How to Piss Your Father Off from 250 Miles Away…

Matt-Falls-2006
This was my Dad in a good mood…

He really was a good guy – you just didn’t want to piss him off. I was an expert at pissing him off, whether I meant to or not. If there was a way to screw things up, and piss my dad off, I would manage it.

Before Kyla was born, her dad and I would go down to Teeny-Tiny Town for Christmas every year. He had two kids from his first marriage, so that made arrangements difficult. Worse, I worked in retail – in a mall – and I had two days to celebrate in: Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And those poor kids had a lot of places to be.

Our Christmas routine tended to look like this:
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Stories Beat a Movie Every Time…

Ice Cream
Wrong Era… Wrong Ice Cream… but Hey – It’s ICE CREAM!
Photo © Kyla Becker, 2012

Sunday Dinner-and-a-Movie at Ruby’s last night was disrupted, interrupted and kerfluffled – but in the most fun possible way…

It was my turn to cook. I made a rather passable broccoli and cheese stuffed meatloaf, served up with home-grown potatoes (that I growed my own self!) and a can of corn – I don’t grow corn, canned or otherwise.
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Am I Smarter than a Potato?

Inanimate Objectivity-Potatoes
Potatoes are Smarter Than They Let On…
My big project for 2014 (aside from becoming “Independently Self-Sufficient”, that is) was to be able to feed the household without having to purchase any vegetable I could grow myself.

Actually, the garden was a major part of the “Independently Self-Sufficient” plan – I just knew damned well that I could only just begin the project this year. I could only plant the stuff, and hope that in a year or two, I had learned enough and grown the garden large enough that we wouldn’t need to purchase items like tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and blueberries, melons, peas… you know – the kind of stuff that people around here manage to grow in sufficient amounts in their backyards.

My main concern was that gardeners around here have a big one-up on me.

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Ruby’s Restaurant…

Traffic Jam!
Traffic Jam!
Taken Sunday September 14, 2014 with Samsung Galaxy S3

This is what I get for complaining about losing against Ruby in cribbage. I don’t know where her luck (er… talent?) comes from, but after winning my second game in about 8 1/2 years (!!!) against her a couple of weeks ago, I was very disgruntled tonight to see that she’s back on her winning streak.

Or I’m back on my losing streak.
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Darla’s Coin-Operated Refrigerator…

God's Railroad
“God’s Railroad”
© Les Becker, 2005
Taken April 10, 2005 with Polaroid PDC3070

September 6, 2014

Somewhere between Wawa and Hawk Junction is a little town called Magpie…

Sometime during the 1930’s, Ruby’s sister Darla, and her husband Harry lived there. In fact, that’s where Ruby’s nephew Satch was born 78 years ago, and he still gets a kick out of telling people where he originated, since nobody’s ever heard of it.

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