Geezer

There are 386 posts filed in Geezer (this is page 1 of 39).

Adventure Landing Sails Over the Horizon

Adventure Landing as seen by the Wake County Tax Assessment department.

It hit me harder than it probably should have: a nearly forty year old mini amusement park abruptly closes up shop. I probably never visited more than a dozen times in the thirty-four years I’ve lived her, so that’s … what, once every three years? They sure weren’t making money from my visits, but I have to say that every time I visited they sure were making money. There were always kids flooding the arcade, the lines to ride go-karts were constant, and you could always count on waiting for players when you worked your way through the mini golf courses.

In fact, the day they announced they were closing, I reminded a colleague of the time many years ago when our employer took the whole team out to ride go-karts at Adventure Landing as a wacky reward for getting our product across the finish line, so to speak. I had no clue when I brought this up that Adventure Landing had already called it quits.
Continue reading →

The last days of the Southern drawl

Around Raleigh I hear fewer and fewer Southern accents and I think it’s sad. I can still muster up mine but it seems to only come out when I’m around other Southerners. The ratio of Southerners in Raleigh seems to be dropping by the day.

On Sundays after church, my family would pile into our crank-window GMC truck and head to Kentucky Fried Chicken. “Can I get me some of them tater wedges?” my father would say into the speaker, while my sisters and I giggled in the back seat. My dad has always had a southern accent: His words fall out of his mouth the way molasses would sound if it could speak, thick and slow. But his “KFC voice,” as my sisters and I call it, is country. It’s watered-down on work calls and during debates with his West Coast relatives. But it comes out around fellow cattle farmers and old friends from Kentucky, where he grew up.

My mother’s accent isn’t quite as strong. She’s a therapist, and she can hide it when she speaks with her patients and calls in prescriptions. But you can always hear it in her church-pew greetings, and when she says goodnight: “See you in the a.m., Lawd willin’.”

I was always clear on one fact: I wasn’t going to have a southern accent when I grew up. I was raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, near Nashville, where the accents grow stronger with each mile you travel from the city. I watched people snicker at the redneck characters on television who always seemed to play the town idiot. I knew what the accent was supposed to convey: sweet but simpleminded. When I was 15 and my family went to New York for the first time, the bellhop at our hotel laughed when my mom and I spoke; he said he’d never met cowgirls before. That was when I decided: No one was going to know I was from the South from my voice alone.

Source: The last days of the Southern drawl

Thirty years with a web presence

My blogging mentor, Wil Wheaton, noted his 24 years of blogging today so naturally I had to check where I stand on these metrics.

It’s been 23 years since I began actual blogging (or as I called it back then “web logging”), using a dynamic, database-backed site rather than static pages. Here’s my first post. I looked for the prior software I’d been using, “bpblog,” but it seems it has completely vanished from the Internet. Which might be a good thing, actually.

More interestingly, last month marked THIRTY YEARS of a web presence! That would be the “Flea Forum” hosted on the servers of a long-gone local Triangle web hosting and internet company, Cybernetics. Check out this mirror in all of its 1995 glorious, hand-crafted HTML glory.

I kept a digital journal even before this though as far as I know I never posted it online. I recall posting an excerpt or two here on MT.Net. But private journaling doesn’t count.

I’m still committed to growing my blog reading and writing as nearly every commercial online media company does more pissing me off than entertaining me lately. Either its incessant ads, shadowbanning, patently stupid fake AI photos and videos or the million other ways they annoy me. It’s time to get back to real, y’all.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to be a keyboard warrior from now on. I dabbled with video posts earlier and I would like to bring this back. I will probably write what I want to say, read it on camera, and post both. If you have the ability to post video why not do it, right?

Thanks for sticking around. I hope our conversation can continue.

Chasing hallieandtravis.com again

When the kids became young adults and I tapered off my regular blogging about them (and me – their blog was as much about my journey as a parent as it was about them), I opted to let the hallieandtravis.com domain expire. I’d always had far too many domains to juggle and I took a gamble that it might sit idle until I was one day ready to set it up again.

About two years ago, I saw that the domain was active again, serving as the wedding guest registry of a Nebraska couple.

Good on them, I thought. I hope they have a wonderful wedding. But I also thought that maybe when the wedding was done the domain might be made available again. When the renewal date came this spring and then got extended, my heart sank.

After rediscovering that post about the magic day in 2010 today, I decided I would try to reach out to the current domain owners and ask if they would be willing to let me buy the domain again. I sent an email to an address I had guessed about and it didn’t bounce, but I also didn’t receive a response.

I am hopeful I can reclaim the domain someday and perhaps share those writings with the world again.

Sweet memory lifts me today

I was working my way through the blog this morning when I found this post of a touching walk I took with Travis fifteen years ago when he was six.

A special walk home

I met Kelly and the kids at Hallie’s school to hear an update from the teacher on Hallie’s progress. I left smiling when her teacher called her “phenomenal,” but little did I know I wasn’t done with hearing good things. I decided to forgo hitching a ride home with Kelly in the van in keeping with my carpooling experiment today and opted instead to walk the 1/2 mile home. Travis decided to join me, so together we walked up the hill back to our house.

As we walked, we chatted about lots of things. He wanted to hold my hand and so we walked up the hill hand-in-hand. As the conversation continued, he said something that made me remark “that wouldn’t be my favorite thing.”

“You know what’s my favorite thing?” he asked as we kept walking. “My love for you.”

All I could say was “awwww” and returned the compliment. It was so sweet to hear but as I thought about it later I only appreciated it more. Travis will often tell someone he loves them but it’s rare that he offers it the way that he did.

His hand in mine, the pleasant walk, and words that would make any father proud: it doesn’t get much better than this.

This day came in the immediate aftermath of my friend Gerry dying. For many weeks at work, I would stuff earbuds into my ears and listen to yearning music as I worked alone in the aisles of the NetApp datacenter, sorting through my grief.

Wow, what a special day that was, lifting me at a time I really needed it. I’m still so thankful.

Montserrat and music

AIR Studios Montserrat in 2014,. Photo by CaptMatty, Wikipedia.Commons.

As you may know, I got serious about my music when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. I will talk more about that in a moment, but the gist is that music takes up much of my free time at the moment. I still ask myself “wouldn’t it be great if I could do this full time?”

Recently, I learned of a recent documentary called “Under the Volcano” about Sir George Martin’s recording studio built on a hill in Montserrat under … well, a volcano. While I have not yet seen the documentary, I did read up on this studio, called AIR Studios Montserrat.

As a music fan in the 1980s, I knew many of my favorite albums of the time had been recorded in the Caribbean. I just didn’t know exactly where, or that most had been made at a single studio: AIR Montserrat. The Police; Dire Straits; Paul McCartney; the Rolling Stones; Jimmy Buffett; Elton John, Earth, Wind, & Fire, and so many others recorded some of their best work in Montserrat. Oh, if those walls could talk! They don’t have much to say anymore, sadly, as they are literally crumbling as the harsh Caribbean weather tears into these exposed, abandoned buildings.
Continue reading →

What makes a sailor different

I found this posted in a Navy-related Facebook group, shared in February 2024. As a destroyer sailor myself, I thought it describes well what makes a sailor different. I have searched all over and cannot find this anywhere else on the Internet, so the author is unknown.

To a Young Person Considering Naval Service: Attitudes and Preparation

If you are considering Naval Service, it would be good to take a look at all the services and what they have to offer. They are identical in pay and benefits for a given rank, though they differ in the main type and setting of the work you will do.

Before we get into the small print, you should know that one very important aspect of military service is the overall attitude and bearing of the particular branch. This is, as much as anything, what you should consider when choosing one over another.
Nothing much has changed in this area in the many decades since I joined the Navy. From what I can see, things are about the same. If you want to get an idea, take a look at what the services consider important. Look at their monuments and memorials.

For nearly all of its existence the Navy didn’t really have a memorial, per se. The reason for this is that the Navy didn’t concern itself that much with how posterity viewed it. It was the Navy and would be the Navy, and if you didn’t know or like that, the fleet wasn’t going to lose any sleep.
Continue reading →

The founding of Raleigh’s Citizens Advisory Councils (CACs)

I conducted my first East Citizens Advisory Council (East CAC) meeting for the first time in years. It’s been a year since the CAC met but it felt good to be doing something again.

I thought it was prudent to create a presentation about CACs, since there are new neighbors in the area who aren’t familiar with them. I’m also slated to talk to the Wake One Water group (a Wake County board) about CACs this Friday and a presentation could be useful for that call as well.

I slapped some slides together at the last minute, putting in the “facts” that I had assembled over the years of participating in CACs. There were holes in my knowledge, though, that drove me to do some research today on the murky early days of CACs. What I found surprised me.

I was able to finally view archives of the Raleigh News and Observer through the State Library and searched these for mentions of CACs. Of course I found mentions from 1974, the year commonly stated as the birth year of CACs. As I kept digging, I was surprised that more mentions came up. Earlier.

Many of them in 1973.
Continue reading →

I am the Costco cart master

Saturday afternoon I made my weekend trip to Costco. Walking into the store, I pulled a shopping cart from the stack as one of the employees – a young kid – struggled with a full stack of carts pulled from the cart corrals.

As I was walking out of the store a little later, the same kid was struggling in the hot sun to fetch another stack of carts. The kid was really busting his ass. I unloaded my cart and returned it to the cart corral, where my OCD kicked in yet again.

The shitty part-time job I had in high school at the Dart Drug in Sugarland Plaza in Sterling, Virginia taught me a lot about working in retail. I will forever remember how to run a register and I will forever remember how to track down errant shopping carts. Needless to say, when I’m at Costco or other stores with carts, I can’t help but want to put them away the right way. It’s a combination of my engineering mindset, a dash of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder thrown in, and a tip of the hat to the young, hard-working store employee I once was.

Thus, on Saturday I could not just carelessly shove my cart into the corral. A full string of carts were parked in the middle of the corral, mostly stacked. I added my cart to the end and then took a moment to shove the whole stack to one side, making room for twice as many new carts to be added. It’s just what I do.

Just as I tamed the cart corral and was walking away, I heard a shout from across the parking lot. The young Costco kid was standing up from the shelter of the store’s shadow and was cupping his mouth and looking at me.

“THANK YOU, SIR!!” he bellowed across the lot with a smile.

We gotta look out for each other. I gave him a big smile and a thumbs up as I walked away.

Quiet house

The kids have been home from college for the last few weeks on their holiday breaks. It has been wonderful having them home again, with lots of catching up, games, hikes, jokes, and just hanging out. I know how my parents felt when I returned home back in my college/military days. There’s a special comfort knowing they’re close by. I would walk by their doors in the morning (and sometimes the afternoon), smiling at the knowledge that they were home.

The past few days have been tougher, sending them back to their studies. Hallie packed and left on Friday, bound not for Chapel Hill but for a semester interning in DC. She’s excited to be starting a new adventure and Kelly and I are both excited for her and proud of her.

We had most of the rest of the weekend with Travis, though he also packed up this morning and I drove him at 10 AM to meet his carpool buddy for the trip back to Asheville. He is doing well in his studies and the interests he has picked up.

Now it’s just Kelly, me, and the dogs, and the quiet is settling in. I’ll miss the lights left on, the dishes strewn around the kitchen, the constant loads of laundry, and even the late night kitchen raids. Those things that once annoyed me now bring me comfort. It’s a reminder of the routine we’ve had for so long.

I know our jobs as parents are to get them out on their own, and we’re mighty damn close to having done that. Yet it’s still good to be remembered and to feel needed. I guess the beauty in the building of self-sufficiency is when they come back even when they don’t really have to. I’m already looking forward to our future visits.