um…oops?

I think I annihilated a bird yesterday. I was coming down the off-ramp of the tollway to Roosevelt and there were two gray birds (pigeons maybe?) walking across the road. Gray birds on gray pavement. I barely saw them. One flew up and narrowly missed my windshield. I don’t know what happened to the other one, but I did look in my rearview mirror and saw a cloud of feathers. A lot like when Randy Johnson hit a bird with a fastball.

It didn’t feel like I hit anything. Nothing like the time I was with my dad, who was driving, and we hit a cat. I felt the bump then and was sick to my stomach for a while. And I didn’t notice any signs of a bird on my car when I got home. So, really I can only speculate that I did hit it.

But honestly. What is a bird doing walking? I’m a strong advocate that if you have wings, you should be using them. Birds just don’t seem to listen to me. But I’ve known that ever since I owned a pet parakeet. That was the meanest, most stubborn bird ever. Refused to learn any tricks and instead preferred to bite the hand that fed it. Then one morning my mom woke me up, looked at the bird and told me it was dead – probably had frozen to death since it was cold the night before. Yea, I cried. So there.

Of bondo and scam artists

Speaking of the good old ’88 Accord, here are a few highs and lows with this car. (This is getting classified under Stories from My Youth because, well, all this happened when I was younger. Is it sad that I’m classifying anything before I turned 30 as “My Youth”?)

Sara got it our sophmore year in college. Being one of the few people who had a car, we used it often. I remember one time driving the whole softball team to a game in the car. That’s right – 10 people squeezed in there. Don’t ask me how. We were in college and not too bright.

Our first accident that we had was leaving for Minnesota for Christmas break and not more that 10 miles after we left, we were crossing an overpass and the kid driving the Firebird next to us lost control and knocked us into the guard rail. I still drive by that guard rail just outside of Hudsonville whenever we take trips to Grand Rapids and remember that night fondly. Well, maybe fondly isn’t the best word.

The car was driveable, so we went on. For whatever reason (probably the mental exhaustion from all that), we stopped for the night somewhere in Wisconsin. The next morning, the car battery was completely dead because there was damage to the flip-up headlights and they were attempting to close all night long. So we spent the morning getting a tow to a garage and getting the battery charged. Good times.

There are other great stories. Like the time I lent it to a coworker while in the film business, and he managed to rip the front bumper off when he hit a concrete embankment while parallel parking.

But the coup de grâce was in the spring of ’98. I was driving up Sacramento Ave. when up ahead a light turned red. There was also an ambulance sirens heading towards us, which may have contributed to the confusion. The guy ahead of me slammed on his brakes. I slammed on my brakes. The woman behind me decided to use my rear bumper as her preferred method of stopping her car.

She had one of those vans with the vertical attachment to the front bumper. Thus, this left a nice rectangular dent in my bumper and the side panel above the passenger side rear well folded up a bit. The car was still driveable, but the insurance company bought out the car instead of fixing it, since that was the cheaper option.

One day, as I was leaving the Menards parking lot, I start seeing a guy in a pickup truck behind me honking his horn at me. I eventually figure he’s flagging me down. We stop and talk. He hands me his business card from a body repair shop and informs me he can pop that dent out of my bumper for $150. Considering the repair would have cost me over $5000, I figure this is a bargain, so my young, gullible, trustworthy self agrees to the deal.

We go back to the parking lot where he did make a valiant attempt at popping the dent back out. First with some hand tools and then he tried hooking up a chain to his truck and pulling it out (thus the two screw holes in the dent where he attached lag bolts to my car). But none of it worked. To his credit, the fold on the side did decrease slightly and the bumper straighten out a tad.

He said he needed another tool and could do it properly. He would come to my apartment the next day with it and finish the job. Then he slapped a bunch of bondo on the side dent. I paid him half of the amount and told him I’d pay the rest when he finished the job.

I never saw him again.

I tried calling the number on the business card, but they never heard of him. I now figure he must have just had that card in his wallet. Perhaps he was a customer.

I’m slightly comforted by the fact I only paid him half, but I still kick myself for paying him anything at all. He really left it looking worse than it was. I could have slapped bondo on there better than that.

So, lesson learned. In the big city, you really can’t trust any strangers off the street.

Traveling man

I got to thinking about raising my son and the cool places we’ll visit. I’ve been very blessed with growing up in a family that loved to travel. And now, I’ll get to show Alex all the places I’ve been to, and hopefully more. There are a whole bunch of National Parks I still want to visit.  (And I’m in the early stages of planning a trip to visit every baseball stadium in America and watch games – that’s about 10 years away, though).

But I’m also excited to go camping and fishing again at places I visited as a kid. I sat down and listed all the places I can remember visiting and then mapped them out using Wayfaring. I stuck with National Parks & Monuments for this particular list. I came up with 28 places. Although that’s a little misleading because 4 of them are in New York City and 6 are in Washington DC. Both of which I’ve visted on numerous occasions. But, since they are Nationally recognized and get their own homepage, I’m counting them.

Here is my Wayfaring Map.

I noticed there’s a distinct void of places in the mid-south. Did you know the Alamo is not a National monument? But I’ve been there and over to New Orleans, too. However, they don’t count in this exercise since they’re not National status.

My list includes the following. First, National Parks in alphabetical order:

• Badlands National Park
  Southwestern, SD
• Denali National Park & Preserve
  Denali Park, AK
• Fire Island National Seashore
  Patchogue, NY
• Grand Canyon National Park
  Grand Canyon, AZ
• Grand Teton National Park
  Moose, WY
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park
  Tennessee and North Carolina, NC,TN
• Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
  Porter, IN
• Katmai National Park & Preserve
  King Salmon, AK
• Kenai Fjords National Park
  Seward, AK
• Mesa Verde National Park
  Cortez and Mancos, CO
• Shenandoah National Park
  the Blue Ridge Mountains near Luray, VA
• Yellowstone National Park
  Yellowstone National Park, ID,MT,WY
• Yosemite National Park
  the Sierra Nevada, CA

National Monuments and Memorials:

• Alcatraz Island
  San Francisco, CA
• Castle Clinton National Monument
  New York, NY
• Ellis Island National Monument
  NJ,NY
• Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site
  Washington D.C., DC
• General Grant National Memorial
  New York, NY
• Gettysburg National Military Park
  Gettysburg, PA
• Golden Gate National Recreation Area
  San Francisco, CA
• Korean War Veterans Memorial
  Washington, DC
• Lincoln Memorial
  Washington, DC
• Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
  Crow Agency, MT
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial
  Keystone, SD
• National Mall
  Washington D.C., DC
• Statue Of Liberty National Monument
  NY
• Vietnam Veterans Memorial
  Washington, DC
• Washington Monument
  Washington, DC

I’m sure my family will correct me if I’ve made any mistakes.

Also, unfortuantely, Wayfaring organizes the waypoints in order that you put them down on the map, not alphabetically. Oh well. Still fun to look at.

I realized this is my last post of 2006. Happy New Year everyone. See you again next year.

Tree Forts

It’s time for more stories from my youth.

Growing up, I loved climbing trees (actually, I still do, but the frequency of said activity has certainly decreased – I blame lack of climbable trees in my yard). In addition to climbing them, I also loved building forts in them.

In our backyard, we had (have? I guess so, they’re still there) two big Silver Maple trees – one in each corner of the yard. My dad built us an awesome fort in and around one of them. It still stands today, 20 years later. My parents have friends with young children who come over to play in it (the children, not the adults). I look at it now and wonder how I ever fit in it – it’s not that large.

I guess I was so happy with that tree fort that I needed to build another. Over around the other maple tree I built a shack. It was ugly and dangerous. I don’t recall exactly where I got all the wood for it, but it surrounded the base of the tree (while not IN the tree per se, it can still be considered a tree fort since it was a fort that used a tree as it’s main support structure).

Man, was that thing an eye sore.

There wasn’t a level board in the place and there were nails sticking out everywhere. But it didn’t matter. My friends and I still had a ton of fun in it. We even built a zip line and a little stand to land on. That was a blast, but it was the most rickety thing ever. A neighborhood kid did fall and get a minor concussion once. Ah, those were the days…good times.
Eventually I had to dismantle it because I think the neighbors complained. For years though, I had dreams and aspirations to build out my dad’s tree fort even bigger, but unfortunately they were never realized.

I look forward to the day when I can build a tree fort for my son.

Sayville, NY

So, for some reason that I can’t remember anymore, I decided to put my hometown into good old google and see what came up. I eventually ended up on this site. (sorry – view this site in Firefox if possible – it’s a geocities site with lots of popups)

This site is has some of the funniest, one sided, sensationalist stories I’ve ever seen reported. Most of the stuff reported here is true, but some stories get slanted as if this writer worked for the Enquirer.

At any rate, I did learn a few things (and found other websites to back some of this stuff up)

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1) The Telefunken Wireless Station. Growing up, I always saw these large radio towers (North of the train tracks, West of Cherry Ave. in West Sayville). I was always curious about them. Turns out these towers played an important role in World War 1. They were built and run by the Germans before the US entered the war. That is until the Army intercepted and decoded a transmission coming from that tower, sent to Mexico to try to get Mexico to invade the US. The other infamous message sent from that tower was the instructions and coordinates to sink the Lusitania. Then we sent in the Marines. (more info is here)

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2) High School Gun Shootings Violence in the 90s set off by Kid in Sayville! That’s the actual title of the page. In the article it goes on to state how a student, Kevin, brought a gun to school to shoot another student. Now, I was there that day and Kevin was a friend of mine. (It was in Chemistry class when he was called out of class) What the article doesn’t state is that there were no bullets. The gun was not loaded and he wasn’t going to shoot anyone. He was threatened by bullies with a knife the day before and was just going to brandish the gun for intimidation.

The article does get one thing right, Kevin was a good kid. He was expelled for the rest of the school year and I brought him his homework from time to time. The rest of the article tries to connect this incident with all the other gun toting kids and school shootings. I don’t know about that, but the author really tries to make more out of the incident than what really happened.

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3) Pirates buried treasure in Sayville. Ok, so here the author takes some extreme liberties in trying to assert that there is buried treasure in Sayville. While Pirates probably did run around the bay and ocean around good old LI, whether or not any actual treasure is buried in the hamlet of Sayville remains to be seen. (Still cool to say that I traveresed the same grounds as some infamous pirates)

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4) Father Divine lived in Sayville for a while. Now this is an interesting story that I had no idea about. This Father Divine character was a cult leader who told his followers to give them all their money and had to call him god. (more here) Jim Jones of Jonestown was apparently a follower and modeled his own cult off of Father Divine. He even tried to overtake the Divine’s cult and assests after Father Divine died.

All I know is that the next time I’m back in Sayville, I’m definately going to drive by 72 Macon Street.

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5) There is a lot of information about Melissa Joan Hart, aka Sabrina the Teenage Witch. This is where I just rolled my eyes. Meilssa is a year younger than I and since I went to private school from K-8, I never met her. She left for acting school in NY before she entered High School. But the site does mention some of her friends who I knew.

Now, I’m not trying to assert that I’m cool because I’m like 3 degrees from her, cause really, knowing a D-Grade actress really isn’t that big of deal. And there’s no way I’d ever be cool.

But what riles me is that the site tries to portray Sayville as a bunch of really mean, snobby kids that all they do is pick on others. There certainly were plenty of those types of kids, but it’s also high school. I’m sure you could get stories like those out of nearly every school.

The fact is, I had a great high school experience. I have nothing but good memories (well mostly) So again, the author took a couple of students who had bad experiences and tries to sterotype the whole school.

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So, there is some fun history from my home town. And there is still a ton of other loose ties and stories listed on the site. I never knew Sayville was as interesting as all that. And here I always thought my town was dull.

Actually, it probably still isn’t interesting, it’s just that the author uses a lot of sensationalism to make our town sound a lot more exciting than it really is. Just more proof that you can’t always beleive what you read on the internet.

Don’t lie to your mother

It’s time for a confession. My mother told me when she was here over Memorial Day that she could only remember 2 times growing up when I had lied to her. This tells me that one of these three things must be true:

1. I’m a really good liar (I don’t think this one is true, because my wife can always tell when I’m trying to pull one over on her)
2. I was an angel child and really didn’t lie to my mother (this one has my vote)
3. Or finally, I now know where I got my bad memory from.

Here’s a little background about the area surrounding the house I grew up in. Behind our house is a wooded lot. For whatever reason, there are several undeveloped acres tucked between houses on 3 sides and the highway and strip malls on the far side. We would play in these woods a lot, and it was a great place for boys. We could build forts and dig “booby trap” pits and play all sorts of games back there.

The stores and buildings on the highway contain things like a 7-Eleven and a bowling alley. Now, I can’t exactly recall how old I was (6th or 7th grade?), but one of my childhood friends, Chad, and I came up with a great plan. You see, we became addicted to the video games at the bowling alley. Double Dragon … Operation Wolf … Gauntlet – good stuff.

We knew we wouldn’t be allowed to go to the bowling alley to play video games, so we had told my mom that we were off building forts in the woods. I remember one time we were walking back only to hear my mom yelling for us to come home. I don’t know how long she had been calling us, but we got away with it.

I have no idea where we got the money to play the games either, but I can recall dumping tons of quarters into those machines to try to get to the end. Perhaps from mowing lawns. I think that job started around that time.

So, sorry mom – there’s one more for your list. Please don’t ground me.