Pizza Oven & BHS Reunion Weekend

Hi Mom and family,

Thursday: 

Dale Sr. built me this shelf which I asked for, so I could display the coffee cups I've brought back from foreign travel. Now, if I could only find where I stashed said coffee cups!

Here are some more photos of the pizza oven progress, also taken Thursday:

Tony cutting rebar:

Rebar in place to hold up the floor of the pizza oven:

I stopped by to visit Tish on my way to my Arabic lesson, after making the copies I would need for drama club. She and her husband Dixon showed me the horrible photos of the staph infection on his knee, blisters and discoloration. I had heard about how horrible those infections can be, but those photos drove it home.

Few kids came to drama club, because parents had not yet received the letter telling them what days the meetings are scheduled. I had written the letter and given it to them, but the director wanted to re-type it because I'd written "Boys' and Girls' Club" and they always spell it "Boys & Girls Club". However, I was able to make contact with two or three parents and give them some understanding about what the club was about.
 
The next morning I got this photo of Ziggy relaxing on the couch:

More pizza-oven/smoker photos: 
This will be the storage area under the pizza oven:

The temporary plywood rood of the same storage area:

The firepit area between the smoker and the pizza oven:

Another storage area, behind the fire-pit:

The chimney flue (not placed  here it will eventually be placed):

John Ducette cutting a cement block with his water-lubricated saw:

 

Cam getting ready to hand John D. a cement block:

Packing during the afternoon, I had to face the fact that I was experiencing an attack of "nerves" about the coming high school reunion. Would Alice K. be as glad to see us as we would be to see her? What would it be like to see all those people from so long ago? I have many wonderful memories from those high school years, but some very uncomfortable ones as well.

 In the evening, we went up to hear the wonderful Hans Olson at the Handlebar Pub and Grill: He played a great couple of sets, it was like he was on fire. He didn't ask for requests like he sometimes does, it was as if he had so many songs in his head he couldn't play them fast enough.

Here is a photo of Dale Sr. with beer signs, and me with my Guinness:
 

The music really helped clear my head.

Flying out on Friday morning, I saw, for the first time ever I think, the reflection of the moon on the wing of the airplane.
(That tiny little dot.)

 

I had a nice flight, and then waited at the Starbuck's on Shattuck and Kittredge until it was time for Kathy to pick me up. We were to wait for our old friends Heidi and Alice K. in the Doubletree Inn hotel. I was a little disappointed that they wanted to eat there, but then I remembered that I myself hate to drive in Berkeley!

First we took a walk with Heidi, who got there earlier. Kathy and Alice were both closer to Heidi than I. I had forgotten, or had never known, how hilarious she is! And she is the one who kept in touch with Alice, who added so much to our high school lives.

I couldn't believe how both of them looked so much the same. Heidi's husband Eric took this photo of the four of us, before we went into the hotel restaurant...me, Alice, Kathy, and Heidi.

What a wonderful lunch the four of us had! Alice has been an anthropology professor at a city college in Sacramento. Her husband, whom she started going with when we were in high school, teaches criminology (if I remember correctly). We all talked a mile a minute, and all agreed we should meet again every year.

The view of the marina from the restaurant:

The next morning I took my weekly hike, walking down to the African market at the Ashby BART station and back up the hill.


 

Sad to see this beautiful mural on the side of Shakespeare's Books, now that that bookstore is all emptied out and ready to be sold. It seemed symbolic to pass by it on the day of our high school reunion, as Kathy and Alice and I would always go in there (and into Moe's books) when we walked up to "the Ave" for a cappuchino at "the Med" (the  Café Mediterraneum).

The walk up the hill was pretty tough, all the more reason that I need it.

I always like looking at these pines, because they look like the Aleppo pines, sometimes called "umbrella pines", that I've seen so many of in Italy.

In the afternoon I dressed up for the reunion. I asked Sandy to take the photo. Good thing, because once there I didn't remember to take any photos of anyone I cared about, much less myself!

My high school reunion was really interesting, and I am so very very grateful that Kathy asked me if I wanted to go with her and Heidi. It will take a while for me to digest everything, though. I found the barrage of memories left my admittedly over-sensitive psyche feeling temporarily traumatized. The valuable insights which the experience has added to my understanding of life, life in general and my own life: absolutely priceless. 

However, for now I'm still internally slammed from the shock... re-surfaced memories. Those teen years were a mix of delight and pain...

Very different experience from the wonderful lunch the day before!.
 
Only took a few photos, bad ones! 

(On the far left is Eric, our friend Heidi's  husband, whom Kathy and I like a lot.)

I was very sad to find out that Steve Kent, who went to Hillside, one of the classmates whom I had been looking forward to seeing again, has died of AIDS. He was gay, which I had not known. I wasn't in his group of friends in high school, but he was one of those popular kids who  always treated everyone decently, and was so refreshingly intelligent as well.

A girl named Nancy Pettit (who, it turned out, spent many years as a drummer with rock bands) had kept all her photos. She was the one who brought the above photo, and the candles, and set them on the table where the reunion organizers had displayed the list of all of the departed classmates.

There were around forty who are no longer living (out of a class of around a thousand), only a couple of whom I knew well enough to remember, and mourn. All of the males in our class who did not go to college, get a medical discharge, or declare themselves as conscientious would have been candidates for the Vietnam War draft, but none of them died that young. 

Signing off,
Lennie

Pizza Oven Progress and News from Lyssa

Hi Mom and family,

Nice weekend in Berkeley. I hope you are now feeling better, Mom, than you were on the Sunday after the tea. It was nice that you felt revived enough in the evening to take part in that nice visit we had with John McCurley. I hope that the meeting he had in Berkeley with his new employers went well.

It was nice chatting with Karina on Monday morning, and then with Marisa. The conversation with Marisa was pleasant; I told her how pleased I was to read in her notes about the tuna sandwich or other high-protein meal given mid-afternoon or late afternoon.

After a quick, pleasant lunch with Sandy at a nice little coffee place on University, I had an easy trip home.

When I got home there were little kids, not our nice Mexican neighbor's kids, running all over the bricklaying sand and equipment.  Dale Sr. and John Ducette had left it lying out at the end of our little dead end street. In the morning, Dale Sr. found the hole in the fence, and we talked to the neighbors about it, asking if it was all right if we fixed it.
 
Our neighbors said that they would fix it themselves, at least I think they did. It was a pleasant exchange. I'm not bad in Spanish, but when I'm nervous it leaves me. I did get the point across, and also managed "estan buenos vecinos, Ustedes".

Much progress had been made on the new gigantic smoker, fire-pit, and pizza oven. I'm a bit disappointed that they will not be using brick, as Dale Sr. had said he was planning to do. I think his friend John Ducette, shown here, talked him into using cement block and stucco as are old one was. But, it's his project, not mine, so I just bit my lip.

Three guys have been helping Dale Sr. with the project, all of them having a great time in spite of the fact that they were all physically so tired. Tony "the hermit" (we never call him that to his face) showed up to help. Then Cam, the guy who built the fence across the street, he was back in town and Dale Sr. had asked him about building some metal doors for the smoker and the storage unit which will go behind the fire pit.

It was great to see Cam, hadn't seen him in a long while. Here's a photo of me and Tony "the hermit", who plays beautiful dobro and guitar, and one of Dale Sr. and Cam.

On the way to meeting with my computer tutor, I heard on NPR an interview with a Mexican immigrant is making a lot of money selling a piñata he started manufacturing. A piñata in the likeness of Donald Trump. When I got to Starbuck's, I couldn't resist going on Google to see what it looked like, and here it is.

During my lesson, we continued to work on ghc-ghc-ghc.com. I'm hoping to finish it before the weekend, so that in the event that I end up talking to someone at the high school reunion whom I wish to give one of my cards to, they won't go onto the website and find some empty pages. It's going quickly because it's basically just paragraphs about each topic, plus links to relevant websites.

After the lesson, I went up to the library to type out a scene for the drama club to use. In the new version, the twenty or so lines of the one "mean character" are divided between three characters.

I stopped for chicken feed and a scratch block, and called Dale Sr. to see if he wanted anything from Safeway. He and the other guys who had worked on the pizza oven were over at the "man-cave" where he was making them chile with smoked pulled pork and beans.

When he came home at 7:00 PM, he started to fall asleep in his chair. The cement-block work wears them out!

A little later, Cate, a woman who was at my music jam came over to do some singing. She brought back my songbook, and brought hers with her. Her friend, who came with her to the jam, is going to type out the songs which she got from my songbook into her tablet device so that she can use it during music jams (they go to another music jam also).

Even though Cate is almost 70, and a cancer survivor, she is really interested in singing better. I told her that actually she has a nice voice,  it's just a little forced-sounding from being nervous. I hope I helped her some.

After we sang some, we ended up chatting about quite a few topics. I think...hope...maybe I've made a new friend.

She is the one I mentioned who actually lives quite near Lyssa and Mike, as the crow flies, but quite a distance in road miles, in the interior mountains of British Columbia. Like Lyssa, she was an American who ended up marrying a Canadian, and like me, she was a young adult in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 60's.

She also let me borrow some copies of songs from her song book so that I could make copies of them.

Lyssa writes that she is glad to see from the blog posts that you look well, Mom.\

 She recently took little Waylon along for a very long day. First there was an all-day "martial arts day" outside in a park, followed by an evening dinner party. The baby was "a real trouper" though they left the house  at 7:30 in the morning and didn't get home until almost 11pm!

She says that they are  working on incorporating the pizza business, "so that any property we buy will have liability protection from the business".   Mike and Tami had been operating it as a limited partnership before, but Lyssa realized that it would be smart to make it a more formal company now that there was more at stake.

"Buying property will attract attention in such a small town, and though it seems so unlikely that anyone would sue the pizza place, I'll feel better this way," she wrote. (They are looking for a piece of land, Mike has always rented before.)

Very wise of her.

Love,
Lennie




 

Rainy Days in Berkeley

Written January 24th
About January 22nd and 23rd

Hi Mom and Family,

I was outside waiting for the Supershuttle van at 3:45 AM on Friday. There was a beautiful moon, full or near-full, and I got this photo:

Oakland was rainy and cool when I arrived. I loved the way the airport looked with the lights reflected on the drenched pavement.

: 

Before leaving the airport, I wrapped the contents of my roller bag with the garbage bag I always pack if there is a possibility of rain. Smaller Safeway bags wrapped up my lap-top and the song copies inside my back-pack. I have learned that, if rain is coming down hard enough, neither the suitcase nor the backpack are water-proof.

 
 
Because the plane was early, I had time to work on some music with Oscar before we had lunch. I really enjoy my lunch with them on the Fridays of the weekends I'm here.

 I told them that for the coming weekend I would not be able to come for lunch, because I wanted to be available to lunch with Kathy and our high school friends whom I have not seen since '66, Alice Kalmar (who was such an interesting addition to our high school experiences) and Kathy's friend Heidi Schoener.

I walked south to Stone Mountain and Daughters to look for some fabric I wanted. I loved walking in the rain in Berkeley as much as I did when I was in high school:

 On the way back to Andronico's, I stopped at Baubles and Beads to get some brown "e" beads to for a necklace I am working on. I was very sad to hear there, that this store is closing, both their San Rafael location and the Berkeley one, in order to sell solely on-line. To me, beads are something that one likes to pick up and feel before buying.

I know there are great bead stores in my area, but it's been a nice little treat for me to stop there at such a nice bead store, pleasantly located between BART and Andronico's.

The bus trip up the hill was quite difficult, because I had a heavier load than usual.

I was happy to find you seemingly well and happy, Mom, though Sandy said you'd felt like lying down all day. This is very unusual for you lately. (I myself sometimes feel that way on a rainy day, and go looking through my favorite old chick-flick DVD's!)

You rose at 10:00 on Saturday, Mom, and ate the entire breakfast which Tamika fixed for you, two eggs, some chopped up Canadian bacon, and toast. No lying down nor napping for the entire day. 

In the afternoon, I worked on my chicken ettouffeé recipe and Sandy his squash and garbanzo dishes. As usual on a "tea" day, Tamika made the salad. She also chopped up all the celery, green pepper, red pepper, and Canadian bacon and minced garlic needed for my recipe! I chopped the onions.

She chopped up everything very fine, and said that was what her grandmother insisted on. My chopped onions looked very amateur compared to what she chopped!

The chicken ettoufeé came out pretty tasty and was well-received. Good old new Joy of Cooking!

 I used the chicken broth in the recipe, which we made from those chickens that Madelyn brought here for a meal during the holidays (or was it Rebecca?)

Ana Jarnigan came around 3:00, by pre-arrangement, "to have some one- on-one conversation with Teddy". She brought some lovely slipper-socks knitted in Peru.

She told us that Michael Jarnigan recently lost an old and dear friend of his to a brain tumor. Michael spoke at the funeral.

You can see in this photograph how nice Mom's hair looks. Great haircut you gave her, Nancy! Many comments about it from the guests at the "tea".

The tea was great, about a dozen of the regulars. A very interesting conversation, first about philosophy, which several of the people there turned out to have majored in, and then about the financial crash of 2008 and the reasons for it.

The music Oscar and I played went quite well. It helped that we had worked on it some the day before.

We usually play for the last half hour of the 4:30-6:30 tea. It's very relaxed, some people come closer to us to listen but others keep conversing in the living room. If I don't start by around 6:00, you starasking about it, Mom

After dinner we washed up for quite a while. Then we started "Downton Abbey" an old one which they are watching as a way to get background for the Downton Abbey VI which Sandy has ordered. I mentioned that it would be on TV Sunday night, but he said he hasn't watched anything on directly on TV for years, as he prefers to watch what he wants to watch, when he wants to watch it.

I made it through the half-episode they had started, but I could not stay awake after that. 

Love,
Lennie

Drama Club and Urban Hiking

(I'm a little behind on posting; this blog covers Tuesday 19th through Wednesday the 20th)


Hi Mom and family,

I'm finishing writing this a little after midnight, early Friday morning. My shuttle van comes at 3:30 AM. "Yawn!"

Tuesday morning I went by Office Max to make a copy of the song I sent Oscar, then  went up to the post office to get the song in the mail. I found a traffic jam in the Post Office parking lot there, with cars lined up to try to get into half of the parking lot because the other half was getting new asphalt.

I parked across the street and just jay-walked over. The part which had not got new asphalt was all dirt, where the old asphalt had been taken up.

Exiting the parking lot across the street, I was right "on the heels" of a fender-bender! The car in front of me was signaling a left turn, and I thought "Oh, this will take a while." The person pulled out sooner than I expected, and slowly and methodically drove right into a car which was stopped in the middle turn lane!

The driver in front of me must have been looking to the right so long that she or he forgot that things might have changed, meanwhile, on their left.

I had to get home and finish getting the casting figured out for the drama club.  It turned out I had plenty of time because my tutor called and asked that our session be moved to Thursday. Which was a relief.

I decided that, for my third, fourth and fifth graders,  I could use a scene which I had previously thought would be too difficult for this age group. By splitting the one "mean girl" role into three "mean girls" I could reduce the number of lines each girl must remember and the scene would still "work".

For the first and second graders, I am using an easy but well-written skit by Laurie Allen. A friend helped me simplify years ago when I first started working with the elementary age kids.  It is about some kids who find a birthday card with some money in it, and one of them convinces the others to do the right thing and turn it in.

I jotted down how I would organize the hour I have with the kids. It really helps me, with a group of rambunctious kids, be well-prepared. . For instance, during the time when the littlest ones had to sit while I was auditioning the older ones, I tell the little ones I need their help in deciding who should play which role, and give them a little form to fill out.

 Of course, I would be making up my own mind and didn't need their input, but if you give them some task to do, it's much easier for them to sit. This is a trick which my friend Laure pointed out to me, years ago when she helped me do the drama club at the high school, that first scary year after Lyssa graduated and could no longer help me with it.

The older ones can be sent to a corner with their scene to read through it on their own, while I work with the little ones, but "vice versa" does not work at all!

Starting the second week of February, I will go there for two sessions each week, one with the older ones and one with the younger ones.

I stopped at Starbuck's on the way home. It finally gave a chance to look through e-mail, check the meetup pages for messages, check the facebook group pages, and do the blog for the last few days.

There was an e-mail from Kathy saying that our main other friend from Jr. high and high school, Alice Kalmar, would be in Berkeley the weekend of the reunion!!! Alice is not attending it the reunion, and does not wish to, but there is a possibility of seeing her, which is quite exciting for me. I have not seen Alice since high school.

I also got a very nice e-mail from one of the women who came to the music jam, whom I had given one of my cards as she left, when she asked for my e-mail. She's the one who lives in British Columbia. Her e-mail said that the Sunday music jam was lovely, and then she went on to rave about my personal website. Quite gratifying. Motivates me to go ahead and finish all the pages on it! (I haven't finished the "travel talk" website either.)

By the time I got home it was almost nine-thirty, and Dale Sr. and Ziggy asleep. I thought I'd read for a while, and dropped off myself, completely forgetting my medications and vitamins. Aaagh!

Yesterday morning I spent a couple of hours doing some overdue watering and weeding on the lot across the street. It was so pleasant outside in the cool, bright sunshine. I then  drove into Tempe for my Arabic lesson.

As you know, I have resolved to do one long walk per week, at least six or seven miles. The reason for this is to toughen myself up for the week-long hike in Mexico (six to ten miles a day and sleeping on the ground) which I plan to do with my friend Ann in May.

I decided to do my weekly walk right there in Tempe after my lesson,  in more interesting surroundings, and end with a meal in a restaurant. First I walked down the picturesque several blocks of Mill Avenue, an area where little shops and restaurants compete for the college student crowd.

This fountain and the large statues of rabbits, is right outside the parking garage: 

Then I walked down to the river, past Tempe Town Lake Park and across the bridge to the other side.

Mill Avenue is a pleasant street to walk down. I turned into a pleasant little courtyard with a garden and fountain.

The historic Hayden flour mill is a landmark on Mill Avenue:

This poster shows projected building for the block on which long-time local landmark "Monte's La Vieja Steakhouse" has stood for almost a century. They are keeping the steakhouse, but it will be dwarfed by the proposed building around it.

Above: Tempe Town Lake Park. This park was built when the river was dammed to make the lake. It is the scene of many events such as the Oktoberfest, marathon runs,and daily dog walking, jogging, etc.

 Below, some of the new corporate buildings which, during the last decade, have been built around Tempe Town Lake.

The bridge was built after the old one washed out in the floods of '78 (the year I moved to Arizona. The new bridges, one for north-bound and one for south-bound traffic, were built to replicate the style of the original bridges. The north-bound one has a nice wide sidewalk, welcoming to foot traffic.

 These people, in Tempe Town Lake Park, were doing a kind of bicycle roller derby. They were riding around in circles and making sudden turns in order to cause other riders to lose their balance. I'd never seen anything like it.

View of the train bridge: the "light rail" metro train crosses here.

I wondered if  this huge"First Solar" building, just north of the river, was actually powered solely by solar!

I walked up a winding walk on the other side of the Salt River, called the "Crosscut Canal Shared Use Path". It suddenly felt like I was out in the desert. Occasionally a jogger or someone on a bicycle would pass me.

There were signs saying "Beware: Disc Golfers". Then I saw  baskets with numbers on them which looked like they were a part of the disc golf. I later learned from Dale Sr. that disc golf is played with frisbees, and that it has become more and more popular.

 

Walking back through the venerable Moeur Park picnic area with its Conservation Corps-built picnic sites, I climbed up and down this set of stairs five times, to get some hill-muscle-strengthening going on.

I walked back down, back across the bridge, where I saw these rowing teams getting into the water. 

Next to the hulking, long unused Hayden Flour Mill, there was a display about the proposed project which will house a museum in the first floor of the famous Tempe Landmark. These photos show the Mill as it once was.

I was so glad to read about this project and the museum which will be part of it.

Then I went up the Hayden Butte trail as far as the lookout point but not to the very top. I was huffing and puffing a bit but it felt good.

In this photo from the look-out, you can see the new "light rail" metro, moving along its track, and other views of the Mill Avenue area:

I walked back down, and did a little more walking until I reached my 5:30 PM goal. (I'd started at 3:00 PM).

I had a plate of Döner Kebap (like gyros but on a plate with rice) at the Turkish Grill, where the staff is friendly, the food is good, and you can sit outside and watch the street. My effusively friendly waiter, who had time to talk because their dinner rush hadn't started, was a student from Saudi Arabia.

I should have taken the photo of my dinner before I took the bite out of the pita bread!

  
 My "urban hike" only totaled around 2 and 1/2 hours of walking, probably only five miles total.In order to meet my goal, I walked another hour the following morning. Clear, very breezy chill air and bright sunlight.

The entire day Thursday was very full. I had a hair appointment, my computer tutor, a stop at the library to compose the permission letter for the drama club kids' parents to sign, back to Office Max for more copies, and then drama club itself.

In the evening one of the women who had come to the music jam meetup last Sunday came by to borrow one of the copies of my big song book. I'm sure she'll bring it back, I have that feeling about her. But if worse came to worse, I do have two other copies of it. And I was glad, because it showed she was really interested.

Love,
 Lennie