More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...

This is me, in an undated photo that appears to be a studio portrait.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Tommy”.  It's printed on fancy embossed paper; unusual in her collection.  I am unaccountably excited about (apparently) the shoes I've torn off my feet.  If I'm about one in that photo, then this is circa '53...

Here's my brother Mark, in another undated photo.  He's so small in this one that it has to be from early '61.  My mom wrote “Mark our ‘Indian’” on the back.  I don't remember mom ever referring to Mark as an Indian, and I'm not sure where that remark comes from.  Something about his appearance?

Here's a scene from a Christmas morning we've seen in earlier photos.  The lab dated this January 1958, so this must have been Christmas 1957.  The bookshelves are up (at right), and I can see some of those Reader's Digest condensed novels on them.  There are a bazillion or two toys I don't remember at all.  The baby carriage surprises me – Holly, Scott, and I would have been too old for it at that point, I'd have thought – and Mark hadn't yet arrived on the scene.  At the right you can see the World Book encyclopedia that my parents picked up at a garage sale, for next to nothing.  That encyclopedia had a huge impact on me; over the course of the next few years I read the entire thing.  That rack held all 28 volumes in two rows; you're seeing the left part of the upper row.  I knew every one of those volumes very well, and I'd bet that even today I could navigate it instantly.

Dated by the lab March 1959, this photo was taken in our home's front yard, looking south.  The subject is the tree in the middle, a Magnolia grandiflora that later grew much larger, along with several others in the same planting.  Behind the magnolia you can see our flagpole sticking up.  I don't recognize the dog, but I'll guess that it's one of Chalky's hounds, loose for some reason.  The little building to the left of the magnolia is Chalky's little storage/shop building.  The row of trees on the left puzzles me.  I remember several nice blue Atlas cedar specimens in a sparse row there, not those low shrubs.

This is my sister Holly, in a photo the lab dated February 1959; my mom wrote “Holly” on the back.  She'd have been almost 4 years old.  She's holding one of the peat-potted hollies that my dad sold by mail order for a few years, shipping them in bright red cardboard tubes by parcel post.  The pot is made from pressed peat moss that was folded into that form when wet (unlike the peat pots today that are pressure-formed in a mold).  The heavy pressed peat held a lot of water.  We'd wet the pots well, insert the entire plant into a thick plastic bag, tie it up with a twist-'em, stuff it in the cardboard tube, tape the tube shut, then paste on the customer's address.  It was quite a process, and I remember spending quite a few hours on various stages of it.  Oddly I don't remember my brothers and sisters helping with it – was it really only me?  Memory is a funny thing...

Here's a nice photo of the old homestead.  The lab dated it October 1954, and my mom wrote “house” on the back (in case we forgot, I guess!).  The long side in view is the east side of the house, with the south end visible toward the left.  My bedroom was in the southeast corner; its two windows are visible.  The fence I don't remember is clearly visible on the north side (toward the right).  The classic old wood frame and formed steel body wheelbarrow tells me that my dad was working somewhere around there – that wheelbarrow was a basic tool for him, like a carpenter's rip saw.  Visible on the front porch roof is some fancy decorative woodwork (inside the angled brace).  I don't remember that at all!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Debbie is doing a bit better this morning, especially with respect to her level of pain.  As I write this, she hasn't needed any pain medication for nearly 12 hours – significantly different (and better!) than her pain levels yesterday.  I'll call that quite hopeful!

Yesterday finally was the day of the dishwasher!  In the morning I tore out our old, burned out dishwasher and tossed it in our dumpster (with the tractor, not my Herculean arms!).  I left the old drain, hot water, and power connections in place, thinking they'd be useful for the new dishwasher.  Then I ran down to Ogden and picked up our new one without incident.  After I unpacked it I discovered all sorts of parts that I didn't understand – but clearly this thing didn't install anything like other dishwashers installed.  So I did something I normally don't bother with: I sat down and read the installation instructions front to back.  It really was a different kind of installation!  So ... first step was to remove the old drain, hot water, and power connections.  Then I had to cut a hole (5.5" x 2.75") in the cabinet panel between the dishwasher hole and the area under the kitchen sink.  The drain line and hot water line are pre-installed into the Bosch dishwasher, so I had to feed them from the dishwasher hole through the new hole I cut into the under-sink area.  This is backwards from the usual dishwasher install.  The really different part was the electrical power, though.  The back of the dishwasher has a connector that you just plug into a power cord they provide.  This is quite short – about 30" – just long enough to reach through the hole I cut in the cabinet.  On the other end of that power cord is a 4" surface-mounted junction box, which I mounted inside the under-sink area.  It's shipped with a 10" stub of a power cord, but I wanted to permanently wire it into the same circuit our old dishwasher used, so I removed that power cord and wired it up to the dishwasher circuit's Romex.  The junction box has a nice terminal block inside, so I didn't even need wire nuts to accomplish this.  I spent an hour or so carefully leveling the new dishwasher, and getting it to the right height to properly fit in our cabinet.  The old dishwasher had a problem with drawers running out by themselves; it was tilted forward.  The new one is perfectly level. :)

Then it was time for a test run.  I put a few dirty dishes in, loaded it up with soap and rinse agent, and set it off.  At first I thought it wasn't working, but then when I put my hand on it I could feel a little vibration.  I couldn't hear a thing, though, unless I got on my knees and put my ear literally on the door.  Nice!  Our refrigerator is significantly louder than the dishwasher.  The dishes came out beautifully, so I loaded it up and did a real load, and those also came out beautifully.  We have a dishwasher!  Yay!

This has some very nice features compared with other dishwashers we've owned.  My favorite, so far, is the “cutlery tray” – a very shallow tray at the top that is very easy to load silverware in and out of, and which does a bang-up job of cleaning them.  It's way easier than the silverware baskets we're used to (though they include one of those, too, for some reason!).  The middle drawer can be easily set to different heights, so it's easy to accommodate really tall items in the bottom drawer, or moderately tall items in both the middle and bottom drawers.  There's also something they added (I suspect) because the unit is so quiet: a red LED lights a small spot on the floor when the unit is running.  If that wasn't there, you might easily open the door accidentally while it's still going, because you can't hear it!