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
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