It was a blast finding all the parts to Travis’ costume…I think he wanted a ‘Johnny Depp’ look, but was a good sport with the make-up Brian did for him. I think this is Cynthia’s first attempt at sewing a costume! It turned out great…that was fun time for sure.

I have been trying to gather old Halloween costume pictures since Lei posted her childhood photos years ago, I really thought that there would be more, but, after all this searching, least I found some.

OK, lets use the comments to guess who is in the picture

and/or what they are made up as!

(you see that way I don’t have to think up captions)

(Click on pic to enlarge, be patient, they are big, there may be an arrow to zoom at the bottom too.)

I hope we haven’t started with one that is too easy.

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Maybe they just seem easy to me cause its my game?

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OOps we just went from easy to impossible.

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OK so which kid????

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Maybe girls are easy?, by the way I don’t know who did the makeup but I think its great!

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Now don’t get confused.

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Now the piece de resistance…

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Just my favorite costumes ever, and the hardest,

don’t tell if you know, till everybody (all 2 readers) get to vote.

OK ready Comment!

We have had such a great response I decided I had to add these that I forgot

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That is a happy child!

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For extra credit, name the cat?

Oh, and I must confess I’m not real sure what the costume is?

Let the games begin! again

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And out of the corner of my eye… I see it.

Just strolling across the path, it’s a cat, a BIG cat. It looked just like this.

I remember seeing these kitties on “Wild Kingdom” and at the zoo, wishing I could have one! But having is not as wonderful as wishing! I was about a hundred feet or so away, and it was like I was rooted in the ground for a few moments, just staring at it. The cat was not in a hurry at all, it seemed like it had been strolling around the area all it’s life. At one point I know it looked right at me, but didn’t seem to be bothered and just kept going on it’s way. After it disappeared into the brush I ran in the house and got the 410 shotgun (it’s actually Donnie Prokochuk’s, he left it here about 15 years ago), and a couple of shells for it. I loaded it and off I went to ‘track’ it. I headed off in the direction of the last place I had seen it.  When I came to one of the big Pinon Pines, I slowed down and walked as quietly as I could going around it to see the other side. But with every step I took I could hear “it” move in the brush behind the other side of the tree! I stopped and the sound in the bush stopped. So I took a few more steps, and then the sound of something moving in the brush started again, I thought who’s tracking who here? After a few more stops and starts I realized it was me making all the noise. I also realized that the little bit of Indian I had in me was not enough to be able to track a mountain lion through the brush, and actually sneak up on it. Writing this now, I can’t think of a good reason at all for me to track it in the first place. I went back in the house and started searching for pictures of big cats and found that it was a mountain lion I saw. I let California Department of Fish & Game know and they are sending out information on what to do when you come in contact with a Big Cat. My cousin Kathy, she’s with the Department of Forestry, had the same advice I found online. “Basically you want to NOT RUN!!! And, act BIG…raise your voice and arms and stand your ground.”

The last time we had a run in with a BIG animal was right after my mom moved onto the property in 1994. We were still in our trailer and she had a smaller trailer while we finished building our house and started building hers. One night we, Randy, Brian & I were in her trailer and we were playing pinochle. It was winter so it had gotten dark early and it was a moonless dark night. All of a sudden we heard a blood curdling roar/growl! At first we didn’t know what it was. Then another one, even louder and seemingly closer. Then we decided it must be a bear. Well none of us felt safe in the small trailer, so we decided to go the small distance between mom’s trailer to our bigger trailer. Randy and Brian took mom’s two small dogs, Bud & Spike first, turning on the lights inside and out. They also armed themselves. When they could see nothing with flashlights they had me & mom come across, it was about 15-20 feet, but it felt like a football field. I know Randy had either the 22 or shotgun, but I can’t for the life of me remember if he fired it towards the uninhabited mountains behind us or not. Hopefully he and Brian will comment and add their remembrances to this. A few years later at a party we had for Brian after he finished basic training in ‘97, his friend Rick told the story of how he and Donnie had come up to the property one dark night, with a metal trash can lid, with a hole drilled in it, and a rope. When you pull the rope through the hole in a metal trash can lid it makes a “blood curdling roar/growl”, just like a bear! We all had a good laugh on us scaredy cats!

The headlines today are flooded with the “Swine Flu Outbreak”. They’re saying a “Genetic analysis shows the flu strain is a never-before-seen mixture of swine, human and avian viruses”. Let the fear begin! Several articles and reports used the term ‘pandemic’, which I always have to look up. When reading the Wikipedia definition, they list all the pandemics in history, one of which was the “Hong Kong Flu” in 1968-1969. I had that flu in the beginning of December 1969. I was terrible, lasting a couple of weeks that took me through my Christmas vacation! I had barely recovered by the time school started after the New Year. I remember my parents being very concerned, because of the dehydration I had due to the incessant vomiting and diarrhea. I didn’t know that nearly 34,000 people in the United States died, I wonder if they knew about the deaths? Until now I didn’t realize I was a survivor of  a pandemic! Just another example reminding me of Brian saying at about 8-9 years old, “you were alive in history, mom?” Yes I was.

A recent comment got me remembering this cool car. It was metallic green with three on the tree. It was like tank. I found out just how sturdy it was coming home one morning after taking Keri to school, she was in kindergarten, and Brian 3 was in the back seat (no car seats in those days). It was rainy and the roads were slick. As I was pulling up to the curb in front of the house my foot (in slippers) slipped off the brake pedal, and instead of mashing down to brake, I jammed my foot on the gas. The car jumped the curb and slammed into the corner of our 4ft chain link fence. The car knocked the corner post down, pulling 2 or more feet of post and concrete up out of the ground. After the shock and making sure Brian was okay, I inspected the damage to the car. None, except a small scratch like indent on the front bumper! What a great car!

That was also the last time I ever drove with slippers on. Fortunately the fence post went right back into the hole with little damage to it either. I think we just had to add more cement to the hole.

That’s Brian on the right in blue & white. It was 1991at a practice for the “Snowline Diamondbacks”, he was 13. In Glendale the year before he was a tight for the “Glendale Bears”. This was his last year to play junior football. When he went to high school he played one year for the “Serrano Diamondbacks”. I don’t know why he didn’t continue to play throughout H.S. Maybe he’ll comment and tell us all his remembrances of playing football.

We really enjoyed going to the practices and games. The pizza parties after the games with all the kids and some of the families were great fun too. That is where we learned that Keri was an excellent arm wrestler. She put down most of Brian’s team mates…not sure if they weren’t letting her win just to get close to her or not. She is Brian’s biggest fan then and now, and showed her spirit as a “Glendale Bears” cheerleader.

This was taken on the Hoover High School football field in 1990, she was 13. Hoover High is where her grandmother, Doris went in 1946-47. She only went there for one year and then her family moved to Adams Hill, and then she went to Glendale High, where she graduated in 1949. Her younger sister Emily went there too…as did some famous alumni like Marion Robert Morrison, we all know him as the “Duke” John Wayne.

Keri and Brian were students at Eleanor J Toll Jr. High School in 1990. Their grandmother Doris went there also and graduated in 1946. We really loved the time we lived in Glendale, but sadly housing prices and the influx of gangs Armenian, Mexican and Asian, made us look to the High Desert to buy. Which reminds me that yesterday I saw the first graffiti in Phelan.

Travis put up a post on his blog about his High School, so I thought I’d add a comment, it’s always nice to have comments, well it got kinda long and I still had more to say, so I decided to put my “comment” and finish my thoughts here.

Sylmar High School

Wish I could say that school had been so easy for me! It wasn’t, in retrospect I wish I had just been paying attention, that would have made it easier. I was terrified of going to Junior High. We lived in Sun Valley in ‘66. So I went to Sun Valley Jr. High. The town was not the scary place it is now, there were some bad areas but on the whole it was a fairly nice town, but the kids from the bad areas went to the school and all summer the older kids on the block talked about getting “scrubbed” on the first day of JH, and how the Chicano girls had razor blades in their hair (those were the days of the ‘beehive’ hairdos). Read the rest of this entry »

I went down to Florida last week to see Keri and the girls. Here is Ashley and me at her Karate tournament in Melbourne, Fl. It is just south of Cocoa Beach, Fl. where Maj. Nelson lived with Jeanie, he was part of the space program located in Cape Canaveral, Fl where the Kennedy Space Center is, it was called just NASA back in the day. Of course I’m talking about the sitcom “I Dream of Jeanie“ from the 60’s, boy those were simpler days, and we were easily entertained, maybe because I was younger.

Ashley took 2nd place in her combat, and her ‘moves’ routine was just great. It was so cool to be able to be there and watch her in person.

I had a wonderful visit…just watched movies made beaded bracelets played with the baby and just visited.

At 6:01 am I was still in bed. The night before I had finished reading a book on the bombing of Hiroshima, for a school assignment. When the quake hit, the sound was so loud, I thought we were being bombed. It was still an hour before sunrise, I just read that while I was looking for pictures to put up here, so I didn’t notice the huge crack in the wall of my bedroom till later. You could see into the garage where the crack started out vertically then went horizontally to the other side of the room, where I could see outside.

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I hosted my first ‘Christmas Around the World’ party in 1986. My Auntie Em had been going to these home parties and thought I should host one. Their hostess program was really wonderful. It was so easy to earn lots of free gifts. I only had a couple of actual home parties, where I had friends come to my house. I realized I could earn just as much by having ‘catalog’ parties, that is a party where I would pass out the catalogs to everyone I knew, but I didn’t have the hassle of a home party. You know, making all kinds of hors d’oeuvre that you always have tons left over, because it’s always better to have too much than too little, so you end up sending the left-overs in your kids lunches for a week, they also ended up drinking the left over punch. Lime green sherbet in pink lemonade looks so pretty in the punch bowl, but after it melts and becomes a cloudy foamy greenish, not a very pretty pinkish colored stuff, it would take a lot of convincing on my part to get them to believe that it really was OK to drink. Not to mention the added house-cleaning, the cleaning you do in case someone looks there kind of cleaning, which is why we probably have these parties in the first place, just so we have a reason to do the cleaning we wouldn’t do otherwise, or put off until, we are having a party. Read the rest of this entry »