Category Archives: Ronnie

Twenty-Five Years

Let me introduce you to The Long-Suffering Wife, Ronnie:

She’s now been suffering with me as her husband for twenty-five years, one of those big, milestone anniversaries.

Wow! I had hair, and it was still black!

In the past I’ve rarely mentioned her by name to protect her privacy, but she has agreed that twenty-five years is enough of a reason to break a few “rules.”

We’ve had a lot of adventures in a quarter century.

 

We’ve traveled across the US and Canada, and cruised down to Mexico.

It’s been a slice. And now, on to the next twenty-five years.

Paul & Ronnie. We’re a cute couple. A couple of WHAT remains an open question.

 

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Filed under Paul, Photography, Ronnie, Travel

July Upgrades Start Strong!

One of the things about the Forever Home is that it’s well over twice the size of the rental home we had in West Hills for the previous seven years. One immediate effect was that, even after pulling a lot of old furniture out of storage, there were (and still are) spots and even whole rooms where we need to get some new furniture.

For example, the kitchen has this spectacularly huge island, but needed bar stools.

The breakfast nook off of the kitchen, up until yesterday, had a broken treadmill in it. (To be fair, it’s being repaired, I have the parts, and this was a nice, open space to work on it.)  This really nice table and chairs, resplendant with the monthly decorations from The Long-Suffering Wife, is a huge upgrade.

The bar stools swivel, and I tested all four. Most will do two and a half to three full revolutions with one good push, but the one on the far left did 4+! I had to stop it before it finished on its own since diziness and sever nausea were about to cause a mess that I would be just as happy to not clean up. (You might be thinking something like, “He’s an adult, right? Why is he spinning around on a bar stool until he makes himself puke? Is he really that stupid?” For the record, I’m pretty sure The Long-Suffering Wife was thinking the exact, same thing…)

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Filed under Forever Home, Photography, Ronnie

Getting Our Kicks

Today was The Long-Suffering Wife’s birthday (Happy Birthday! 🥳🎁🎂🍾❤️) and she wanted to go see the local Route 66 Museum. So, we did!

Route 66 is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and the Victor Valley area is one of many places in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois that it passed through. The primary highway from Chicago to Los Angeles before the interstate highway system was built post-WWII, it’s still a nostalgic icon for many.

So many artifacts and bits and pieces! It was great. Souveniers were bought. We’ll be back.

A good birthday was had by all.

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Filed under Ronnie, Photography

Once More Into The Community

Since moving to Hesperia we’ve been actively looking for opportunities to get involved in the community and participate in local events. The Christmas tree lighting, the weekend farmers’ market, the museum, the astronomy club star parties, and so on.

Today the “Monday Municipal Mile” events start for the spring. The same Civic Center park (next to City Hall, the library, the police station…) where the Christmas event was, a lap around the park is a quarter mile, four laps gets you your easy, flat, paved mile with benches and rest stops all over the place if needed. We got our T-shirts, and they also had water, Gatorade, snacks, and first aid (not that I saw anyone needing it).

We heard from the mayor, a couple of City Council members, a bit of blah blah blah about how healthy this all is, and then we were off!

I did two of my four laps with our local City Council representative and had a great conversation about what brought us to Hesperia, what we like (a LOT of things, like this event!), what we don’t (a short list, mainly some key streets that need some maintenance, which they’re aware of and working on), and what we’ve got to look forward to (multiple HUGE warehouse & distribution centers, lots of shopping growth, the high-speed LA-to-Las Vegas rail project). It was great!

We’ll be out there every Monday. Easy exercise, nice folks, a little bit of community involvement. Small town America! Cue the country music!

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Filed under Ronnie, Photography, Forever Home

The New Tree – Layer Two

New, bigger, better house – new, bigger, better Christmas tree. An array of options for the built in lighting, we chose to go with twinkling white lights.

Next, it’s time to two full strings of colored lights, plus two full strings of bubble lights.

I do love me some of those bubble lights. A fond memory from my childhood, even if they were the very old-fashioned kind that were both highly flammable and poisonous. (Or should that be venomous?)

The modern lights are safer. But they will still break if banged around, and today the algorithm brought me a string of videos of large dogs, particularly great danes, obliterating Christmas trees, and The Long-Suffering Wife dearly wants a great dane, so… Let’s hope this isn’t a foreshadowing comment.

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Dogs, Photography, Ronnie

Pudding Brain

As Senior Director of Finance & Administration I often have a very full plate. To say the least. At the top of the annual list, especially in terms of stress and “challenges,” is the audit. Our auditors are good and generally nice folks who I get along with, but to be done properly the audit process by its very nature is … “thorough.” Think of it as being a bit like a colonoscopy without benefit of anesthesia, but everyone’s smiling and cooperative.

This year’s audit starts on Monday, so the last two weeks have been prep, prep, and more prep. Pulling documents, finalizing the year-end accounting, and so on. Tons and tons and tons of details, numbers, schedules, reports, and extra brownie points if the figures are actually accurate. (We do pretty well on that score, actually.)

But it does leave one with a bit of a “pudding brain.” Remember that classic of camp cinema, “Flash Gordon!,” the one with Sam J. Jones, Melody Anderson, Max von Sydow, Brian Blessed, Topol, and Timothy Dalton? (An excellent film!) Remember the “scanners” working the consoles in the bowels of the war rooms of Ming the Merciless?

That’s me already… I’ve even got the haircut for it. (I have GOT to find me a pair of those glasses!)


However, I’m not so fried that I didn’t notice the date. Yes, 81 years ago our parents and grandparents and great grandparents stormed the beaches of Normandy. That’s important to remember. But more important personally, it was 25 years ago tonight that I went out on a first date with The Long-Suffering Wife. She says that her fear was that I would excuse myself to the restroom and then slip out the window and shimmy a couple stories down a drain pipe to abandon her there.

Obviously, I didn’t.

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Filed under Entertainment, Family, Farce, Paul, Ronnie, Science Fiction, Silly Shit

Twentieth Anniversary

How does one celebrate one’s twentieth wedding anniversary? Well, some folks go to the French Riviera, some to New York, some just go out to dinner, some something somewhere in the middle.

We went out and beat the shit out of bottles, VHS tapes, dishes, a computer monitor, a printer…

It’s like a scene out of “Full Metal Jacket.” “Let me hear your war cry!!”

The protective gear is necessary – glass, plastic, metal shards flying everywhere. Along with every muscle, tendon, and ligament in my body. I’m going to need a fork lift to get me out of bed tomorrow.

There was much destruction. And sweat. And soreness tonight. It was worth it.

Dinner was at the Top of the World restaurant (rotating!) at the top of Stratosphere. Occasionally you would see someone plummet by past the 106th floor on the express route from the 108th floor to the 63rd floor (or someplace down there). We did not do that adventure for our twentieth anniversary. Maybe for the fortieth.

After that extreme destruction, hand to hand combat with inanimate objects earlier, an unusual amount of walking through casinos, and enough great food to sink a ship, we ended up with some amazing dessert.

Happy Anniversary, Ronnie! It’s been an adventure every day, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next twenty bring! Love you!

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Watch – Out!

As Adam Savage is fond of saying, “Well THERE‘s your problem!”

The Long-Suffering Wife was minding her own business, out on errands, when her Apple Watch spontaneously disassembled itself.

She has the screen, grabbed it as it was falling off. But see all of those really, REALLY tiny wires?

I suspect they’re important. I can solder and run a test meter and do some fundamental electronics work – but THAT’s way above my pay grade.

Um…yeah. That’s not going to just snap back together.

I’m not upset. It’s not like it was new and we need to go to the Apple Store and demand to “talk to the manager.” It was a Series 2, and its replacement will be a Series 6, so in “computer years” it was probably living on borrowed time for at least the last year or longer.

The additional benefit is that it makes it brain-dead simple to figure out what to get her for her birthday later in the month. And thanks to the internet and FedEx, she’ll get it tomorrow!

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Filed under Photography, Ronnie

Eighteen Years

Eighteen years ago there were a whole slew of family and friends gathered at a purple tea house (rumored to formerly be a house of ill repute in its distant past):

We were a cute couple.

We still are.

We’re dressed a bit less formally and my hair has gotten a lot more grey, but we’re still going strong!

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Filed under Paul, Ronnie

Seventeen Years Ago

Two years ago, actually, I had pictures of the all new, mid-five-figure full-line replacement sewer that we had “bought for each other” as our fifteenth wedding anniversary. So much for crystal, timepieces, or red roses, we go for a week of having our yard dug up and being able to flush a live armadillo all the way to the Van Nuys sewage treatment plant at Mach Two instead!

That math means it’s now seventeen years. The sewer line is still going strong, but it belongs to someone else now and we live here instead. With that change we’re seeing others, so this year we bought each other a very nice new bedroom set for our anniversary. The pieces replaced are the ones that I got at a garage sale in 1975 when I left Annapolis, moved to Southern California, and got my first apartment prior to starting school at UC Irvine. More stuff being left behind, with things shared replacing them and new memories to add onto the old.

Here’s to the Long-Suffering Wife who for some reason still puts up with me. Here’s to the future, the next seventeen years and whatever adventures, joys, and heartaches, trials and triumphs they might bring.

Here’s to wondering what the hell we’ll get for each other for our eighteenth anniversary next year. Google says it’s “feathers” and “porcelain.”

Kinky!

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Filed under Castle Willett, Paul, Ronnie