Rocket Girl, Second Launch

Posted on June 11, 2015 by admin

Ann was in her school district’s Rocket Club again this year, involving the after-school construction of a rocket one day a week for a few months. The mass launch — one rocket at a time, not quite as quick as a Stalin’s organ — was on Monday afternoon during school. Afterward, Ann brought the rocket, which she called “Gemini,” home.

The rocket lost a fin at some point in the flight, or when it hit the ground. The dog photobombed the picture.

Liftoff! The rockets were lined up on top of a saw horse and shot off one after the other.

This was Ann’s second school-project rocket. The day was partly cloudy and warm, with some wind. Later in the afternoon it rained, but the launches were done by then.

The World’s Most Accurate Watch

Posted on May 19, 2015 by admin

During a recent conversation with Ann, something I said suggested absolute uselessness to her, and she came up with the following: “That would be about as useful as a watch that only said NOW.”

That would be useless for telling time, I agreed. But guaranteed to be the most accurate watch ever made.

During the same conversation I also introduced “useful as screen doors on a submarine” to her. Someone has to pass down the wisdom of previous generations to the rising one, after all.

London 1956

Posted on May 17, 2015 by admin

More of my father’s slides, mostly unseen for at least 50 years. In May 1956, my family went to London for a short visit. The note on this slide says, “Mama, Jay, Jim in corner of Buckingham Palace grounds c̄ bearded character” (he used a bit of medical shorthand). Jay told me that the “bearded character” said he was Father Christmas. Next, “Mama, Jay, Jim in square in front of Westminster Abbey.” Looks like a pleasant spring day with a little bit of a chill in the air.At first glance, it looks like the woman in this picture — the one who’s not my mother — saw a man with a camera, and posed in an instant. But her feet are positioned in mid-step, so I think she happened to be looking straight into the camera. Anyway, the caption is: “Jay, Jim, Mama + some Englishwoman, Picadilly [sic] Street.”This one: “Mama, Jim, Jay + little English girl, Green Park.”Jay was four, Jim a few months older than a year, and it looks like the girl was somewhere between those ages.

Grandpa 1963

Posted on May 10, 2015 by admin

I don’t have that many images of my maternal grandfather — most of them are at my mother’s house — but there are a few kicking around here.

The picture is dated “Mother’s Day 1963,” which was May 12, 1963, a Sunday. Grandpa — even at this late date, I can’t call him “James” or anything else — aged nearly 70, is sitting in his back yard in Alamo Heights with his dog Georgette. I remember Georgette better than Grandpa, since he died in 1966, when I was five; the dog lived until sometime in the late ’60s.

I remember the back yard pretty well from visits later than 1963. Behind him to the right is the detached office-laundry room-garage behind his house. The office even had a nickname: the Pout House, which seems to speak to some long-ago family joke. Even further back is a fence lined with bamboo, which I believe he planted.

As I mentioned before, he was Texas A&M Class of 1916 and member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during and after the Great War. He was a civil engineer by profession during the great age of 20th-century road building in Texas, and aspired to work on building the Alaska Highway, but that didn’t happen. He and Grandma (Edna, 1894-1971) currently have 13 living descendants, age 12 to age 89.

This is in McKinney, Texas. The pic manages to capture my mother on the left, me (the small face under hers), Jim (under me), Grandpa and Grandma (holding another camera?). Grandpa’s hearing aid is clearly visible. One thing I know: by this time, he was quite hard of hearing.

It’s dated Spring 1963, at some time when Grandpa and Grandma were up for a visit from San Antonio. I feel certain they would have driven up, and I hope used the parts of I-35 that were finished at the time, which would have been spanking new. As a civil engineer, I’m sure Grandpa would have appreciated it more than most (and it wouldn’t have been the crowded mess it is in the 21st century in some places).

Jay tells me, about that picture, that Grandpa grew the beard about the time Ralph was born (our cousin, born April 1963) with the idea that it would make him look more familiar to Ralph, whose father wore whiskers. “Dr. Colvin [a psychiatrist we knew] happened to see a picture of Grandpa with the beard and asked if he had been a psychiatrist. (There is, I suppose, something Viennese about it.)”

Naptimes, 30 Years Apart

Posted on May 3, 2015 by admin

Last time I was in San Antonio, I dipped into my father’s collection of slides, mostly unexamined for at least 50 years, and pulled out a handful for scanning. The handwriting on the following slide said: “Jay Stribling sleeping, May 1956.” My brother that is, when he was four. No place is noted, but I suppose it was in Germany.

I looked up The Golden Geography. It’s by Elsa Jane Werner, illustrated by Cornelius De Witt, and originally published 1952. A lot of them must have been printed, since they seem easily available now online. I don’t remember it around the house in later years, which can mean only one thing. The only reason a book ever left our house is that it fell apart completely.

A casual Google search doesn’t uncover a scan of that Nancy & Sluggo comic, and it isn’t worth pursuing very far. The Eiffel Tower was a souvenir from my parents’ trip to Paris. I’m told they went without their small children, my brothers, which is what I would have done. They bought one for Jay and one for Jim, and the towers are still in my mother’s house, though not so shiny these days.

When I sent the image to Jay, he shared it with his sons. The eldest, my nephew Sam, sent us a picture of him at a similar age (in the 1980s) and in similar repose.

Time flies, things don’t change.

Molly’s Cupcakes

Posted on April 2, 2015 by admin

A splendid Easter to all. Back on Monday.

As usual in a different city, we poked around some of the local retail. I was especially glad to check out the selection at Iowa Book on South Clinton, which is what it sounds like. In the remainder bin, I found Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (2010) for all of $3.49 + tax. It promises some interesting bits, when I get around to grazing it, which is what I usually do with letter collections.

Picked at random (p. 204) is the following — but I think it conveys some sense of the man. Part of a letter to Joan Leigh Fermor, whose husband was Patrick Leigh Fermor, November 30, 1971:

“I do hope to see you in England. When do you come? Paddy [Leigh Fermor] I know is going to D[erek] Hill for New Year, and we are supposed to be in Ireland for Christmas. But I have the most itchy feet and want to go to Niger — more nomads, the Bororo Peuls, the most beautiful people in the world who wander alone in the savannah with long-horned white cattle and have some rather startling habits, like a complete sex-reversal at certain seasons of the year. So I may be off.”

Not far from Iowa Book is Molly’s Cupcakes. One of the 10 Best Cupcakes in the Country, a sign proudly says, citing USA Today, and another says the joint was the Winner of the Cupcake Wars or some such. I was intrigued enough to pop inside when everyone else was still in the bookstore, just for a look.
Later, I brought the family back for cupcakes. I can’t say that I’ve bought too many cupcakes in cupcake specialty shops over the years — it seems like a example of the Starbucks syndrome, making something simple more complicated to charge a premium — but why not? We were on a road trip.

At $2 for a basic cupcake, and $3 for a filled one, you do pay a premium. But damn, they were good. I had a red velvet with vanilla frosting.
I managed by accident to take a portrait of the entire family during our visit to the shop.
The girls as the main subject, but Y and I in the reflection.

Divers* Notes on an Ordinary Thursday

Posted on February 5, 2015 by admin

Maybe it’s time to go on another literary bender. Lately I’ve been reading The Dog of the South, which I’m enjoying, so maybe Charles Portis is just the thing. Since I read True Grit not that long ago, that only leaves three more novels of his left to read. The man’s got a gift for understated humor. Sometimes that’s the best kind.

Got one of a mass email from the principal of Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary School recently – an email of the times: “In light of the recent news regarding measles at a Palatine child care facility, District π is sharing with all families this Measles Fact Sheet from the Cook County Department of Public Health. At this time there have been no reported cases of measles in District π. Should there be a case of measles at your child’s school; [sic] parents/guardians would be notified.

“Measles is a highly contagious disease. However, more than 99% of our students are vaccinated against this disease and the measles vaccine is highly effective.”

What he didn’t say, but I wouldn’t have minded if he did: “We’re glad there aren’t a lot of anti-vax morons in our district.”

The usual suspects were over to celebrate Ann’s birthday last week.

A close up of the cake. It’s the same kind as seven years ago, at Ann’s request. (She didn’t remember having it before, but was impressed when she saw it, and wanted it.)

To quote myself: “[The cake is] very dark and very round, heavy as a manhole, rich as Bill Gates. Among chocolate cakes, it’s a Union Pacific steam locomotive.”

* For some reason, I’ve long been fond of the archaic form of diverse “divers.” According to Grammarist: “The archaic adjective divers means various or many. Diverse means having great variety. For instance, a group of three can be called diverse if all three elements differ from one another, but we wouldn’t call the group divers because three are not many. Still, divers (usually pronounced DIE-verz) has given way to diverse in the sense meaning various, and in the many sense it gives way to other synonyms. The word has not been widely used in over a century, and even in the 19th century it was mainly a poeticism.”

Snow in San Antonio

Posted on January 25, 2015 by admin

In the winter of 1973, snow fell on San Antonio twice. That much I remember. That’s memorable because the number of times that snow stuck to ground in San Antonio during my youth there — 1968 to 1979 — was twice. By the time a foot or so fell in 1985, I was elsewhere. The 3 inches that fell in San Antonio February 1966 was before my time, but that might have been when it snowed heavily in North Texas, where I was. I remember that too.

So naturally we went out for a look. And to take pictures. I’m with Jim in the above image, and I took the one of Jay and Jim below.

This must have been the first snowfall, which was 0.8 inches on Jan 11. It looks like that much, not the 2 inches that fell on Feb. 8. Also, I doubt that Jay would have been around in February.

A front yard picture of a tree long ago dead and removed. I don’t know why I didn’t take any pictures of the February snow. Maybe no film. More likely sloth.

Back yard picture, on the deck that was later covered. At the time, it was open, and home to a decaying grill. Mostly I don’t remember cooking much on the grill, just building fires in it from time to time.

Thursday Stew

Posted on January 15, 2015 by admin

A bit of meltage today, with temps around freezing, and the sunshine doing the melting where it hit snow directly. Compared with last week, the air felt good. But hard winter will be back, count on it.

Started working my way through Deadwood around New Year’s. When the show was still fairly new, the profanity put me off it. Not the profanity itself, but the fact that I considered it grossly anachronistic. Now I understand it as an intentional anachronism, done for good reasons. The show’s impressive: one that helps make the argument that now is a golden age of television, or at least the 2000s were.

Ann’s been reading Through the Looking-Glass lately, and looking for our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has gone missing. Not long ago she read The Wizard of Oz. And she’s asked me to find our copies of The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book, so she can read them. The kid’s got some kind of bug.

I have an ambition to scan more coins, specifically those I’ve encountered lately that don’t feature any Roman letters or even Arabic numerals. In the old days, it was a chore figuring out the origin of coins like that, so much so that for some time as a youngster I had a 1 yen coin that I thought was a 1 yuan coin. These days, all it usually takes is a focused Google search.

But I’ve alternately been too busy and too indolent to do much coin-scanning. I did get around to this one. Forgot to check the box that would correct for dust (the scanner’s got some impressive features for a cheaper model; guess the tech’s improving).

It’s a well-worn brass 10 santim piece from Ethiopia. 100 santim = 1 birr. The lion, I suppose, is the Lion of Judah.

Tannenbaum ’14

Posted on December 15, 2014 by admin

We acquired a Christmas tree on Friday, but the thing wasn’t fully decorated until this afternoon, when Ann and some friends put on some icicles.

Earlier, I put on the lights, and then Lilly and Ann hung some of the other decorations. Along with the icicles, I crowned it with a star (it should be last, but close enough). Unconsciously, my children more-or-less follow my rules of Christmas tree decor, which I detailed more than 10 years ago (but which I clearly learned from my family decades earlier).

… lights first, ornaments next, icicles after that (tinsel to some people, those who also call it “trimming” the tree). The last item is the Star of Bethlehem, which goes on top.

Other guidelines, if you happen to be me, and want to decorate your tree:

* Space the lights and ornaments evenly, but not uniformly or systematically. That is, unless you have a very young child, as we do; in that case, fewer and tougher ornaments go near the bottom, and fewer lights down there too. [That last sentence doesn’t apply any more.]

* Decorate the back, the bottom and the interior of the branches, not only the front or visible sides.

* Be eclectic with ornaments, but no commercial logos or too-silly ornaments, unless your child made them.

For us, that last one means you’ll find on our tree: balls, santas, angels, stars, bells, birds, elves, snowmen, toy instruments, strings of beads, ribbons, even an eggplant ornament. They’re made of glass, plastic, cloth, paper, wood and ceramic. Lots of colors, more cool than hot. Some are old and beat up, some relatively expensive, some downright cheap, some bought at department stores, or discount stores, or garage sale, or acquired for free as gifts.

Eventually, the tree looked like this.

It looks better than the ’73 tree, but maybe that’s just the magic of digital photography.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Family