, Dad was commenting on a post I'd made about how the what-ifs rise to choke you, and how at the same time, I don't think learning about Mom's cancer any earlier would have helped - and it might have hurt. I'm not sure she didn't give up a little when she got the diagnosis, letting the end come faster than it otherwise might have. And Dad says, and I agree, that he thinks she would have refused aggressive treatment (such as radiation or chemo) unless it had a high chance of success. Nor would she have stopped smoking or drinking (indeed, she smoked until she couldn't hold the cigarettes any longer). So...the 'what if' she'd gotten the diagnosis sooner probably doesn't matter.
Anyway, we were talking about that and Dad was agreeing and he'd said something about, in hindsight maybe we could have pushed, but probably it wouldn't have helped. And I made a crack about hindsight being "20/15 - you see things that weren't really there." He laughed, and said he liked that and might have to use it somewhere. In another conversation a week later, I tried to comment to the same effect when he was wondering what-if (I forget about what - maybe about the doctors focusing on the alcohol rather than looking for other causes of Mom's illness), but I botched it and said hindsight was "20/35" - he laughed, and then gave me a sort of puzzled / baffled look that was very Dad, head tilted to one side, mouth drawn aside a bit, brows drawn together. Oh I wish I had a photo of that expression - the "er, okay?" expression!
Speaking of brows, anyone remember how bushy his eyebrows were, besides me? When I was young, Mom cut our hair. And I would solemnly claim the scissors from her (the short ones, not the big hair shears!) and trim Dad's eyebrows. They really were bushy: when Mom stopped cutting his hair and I'd moved out and he went to the hair place to get it cut, which he always called the barber whether it was or not, he'd get his eyebrows trimmed as well!
I found my old memory posts too, describing events from when I was a kid. They were more focused on me than I quite want but they do include my parents' reactions (and some of the stories I only have because they amused, astonished, and/or impressed my folks enough to retell). The ones I have so far found are:
http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/10864.html?mode=reply
http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/56726.html?mode=reply
http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/56896.html?mode=reply
One story my parents loved to tell, and which I wish I had written down when I was still able to ask questions, involves me deciding to go into the pasture where the sheep were to collect filberts off the trees. I took a little pail with me, and Mom told me not to use that one, to get a different one because it looked like the bucket the sheep were given apples in. I pointed out that I didn't have any apples in it, she tried to tell me that they wouldn't understand that, and (I'm not clear if I was in the pasture or not when the conversation started) long story short, I was in with the sheep and got knocked head over teakettle by a ram. I wasn't badly hurt or anything, so Mom found it funny. (I suspect I was indignant, but I also bet I learned not to assume the sheep knew what I had in the bucket...or didn't have in the bucket....)
Mom also has stories of me licking their salt lick, stealing finger-tip tastes of their molasses, and sliding on my backside down the, pardon my language, shit-covered ramp to where the sheep were. Apparently I thought it made a great slide...probably did, too. I imagine Mom was not as fond of the cleanup as I was of the sliding, though. (How many freak-outs will I have caused people who think that children should be protected from anything unsanitary or dangerous, by this point? *grins*)
Later on when we lived at Ribbon Ridge, we had Mickey (a Belgian Tervuren) and then Sam (a Brittany Spaniel) for dogs. And cats beyond counting, though some were more family cats and more precious than others. Some of the outside cats weren't even named. People (I use the term here with some reservations) dump cats (and dogs) out in the country because they think it's kinder than taking them to a shelter where, if they can't find a home, they might be put down. It's not. The vast majority of domestic cats, dumped in the countryside, won't live out the year and they will die in some unpleasant way, of injury, illness, or just flat starvation. Don't do it.
So we fed them. Put cat food out in the barn and let the feral ones eat from it, tame them down, tame the kittens, spay or neuter the ones you can catch...at any given time we usually had 1-3 cats that we called "indoor cats" (allowed out, but usually spent the night in), a bunch of indoor-outdoor cats (allowed in, but usually not overnight), and a bunch of "outdoor cats" (ferals and semi-ferals who wouldn't come into the house or couldn't entirely be trusted in the house). I am, by the by, still feeding the feral cats that Dad was feeding. However, I'm not sure what to do about them. I can't afford to take them in, the odds of getting them with a live trap for spaying/neutering aren't that good, and unless we keep the house (no idea yet), I won't be able to go on feeding them. Gah!
Anyway, for a while recently, the food was going down more rapidly than the resident cat population could explain. So Dad put a video camera on them, captured the input, and had a look. He made a really funny video from it, though alas, one of the early finds that had me rolling is not on there - Dad thought he had deleted or lost it by mistake, and regretted that. It really was funny - a mouse climbed up the post, skittered across the beam on the wall, hopped onto the shelves, climbed into the dish, ate his fill (hardly any effect on the levels) and then scampered off. BOLD mouse. Anyway, the video Dad made doesn't include that but does include some other fun scenes.
porpentine has very kindly uploaded it to his web space for me; please be kind to his bandwidth by downloading it if you want to view it repeatedly. It's a .avi format and is about 12 megabytes, as a warning! It's here.I made a 'garage' out of something, I think either blocks or a cardboard box, and then put blocks in it. My toy cars were sitting nearby. Mom asked when I was going to put the cars in the garage and I looked up at her in astonishment. "Cars don't go in garages, Mommy!" Dad's tag-line when telling this story was: "Well, in your experience, they didn't." The garage was an area to store stuff - ours is too, come to that. For Dad it was an area to store tools and suchlike. Garages were full of wood and boards and saws (which I wasn't supposed to touch) and air compressors and welding sets (also not supposed to touch) and things like that. Who'd put a car in a garage? (And we have two good spots in our driveway, and who wants to be parked into the garage, so the tradition continues, although our garage hasn't got so much in the way of tools.)
Mom liked to solve word puzzles especially - cryptograms, crossword puzzles, cryptic crosswords. I sometimes like cryptograms, but I'm not great at them, so only sometimes. As a child I learned cross words and kriss cross, cross sums (kakuro) and number place (sudoku), logic puzzles and mazes by doing puzzles out of the magazines Mom got. I wonder how many puzzles I did that she would otherwise have done herself, if she hadn't been letting me explore and learn. Not the math ones, I think - or at least I doubt she'd have missed them as much. I sometimes did crossword puzzles, but the cryptic crosswords made me want to scream in frustration. They required a twist to the thinking that I just couldn't master. Mom could, and did, and enjoyed puzzling them out, I believe.
Dad mentored Jon Howell in computers. He taught me about computers, too - but I played around only a bit with Basic, and had no real deep interest in hardware at all. I took away the user's perspective more - communication and words, oh how I loved Usenet and email - and also an interest in making computers go, but coupled with no hardware knowledge. As a result, I didn't learn a lot of what Jon did (and I think Dad was glad to have someone to share that knowledge with), but I did learn other things and ultimately went into programming. I'm a wimp with hardware, and I'm a lot less likely to use something that requires much poking at the technical underpinnings - I like things to be of the "pop it in and use it" variety, or at least not to require me to learn seven or eight new facts before I can deploy it. I'm not, alas, a tinkerer. But I do love technology and computers, and I am a software engineer, so in that sense I carry a lot of my Dad in me - a different facet, but still from him.
And from both of them, the love of words - the love of reading, of communication. Poetry, and word-play, and puns. We used to play Scrabble a lot (and also other games, of course - Mille Bornes, which Dad and I played a couple hands of the weekend before he died - Monopoly, Upwords, lots of various card games including pinochle...). When I was little, Dad got or made a card holder so I didn't have to try to keep all the cards in my hand, which was difficult for me. Got, or made - I suspect made, but I don't know. Just a pair of small boards, one glued perpendicular to and in the center of the other, to form a 'back' for the cards to lean against, and a narrow channel in the other to hold the cards. Worked nicely.
We used to have a card-shuffling machine. Pop the cards in and it would shuffle them. I thought that was very neat, especially as it took me a while to learn to shuffle without bending the cards or spraying them everywhere, or just getting them stuck. I have no clue what happened to that machine. It probably broke, and wasn't replaced, or got put away; it would be very old by now. But wow, was it cool to me when I was a kid.
At some point, Dad was commenting on a post I'd made about how the what-ifs rise to choke you, and how at the same time, I don't think learning about Mom's cancer any earlier would have helped - and it might have hurt. I'm not sure she didn't give up a little when she got the diagnosis, letting the end come faster than it otherwise might have. And Dad says, and I agree, that he thinks she would have refused aggressive treatment (such as radiation or chemo) unless it had a high chance of success. Nor would she have stopped smoking or drinking (indeed, she smoked until she couldn't hold the cigarettes any longer). So...the 'what if' she'd gotten the diagnosis sooner probably doesn't matter.
Anyway, we were talking about that and Dad was agreeing and he'd said something about, in hindsight maybe we could have pushed, but probably it wouldn't have helped. And I made a crack about hindsight being "20/15 - you see things that weren't really there." He laughed, and said he liked that and might have to use it somewhere. In another conversation a week later, I tried to comment to the same effect when he was wondering what-if (I forget about what - maybe about the doctors focusing on the alcohol rather than looking for other causes of Mom's illness), but I botched it and said hindsight was "20/35" - he laughed, and then gave me a sort of puzzled / baffled look that was very Dad, head tilted to one side, mouth drawn aside a bit, brows drawn together. Oh I wish I had a photo of that expression - the "er, okay?" expression!
Speaking of brows, anyone remember how bushy his eyebrows were, besides me? When I was young, Mom cut our hair. And I would solemnly claim the scissors from her (the short ones, not the big hair shears!) and trim Dad's eyebrows. They really were bushy: when Mom stopped cutting his hair and I'd moved out and he went to the hair place to get it cut, which he always called the barber whether it was or not, he'd get his eyebrows trimmed as well!
I found my old memory posts too, describing events from when I was a kid. They were more focused on me than I quite want but they do include my parents' reactions (and some of the stories I only have because they amused, astonished, and/or impressed my folks enough to retell). The ones I have so far found are:
http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/10864.html?mode=reply
http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/56726.html?mode=reply
http://kyrielle.livejournal.com/56896.html?mode=reply
no subject
no subject
no subject
Cute video, love the commentary.
expression
Wow. Thank you for that description. He was back, just for 300 ms, doing that expression, before he had to go again.
--Jon
Re: expression
Good! I wish I could share it with everyone, but at least I evoked it for those who had seen it. (A really good rendition of it, of course, involved tilting the head back and forth a bit, adjusting the expression for consistency with the angle, and - if someone had been deeply dumb - ending with the mouth in an 'O' shape and brows still together, maybe one finger to the mouth, with a sort of 'uhhh' or 'errr' that had the same tone you might otherwise here on a 'duhhhh' - the confused sort, not the attack sort. But this one that I was remembering wasn't quite that dramatic.)